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  All of these things seemed infused with life again, or maybe it was just that new memories rose from each of them. When she looked at the silk ribbon on an old hat she could remember Henry holding her hand. She could hear Carson singing in the basement when she pulled out the old bathroom scale and saw the bag of yarn with his old latch-hook tool at the bottom of the closet. She sniffed at some floral soaps under the bathroom sink that had never been used—too pretty—and remembered the scent of Gretchen’s hair when she let it air-dry on Sundays. Before Judy left the bathroom, she set the soaps out in the soap dish.

  Rusty was out in the front yard, flapping his arms. Judy paused to watch him through the picture window, then headed for the basement. She wanted to look at the children’s rooms, see if anything had been moved. It had been years since she’d really examined them—the books on the shelves, the knickknacks on the desks, the old shoes in the closet.

  But there, in her old bed, Judy found Gretchen, lying on top of her old pink spread, toes curled, one arm draped across her big belly. And Judy felt not just elated, but that she had another chance. Maybe this would be the baby she herself had always wanted to have, a little Forrest Lowell or Constantine Wilhelm.

  She stooped over to look at Gretchen’s sleeping form. Her face was serene, her brow free of creases. She smiled in her sleep, letting out a whispery snore. She had on a brown linen dress with little wood beads along the hem. Except for her short hair, which was shaved fine as carpet, the girl could have been Judy. It was like looking in a mirror, twenty-four years younger, unblemished, with a whole life ahead of her and a new life growing within.

  For a moment, Judy could remember the taste of such a beginning. She could remember what it was like to hold something inside, how very private it was, how profound to feel it kicking, to own it and be part of it at the same time. It made her feel womanly and strong, a feeling she had almost forgotten. What she realized, sitting there in the fading light, imagining Gretchen’s child, was that she herself had been robbed—yes, robbed—of bearing and naming her own children, of keeping her children, of protecting them in the ways she knew how. Forces much stronger than her had taken over, forces no one had taught her about.

  “Never marry a man who can crush you in bed,” her mother had said. Judy ran her finger over her lip and felt it then—yes, it was true. She was growing something of a mustache. It felt downy to her touch, like the first hair on a baby’s head, yet a little manly. Something was sprouting from within, something new, something quite new. She started for the stairs, rushing up the steps into the kitchen. Rusty’s house keys were on the table. She slipped over to the sliding glass door, clicked the lock in place, then went around to the front door, pushed in the button, drew the chain across, then gave a final thrust to the garage door and locked that, too.

  Rusty was still out in the yard, swearing at the sun as the great bus pulled away. Next door, the sprinklers kicked on, and Judy watched from behind a curtain as Rusty sputtered and cursed. She folded her arms across her chest and stood quietly with her eyes closed, feet together, feeling the house become submerged in the warm glow of evening.

  Chapter 8

  GRETCHEN’S SONG

  Gretchen woke up, raising her head off the pillow, disoriented for a moment by the sight of her old pink dresser across the room. She rubbed her eyes, let her vision go starry for a minute. A faded streak of sunlight spread across her thighs like a loosely woven scarf, and she recalled how, almost eight months ago, she had been in this bed with Ray beside her. A child had been conceived—two cells colliding in the dark, the sperm with its mission, the egg with its grounded sensibility. It was hard to believe that in a fraction of a second an identity had been created, so quickly, so quietly. Her parents upstairs had gone about their business and not heard a thing.

  It was amazing to think such a thing was possible—one expected fireworks, at least some timpani, something to announce that a being had been conceived, a little XX or a little XY that would inhabit its mother’s middle passage, cells splitting in secret. But no. For weeks, invisible! Just a double stripe on a pregnancy test, a yes from a nurse who administered the blood test. And even then, still a mystery, a tremor of light, a face forming out of sky, shielding itself from attention. And that, Gretchen thought, was what was so beautiful—like in the liquid it lived in, all decisions had to be suspended. It was Occupant X and no more.

