It was near the end of September, and the trees around the Hilldale Elementary playground were beginning to ripen into splotches of yellow and red. As per usual, I sat by myself on one of the wooden benches on the far side of the playground watching the other fifth graders running around the slides and jungle gyms littered around the sand. I typically brought something to read to occupy myself while I waited for recess to end, and while most days I managed to sneak the business section of the Star Tribune in my backpack, this week I had managed to get a copy of Market Wizards by swiping my dad’s library card. I had to smuggle it home and put a different dust cover over it.
Thumbing through hardcovers about trading theory and market psychology was a rare distraction from the banality of being trapped in the body of a child. I would have killed for a tablet or a smartphone; or at least a connection to the internet. I was years away from that, much to my chagrin. It gave me nothing but empty time to just sit and think about the last few months and my current situation.
After being released from the hospital, I spent the remainder of the summer in isolation. I avoided everyone in the neighborhood, and in all honesty I got the impression my parents were not eager to explain to everyone why they suddenly had a daughter. They had been instructed to inculcate me into girlhood for my rehabilitation, at Dr. Walters’ insistence. Blouses and skirts were mandated, and I was constantly directed by Mom about how to act in public.
“Don’t slouch, sweetie,” Mom reminded me once as she rummaged through shelves of Mary Janes. While Mom sensed my discomfort, I suspected that she enjoyed finally having a daughter to dote upon, since my sister Jane wasn’t here yet.
As usual I put up no resistance. The embarrassment of going out in public dressed as a girl was overruled by my determination to stay out of a padded room.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
Mom nodded, placing her newest choice of footwear for me into the cart. “Okay, I’ll come with you to the ladies' room.”
“I can go by myself,” I grumbled, hating that she kept reminding me which restroom I had to use. As if I could forget.
If being coached by my parents and suffering through clinical evaluations was an ordeal, then enrolling in elementary school was a nightmare. School officials had reluctantly allowed my parents to re-enroll me as a girl, and with the updates to my medical records they treated it as a clerical correction and threw me into the maws of fifth grade social politics. My teacher, Ms. Foster, did her best to accommodate me, but the boy everyone had known since kindergarten who was now a girl was a target no matter how much I was insulated.
“Matt, er, Maya, why do you want to be a girl?” they would ask.
“It’s not a choice, I’m a girl whether I like it or not,” I would reply simply.
“But didn’t you know?”
I would recite the story. “Everyone kept saying I was a boy, so I thought I was. Then the doctors told me I was actually a girl.”
“So where did your dick go?”
I would throw up my hands and grimace. “I don’t have one!”
Eventually the questions ceased, and the more mundane realities of a fifth grade schedule took hold. I became a sort of pariah in my classroom. Boys that I had known for years kept their distance. I was no longer “one of the boys” even if I had never been particularly popular. Matthew had never been an athlete or a cool kid, but this new girl Maya was an unknown quantity. Familiar, but not in the tribe.
If the boys were aloof, it was nothing compared to the coldness from the girls. They had known Matthew as just another one of the boys who would occasionally tease or bother them. But suddenly, that particular boy claimed they were a girl, one of them. I was seated with them at lunch, grouped with them during activities, and even worse I shared a bathroom with them. The sheer audacity, I could imagine, of me claiming to be one of them would be pretty off-putting.
What hurt most is that, mentally speaking, they were right. I constantly felt like a pretender as I sat acting like a child in a classroom.
It was a respite to simply sit by myself on a park bench and delve into finance theory. Working numbers in my head and watching economic history unfold in real time was a point of fascination for me. It was also the rare comfort that I could carry over from my stolen adulthood. Something that they couldn’t chip away from me every day, no matter how many dresses they forced me to wear.
“Well well, if it isn’t the little book girl,” a voice above me sneered. “Enjoying your book?”
I looked up at the four of the boys from my class surrounding me. Their leader, a smarmy boy named Josh, was the one who spoke to me. The boys loomed over me, and I had a pang of helplessness. Not for the first time did I feel especially small, but I squashed that feeling and reminded myself that these were just a bunch of dumb kids. It felt hollow, because I was also just some kid, even if I wasn’t dumb. To make matters worse, there was only one of me and a gang of them. I steeled myself as best I could.
“It’s fine,” I replied, meeting his eyes.
“Or maybe it’s book boy? Which one is it, are you a little book boy or a little book girl?”
