Page 14 of Best Woman
“You have such a way with words.”
I unlock my phone and begin a ritual I’ve taken to performing daily, sometimes hourly, almost like a compulsion: stalking Kim Cameron’s various social media profiles. She’s fairly active butin a cool, detached, above-it kind of way. Her latest Instagram story is a blurry still photo of a dark bar and the side of someone’s head. I can’t decipher a single clue about where they are and who that person is, but I’m still full of jealousy that they’re with Kim.
I’ve got it bad.
“You’ve got it bad,” says Daytona, who has taken the red light as an opportunity to sneak a look at my phone—and into my head. “This girl must have grass-fed organic snatch.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“But you’d like to find out.”
She turns to look at me, but I can’t see her eyes through her huge tinted aviator sunglasses. “I don’t know, Jules. I think you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and just hit on her like a normal person.”
I huff a snarky little laugh. “You don’t get it. Kim Cameron was a hardcore lesbian in high school. She used to run a little side hustle breaking in people’s Doc Martens for them.”
“That’s not a bad business idea.”
“When she came out, my cellphone was a Motorola Razr. And she knew me when I had acne and greasy hair and oh,was a boy! I need every advantage I can get.”
“But don’t you feel like you’retakingadvantage?” It’s not judgment in her voice, but something close to it.
“I won’t deny that it’s a moral gray area, but look,shewas the one who assumed I was a damaged little transsexual who needed protection from the cruel world. I just…let her keep thinking that.”
“You’re the girl who cried TERF,” she says, and I can’t help but laugh. “I just wonder…”
“What?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know, babe. What happens when a wolf does show up to blow your house down?”
“You’re mixing metaphors. Fairy tales. Whatever.” But she has a point. I was so eager to let Kim believe my family was a minefield lying in wait to blow up the wedding, and it was easy because it hadn’t ever happened to me. There was no lingering trauma flashing red.
Which just proved Daytona wrong. Everything would work out. I’d make some sad eyes around my mother, woo my crush, and ace the ultimate test: passing for a girl Kim Cameron would date.
My flight toFlorida is, of course, delayed. We sit on the tarmac for two hours as the engine is checked, the wheels inspected, and the fuel tank refilled.
I sit pressed against a window, worrying about the garment bag tucked into the overhead compartment above me. There had been no question of checking my luggage: River assured me that the clothing and accessories I was borrowing (“transporting across state lines,” they’d said, an alarmingly legal description) cost, in total, about the same as the plane. So that garment bag would be staying as close to me as possible for the next week. “Hannah Gwillprosecute,” River had warned. “But don’t worry, you’d make friends on the inside!”
As my three-hour flight stretched into five, I decide to use my time wisely and research for my upcoming endeavor. From the extensive in-flight entertainment menu, I’m able to assemble an extremely thorough watch list:My Best Friend’s Wedding,Muriel’s Wedding, Rachel Getting Married, My Big Fat GreekWedding, 27 Dresses, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wedding Planner. And then I throw inWedding Crashersas a bonus.
As Rupert Everett asks Julia Roberts who is chasingher,we finally lift off. By the time the beverage cart comes around, I’m watching Nia Vardalos fall in love with Aidan fromSex and the City. I sip ginger ale—nectar of the gods when sipped at a high altitude—as family shenanigans unfold. Their hilarious dysfunction makes me think about my own family, which is just as dysfunctional and significantly less hilarious. From the inside, at least.
My parents, Dana and Stan, divorced when I was eight and Aiden was six. From that moment, there were two sides in our family: Mom’s and Dad’s. I was firmly on my mom’s, Aiden on our dad’s. It’s not that I didn’t try to get along with my dad, but I don’t think he ever really understood me, or maybe he never really tried. Aiden he did understand: they liked all the same things, and Aiden so clearly got that my dad needed his little buddy when I was no longer interested. Every other weekend when we’d go to my dad’s small apartment, the two of them would watch baseball in the living room, fueling their grating obsession with the Yankees, while I read and drew quietly out back by the canal.
I tried to spend more time with Mom, but she always insisted that it was important for me to have a relationship with him. Maybe she just wanted me out of the house after she’d married Randy, a Texan Jew who looked kind of like Robert Redford. Randy is one of the absolute strangest people I’ve ever met. Once, at an Italian restaurant, he wiped the sweat off his brow with a piece of garlic bread and thenatethe bread. “You can’t waste good food,” he’d told us as I struggled to keep my chickenparmigiana down. “When I was a kid we lived off a can of beans a week!”
When I was in high school, Mom and Randy had kids of their own. Brody and Brian were the cutest babies I’d ever seen, but they’ve always been…unnerving. I only had a few years at home with them before I left for college, and that was mostly spent changing their diapers and being haunted by the sound ofSesame Streetplaying on the giant TV in our living room. But every time I visited, they’d be a little bigger, a little older, and they’d look at me with eyes that were far too knowing for children. Maybe it’s the twin thing, that they always finish each other’s sentences and that, despite knowing them their entire lives, Istillcannot tell them apart. No one can, except for my mom. They’ve got a sort of eerie, haunted quality about them, and though I’ve never seen them like, torturing kittens or wandering the halls of an abandoned hotel asking other children to play with them, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Halfway through my next movie selection and wondering what happened to Katherine Heigl’s career, I climb over my sleeping seatmates and trek to the tiny airplane bathroom. In the glaring overhead light, I stare at my face in the mirror, searching out my genetic inheritance, the puzzle of pieces that link me to my bloodline as indelibly as my memories. There is my dad’s tiny sloping nose, my mother’s freckles, Grandpa’s bushy eyebrows, and the squinty eyes my siblings and I all share.
When I first told my mom that I planned to transition, she cried. “I’ve always wanted a daughter,” she’d admitted as I sat curled into a tight little knot in the darkness of my Brooklyn bedroom, phone clutched in hand, terror bleeding slowly and cautiously into relief. “Whatever makes you happy,” my dad hadsaid before quickly changing the subject. Randy had taken me to the mall and bought me a shopping bag full of makeup. Brody and Brian had nodded in silent unison and then gone to set something on fire, probably.
Aiden and I had sat in silence on the phone for a full minute. “OK,” he’d finally breathed out. “OK. I love you. I love you…Julia.”
“I love you, Julia!” he’d said on the phone days before. “I can’t wait to see you mooning over Kim in the synagogue.” My stomach had twisted in knots. “Do you think the ‘Thong Song’ is appropriate for the reception?”
I look back in the mirror, at the eyes shaped just like Aiden’s, though his are hazel whereas mine are brown. I pull my shirt up and snap a photo of my breasts in the mirror to send to the group chat with my friends when we land. When I get back to my seat, I switch off27 Dressesand startScream,needing to watch someone die violently. Could I pull off Drew Barrymore’s blond, banged bob? Probably not.
I drift off for a while and dream about a mall sunk deep underground, full of fleshy orange zombies in tracksuits who tip over a Dippin’ Dots vending machine. The glass cracks and a million spiders swarm out. Lorraine from Born to Bride shambles toward me, her tracksuit an ugly teal that clashes with her skin and her putrid pink lipstick.