  Gretchen put a hand on her belly. It was a true presence now, with arms and legs and a tiny secret between its thighs that no one—not even Gretchen—knew about yet. And it would be a long time—maybe three or four years at least—before anyone would know, anyone other than Ray or herself, that was. It wasn’t anyone’s business, she had decided. It didn’t do anyone good to know, other than to establish stereotypes and develop silly monikers, false expectations. She loathed the ultrasound hounds who demanded to know the sex of their unborn fetuses in order to prepare the nursery accordingly. To go around discussing the sex of a child before anyone had even viewed the little face—it seemed so presumptuous, so peculiarly obsessive.

  What a lot of baggage for something yet unborn. Little He or She enters the world in one of two categories, based not on the color of its eyes or the shape of its navel but according to the color of a onesie that corresponds to its genitals. Before the infant knows what is happening, its tiny body is pushed into a largely defined role, and on it rolls, into adulthood, surrounded in the trappings of its sex, rarely stopping to question, unless it comes across something quite out of context that gives it pause and cause to wonder: Why am I what I am?

  For Gretchen Glide, that moment still stood out rather distinctly in her mind, as distinct as the little slides she used to study under her microscope as a child, bringing cells from her tongue under scrutiny, looking at gnats, clippings from her father’s toenails, hair from the cats under the light. How she had loved to scrutinize the minutiae of ordinary life, long before she suspected something in their house was not quite right and that the greatest secrets could not be magnified.

  She remembered the time perfectly. She had been nine or ten, and in the quest for new things to look at under her scope, she had planned to sneak into her parents’ room, where she had designs on their closet—going through their pockets in search of interesting specimen. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find, but she was sure that within the lining of her father’s suit coats and her mother’s dress pockets she would find choice specks of dirt and grub to rub onto her glass slides. And she was sure these things would reveal truisms about her family—creepy-crawly things, maybe even lice. It was simply a matter of waiting until her parents were gone some night and Carson was babysitting. From time to time, her parents slipped next door to visit Donald and Celeste for a nightcap—“a little drinky-poo” was what her mother always said.

  On one such occasion, Gretchen had crept into her parents’ bedroom. From the windows the voices next door rose and fell, her mother’s tinkling laugh, her father’s one-note harrumph. Their bedroom was dark, their bedspread still taut. She ran a swab over her mother’s dressing table, tucked it in a Ziploc, then made a move toward the closet. As she pulled back the door, it stuck to the track. Then from behind it came the faint sound of something scuffling around amid her mother’s shoes. She’d paused. Was that breathing she heard? Surely not.

  She’d hesitated, then yanked the door open and jumped back, expecting a mouse, a monster—she was not past such fantasies—but the closet was quiet, the clothes on the rack swinging slightly to and fro and sending up the faintest smell of her mother’s perfume. She surveyed them in the dark, her mother’s A-line skirts and puffy blouses, then decided to start at the far end, where her mother kept a satin robe and a few night things, including a turquoise negligee Gretchen had often eyed, though she’d never seen it off the hanger.

  Gauging the giddy laughter from next door, she decided she better make the most of her time by yanking the negligee from the rack and giving its lacy trim
and gathered satin pockets a thorough scouring. But the turquoise negligee did not want to part with its hanger. In fact, the turquoise negligee seemed to have a mind of its own. Something inside it kicked at her when she tugged the lacy hem, and moments later she found herself flat on her back, looking up at a strange specter that hissed, “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  She had been too surprised to struggle, staring up into the eyes of her brother—or was it? The figure had Carson’s narrow shoulders, his delicate hands and hairless wrists, even his long face, but the lips were painted like a bold red carnation, and the eyelids shimmered with mothy powder. Its mouth twitched, its eyes grew glassy, on the verge of tears. For a moment, in the half-light, she could read something there, detect something more intricate than anything she had studied under a mirrored lens. The creature was half man and half woman.

  A notion fluttered up and through her mind, a notion that would recur from time to time throughout her life, like the beginning of a question she could not quite phrase—it brushed her insides like a different kind of butterfly, reminding her that the surface of things was not necessarily as strange as what might lay beneath.

