At the very moment that I was born, four minutes past Sagittarius, they
discovered I had no penis. They had always wanted a girl, but didn't
think it would happen, and then there I was: the first girl in the
family in 50 years, the youngest of five brothers before me. The whole
of my extended family came by my father, who had eleven brothers. And
no sisters. Though no one knew it then, I was also to be the last
person at all to be born into the clan. To the displeasure of my
father, my mother, exhausted and sweaty and with blood on her socks,
(but lucid and able to boast of not using pain medication for my birth),
ever planning ahead, snarled from the stirrups that if she got pregnant
again it would kill her, and for her doctor to go out there to the
waiting room and tell her husband that fact right now. He frowned while
he stitched her up, but finally consented: and that was the moment she
became what she considered to be liberated. For the rest of her life,
when she would have more than two glasses of wine, she would tell the
story of how she would, and still did, thank God for the pill. She was a
very devout woman, who liked to say that she never wanted children in
the first place, and could have lived happily without any, but there was
nothing to do for it. She also was very permissive with my brothers,
saying, as they were heading out on some adventure, that the loss of one
wouldn't matter, there were plenty more at home. My mother was
delighted to have a girl, but let's be realistic. She was one of the 13
adults in a close knit family living near one another in the suburbs,
who would in many senses jointly parent my siblings and I, and she was
often universally overruled with her opinions. From the beginning, in
their understandingly limited comprehension of female, the family in
general held on to one great fear: that I would become impregnated by
age 16. This fear was struck through with a thick vein of anticipatory
schadenfreude, and his brothers began teasing my father. And so when I
was four days old they placed a bet, eleven against one I would get
knocked up, to be called on my sixteenth birthday. I didn't know this
until much later.
When it was haircut time, we all marched down to Mr. Sid's barber
shop, with his travel posters of Greece and his suspect magazine
selection, and we were given identical styling, which happened to be one
or the other of the two styles Mr. Sid knew. We were buzz cut in
summer, and given a slightly longer side part in the school year. Mr.Sid
would always ask me if I wanted a shave too, noting the darkish hair
that downed my upper lip. "A moment with the blade and you can have it
made", and I would scarlet as his belly roiled with convulsive
laughter. My mother sat there and didn't remark the incident, until we
left, and she would hiss as we walked down the sidewalk that I had to
have thicker skin; I had to stop letting other people hurt me, and that
in the end, I should buck up because it was not going to change until I
was a teenager and could take care of my own hair. My mother prized
simplicity, and that was the bottom line. It didn't matter that people mistook me for a boy. It didn't matter that I
hated Mr. Sid. Hate was just a feeling. I realize now that I hated Mr.
Sid instead of hating my mother.
So, for thirteen years, during the
school year, every six weeks I would ride home on the floor of the car,
crying, wetting my root beer flavored sucker with drool, tears, and
snot. I derived pleasure in pressing that lollipop into the carpet of
the car, then smashing it and grinding it in. When it hardened again,
and my mother found it, she would be furious. Every six weeks. I'm not sure
why my wailing didn't move her, but I am sure it had absolutely no
effect upon her need to streamline, and run a tight ship. This desire
for order shows in the photos of my childhood: six kids in lederhosen
shorts, bump bump bump down the line from tallest to shortest, or six
little ones in footed pjs holding their favorite present and sitting
around the Christmas tree. I remember my favorite gift was the dump
truck I received the year I was eight. It came unpainted and with a set
of paints so I could decorate it as I wanted. I covered it in pictures
of flowers, and girls wearing dresses, and holding hands.
It is a dubious fortune, at best, to be a first and a last.
