Mad Honey: A Novel (27 page)

“What about the female pandas?”

“They ovulate only a couple days every year, and a baby panda is one nine hundredth the size of its mother.”

We were eating steak and drinking wine I could not afford on my
salary, and Braden was gorgeous and charming and so attentive to me that it took me an hour to realize how rarely I’d been on a date where the man seemed to care more about my answers to questions than about hearing himself talk. An hour had passed, and I still knew little about him.

“Your turn,” I said, as he ordered a second bottle of cabernet. He’d grown up in Virginia and went to UVA, then medical school at Vanderbilt. His grandfather had died of a heart attack, which is why he became a cardiac surgeon. “Tell me something I don’t know about hearts,” I asked, turning the tables on him.

“What do you know?” he parroted.

“That they can be broken?”

“Actually, that’s true,” Braden said. “Broken heart syndrome is a lot like a heart attack symptom-wise, but it’s caused by emotional trauma instead of heart disease.” I realized that, through this entire dinner, he had never taken his eyes off me; he had never looked at his phone to see what happened to his original date. He treated each word out of my mouth as if it were a drop of water, and he was a desert.

It was making me more drunk than all the cabernet in the world possibly could.

We were still talking four hours later, when the restaurant closed down and kicked us out. It was pouring, and there were no cabs in sight.

“Well,” I said. “This sucks.”

“Does it?” The corners of his mouth turned up. “I thought every woman wants to be kissed in the rain.”

I looked at him, matted and drenched, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Certainly the most beautiful man who had ever made me feel like I was the only planet in his universe. “This one does,” I said, and then I was in his arms.

When he finally hailed a cab and dropped me off at my apartment building, I asked him if he wanted to come inside, and he shook his head and kissed my forehead. I was tipsy enough to not realize,
until he was gone, that although he knew where I lived, I didn’t have his number or his address. I figured that would be that; the best date I’d never had.

The next morning, when I got to work at 6:00
a.m
., there was a helium balloon tied to my staff locker—
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BABY!

A note was tied to the ribbon.
Are we having a boy or a girl?
There were instructions to be ready at seven, at my place, with my response and whatever I’d wear to a picnic in Rock Creek Park.

Back then, I thought Braden’s directives were romantic, not controlling.

Back then, I thought it was sweet that he asked me out with that question.

Boy or girl?

Back then, I thought the answer was simple.

ARISTOTLE WAS THE
one who said the largest bee in the hive was the leader of the colony, but because of the time he lived in, he made the assumption it was a king. Even though scientists subsequently saw that same monarch laying eggs, cognitive dissonance allowed them to still assume it was a male, because female rulers just…
didn’t exist
. In the 1600s, when a Dutch naturalist, Jan Swammerdam, dissected a queen bee and found ovaries, it was the final proof that the “king” bee was actually female.

In college zoology classes I learned there are plenty of animal species that change sex. It’s called sequential hermaphroditism. Clown fish are all born male, but the most dominant one becomes a female. Wrasses work in reverse, with a female able to transform her ovaries into testes in about a week’s time. The slipper limpet, when touched by other male limpets, can become female. Male bearded dragons can change sex while still in their eggs, if exposed to warmer temperatures. Spotted hyena females have what look like penises and have to retract them into their bodies for mating. Coral can go from
male to female or vice versa. Common reed frogs spontaneously change sex in the wild.

In other words, it’s perfectly natural.

Yet it occurs to me that while I studied this phenomenon in animals, I never really considered what it was like for humans.

A change of sex occurs, in the animal world, when it is beneficial to the continuation of the species.

I think about Lily, and her suicide attempt, and consider that you could make the same argument.

I want to ask Asher if he knew. If he talked to Lily about this. But I am afraid to hear that answer.

What I know about transgender women comes from the media—from seeing and hearing Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox and Chelsea Manning and Janet Mock. I haven’t really thought about what it means to be trans…because I have had the luxury of
not
having
to think about it.

