Page 46 of Best Woman
Dad’s house is still as small and cramped with junk as it was this morning, but clearly he’d heeded my suggestion about leaving the windows open. The smell of lazy man no longer lingers quite as heavily in the air.
“Oh thank god,” I groan, dropping down onto a bench by the door to take the heels off my aching feet.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just take those off in the car,” Dad says, walking toward the kitchen to grab a bottle of water. Not very sustainable. I’ll have to get him a reusable bottle.
“My friend Daytona always says that a queen shouldn’t take her drag off until she’s at home with the door locked.”
“But you’re not a drag queen,” Dad says, brow furrowed.
“No, but this, ” I say, sweeping an arm to encompass the dress I was still squeezed into, the makeup on my face, and my giant blowout, “is drag.”
“So that’s not really you,” he said, sounding genuinely curious.
“You don’t like getting all glammed up in a dress and high heels?
” There’s a question underneath the question, something like, Then what’s the point .
I can’t believe I’m discussing fashion and gender presentation with the man who refused to buy me a Sailor Venus doll when I was nine.
I pull my right foot up onto the bench and start massaging the blood back into it. “Because it’s what everyone expected. Or needed to see. Whatever.”
Dad hands me an evil, environmentally unsound plastic water bottle and falls heavily into his favored armchair. “I don’t think anyone needed you to be uncomfortable just to, I don’t know, prove something.”
I can’t help the snort I let out. “Of course they did, Dad. That’s what being trans is .” I crack open the water and take a glug. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
He tells me where I’ll find everything I’d need for the night and that we’d need to leave early the next morning if I wanted to have time to swing by Mom’s and get ready before heading to the farewell brunch. The thought of being in that house and facing her—
I’ve always wanted a daughter.
—makes my stomach seize up like I’m constipated. And maybe I am, just not…physically. Psychic constipation.
The room is almost as I’d left it just days ago, with one glaring omission.
The photo of me that had hung on the wall was gone.
In its place is the ugliest piece of art I’ve ever seen: a giant papier-maché Kit Kat bar, executed in wobbly detail by someone with little artistic talent or hand-eye coordination but lots of enthusiasm.
I knew this because I’d made it in second grade.
I had no idea Dad had held on to it. I’d always wondered why this piece wasn’t in my mother’s cabinet of offspring art.
One of the edges bore my initials, still the same even after my trip to city court two years ago to have my name legally changed: JR. Here is a little piece of my past that my dad had kept all these years as I moved further and further away from him and the version of myself he knew and understood.
A piece of me that is, in a measurable way, unchanged.
I unzip my dress and get into bed. I think of how my mother would chide me for going to sleep without washing my makeup off, and that’s the thing that finally shakes the ugly sobs from my chest.