Parrotfish (3 page)

“I have kind of a headache,” I said. “Do you mind if I stop for today? I’ll help you again tomorrow.”

“Angela—I mean . . .” He shook his head as if that would help the right name rise to his lips. “Gray . . . Grady, you’re the only person in this house who enjoys helping me put up the decorations. You deserve some time off too.” He winked at me and went back to the paper. I should have known that Dad would be the family member who had the least trouble with my change from daughter to son. Dad was addicted to happy endings. He’d do whatever he had to to finagle one, even if it meant drastically altering his idea of his own child.

On the way to my bedroom I passed Charlie grinning maniacally and shooting his way out of another felony.

B
y busting our humps for two more days, we managed to get all of Dad’s characters singing, skating, leaping, winking, and lying in a manger. Even Charlie was forced to abandon his joystick and remote control for a few hours in pursuit of our goal: the entertainment of greater Buxton by nightfall on Sunday. I didn’t mind physical labor, and I’d always enjoyed working on projects with Dad—just not
this
project. If it had been a normal year, Eve would have helped out too. She always liked being there on Sunday when we put the finishing touches on everything. She’d stand back on the street and direct us as we moved statues a few feet this way or that. She had a good eye for details. But we got it done without her this year, and it looked fine.

I peeked from the garage door windows as the first visitors arrived, and though I couldn’t hear their remarks, I could imagine.

       
LITTLE GIRL: Look at the Barbies! Oh, Mommy, why can’t we do this at our house?

       MOMMY: Because we have a life, honey.

       GRANNY: [shaking her head] I wouldn’t want to pay their electric bill.

       LITTLE GIRL: I’d help you put up the decorations! Please, Daddy, can we?

       DADDY: Right. Have you seen these idiots? They spent the entire four-day weekend doing this. I’d rather watch football.

       LITTLE GIRL: [grumpy] I hate football.

       MOMMY: [grumpy] I hate “The Little Drummer Boy.”

       GRANNY: Pugh! Those teddy bears stink!

Yes, our hard work and ingenuity were certainly appreciated, at least by five-year-olds. But the worst was yet to come. Now that the outside of the house was finished, we’d have to spend the next week getting the inside ready for display. As if mixing the Virgin Mary with the Virgin Barbies weren’t bad enough, Dad liked to confuse centuries even further by turning the indoors into Queen Victoria’s parlor. As far as Dad was concerned, if it had to do with Christmas, it was all good. You might think no one in their right mind would subject their family to this, but Dad’s
parents had done it to him, and he was passing the joy along to us. In fact, Dad probably became a carpenter just so he’d know exactly how to build his own house for maximum dramatic exposure.

Our living and dining rooms stretch across the front of the house, and each of them has a huge window that takes up most of the street-side wall. There are heavy curtains that pull across the windows, like you’d see on a theater stage. Which is what those rooms would become at night when the curtains were open. During the holidays we would put up a giant tree in each room and decorate it with paper chains, popcorn and cranberry garlands, and small oranges stuck with cloves. As a kid I liked making the paper chains, but now if they broke, I let Laura do the patching. The cranberries were easy, but stringing popcorn kernels onto thread is like trying to put a rope through a light bulb: Unless you’re a magician, you end up with a lot of broken pieces in your lap. Nothing went on the tree that we hadn’t made ourselves.

There were no electric lights used in the show rooms throughout the month of December, although candles, gas lamps, and two fireplaces gave off a golden glow. The fireplace in the living room had a platoon of toy soldiers marching through a miniature snow-covered village on top
of the mantel. The dining-room hearth was swathed in holly branches and hung with five large stockings, made by Mom, with our names embroidered across their tops. (My old name, anyway. Maybe Mom would make one for Grady eventually.) Holly was also intertwined in the dozen wreaths that hung throughout the two rooms. Evergreen swags draped around the wall moldings, and sprigs of mistletoe hung from the ceiling. Both fireplaces were lit each evening at six o’clock and kept burning until we shut the curtains at ten o’clock. The rooms were supposed to look familiar to Charles Dickens should he happen to wander in off the street.

