Past Perfect Boy
I saw the shoes at the Goodwill in the wealthiest section of my hometown. They were impossible. Sizzling electric green with pink-tongued soles. Ribbons of spiral-cut watermelon. Candy platforms for the feet.
Of course, they weren’t made for my feet. Not by a long shot. No more than those dancing boots I once saw in an LA Fleuvog shop — fern green silk with golden dragonflies to cover delicate ankles.
But…the Goodwill shoes were brand new Julian Hakes, and when I looked up how much they went for on eBay, I nearly fainted. Easily $300. $600 was not unheard of. At Goodwill, they were $40. I bought them, feeling like a thief, excited to post them for sale.
I didn’t, though. The shoes sat at the bottom of my closet in a Goodwill bag, vibrating with color, money in a buried Mason jar.
And then the thought occurred to me. What if I did one day manage to wear them? What if I won a swanky writing award sometime and needed an impressive ensemble? These shoes would be the kicker. I would be as fantastic as all the science fictional and fantastic belles I’d seen at every award dinner for the last decade. But what dress could I possibly find to match them?
There were bigger problems, though. The biggest of all? After 48 years, I still don’t know how to be a girl.
I was a boy, I think, until I was six. My dad treated me like one. I helped him fix cars because my hands were small and I could reach into car engines easily. Helped him wash and detail the cars, too. There’s a picture of me, shirtless, in shorts, clomping around in my dad’s old boots with a sudsy rag in my hand, ready to slap it on the side of Old Blue, our station wagon.
Though we lived in typical 70s American suburbs — you know, brick ranch, the lone tree in the front yard, carport — I loved wild places and wild things. My dad took me as often as he could out to the swimming holes and trails of his youth. We were on the banks of Tinker Creek early every morning on opening day of trout season, and I knew how to thread a worm on the hook as well as anyone. If we went fishing for bass or crappie, I helped my dad catch hellgrammites by holding the net while he turned over rocks. And I loved it when we lifted the net and found those hell-jawed nymphs wriggling in the burning air.
I was his retriever when we went squirrel hunting together. Even at 5, I knew to sit still and stay quiet until the .22 popped over my head and the squirrel spiraled dead out of the tree. I’d take my grandfather’s old Scout bag and go pick up the soft corpses, stuffing them inside, wiping blood and gore off my hands onto the leaves. We’d take them home and have my favorite supper — fried squirrel and gravy.
I was a boy in all but one way that I didn’t fully comprehend until the day at the family reunion when I fell off the merry-go-round into a mud puddle that sludged me from head to toe with thick black mud. My dad took me to the spring to wash me off and it was there, standing shirtless while he tried to rinse the mud out of my white eyelet shirt, that a group of boys came up to us, looked at me, and said, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
I knew what I was supposed to say and it was then I put my still-muddy hands over my not-yet-budded breasts and mumbled, “Girl.” But even as I said it, it felt like the wrong word. A disappointment, a deflation I couldn’t explain.
I swear my dad never looked at me the same again. In that moment, we both realized the world we had shared together was split in some way that could never fully be mended. The revelation seemed to grievously wound my father, though I didn’t realize how much he had truly wanted a son until he was dying. As an only child I had fundamentally failed him. I would never manage to right my fatal flaw.
When I was probably 4 or 5, my parents and their friends would pile into their muscle cars and go downtown to stare at the drag queens who used to parade around the Roanoke City Market. I was fascinated by the pretty ladies and said so, a pronouncement which would elicit gales of laughter from the adults that I didn’t understand. Thinking about it now, I would guess that the person who would look best in these fabulous green shoes would be one of those elaborately-coiffed drag queens I used to peep at from the window of our neighbor’s Mustang. If I could time travel, I would leave the Julian Hakes as an offering for those queens my father so often derided. I hope they never knew.
My father also disliked gay people and was particularly affronted by lesbians who dressed and looked like men. Not only were people’s personalities to be determined by their biological sex, they were also, to his mind, meant to dress in a recognizable way that connoted masculine and feminine. Lines were not meant to be crossed. Tomboys couldn’t exist beyond a certain age, and they could not grow into lesbians. (Lesbians only existed for straight male entertainment, after all, a thing I quickly gathered from my father’s not-so-carefully-hidden pornography). Boys should never wear dresses, skirts, or gowns or favor jewelry or “feminine” things. No one could have tattoos or piercings. It was preferable that races not intermarry; whites and blacks were certainly not allowed to date or marry. The painful list of what was acceptable (and what was not) went on and on and on, and he made sure I knew it when he sat me down around age 13 and told me whom I could and could not date.