“You know that I’m a girl.” The tenseness of the situation made me refer to myself as a girl without a second thought.
“Maybe you’re just a sissy whose dick fell off,” said Josh, as the other boys chuckled.
“I’m not a sissy, but yeah, I don’t have a dick. Because I’m a girl.” I had raised my voice at that last bit, and saw a few heads on the playground turn in our direction.
“So you say,” replied Josh. “It’s not like anyone has seen it for themselves.”
I leaned back on the bench and gave a theatrical sigh. “So wait, you want me to pull up my dress so you can see? Gross, Josh. You’re gross. And weird.”
One of Josh’s goons interjected, “Yeah Josh, that’s kind of weird.”
Josh was livid. “She’s weird! She just up and changes her name like whatever, and then shows off how smart she is!?”
A few students had wandered over to the commotion, and I came up with an idea of how to get out of this situation. I raised my voice once again. “So do I have to fight you guys now? Who do I have to fight first?”
That was not something that the boys expected to hear. After a few beats, Josh responded with “You can’t fight us, there’s four of us.”
“Actually, the teachers gave me permission to fight,” I lied.
“That’s not true,” one of the thugs retorted.
“It actually is. You know that girls don’t actually get into trouble when they fight boys, but boys get into a lot of trouble if they fight a girl. Especially if there are a lot of boys fighting one girl. People will say they’re wimps because they needed four boys to fight one girl.”
The boys looked at each other nervously, trying to digest the story I was feeding them. I took the moment to stand up, looking down at Josh. I had a good three inches on him; at age ten a girl typically had a physical advantage over a boy, since they tended to hit puberty earlier. It’s probably one of the last times in their lives that a girl can intimidate their male peers. I noticed that more kids were wandering over to see what was happening.
“You wanna go first?” I asked Josh squarely. “I don’t want to fight, Josh, but if we do, just remember that either you win and get into huge trouble fighting a girl, or I win and it looks really bad for you. Plus, I don’t get into trouble. But like I said, I don’t want to fight. Especially in front of all these other kids.”
Josh jerked his head around, noticing the crowd of boys and girls that was starting to gather. Even his three cronies backed away a little bit. Josh narrowed his eyes and wrinkled his nose at me.
“I don’t want to fight some girl anyway,” he mumbled, and as a final slight he swung and knocked the book from my hand.
As it landed page down in a pile of dirt, he laughed and made his way over to the merry-go-round with his friends following closely behind. The crowd, finding nothing interesting, began to disperse. I kneeled down, picking up my book and shaking the grime from between the pages. The palms of my hands were sweaty and the pit of my stomach turned. That probably could have ended up much worse.
It still could, I reminded myself nervously.
As I dusted off my book, I glanced over to see Ms. Foster who seemed to have been quietly watching the entire commotion. She caught me looking at her, and she quickly turned, taking out a small notepad and jotting something down. I sat back down on the bench, book in my lap, as I stared at my feet.
More observations. It never ended.
***
There were whispers about me for the next week after the incident. Josh and the other boys would occasionally snicker in my direction, and there were rumors going around that I had flashed them on the playground. The girls in the class seemed to take pleasure in spreading the lie, but I refused to react. As I expected, they eventually got bored of trying to get a rise out of me and school continued in its plodding, mercilessly boring pace.
One positive result of my playground altercation was that Dr. Walters reduced my sessions to once a month, as my pliantness and non-aggression was a sign that my role as a girl was solidifying. In her presence I acted sweet and grateful, but once I was in the privacy of my room I screamed into my pillow. I hated that I was being redefined as docile and compliant, as if it was what society expected of me. It was worse because instead of punching the walls of my room in anger I could only impotently sob into my mattress.
Outside of sessions, where I still had to keep up appearances, I started to refuse to wear skirts. It became a daily battle between Mom and me when it came to selecting my wardrobe.
“Maya, sweetie,” Mom implored me one day when we were once again in the girl’s clothing section of K-Mart, “it’s very important to keep wearing dresses, the way the doctors said you should.”
“Mom, even girls at school don’t always wear them. I should be able to pick out whatever I want.”
Mom sighed. “Alright. But you are not going into the boy’s section. If you’re going to wear pants, then you have to wear girl’s pants.”
“Of course I will. They’re the only ones that fit me.”
“And we’re buying a swimsuit. No arguments.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I plan to do a lot of swimming over Christmas break.”
“Cop the attitude. You’re only allowed to wear pants because it’s getting cold outside.”