In order to keep things as authentic as possible, Dad didn’t like us to go into these two rooms during viewing hours unless we were in costume. Nineteenth-century costume. So every year for the past ten years no one but Dad has used the two largest rooms in the house between Thanksgiving and January first. The rest of us would huddle in the kitchen or just stay in our own rooms upstairs, refusing to become character actors just to walk to our own front door. Dad, of course, was more than willing to get dressed up every night in order to light gas lamps and tend the fires. He put on heavy tweed pants and a woolen vest with a collarless
white shirt underneath, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and wore one of those flat newsboy caps on his head. Nothing made him happier.

Obviously, Dad was a frustrated actor. Or maybe a thwarted set designer or something. He loved all this theatrical stuff, the idea that he was entertaining people. Except I think he was more entertained by it than anybody else.

The door slammed behind me. Laura and the usually immobile Charlie came up to the garage-door windows too.

“Who’s out there?” Laura wanted to know.

“The Kellers. Mrs. Taylor and her kids. A bunch of people I don’t know,” I reported.

Laura grimaced and stamped her foot on the concrete. “Do we have to do this
forever
? It was fun when I was seven, but now it’s just humiliating. You can’t go out the door without the whole neighborhood staring at you. I’m so sick of having people walking around my house every night. Pretty soon they’ll be looking in the windows again too. It’s so stupid.”

“Hey, you’re the one who came up with the Barbies. That brings ’em back year after year,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” Charlie said. “Except for those bears. And the music.”

“You don’t spend four days putting it all up, either,” I reminded him. “Or taking it down.”

“The music definitely sucks,” he said, ignoring me.

“I bet everybody thinks we’re just Santa’s little elves or something, all happy and gay . . .” Laura glanced at me. “You know what I mean. Like Christmas is such a big deal for us. Like we’re walking around singing ‘Jingle Bells’ all day. It’s not true at all! We have an enormous nativity set in our front yard, and we never even go to church!”

“Not to mention that Mom is Jewish,” I said.

“Exactly! I’m sick of opening my real presents in the kitchen so nobody sees that they’re made out of plastic or spandex or something from this century! We have to get Dad to stop it,” she said. “This has to be the last year.”

“Fine with me,” I said. “But who’s going to tell him and break his heart?”

“I always forget Mom is Jewish. How come she likes doing this?” Charlie asked.

“Duh, Charlie,” Laura said. “Mom hates all this—haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“She doesn’t act like it. She sews costumes and paints stuff. If she hates it so much—”

“I think she used to kind of like it at first,” I said, “but now she just does it because she can’t
say no to Dad. Not about this, anyway. He
lives
for Christmas. He’d be miserable if he couldn’t make our house look like the last stop for the Polar Express.”

“And our living room look like Macy’s front window,” Laura grumped.

“Do you guys know those kids?” Charlie asked, pointing toward a group of teenagers clustered around the smelly bears, laughing.

“Oh my God!” Laura ducked down. “That’s Sarah and Brit and their boyfriends! They’re in my English class and I’m just getting to be friends with them. I can’t let them see me!”

“Why? Don’t they know you live here?” Charlie wanted to know.

Laura bent low and headed back inside. “I
hope
they don’t! That’s all I need—more news about my weird family for everybody to gossip about!” She glared at me, then sneaked back into the kitchen to hide. Poor Laura. Like Eve, she cared way too much about what other people thought.

       SARAH: I would die if my parents put stuff like this out on our front lawn.

       BRIT: You know who lives here, don’t you?

       SARAH: Who?

       BRIT: Laura Katz-McNair. From our English class. The girl who wears the purple eye shadow.

       
SARAH: Really? Oh, no—I thought I liked her.

       BRIT: Believe me, you don’t. Her sister is that older girl who dresses like a boy.

       SARAH: [sharp intake of breath] No! That he-she person? Oh, God—I feel so sorry for her!

       BRIT: I know. Her whole family is obviously insane.

       SARAH: That’s so sad.

       BRIT: It really is, isn’t it?

“Mom told me you’re changing your name,” Charlie said matter-of-factly.

