nonautobiography part 3

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.