But I’m thinking about it now.

WHEN WE GET
back home Asher and Jordan head to their rooms. I find myself pacing around the house. I put a kettle on the stove for tea, then stare out the window at the fields, so green and verdant it nearly hurts to look at them. The windows are open, filling the house with the smells of grass and warm earth.

In the mudroom, my bee suit is hanging on a hook. I stare at it for a little bit, thinking of the day last fall when Lily helped me make the frames for this year’s hives. I remember at that moment thinking that if I’d had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be like Lily.

But Lily had been born a son, too.

The kettle in the kitchen begins to whistle, which is good, because it breaks me out of my spell. I find a tea bag, pour the water in the cup, and watch the steam rise. I sweeten it with honey.

If I am being painfully honest—is this a terrible thing to say?—I have not really given any time to understanding what it means to
be transgender. I don’t actually
know
any transgender people. (Or is it
trans
? Is
trans
the same as
transgender
? Is a
transsexual
the same thing, or something different?) I know about clown fish and slipper limpets, but somehow not so much about humans.

There is one transgender person in town—Edgar, who is Elizabeth now. The man—no, the woman—who runs the music shop. I’ve seen her here and there—Adams is so little that you run into everyone sooner or later. People seem accepting of her, but I can’t say that when I see Elizabeth I especially think of her as a woman like me. She seems—Jesus, I hate how this sounds—like a work in progress? Like a subcategory of
woman
? But even saying that makes me feel like I’m judging, when I don’t mean to.

Still. When I first heard through the rumor mill that Edgar was now Elizabeth, I wondered, why go through all of that? Why not just make peace with the body you have?

I lift the tea bag out of the cup, wrap the string around the spoon, and squeeze it. Then I throw the bag in the trash. I remember the day Asher called me from the police station.
Mom, I think Lily’s dead.

There are a lot of times I don’t particularly like being female. Like, for instance, the first day of my period, every month of every year, since I was eleven. The way men look at my breasts instead of my face. The times I’ve been slightly psychotic about my appearance, my figure. The assumption that I’m “the weaker sex” instead of a beekeeper who can lug a forty-pound box across several acres without breaking a sweat. All the times I’ve had to live up to the standards of men—and had to remind myself that those standards are bullshit.

I hate that being female is equated with being frail, and yet, I’m proof of it. I’d let myself become Braden’s victim because of messaging I’d received my whole life: that it was my job to take care of my husband, that if something was wrong it was because I’d somehow failed at my job. I’m ashamed to admit it, but there were times—even as a feminist—when I bought into seeing that as my role.

For all these reasons, and others I haven’t even thought of, life as a woman isn’t exactly a party. I cannot imagine a man actively choosing to give up that winning ace.

So…what made Lily decide she wanted to be a girl?

Maybe that’s the wrong word,
decide
. It’s not a thing you’d do on a whim, like changing your hair color, or learning Italian. But it’s impossible for me to imagine feeling so off-kilter with yourself you’d crave such radical change.

Then again, I remember when I was married, how I would step out of the shower and wipe the steam away on the mirror and think,
Today is the day I see someone strong
. But every time, it was always just broken, spineless me.

I had wanted this cup of tea to settle me, but the more I think about all of this, the more restless I become. I walk up the stairs with the teacup in my hand, and I knock on the door to Asher’s room. When he doesn’t answer, I open it. He’s lying on his bed with his eyes closed and his headphones on. From the sound of his breathing I can tell he’s asleep.

On the wall not far from his bed is the hole he punched that day last fall, and which he never did get around to fixing. He was going to get to it during Christmas vacation, he said. But by then my son was in jail.

Well,
I said,
I hope whatever’s pissed you off is worth what you’re going to spend repairing that.

Now I stand there in the doorway with my cup of tea, examining his room in the same way I once looked at the dioramas in the Smithsonian. Here: the bedroom of the adolescent
Homo sapiens,
with the specimen in a state of repose.

