CHAPTER ONE: JENNIFER (Birth–5)
All my life I made beginnings, attempting to write down my story. But I would ask myself why my life would matter to anyone but me. Now you have to ask yourself that question, Kara. Even if I thought I might make a plan to write it in the future — a future in which all of my tasks had been completed, the world was ordered, and everything was in its right place — a chill went down the spine of my soul, and I could not take it up again.
I wouldn’t let you see pictures of me as a girl for a very long time. Even after we lived in the same house. I kept my photo albums sequestered in the attic at 10 Pleasant Lane. You asked me early on in our love affair what my female name had been. “I don’t remember,” I told you pointedly, my perfect dead-pan expression letting you know my answer was hilarious, and yet very serious at the same time. You didn’t ask again.
Seriously, I couldn’t have told you who I was before I changed my name and my sex from female to male. Before I knew you was another lifetime, or two, or three. Who can really remember? I was always transforming. That’s why you fell in love with me.
In order to begin my sex change at forty years of age into the man you met at sixty, it was imperative that I remove the female. I had to choose. I had to cut her out. If I had suspected so much cutting, not only of the flesh, but of the psyche too were required, I might have hesitated more. I was well underway before I realized how regimented I needed to be in order to affect a full facade of masculinity — how disappointing that I had to forgo almost every ounce of my flamboyance. I had to remove the female, and that meant definitely forgetting my former name.
I was afraid that seeing me as a female would ruin the dynamic between us. My first wife had been embarrassed and treated my change as incidental, practically an unfortunate accident. In the beginning of our love, I didn’t know yet how reverently you held my whole spirit. I couldn’t yet fathom what it would mean to have someone love me who loved the whole messy thing — that was your favorite part. At birth I was plain Jennifer. By now you have likely uncovered the many different aliases I used during my female life: Peach, Cheyenne, Chenil, Jaki Katz, Gabriel, Gabe, Jennifer Better, and Gwynnefahr.
Now you have inherited Jennifer’s belongings as well as Nicholas’. I cannot fill you in reliably as I am busy in a timeless dimension. I have only been able to drop in with a kiss between your eyes, and a few gifts. Some of this book will therefore have to be your creation. Filling in as many of the gaps as I might have done were I sitting down with the pieces.
Six months after my death you opened the first of my long cardboard boxes in the attic. When you took out my “infancy” file, bulging with all of my congratulatory birth cards, which my mother had saved, you laughed at how meticulously I had catalogued back to the very instant of my arrival. I knew you were thinking: You, who did not like to be photographed!? You, who got angry if I filmed you on my iPad without asking permission!? You, who said — this house is not a museum — and shredded all of your paperwork daily, have actually saved extensive files? You asked yourself why a person who did not particularly seem to value their life-story save such detailed accounts of it. I can’t answer that, Kara. Maybe so that you would find a great single purpose in writing it all down.
Next the “Early Years” folder, filled with my early drawings and cards for holidays, all of my “I LOVE YOU’s” to my mother and father:
“Dear Mommy, I have gone to the junkyard. I am picking flowers. Jennifer.”
“To Mommy and Daddy for Valentine’s Day, I love you very much, but more importantly Donal kissed me six times and ‘ate up my arm too.’”
“Happy Easter Daddy! I really love you daddy. Although sometimes you may not know it. You are really a nice fat juicy gooshey, nice to sit on, Stone Hearted LOW CREATURE! But that doesn’t stop me from loving you. From Jennifer.”
My father was a boy with a missing father raised by two tough women, so it was perfect symmetry that he found my mother, a girl with a missing father too. Undoubtedly, with each suffering the trauma and shame of that absence in different ways, it was a nearly impossible dilemma when they decided to become parents. It was vitally important to both of their egos to raise a child properly . Yet they had no idea and no practical training in how to do it. Ah, the revenge on all of their good intentions was a precocious and troublesome child.
My father wrote to my mother on the day of my birth: “We enter now the charmed ring of creation. We form life — life-forming life — and the ages will know us. We have been vocalizing, but now the song is begun, and we sing with the music which Nature plays. Only, we must remember to listen as we sing.”
I know you were surprised when you first encountered his eloquent voice in his many love letters to my mother. Of course that is the job of the psychopath. He really knew how to turn on the charm and give my mother what she craved for a time.
Cousin Judy has told you how impressive my young father was in his Navy uniform, and you have seen the photos of him in perfect physical condition on the beach. Oddly though he dated a string of women much older than he was before he married my mother. There was some age-appropriate screw loose, and you and I have surmised that something might have happened to him as a boy that made his later predations against me later somehow explainable, if not forgivable.
