She's Not There Read Online Free PDF Page A

could believe, with such heartbroken conviction, something that, on the surface of it, seems so stupid? This question always baffled me, as I could hardly imagine what it would be like
not
to know what your gender was. It seemed obvious to me that this was something you understood intuitively, not on the basis of what was between your legs, but because of what you felt in your heart. Remember when you woke up this morning—I’d say to my female friends—and you knew you were female?
That’s
how I felt.
That’s
how I knew.
    Of course, knowing with such absolute certainty something that appeared to be both absurd and untrue made me, as we said in Pennsylvania, kind of
mental.
It was an absurdity I carried everywhere, a crushing burden, which was, simultaneously, invisible. Trying to make the best of things, trying to
snap out of it
, didn’t help, either. As time went on, that burden only grew heavier, and heavier, and heavier.
    The first time I remember trying to come up with some sort of solution to the
being alive problem
was about 1968, when I was staying in a summer house in Surf City, New Jersey. A hurricane was blowing up. My parents were away, watching my sister ride horses, and I was being tended by my dipsomaniac grandmother, Gammie, and her friend Hilda Watson, a tiny woman from North Yorkshire who was as deaf as a blacksmith’s anvil. Since it was nearly impossible for Hilda to hear even the loudest sounds, most of the time she sat in a chair wearing a startled expression; when she was aware she was being spoken to, she made a soft whooping noise, similar to the squeals of a guinea pig. Also there was my eccentric aunt Nora, who liked to make sock puppets as a gesture of love. One time she made me, out of one of my father’s black socks, an octopus with a mustache and a red top hat.
    On the day the hurricane hit, I had taken a walk underneath the boardwalk. It was as close to infinity as I could imagine under there, the row of pylons and boardwalk stretching as far as I could see. All around me were the echoes of the ocean and the howling wind and the seagulls and the rain, the smells of creosote and tar.
    I was “taking a big walk.” On the
big walk
I was going to try to
solve
whatever it was that was wrong with me. I walked down the dark tunnel of the place beneath the boardwalk, trying to figure out what the deal was with being alive. I knew I wasn’t a girl—by then it was clear that girls and I were different. And yet, clearly enough, I wasn’t a boy, either. What was I? What was going to happen to me if I didn’t stop wanting to be a girl all the time?
    That afternoon under the boardwalk, as the hurricane blew up, I tried to think about what I could do to solve the problem. This whole wanting-to-be-a-girl-all-the-time business was eating up a lot of my time. But what could a person do, if she wanted something impossible?
    I got as far as a fishing pier, and I left the tunnel of the below-the-boardwalk place and climbed out on the jetty next to the pier. Waves were already crashing up angrily against the rocks, and rain was starting to fall. The wind whipped my hair around. I sat on the farthest rock and looked out at the sea and watched the ocean for a long time.
    And then I thought,
Maybe you could be cured by love.
    Even
then
I think I was aware of how corny this sounded. Still, I believed it to be true. If I was loved deeply enough by others, perhaps I would be content to stay a boy.
    I walked back to the apartment with this newfound awareness surrounding me like a caul. I would start with my grandmother. I opened the door to find Gammie and Mrs. Watson playing gin and drinking vodka. Gammie was describing the night of my father’s conception. “Best screwin’ I ever had!” she shouted. I stared at her.
    â€œWhat’s with you?” Gammie said.
    â€œNothing,” I said. Mrs. Watson was listening to the Zombies on the AM radio.