I was not a boy, then, but I was not a girl, either. I tried to care about feminine things, but just couldn’t.
Bless her, but my mother tried. To get me a haircut, a perm, “feminine” clothes that made me look like a secretary with their demure sweater vests and plaid skirts. I had my ears pierced and a makeover when I was 12. My mother was obsessed with Anne of Green Gables, so when Jessica McClintock came along with her puffed sleeves and wallpaper pastel fabrics, I was zipped into those without so much as a by-your-leave.
My mother was the epitomy of femininity — she was never so happy as when she was dripping with jewels, rank with expensive perfume, freshly coiffed at the salon, with newly false nails sharpening her fingertips. The tiny closets in our house groaned with her clothes. Everything had to match from head to toe — from her eyeshadow to her shoes. My father and I once counted the shoes in her closet and came up with 224 pairs. It all left me feeling revolted and uncomfortable, especially as I watched my father struggle with the credit card bills, the two of them fighting endlessly about her unwillingness to curb her expenditures.
I folded down into myself as much as possible to accommodate her on the one hand, while wearing it as a personal badge of honor that I had no need to be the kind of woman she was. Much to her consternation at my wedding, for instance, I refused to wear makeup or have my hair done, refused to be pretty the way she wanted me to be. I spent as little as possible on my wedding dress and shoes. I would not be her kind of woman, ever. But perhaps I shortchanged myself on the woman I might have been.
Still, I learned all the things a domestic woman should know — I learned to embroider when I was 7 and I was fully cleaning the house and doing the laundry and ironing by the time I was 10. In the fall after the scouting was done, I stayed home with the women while my dad and uncles hunted. I hated the thought of being trapped indoors, embroidering, cooking, flipping through endless clothing catalogs, waiting for the men to come home.
I endured it all. My little fashion rebellions were effectively shut down, either by my parents or people at school. A pair of jeans that I adored because I’d patched the knee with one of my dad’s cool Air Force patches from Thailand went abruptly missing. (I hid his jeans jacket and still have it). It was the 80s, and I fell in love with a band of androgynous men who wore lipstick and leather and named themselves after the villain of Barbarella, Duran Duran. Though my parents allowed my posters and tape playing, I was never allowed to see the band in concert and was constantly admonished for listening to their “Satanic music.”
I turned to books to escape, and books were blessed relief because I could be whomever I wanted to be — boy, girl, unicorn, or dragon. It didn’t matter. I could disappear for a while and be in another world. In a book, I could wear the green shoes without anyone knowing, if I’d known they existed. I came alive only when I disappeared between the pages of a book.
It was difficult for me to know how to be a girl in the 80s because while my mother was dressing me like a secretary from Little House on the Prairie, the girls in the private school I attended for two years all wore name brands like The Limited, Laura Ashley, Benetton, and Banana Republic — stuff we really couldn’t afford. The neighborhood girls who’d had no choice in their assigned schools wore torn fishnets, neon crop tops, leather skirts or parachute pants (if they were really cool), heavy eye makeup, and threw their undergarments onstage to the androgynous men I adored.
I did not want to be that kind of girl.
If anything, I longed to be the kind of androgynous boy girls threw themselves at, but I had absolutely no way of considering that or discussing it with anyone. I can look back now and see that the boys I had crushes on in middle school were not really crushes so much as idols, boys I wished I could be, boys I would never be anything to but that fat kid from the wrong side of the tracks. I can know all that in my heart, but the idea of actually becoming one of those boys was as science fictional an idea to me then as Barbarella’s sexual space odyssey still is today.
I tried to be what everyone wanted. I tried early to be seen. But I could not be seen for what I truly was because I didn’t know how. And when I tried to be a girl, disastrous things happened.
