We sat there in the forest together, the sun flickering through the needles. Not far away was the stream that came down from the hills and flowed past our house. I could hear it trickling over the rocks. Its waters were so dark.
VII
Ranger, 2018
He’s telling me a secret, said Sean.
Lucy was not wrong when she predicted, Some things you will keep. By my late fifties, I’d been female for almost two decades. I’d changed my college, my gender, and my byline. But I’d kept my family.
On a spring day in 2017, we floated around the Central Park lagoon in a rowboat, my son and I. We had a couple of bottles of beer in the boat with us, although he was reluctant to open them. “Isn’t it illegal?” he asked. “An open container?”
“Well, you know me,” I replied. “Always the dangerous revolutionary.”
My son laughed. By the age of twenty-three, Zach had emerged from Vassar College a gentle, witty, generous man, fond of acting, and of cooking, and of Dungeons & Dragons, and of his girlfriend, Emily.
Now, as he rowed me around the lagoon, I looked upon him with love. He reminded me of a version of my own younger self at that same age, except—as I said to Deedie now and again—“without all the tears.” If he had not yet launched into the world (he and Emily were living in Washington, D.C., as she embarked on a doctoral program, and he took on a few temp jobs), I had no doubt that he’d figure out his path in time. I remembered that at his same age I had been living one floor above the S&M dungeon with Charlie Kaufman and working on my novel about the wizard who owned an enchanted waffle iron. My son would find his way eventually, I thought, and in the meantime, what we had was the blessing of a warm spring day and our love for each other.
Zach and I rowed around the lagoon until we found ourselves beneath a stone bridge with perfect acoustics. We began to sing a song by Brendan Behan, one of our favorites when raising a jar together, “The Auld Triangle,” with its concluding verse about a convict’s longing to dwell for a while among the women “up in the female prison.”
Our voices echoed together, my son’s and mine. So there we floated. A boat against the current.
* * *
For a long time it had been unclear whether our family would endure my coming out as trans. In the wake of that unveiling, I had found myself able to live more authentically in the world, to be sure. But it was also true that the old me had suited everyone just fine, and my wife not least. Finding herself unexpectedly married to a woman had not struck her as the most obvious way to improve our marriage.
It was not my mother’s happiest moment either. By the spring of 2001, Hildegarde had at last found herself living a life without dogs. She’d decided to stay in our old haunted house, which seemed curious to me at first; it was such a big place just for one woman, a woman who—to be honest—really lived in only a handful of its many chambers. It was sad to think of her there, without my father, without her children, and I know there were times that she felt lonely. But her buoyant disposition, on the whole, lifted her over these moments, just as it had when she was a child and it had been her job, once again, to yank her drunken father from the pigpen.
I would often find her, when I came back to Devon to visit, sitting contentedly in a rocking chair, needlepointing, or listening to classical music on the radio, or reading the latest political biography or literary novel. When I was growing up, my friends had christened her “the Good Witch,” and even now there was more than a little Glinda to her. She’d throw her arms around us and usher us toward the guest rooms with joy and cheerful serenity. Sometimes I’d wonder, Why was it that my mother seemed so deeply at peace with the world? She’d lived about the hardest, most impoverished life of anyone I knew—at least until she was twenty and made her escape from her parents’ “dirt farm.” She had been scarred by the turmoil of her youth, and by losing her