Page 12 of Best Woman

My flight to Florida is, of course, delayed. We sit on the tarmac for two hours as the engine is checked, the wheels inspected, and the fuel tank refilled.

I sit pressed against a window, worrying about the garment bag tucked into the overhead compartment above me.

There had been no question of checking my luggage: River assured me that the clothing and accessories I was borrowing (“transporting across state lines,” they’d said, an alarmingly legal description) cost, in total, about the same as the plane.

So that garment bag would be staying as close to me as possible for the next week.

“Hannah G will prosecute,” River had warned.

“But don’t worry, you’d make friends on the inside! ”

As Rupert Everett asks Julia Roberts who is chasing her, we finally lift off.

By the time the beverage cart comes around, I’m watching Nia Vardalos fall in love with Aidan from Sex and the City .

I sip ginger ale—nectar of the gods when sipped at a high altitude—as family shenanigans unfold.

Their hilarious dysfunction makes me think about my own family, which is just as dysfunctional and significantly less hilarious. From the inside, at least.

My parents, Dana and Stan, divorced when I was eight and Aiden was six.

From that moment, there were two sides in our family: Mom’s and Dad’s.

I was firmly on my mom’s, Aiden on our dad’s.

It’s not that I didn’t try to get along with my dad, but I don’t think he ever really understood me, or maybe he never really tried.

Aiden he did understand: they liked all the same things, and Aiden so clearly got that my dad needed his little buddy when I was no longer interested.

Every other weekend when we’d go to my dad’s small apartment, the two of them would watch baseball in the living room, fueling their grating obsession with the Yankees, while I read and drew quietly out back by the canal.

I tried to spend more time with Mom, but she always insisted that it was important for me to have a relationship with him.

Maybe she just wanted me out of the house after she’d married Randy, a Texan Jew who looked kind of like Robert Redford.

Randy is one of the absolute strangest people I’ve ever met.

Once, at an Italian restaurant, he wiped the sweat off his brow with a piece of garlic bread and then ate the bread.

“You can’t waste good food,” he’d told us as I struggled to keep my chicken parmigiana down.

“When I was a kid we lived off a can of beans a week!”

When I was in high school, Mom and Randy had kids of their own.

Brody and Brian were the cutest babies I’d ever seen, but they’ve always been…

unnerving. I only had a few years at home with them before I left for college, and that was mostly spent changing their diapers and being haunted by the sound of Sesame Street playing on the giant TV in our living room.

But every time I visited, they’d be a little bigger, a little older, and they’d look at me with eyes that were far too knowing for children.

Maybe it’s the twin thing, that they always finish each other’s sentences and that, despite knowing them their entire lives, I still cannot tell them apart.

No one can, except for my mom. They’ve got a sort of eerie, haunted quality about them, and though I’ve never seen them like, torturing kittens or wandering the halls of an abandoned hotel asking other children to play with them, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Halfway through my next movie selection and wondering what happened to Katherine Heigl’s career, I climb over my sleeping seatmates and trek to the tiny airplane bathroom.

In the glaring overhead light, I stare at my face in the mirror, searching out my genetic inheritance, the puzzle of pieces that link me to my bloodline as indelibly as my memories.

There is my dad’s tiny sloping nose, my mother’s freckles, Grandpa’s bushy eyebrows, and the squinty eyes my siblings and I all share.

When I first told my mom that I planned to transition, she cried.

“I’ve always wanted a daughter,” she’d admitted as I sat curled into a tight little knot in the darkness of my Brooklyn bedroom, phone clutched in hand, terror bleeding slowly and cautiously into relief.

“Whatever makes you happy,” my dad had said before quickly changing the subject.

Randy had taken me to the mall and bought me a shopping bag full of makeup.

Brody and Brian had nodded in silent unison and then gone to set something on fire, probably.

Aiden and I had sat in silence on the phone for a full minute. “OK,” he’d finally breathed out. “OK. I love you. I love you…Julia.”

“I love you, Julia!” he’d said on the phone days before. “I can’t wait to see you mooning over Kim in the synagogue.” My stomach had twisted in knots. “Do you think the ‘Thong Song’ is appropriate for the reception?”

I look back in the mirror, at the eyes shaped just like Aiden’s, though his are hazel whereas mine are brown.

I pull my shirt up and snap a photo of my breasts in the mirror to send to the group chat with my friends when we land.

When I get back to my seat, I switch off 27 Dresses and start Scream, needing to watch someone die violently.

Could I pull off Drew Barrymore’s blond, banged bob? Probably not.

I drift off for a while and dream about a mall sunk deep underground, full of fleshy orange zombies in tracksuits who tip over a Dippin’ Dots vending machine.

The glass cracks and a million spiders swarm out.

Lorraine from Born to Bride shambles toward me, her tracksuit an ugly teal that clashes with her skin and her putrid pink lipstick.

I jolt awake as the plane touches down. Home sweet home.