  She’d fled her parents’ room and gone hurtling into her own bed, where, staring out the window, she had quietly imagined a race of people that were neither male nor female. Somewhere out there, maybe on Pluto or Mars, there had to be other life forms that were unlike anything anyone had ever seen in Fort Cloud, unlike anything anyone had even dreamed of in Fort Cloud—somewhere out there on one of those lost-looking dots of white light.

  Not long after that night, Carson had disappeared, and though she had understood her mother’s despair, Gretchen had felt secretly glad for him. Some part of her had understood that he could not be Carson Glide, not the way he was expected to be. Even at a tender age, she understood this, and she cherished the glimpse of him she had been able to see that night in the closet, a side no one in her family knew existed and one she knew she dared not reveal. It was simply something she could feel, like a subtle vibration or a high-pitched tone that only animals with pointy ears might intercept. Beyond the green welcome signs of Fort Cloud, there were other planes of being.

  And so she did not feel the desertion that weighed heavily on her parents and even her eldest brother, Henry, the three of them sulking collectively without any discussion of it, except for her mother, who asked at least once a day, “What will people think? What will they think we have done?” to which her father answered, “For God’s sake, Judy. It has nothing to do with us.”

  The decision seeded itself then—long before she herself experimented with her own identity (the pink hair, the nose rings, the Vampire Lesbian T-shirts)—she decided that she would never force a child to serve an identity. She would not have one if she could not forge some in-between route to gender, an idea that formed in her mind during college and finally made its way to the page in the form of a poem titled “Avant Baby,” which she’d written for a women’s studies class during her senior year.

  I will not make you a girl or boy.

  Will not put you through pink or blue.

  Rather than watch the lopsided crawl,

  I’ll refrain from having you at all.

  The poem won first place in the campus feminist literary journal, the Speculum, and later, by some chance, garnered a response from a university alum who wanted to include the poem in a book she was writing entitled Man Child, Woman Child, Future Child. She invited Gretchen out for coffee at a nearby bookstore to discuss the matter, telling Gretchen over the phone, “I have long dark hair, and I’ll be wearing a loden-colored cape.”

  Gretchen, who was just coming out of her hot-pink-trihawk-and-muscle-shirt stage, had almost skipped out on the date. She wasn’t particularly intrigued by dark-haired cape-wearers, and she had no idea what “loden” looked like. Sure enough, the woman was easy to spot, with her horsey tresses and her greenish velvety awning.

  “I’m pregnant,” she had said the moment Gretchen sat down. “That’s why I’m wearing the dumb cape.” She made a face and rested an arm on her belly, letting her hand dangle boredly.

  “Here”—she’d thrust her card across the table—“I’ve got to use the john.”

  Leah Vanhorn, the card read. Intergender Counselor.

  Coffee led to dinner, dinner to part-time work editing Leah’s doctoral thesis, and before she knew it, Gretchen was using skills she never dreamed she would rely on again, namely sewing black onesies for Leah’s first child, M16. Something good had come of meeting a cape-wearer, and when the cape-wearer gave birth to her first child and inverted her name to add sexual complexity to her person, Gretchen had been there at the renaming ceremony to pull the vegan potpies from the oven, each one encrusted with a salty smile. And when Leah, aka Hael, and her husband, Glyn, had confided in Gretchen that they were looking to start an intentional community of neofuture parents, Gretchen had said, “Count me in.” Two years later, at the shower for Hael’s second child, Ray had swept into the room with a performance troupe that called themselves “The Birth Liberation Dancers.”

  “Ohhh-la-la,” Ray had said, pressing a stethoscope to her chest during the show and miming a lovestruck swoon. Two winks later she had a dinner date. That was spring for you. By summer, they were sharing a futon and a minifridge, saving up for a down payment on what they teasingly called an “Avant Baby Village” condo.