I want to wake him up and tell him,
Asher, it’s going to be all right, I swear to God,
and that
I understand.
But what if it’s not all right? And what if I
don’t
understand?

Moments later, I’m back in the mudroom, putting on a light jacket. I get in the truck and start driving into town before I even realize where I am headed.

If you want to understand something, you first need to accept the fact of your own ignorance. And then, you need to talk to people who know more than you do, people who have not just thought about the facts, but lived them.

I can’t even call Elizabeth an acquaintance. I know she has a job, and a store to run, and a life that doesn’t involve educating me; that for her I am at best an annoyance and, at worst, an audacious imposition from someone privileged. She owes me no time, no answers, no tutorials.

But ten minutes later, I pull into a parking space in front of Edgar’s Music.

FROM FAR AWAY,
we would look like two women pausing to watch the sun set. The sun dissolves into the ribbon of the Cobboscoggin River as Elizabeth and I stand with our hands on the railing. On the opposite bank are the ruins of the old paper mill, shuttered these last twenty years. A cold smokestack points into the sky.

Elizabeth is smoking a cigarette. “What an eyesore, huh,” she says. She takes a deep drag, and then blows it all out in a thin blue cloud. “My father worked on the log drives, back in the fifties and sixties.” She shakes her head. “The Cobboscoggin used to be jammed with timber. My old man spent a lot of hard days with his pike and his ring dog.”

We’ve been here for about five minutes now. When I approached her counter at the music store, she made it clear she wasn’t all that thrilled about talking to me. I’d introduced myself, but she interrupted me.
I know who you are,
she said, coolly.

The store—which had been filled with the sounds of people playing guitars and strumming basses—fell silent.
Please,
I said to her
.

Ms. McAfee,
she said, thoughtfully.
I don’t need to please you.

She turned away from me. I backed off, not sure what to do. But then, halfway to the door, I stopped.
My son is not a bad person,
I said.

Elizabeth put her hands on the glass countertop before her, a case containing harmonicas and maracas and tambourines.
I know all about your son,
she said.

No,
I told her.
You don’t.

We stood there for a long moment, like cowboys in a gunfight, just eyeing each other. Then I walked out the door. A bell rang softly.

I stood in downtown Adams, wondering what to do next. Wondering why I’d come here, and what I’d expected.

Ms. McAfee,
said a voice behind me.

She was standing there in a yellow jacket, a pink skirt. The look of suspicion was gone from her eyes, succeeded now by something more like curiosity, or pity—a look I’d seen before, years ago. A look that made me feel even smaller, even more foolish.
You’re right,
she said.
I don’t know your son.

“What’s a ring dog?” I ask her now, as we stand by the river, and she crushes the cigarette butt beneath her heel.

“It’s like a peavey,” she says. “A hook for rolling logs over.” She smiles. “My father’s house was full of antique tools. All the things he’d need for undoing the jams on the river.”

“Maybe I should get one,” I tell her. “I’m in kind of a jam myself.”

She thinks this over. The sun is just about to disappear behind the hulking silhouette of the old mill. “I know what it’s like to have assumptions made about you, without anyone bothering to get the actual facts. That’s why I am standing here, giving you the benefit of the doubt, although the nightly news suggests that your son murdered a trans woman,” Elizabeth says.

“Thank you for talking to me,” I say.

“I met her,” she says. “That girl, Lily. She came into my store one time, to buy cello strings.”

I don’t know why, but this catches me by surprise. “Did you talk about”—for some reason I can’t bring myself to say the words out loud—“what you have in common?”

“Ah,” Elizabeth says. “You mean how we’re both”—she leans closer, lowering her voice—“Capricorns?”

My face floods with heat. “I just thought, since you were both…born male.”

“I was
not
born male,” Elizabeth says. “I was born a
baby
. I spent my whole life fighting my way to the truth.” She glances at me. “Lesson one: AFAB and AMAB. Assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth. Or better yet, trans man. Trans woman.”