My fondest memories of my first years were of our summer trips to my great grandmother Gram Grimshaw’s in East Hampton. She was the great matriarch on my father’s side. She took my grandmother in when my grandfather ran off. My great grandmother was great friends with her daughter-in-law, and built a separate apartment for her in the large house. When I went to visit East Hampton I saw my Gram Grimshaw and Grammy Klem in one house!
Gram Grimshaw was my safety and security, the center of the universe. Until she died when I was eight, my happiest memory was being in her house at 103 Newtown Lane. I remember vividly the early sea-smelling country mornings, fried bay scallops, and sand, sand, sand; always a bucket of fresh water on the back porch to dip your bare feet into before you came in from outside; being lifted and tucked safely into my Gram’s high bed behind the parlor while the adults were still up.
My father’s mother, Grammy Klem, was a tiny, tough woman, a thin-lipped, fervently religious Methodist who was very strict with children. There was no getting around her. Her word was law, and there was no appeal. Even so, I was stubborn enough to revolt when she wanted to call me ‘Honey Girl,’ which I refused to answer to. I insisted on being called whatever my father had been called. Surprisingly she indulged me by calling me ‘Honey Boy,’ my father’s childhood name.
My great Aunt Edith was a huge part of my life, the one who told me I was an old soul, an artist, beautiful, wise.. She helped to develop what was special in me.
Over the years Gram’s house became a bank, and the land a parking lot, but it became even more important, a symbol of safety for me. It was a place in my past where I could not be harmed by my father, who obeyed her there. Gram sat at night in a chair against the wall of the dining room, with her long gray hair down, brushing it before she put me to bed in her huge bed, so wonderfully high up, she had to help me into it. There were white, filmy curtains in her bedroom, and pictures over the dresser, some of her dead son Russell and his daughter Dottie Ree.
I often dreamt about the house and my cousin Judy drew detailed floor plans for me from memory. I know you and Richard looked everywhere for that picture of Gram’s house when I was in the hospital. Since it had been the place I felt safest you wanted me to have it with me at Mount Sinai when I was leaving you. Months afterward you found it among my art supplies in the great 17th century armoire I bought for you, which lives in the back cottage. I hope we can meet there together someday — Gram’s house, not the armoire — although it is big enough to hold us both.
I have scattered memories of normal life back in Newark, New Jersey: entering the dark kitchen by the back stairs, Jimmy Stewart reading Winnie The Pooh, Woody Guthrie’s ‘Take Me Riding In A Car’ song, and how my mother studied modern dance with Woody Guthrie’s wife; my cat Sylvia, that I said “Comes in like a parade,” and my father, so impressed that he repeated it for years, swearing Sylvia learned prepositions along with me, saying to her “Sylvia, put the sock on the chair,” and she did; making shapes under the covers with my mother to frighten Daddy; my mother’s mother from Latvia, bringing Breyer’s vanilla ice cream with special dark flecks of real vanilla, the smartweed along the edges of the sidewalk in East Orange, NJ; ball games on the radio, hearing “down and dirty” a lot, the hard, sharp laughter, and the snap of the cards on the tabletop when they played; getting up early in the morning and going up to the Glennon’s apartment before the milkman put the glass bottles at everyone’s door, or the Duggan’s bread man came with fresh, hot loaves in big wire baskets, and certainly before my mother opened her eyes.
I would have already put on my cowboy hat and six guns over my pajamas and taken the dark back stairs up to see my best first friend Betty and her husband Frank. She was a grownup, but she would visit with me in her kitchen like an adult, make me weak tea with plenty of milk and sugar, and even breakfast. One day my mother couldn’t find me and came looking upstairs. Betty told her that I was a ‘rail.’ I knew what that meant: it was ‘liar’ spelled backwards. Betty was in some sort of complicity with my mother. It was my first friend’s betrayal. Betty was probably trying to figure out why I was thin as a ‘rail’ and seeking food, and why my mother was still asleep. I stopped going upstairs for tea in the mornings. Those early days of my mother’s depression, she must have been oversleeping because of her Valium.
I was always more interested in adults than children, and I was intrigued by exploring the world on my own. There’s a picture of me with just that look of fascination on my face standing in the beaten dirt front yard with broken flagstones. It was all beautiful, maple trees dropping their sweet crumbly stuff in early spring, the sweetness of the air, walking with my father in town. He explained why the manhole covers were hotter than the sidewalk — yes, I was barefoot in Newark — conductivity. In those days I enjoyed his explanations of the world. There’s a surreal memory of going with him on a city bus late at night — to be asked, to be out after dark without my mother was exciting. When I was alone with him he gave me attention like a peer. We visited a woman friend of his. It felt surreptitious. I felt the current between them, their excitement and unease. I never forgot it. It was only a preview of much stranger excitements to come.