“Yeah. I want people to call me Grady from now on,” I said.

He wrinkled his nose. “If I was going to pick a new name, it would be a cooler one than that.” He started pounding on an old stool like it was a conga drum.

“Like what?” I asked.

He thought a minute. “Maybe Ryan. Or Keith. Or, no—Clive!”

“Clive?”

“It’s better than
Grady
.”

“Did Mom tell you why I’m changing my name?”

“Sort of. Something about how you want to be a boy now.”

I nodded. At least Charlie wasn’t having a hemorrhage over it like Laura.

“Actually, I think I always was a boy,” I said. “I just didn’t look too much like one.”

Charlie glanced at me. “You do now.”

“Well, I’m trying to now. But I always
felt
like a boy. So, now I’m going to start being one.”

“Can you do that? Just decide to change?” He stopped drumming and stared up at me. “I mean, you don’t have, you know, a penis or anything.”

“No. But I don’t think a penis is the only thing that makes you a boy. Do you?”

He seemed to be thinking it over. “I don’t know. What else is different besides just body parts?”

“I don’t think body parts are the whole story,” I said. “I think the way you feel inside is more important.”

“So inside you feel like a boy?”

I nodded. “More than a girl.”

“Being a boy is cool,” he said. “I’m glad I’m a boy.”

“Well, I didn’t decide to be a boy because it’s cool. Being a girl is pretty cool too—it just didn’t feel right to me.”

He stuck a finger into his nose and fished
around a little. “I guess I get it,” he said, but I had a feeling we’d be talking about it again when he got a little older.

“Does it bother you that I’m a boy?” I asked him.

He shrugged again. “It’s kind of weird, but what do I care? You’re not changing
me
.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You know, sometimes when me and Dan are playing Castle Killer, I like to be the girl character instead of one of the boys. The girl is the fastest one. I like to be fast in games because, you know, I’m not that fast in real life.”

“But I don’t just want to be different for a while. I want to be a boy forever. From now on. You get that, right?”

“Uh-huh.” I don’t know if Charlie was tired of our conversation or of standing on two feet, but he yawned and headed back inside.

It occurred to me that the male members of my family seemed to be taking this better than the females, and I wondered why that was. Did the women feel like I was deserting them by deciding to live as the opposite sex? Maybe for Dad and Charlie, it didn’t seem strange to want to be male, since that’s what they were. But Mom and Laura—and, of course, Eve—acted like I was
betraying them somehow. Would I have to give them up if I wasn’t a girl anymore? I hoped not. I hoped that changing my gender wouldn’t mean losing my entire past.

I
came downstairs on Monday morning before Laura and Charlie. Mom was leaning against the sink, drinking her wake-up cup of coffee and looking out the window.

“Morning, Mom,” I said.

“Good morning . . .” she said. An empty space hung in the air where “Angela” would normally have been inserted into the greeting, or where “Grady” might have been substituted. I had the feeling she’d been standing there preparing herself for my entrance but then couldn’t quite make herself say out loud the name she’d been practicing.

I wasn’t sure whether I’d been avoiding Mom all weekend or she’d been avoiding me, but we’d certainly managed to stay out of each other’s way. I knew she was pretty freaked out by what had been going on with me lately, and I was wondering if things would ever be the same between us again. Not that we were that tight before—I
always had more in common with Dad—but Mom had a good sense of humor, and sometimes we could get each other laughing hysterically about stuff. Would we ever be able to laugh and clown around like that—or even touch each other easily—the way we had before? Would she always have that sad look on her face when I walked into a room?

For the first time since I started understanding who I was, I wondered if the change was worth it.

“Is Laura almost ready?” Mom asked.

“Almost—still shellacking her face.”

“Ange . . . honey . . . this new name . . . I don’t know if I can get used to it.”

I nodded. “Not ever?” My voice came out in a whisper.

She sighed. “I don’t know. I feel like you’re asking me to speak a foreign language. It’s so strange. You’re my
daughter
! I just can’t think of you as my . . .” She poked a finger into the corner of her eye rather than say “son.” The tear escaped anyway.