After puberty hit, I got accustomed to the men who swerved in front of me on the Turnpike, hooting and hollering from their pickup windows as I walked to the store for root beer and penny candy. I bought the penny candy with money I’d charged boys in my elementary school to look down my shirt, since I got breasts earlier than most every other girl there. By 11, I had my period. By 12, my sixth-grade teacher told me I was fat and needed to lose weight. She made us run extra laps around the field, sent home diets for us to follow. In fact, that may have been the first time I tried Weight Watchers. When an exercise book for girls was offered through Scholastic Book Club, I got it and started following the headband- and legwarmer-wearing lady in her diagrams to try to tone my bod.
Unfortunately, the boy next door noticed. And it wasn’t long before he groped me one day when I was over at his house, visiting his sister. After that, I stopped working out. I hid in my room and read, because books, for all the adventure they brought, were the safest place to be in my world. Exercise was painful enough without having to worry about how to defend myself against those who felt they had the right to my body whenever they wished.
The glass wall of girlhood was impossible for me to scale or break. All my attempts ended in failure. I did not realize then that there was more than one way to be a girl, that I could make my own way as a girl of this world. It was too far to reach, especially when all I had left inside was the little boy I would never be again.
I can remember particularly poignantly the last day I tried. I wore my best friend’s dress (a clingy tank dress that probably didn’t fit me well due to my curves) a sparkly headband, put on makeup and earrings, and wore kitten heels to 8th grade. I was late and I got to my locker during class. The only other person in the hall with me was a weasel-faced boy whose name I’ve finally, thankfully forgotten. But I have never forgotten what he said. He looked me up and down as I shouldered my heavy bag full of books and said, “You think you look good, but you look like a piece of shit.”
I hid in my mind, deep inside my mind, and became someone else. Someone who could possibly wear those green shoes. An androgynous boy. The past perfect boy I had been.
I am eliding a lot of things here, it’s true, but I can pinpoint precisely when I started playing this 48-year game of hide and seek with myself, the near misses, the failures and escapes, and the key to all of it is those electric green shoes, shocking me like electric eels, like a viridian sting, or an unexpected kiss with a slip of tongue shoved deep inside.
When that boy grabbed my breast and tried to kiss me, when another boy in 10th grade did the same, grinding himself on top of me, how I hated my powerlessness, how I hated the vile feeling that as a girl this was simply what I could expect from boys, that I would never be their equal, always a vessel for them to approve, fill, break, remold. And that sometimes, no matter how much I tried to hide, they would still find me.
I missed the days when I had been one of them, when I hunted and moved through the wild like a deer or a trout, when I dug under rocks like a hellgrammite, scooping up hapless aquatic insects in my jaws. When I had been respected and amusing and admired for my thoughts as well as my utility, when my breasts did not precede me everywhere I went, breasts that announced the unthinkable, the impossible, that omitted the essence of my very self because they were sex objects to be contained, constrained, revealed, groped at someone else’s pleasure.
And when other girls loved me (because they did), I did not know what to do with that love. I did not know how to respond in a place where I might be an equal and not someone else’s Grand Tetons to conquer. And more importantly, I didn’t want to be *their* conqueror. I didn’t want to intrude upon their bodies the way mine had been. None of it made sense, none of it fit with what I was expected to be and do.
The bullying continued, no matter what I wore or didn’t, no matter how I tried to hide. Something in me signaled the weakest of the herd, as if, having lost my boy self, my girl self could never find strength again.
It took mortal fear for me to reclaim my sovereignty. I took summer school in 10th grade to avoid taking PE in regular school, because I hated it that much and knew what I could probably expect from it. I thought it couldn’t possibly be as awful as a full academic year of PE.
I was wrong.
I was shoved naked in a locker and waited there beating on the metal door for what seemed like hours, until someone came and let me out. I was spit on, threatened, and mocked at every opportunity.
On one field trip, we waited in the school bus while kids took their turns using the hiking trail bathroom. Outside was the tired, dusty green of high summer, inside the sickly, sweaty vinyl of the school bus smothered us with its emerald funk.
