Page 24 - WTP Vol. IX #9

This year the small gathering for Tanya at Sally’s place was a downer compared to her post-op party a year ago. That night she celebrated out with her dear trans sisters, all drinking like sailors before air kissing goodnight on the street in the January
cold at 2 a.m. Still aglow, Tanya had returned uptown gazing from the Uber at the dark buildings along Park Avenue like they had broken loose from their founda- tions and were floating on air.
This year, however, she did not feel up to making the first anniversary of her bottom surgery a special occasion. She felt underserving, unworthy of any more attention, though she never wanted to be one
to deny others their fun. So, she acceded to Sally’s wish for a smaller get together in Sally’s east village studio where they ate her spicy jambalaya and drank champagne. At the end of the evening, Sally embraced Tanya at the door with worry. “Hun, you been quiet
as a church mouse all night.” Tanya returned Sally’s hug tighter than she meant to, for a moment clinging, assuring her she was fine.
~
But back home letting herself into her 24th floor apartment, Tanya’s mind begins twisting in reverse
as it has all evening; at Sally’s, her mind drifting while the other girls carried on freely, dancing to Mariah Carey streaming from the speakers, loudly singing along. She loved them for their happiness, all of them, so seemingly, well, well-adjusted to the lives they
had chosen; but while they danced and sang, she sat, barely mouthing the words. And now shutting the door behind her, Tanya finds her backsliding thoughts seized by the day she first moved in. That hot day in August when the floors shined and the white walls were newly painted; the pain and confusion and Audrey’s recriminations were behind both of them, and though their lasting love and a semblance of understanding were restored, their 12-year marriage irrevocably dissolved.
The one-bedroom apartment felt like a shoebox com- pared to their former Westchester home. But here, she was free to start over, without neighbors watch- ing her, greeting her in her driveway with their smarmy smiles and judgmental nods. Tanya can recall moving in so vividly, how she had spent the first
10 minutes on the terrace basking in the glorious summer sunshine, where high above the city streets
facing nothing but the East River, she had taken off her top and removed her bra before raising her arms triumphantly skyward as if she was on the bow of an ocean-crossing ship. “I’m in,” she had said, calling Audrey on her cell phone.
“You sound breathless.”
“Not breathless. I’m on the terrace with my shirt off. You must be hearing the breeze.”
“Are you kidding? Are you turning into an exhibitionist?”
No, she had not turned into an exhibitionist, Tanya recalls thinking. This trait was not in her, as she was always more of an introvert, even when she was a lit- tle boy. Yet on this cold night, she longs for that same exhilaration, the feeling of warm sunshine glowing within her, she longs for that time. She struggles a few moments to put the feeling into words, to begin a poem maybe. If she cannot resurrect the physical feeling, then maybe she can make it so in her head.
It pains her to think she has given up writing poems. Not that she ever thought of herself as a poet—she
is an advertising copywriter, not a poet—but in the early days of her transition when she could be roiled with doubt, poems restored her certainty, writing them when she could not sleep at night or even at her desk at work. And though she showed these poems to no one, she wrote with so much conviction, they sometimes left her in tears.
But what can she write about now? Her unwarrant- ed, unsocial behavior at Sally’s? Or, after completing her transition, the letdown she was warned about that she often feels? Or perhaps the lonesomeness that has been growing and growing, wedging deeper and deeper... or, why not her unfulfilling social life and the various disappointing dates she has been on?—the well-intentioned men who could not dis- guise their awkward glances, educated men who said they understood her as if they could, or the creep of all creeps, none worse than him, who had said he had fucked many pretty women but had never had trans pussy before. Tanya’s gaze turns stoic as she removes her coat to hang in the hall closet, and then she goes to the kitchen counter to put down the bottle of bourbon they had given her at Sally’s. She notices the bottle is nearly half empty, knowing much of this was consumed by her. One thing that has not changed, she muses wryly, or ruefully, is her taste for good
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Trappers
CLiff s. BerMan