is waif
FIVE YEARS OF RED DOCS
My mom doesn’t like when I wear docs to dinner. The rug is new but fading, an upgrade from our scratchy bamboo and if I wear docs on them I’ll get it dirty. I can traverse around on the wood if I stand behind the table, but if she sees my dirty doc martins, falling apart from years of use, she will descend like a pack of wolves.
On the way back to my 5 year reunion I have a flaming UTI from a guy who won’t commit. I chug warm cranberry juice my not-yet-married-into-the- family-cousin-in-law has in the backseat of her car. We pack vodka to supplement it and try to bridge the gap between two queens. Her Prom, me Homecoming. There isn’t much to say besides growth, gossip, and girls we hate from our catholic school on the four-hour drive. She asks about the UTI and I ask if she’s going to try selling crystals to our old classmates, the answer being Yes. We reach the Cedar Rapids sign running on empty and I text my mother to come pick me up from the Casey’s downtown. Being dumped at the gas station is the midway point for all of us to pick me up and I get a beef jerky stick while my dog bounces around in the backseat.
“I’ve got a gay skirt on and a gay shirt on and my gay docs. Everything about me screams ‘gay.’”
Dropped off at home, I grab a Bud light in seclusion to match my dad. I’ve got a gay skirt on and a gay shirt on and my gay docs. Everything about me screams “gay.” A yell follows behind me and I ignore my mom’s “shoes off” request as well as her “don’t you want to cherish this?” question posed against my violent consumption. Requiring me to be sober before my five year high school reunion feels like a hate crime directed at me and me alone so I sit on the wood floor, boots intact, drinking behind the cabinet, waiting for them to haul ass out of here to whatever social soirée they’re headed to this time.
I plop down on the porch couch, third drink in hand as my mom walks out to talk to me. She’s got some clothes for me to go through and wants me to know if I want a jacket I haven’t worn in seven years. “I’ll just hold this up and tell me if you want it or not,” she asks about a winter coat in August. I cross my legs, boots on white carpet, and insist she throws them away along with my gauchos from 7th grade, a point I’ve been reiterating for months. Scurrying upstairs in to my bedroom, she grabs a pair of heels she bought exclusively for my five year. “These would look so cute with your skirt,” she says. So straight, she means.
When I was young, I used to rip teeth from my socket to see what it would feel like. I woke up one morning at 4 A.M. and looked at myself in my parent’s mirror, barely blinking, as I worked my incisors out from my head. Back and forth I went until 11 A.M. I proudly held the teeth in my hand to show my dad because I was bored with how I looked. Excited by how easy it was to wiggle my tongue in lieu of what was absent. He wanted to know if they were loose and I said no. I made them this way because I am this way, a person full of holes you’ll try to stitch up forever.
Lacing my boots up, she pulls two wooden platform wedges from the box. I think they’re wedges, I couldn’t tell you, but they are something within the heel community, one I separated myself from long ago. Readjusting my underwear, I decline. My boots are just fine and who am I trying to impress, anyway. Privy to my yeast situation, because I loudly have no boundaries, she insists maybe men treat me this way because I do not dress female enough. I do not adhere to what is there and it is the connective tissue to our conversations. It does not bug them that I am out, they try to fit the holes I have dug in our backyard earnestly, but gender is another I’ve buried myself in. They’ve spent the past four years responding to every situation with “I’m trying to understand it’s just weird.” Weird I pick the fashionable maroon docs over the clunky wooden clogs.
“Well, first off, no he treats me like shit because he is shit,” I tell my mom, eager to watch her squirm at the word shit. “He literally didn’t put sheets on his bed for four months. I slept on a bare mattress for four months,” she shifts again, uncomfortable knowing the lengths I’ll go for good dick. “Secondly, as we go over every time I am home, I’m not straight and I don’t like dressing feminine,” I say as she runs her hands through her hair, trying. “This is the first time I’m bringing it up but I thought all the overalls I wear would have made it pretty clear I’m not the kind of woman you want me to be.”
I notice my dad on another so I open another, insistent keeping up with my brother and father is masculinity. My mom watches with soft eyes as I move through the kitchen with weighted feet. “I just think you’d be so much prettier in heels, Meg,” she says, wading through the dark on a topic neither of us know anything about. “I bought these for you from Younkers,” our age- old tradition. “I guess you can take them back with you if you want.”
In high school, I was Homecoming queen. My mom took my crown immediately and wore it the entire night, hugging me close at Applebee’s to celebrate my win. “Your dad needed this,” she whispers in relation to my grandfather’s death. How the two are related only God knows but winning a popularity contest brings peace to all our minds. It feels good to be loved. Wandering crooked in a Catholic School for years leaves another hole in the yard but this is one my parents love. The one they grieve like a grave when I cut off my hair and kissed girls. The people loved me one way. Hard to say if they’ll love me another.
On the ride over I bring up the war in Syria. I often do for some reason in my hometown. My Uber driver nods, already thinking about his next pickup twelve minutes away, and kindly asks me what Chicago is like. I tell him about the guy who recently committed suicide at Belmont and how they found his body strewn on the train tracks between two stations. I need to let everyone know how different my life is there, how different two places can be when one person exists in both. He lets me out at Parlor City with a friendly wave and drives off. I hope he’s listening to the murder podcast I recommended when he goes.
I’m Vice President so I’m the first to arrive. I must check and make sure everything is intact because the president, the first girl I ever had a crush on, is too posh to leave her NYC life for some event in Iowa. People begin pouring in as I sip on cranberry vodkas, loudly telling people I haven’t seen in four years that I’m killing two birds with one stone. “I’ve got a festering UTI and it is SCORCHING in here,” I shout, convincing the guys in my class reasons why they should get a Gardasil shot. “You can just smell the yeast cooking.”
People saunter over throughout the night and I marvel at how we have grown. I thought Emily would ride the wave of being a lesbian senator but is now a farm wife. I hoped Allie might join the Opera but now she’s a step mom. The music shifted and the dance did too. People drifted from the rhythm of what we knew in to what we didn’t and picked up flashlights to explore the unknown like me. How did we get here? To see the ground we once ran frozen overnight. How did we change so fast and stretch so high? How did every conversation start when we were greeted by our parents coming home for our five year? Did they chastise us for swearing? Did they marvel over our salaried jobs? Most importantly, why did no guy in my graduating class get a Gardasil shot?
I climb fences and write my name in sharpie all over downtown with my friend Austin, a friend who wasn’t a friend before the night. We strut and twirl with his boyfriend Sheldon pinky promising we’ll spend Christmas together in Spain this year. We don’t, obviously, but the sentiment is there. My friends text and ask me to come to White Star Ale House and I opt out, following the sidewalk to wherever it ends. Being a part of everyone doesn’t allude to me anymore. Laying in the grave people love to see me in is a coffin I no longer fit. I’m unlikeable. I’m loud. I operate outside of what’s expected and I like it.
I snapchat the boy I hate that I hate him and I’m drunk. I stomp in to my house at midnight and sink my hands balls deep into some leftover mac and cheese. My dad wakes up from the couch and shakes his head at the sight of how wasted I am. “I talked about World War II this time on the way home.
Why did I do that?” He hands me a shovel and tells me to dig another hole.
“Because that’s just what you are: a Surprise.”
Apparently, the courage to let them down is something I’ve still got.