I got up to take my turn, but when I tried to move down the aisle, my path was blocked by a kid who produced a lighter and requested hairspray from the girl next to him. (It was the 80s; every real girl carried hairspray in her purse). I barely had time to step back before a gout of flame hurtled toward me amidst peals of laughter and snickering. The only reason he didn’t manage to actually set me on fire was because the coaches re-boarded the bus at that moment and he hurried into his seat. The sizzling aerosol, the odor of almost-singed clothes and hair, seared my nostrils for the rest of the day.
A friend of mine from school had been badgering me to attend her martial arts school with her. That day, the day when I was almost literally roasted on a school bus, was the day I decided to go.
In Shaolin kung fu, I found my place in ways I never would have imagined. By then, of course I was deeply geeky, loving nothing more than to get lost in a fantasy world filled with sword-wielding mercenaries and powerful dark wizards or giant worm-riding Messiahs, but too afraid to share that love for fear I’d be bullied even more. To actually wield a sword in real life seemed utterly fantastical to me, but here was a place where swords, spears, halberds, and other weapons I’d never even seen before lined the walls and were picked up and used as if they were nothing more unusual than a pair of gardening shears.
I fell in love with everything about Shaolin kung fu — from its history, to the language and culture that had spawned it, to the silk uniforms our practitioners wore at tournaments. Here, it didn’t matter if I was a girl or a boy. What mattered was what the body could accept. One of our youngest black belts, in fact, had been taught the straightsword, a sword often reserved for scholars and women, in China because of his small frame and lightning speed. And one of our more advanced women had learned broadsword, typically a man’s sword, because she had powerful shoulders and hips and was tall. Gender didn’t matter. The body dictated what it could handle.
When I began learning sword was the first time I had felt comfortable in my body for years, as if my body was relearning itself, as if the sword was made to fit in my hand alone. Even now, when the swords in my house are more ornaments than practice tools, I sometimes find myself flipping an invisible sword, twirling it through my fingers, feeling the silk slide of tassels around my wrist. It no longer matters then what is between my legs. It only matters how my body can wield the power it holds.
In the years I was there, I learned to defend myself, use a staff, and wield a straightsword. I learned a quiet confidence that made it possible for me to walk through my high school without being bullied or beaten. My clothes no longer mattered. I wore jeans and t-shirts, dresses and boots with equal aplomb. If someone dared to challenge me, I would simply drop into a fighting stance and invite them to spar. Just doing that worked wonders. No one bothered me ever again after the one time I had to do it.
My parents never liked that I was in martial arts. It was “unladylike.” They threatened to pull the plug on it several times. They often refused to take me to tournaments or demonstrations, and I’d have to ride with older teens whose cars were barely functional, scraping the bottom of my coin jar for enough money to have a hot dog at the concession stand. My father, in fact, left me standing at the only tournament where I’d won 2ndplace because I wanted to go to dinner with the other competitors afterwards. I can’t remember how I paid for my dinner or got home; someone from the school must have helped me.
Sometimes, though, I think maybe they were secretly proud — they did come to some things, especially after I made the demonstration team and began performing at various events around the valley. I never competed in another tournament again, however. Though I had more confidence in myself than I’d ever had, the years of hiding deep inside myself, the lack of physical activity, made me clumsy and more inflexible than many others who competed. However, the point was that I kept trying, and it was this perseverance that became my bedrock, a far more solid shield against the world than burying myself in books alone.
I fell in love there with the straightsword-wielding boy, who was possessed of a gentle strength I’d never found in any other. I discovered over time that just as I had been a boy once, he had been a girl when he was young. We fit together like that Dar Williams song “When I Was a Boy.” That’s his story, not mine, but it was that love and understanding that carried me when nothing else quite did and it’s that love that remains from a time when everything else is gone.
He was with me the day I bought the green shoes. I was convinced they weren’t intended for me but for another, whether a glamorous model or a fabulous drag queen. I have not yet been able to pass them on, though. I think I am saving them for the boy I was long ago.
Such revelations may sound as though I plan to transition. I do not, though I once considered it. I think perhaps if I were to choose a label for myself now, it might be nonbinary. But that doesn’t feel quite comfortable to me, either. I simply am as I am; labels are too constricting. What I know today is that gender for me is like tense, the declension of it shifting through the years across a spectrum of knowledge and experience. Gender is a dance I move through, and even as I know the woman I am will probably never wear these Julian Hakes, I know the boy I once was surely would.