“Sure,” I mumbled as we continued poking through the aisles.
Mom broke the silence after a few minutes by attempting conversation. “Have you been thinking about what you wanted for Christmas next month?”
I nodded. But I didn't know how my parents would react. I decided to give it a shot.
“An electric guitar.”
It was another link I missed from my previous life. I had never taken music lessons in my youth, so as sort of a mid-life crisis in my thirties I decided to teach myself. I really enjoyed it; I would spend hours in my home office learning chords, and after a few years I was able to play by ear a lot of the songs I listened to as a teenager. I never performed publicly or anything, I simply liked playing for myself.
Mom raised her eyebrow. “A guitar? You don’t know how to play music.”
I quietly chortled. “I could learn.”
“I don’t know, Maya,” she said as she pulled out various one pieces, “It’s not very –”
“Lady-like, right,” I frowned. “But you asked what I wanted, and that’s what I want.”
From Thanksgiving through December my gift request to my parents was always the same. Mom would always suggest other “appropriate” options. American Girl dolls were the rage in 1991, or perhaps a Caboodles kit or Babysitter’s Club books. Something girls were into. Dad didn’t even know where to begin picking out gifts for daughters, and stayed quiet. But I was firm, and my fingers were twitchy.
Perhaps the best part about Christmas was the fact that I got a parole from school for a few weeks. Much like Thanksgiving a few weeks prior, we spent the holidays with just the four of us, avoiding the extended family. There had been a few altercations with various members of the family that I had been insulated from, and I was in no mood to reintroduce myself as Maya and pretend to be a compliant little girl. I just wanted to be left alone.
I awoke on Christmas morning to the sounds of Tim excitedly waking up a floor above me with the sun barely peeking through my basement window. It had been years since I had expected a gift from Santa Claus under a tree, but I would be lying if I wasn’t at least a little excited. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes in my lavender pajamas and wandered upstairs.
Tim was already digging through his stocking, pulling out little toys and sweets as he began to sort and examine them individually. Out of curiosity I emptied my own stocking; I disregarded the barrettes and pink stationary stuffed inside of my stocking, when my eyes locked on a rather long present propped against the wall behind the tree. I couldn’t help but grin at the label with “For Maya” written on it.
Mom and Dad eventually joined us from their bedroom, which immediately signaled to Tim that it was time to tear open our presents. Our parents sat on the sofa watching as Tim uncovered his gift: a Nintendo Gameboy. I vaguely remembered both him and me receiving one when we were kids, though when I glanced under the tree I didn’t see a box for me of a similar size.
What I did find were several boxes of clothes, as well as a sparkly notebook adorned with a happy pink butterfly on the cover, which I regarded for a moment before politely setting it aside as I licked my lips at my larger present still unopened.
“Go ahead, Maya,” said Mom as I hoisted the gift from the wall and laid it on the floor. That sleeping anticipation that every child has on Christmas filled my chest, as I carefully unfolded the wrapping paper without ripping it. It was a quirk I had as an adult receiving presents to not tear the paper. Removing the final piece of tape holding it onto the box, I held my breath and turned over the box.
It wasn’t a guitar.
Instead, it was a Casio SA-1 keyboard. It was in a light pastel color, apparently with light-up keys that glowed blue or red. With only thirty-two keys, it was quite a bit smaller than an actual piano. Even the keys themselves were shorter than usual, practically designed for the short fingers I now called my own.
I stared down at it, the ache of my disappointment sinking somewhere deep in my chest.
“And this is just the start, Maya,” my mom said happily, not noticing the furrowing of my eyebrows. “I know you’re interested in learning music, so we signed you up for piano lessons starting next week! I read somewhere that guitars might be a little too advanced for a beginner, so we think this is a little more appropriate.”
I didn’t look up at her, though I began to involuntarily grip the box as my knuckles turned white. I sensed, though, that my silence was a bit too long.
“That sounds nice,” I said robotically. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“I’m so glad to hear that, sweetie,” Mom said as she began to gather the discarded paper scattered across the living room. On the sofa across from her, I saw Dad with Tim on his lap, as they pulled open the Nintendo box and fawned over the gray rectangle and assorted cords. Mom happily carried the bundle of paper into the kitchen and prepared to make our traditional Christmas morning breakfast.
I sat on the ground, staring daggers at the diminutive piano at my feet.
Not for the first time, did I push back the welling of tears and curse my life.