  Their membership in the community had been unanimous. With Ray’s performance art degree and Gretchen’s black-onesie cottage industry, they were the picture of post-sixties neodomestic bliss. With no standard gender roles (he washed and waxed, she sewed and maintained the truck), they presented a unified front of vigorous crunchiness and intellectual rigor. Until recently.

  Gretchen could smell meat cooking upstairs. She listened for the sound of footsteps, wondering if Henry and his band were still asleep or if they had left for Chicago. She had enjoyed playing the part of the roadie temporarily and had been amazed—even startled—at the extent of her brother’s fandom, but she had also been very glad when the bus pulled into Fort Cloud, even if it meant an encounter with her parents.

  The phone rang. She heard someone shuffle across linoleum. She guessed it would be Ray calling. She wondered if anyone would remember she was down here. She rolled onto her back and drew her knees up to her belly, felt the baby inside her jostle, its foot jab up under her rib, its head push against her spine.

  When she rolled over, she could smell the smoke from her hair in the pillow. The night before she had stood amid a throng of darkly clad teenagers in dog collars, trying to blend in, and she had felt a sense of distance from them already, as they raised their fists, punching beats into the air in time with her brother’s howling vocals. She had been partial to the laser light show and dry ice, even though some kids behind her grumbled that it was not as good as at other shows they had seen. She had enjoyed listening in on their conversations as they shared cigarettes, shuffling from foot to foot between sets.

  “So who is Carson Glide, anyway?” a boy with red hair and a lip ring had asked his girlfriend, behind Gretchen.

  “It’s probably just a name, kinda like when you go to Wendy’s or Arby’s,” the girl said.

  “Wendy was a real person—she was that old dude’s kid,” Lip Ring insisted. “The dude on the commercial, the old guy.”

  “Please.” The girl flipped back her braids. She had black branches painted around her eyes and gripped a shiny black vinyl wallet in the shape of a cat face. “They just want suckers like you to believe in a Wendy. There’s no Wendy. Wendy’s dead.”

  “Yeah,” said Lip Ring. “You’re probably right. I was duped. Who would name their kid Carson Glide? It sounds like a deodorant.”

  “Names are stupid,” Kitty Wallet declared. She picked at her lip and stared at the crowd. “Carson Glide is dead. I’m going to start writing that in bathrooms.”

  Gretchen hadn’t been able to contain herself. Did all kids sound so m
oronic? Had she been one of them? “Carson Glide is my brother,” she snapped, turning around and facing the two teens. “Really.” She’d raised her eyebrows and held up the VIP pass around her neck, foolishly.

  They’d turned away, snickering. “Freak. She’s probably a plant,” Kitty Wallet said, pushing her boyfriend through the crowd ahead of her.

  Gretchen had looked down at the faded Flaming Lips T-shirt that strained around her belly and wondered, What am I doing? No matter how you raised a kid, it could turn on you. It came through your legs, screaming, and would probably always scream at you in some way or another. Look at her and her brothers.

  She crossed her arms and went out into the hall in search of a soft pretzel. Instead, to avoid the crowds, she shouldered her way into a phone booth and called Ray. “I’m in Milwaukee. I’m safe,” she said to the answering machine. “But I’m still angry.”

  After the show, she’d gone backstage to the greenroom, where people were doing ecstasy. Someone was snapping pictures. A woman with a little Chihuahua in her cleavage had offered Gretchen a hit.

  “I’m done with that,” Gretchen said.

  “Are a lot of people straightedge in the Midwest?”

  Gretchen lifted her shirt and pointed to her belly.

  “Oh, wow,” the woman gushed as the Chihuahua licked her neck. “Girl or boy, do you think?”

  “Both,” Gretchen practiced.

  The woman gave her a confused look, then flicked a wrist of shimmering bangles that encased her arm like a Slinky. “I get it,” she’d nodded coyly. “I get it. Cool.”

  In her old bedroom, the light was waning as evening deepened to dusk, and above her the stars were beginning to emit a low-level phosphorescence. A chill ran through her. She rolled onto her side, pulled the bedspread around her for warmth as she stood up, then mounted the stairs. She could hear her mother humming from above.