Middlesex

At restaurants I began to use the men’s rooms. This was perhaps the hardest adjustment. I was scandalized by the filth of men’s rooms, the rank smells and pig sounds, the grunting and huffing from the stalls. Urine was forever puddled on the floors. Scraps of soiled toilet paper adhered to the commodes. When you entered a stall, more often than not a plumbing emergency greeted you, a brown tide, a soup of dead frogs. To think that a toilet stall had once been a haven for me! That was all over now. I could see at once that men’s rooms, unlike the ladies’, provided no comfort. Often there wasn’t even a mirror, or any hand soap. And while the closeted, flatulent men showed no shame, at the urinals men acted nervous. They looked straight ahead like horses with blinders.

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.

A word on penises. What was Cal’s official position on penises? Among them, surrounded by them, his feelings were the same as they had been as a girl: by equal measures fascinated and horrified. Penises had never really done that much for me. My girlfriends and I had a comical opinion of them. We hid our guilty interest by giggling or pretending disgust. Like every schoolgirl on a field trip, I’d had my blushing moments among the Roman antiquities. I’d stolen peeks when the teacher’s back was turned. It’s our first art lesson as kids, isn’t it? The nudes are dressed. They’re dressed in high-mindedness. Being six years older, my brother had never shared a bathtub with me. The glimpses of his genitals I’d had over the years were fleeting. I’d studiously looked away. Even Jerome had penetrated me without my seeing what went on. Anything so long concealed couldn’t fail to intrigue me. But the glimpses those men’s rooms afforded were on the whole disappointing. The proud phallus was nowhere in evidence, only the feed bag, the dry tuber, the snail that had lost its shell.

And I was scared to death of being caught looking. Despite my suit, my haircut, and my height, every time I went into a men’s room a shout rang out in my head: “You’re in the men’s!” But the men’s was where I was supposed to be. Nobody said a word. Nobody objected to my presence. And so I searched for a stall that looked halfway clean. I had to sit to urinate. Still do.

At night, on the fungal carpets of motel rooms, I did exercises, push-ups and sit-ups. Wearing nothing but my new boxers, I examined my physique in the mirror. Not long ago I’d fretted over my failure to develop. That worry was gone now. I didn’t have to live up to that standard anymore. The impossible demands had been removed and I felt a vast relief. But there were also moments of dislocation, staring at my changing body. Sometimes it didn’t feel like my own. It was hard, white, bony. Beautiful in its own way, I supposed, but Spartan. Not receptive or pliant at all. Contents under pressure, rather.

It was in those motel rooms that I learned about my new body, its specific instructions and contraindications. The Object and I had worked in the dark. She had never really explored my apparatus much. The Clinic had medicalized my genitals. During my time there they were numb or slightly tender from the constant examinations. My body had shut down in order to get through the ordeal. But traveling woke it up. Alone, with the door locked and the chain on, I experimented with myself. I put pillows between my legs. I lay on top of them. Half paying attention, while I watched Johnny Carson, my hand prospected. The anxiety I’d always felt about how I was made had kept me from exploring the way most kids did. So it was only now, lost to the world and everyone I knew, that I had the courage to try it out. I can’t discount the importance of this. If I had doubts about my decision, if I sometimes thought about turning back, running back to my parents and the Clinic and giving in, what stopped me was this private ecstasy between my legs. I knew it would be taken from me. I don’t want to overestimate the sexual. But it was a powerful force for me, especially at fourteen, with my nerves bright and jangling, ready to launch into a symphony at the slightest provocation. That was how Cal discovered himself, in voluptuous, liquid, sterile culmination, couchant upon two or three deformed pillows, with the shades drawn and the drained swimming pool outside and the cars passing, endlessly, all night.