A short story by Eva Castor
October is a cruel month in Alberta.
The leaves turn from spring and summer’s shimmering greens to autumn’s plums, wines and golds and then they fall off the trees, either decaying on the ground or getting jammed into bright orange garbage bags which line the curbs of suburbia like oversized plastic pumpkins.
The autumn transformation from cool greens to warmer tones can be quite beautiful. However, what comes after the trees undergo their annual denuding is long and brutal. Winter weather here lasts for at least two seasons, often snowing well into spring.
Sometimes a late spring blizzard will surprise Calgary’s stubby rowan, crab apple, and ornamental cherry trees. These early-to-leaf-out species are all dressed up in freshly sprung leaves only to make the acquaintance of a late snowstorm and be bent over by heaps of wet, branch-cracking snow. When this happens, broken tree limbs abound.
Some trees die.
1.
I have an eating disorder and I don’t think anyone at home knows about it.
My husband Rob is busy working all the hours God sends. Our son Josh, just turned seventeen, is distant and disinterested in the household when he is home, and that is not very often if he can help it. Amanda, our twentysomething daughter moved out four years ago. Even old Mr. Nibs Bibs, our nearly 16-year-old tuxedo cat, is gone, having crossed the Rainbow Bridge in December, just before Christmas. It is for these reasons that I do not believe that anyone has any idea that I make myself sick every single day.
I am alone when I binge. I am alone when I purge.
I flirted with bulimia in my late teens, and even though I would have enjoyed being rail thin for the sake of fashion, at the time I found it unpleasant and in some fundamental way it seemed pointless. Food is to be eaten, not vomited.
Now, of course, things have changed.
I have a Dairy Queen frozen ice cream cake next to me in the front passenger seat of the car. We—that is, the cake and I—are on our way home to a mid-size, split-level, vinyl-clad house in the fetchingly named community of Sage Hills.
All around the neighbourhood the leaves have changed colour. Pulling into the garage I notice that our rowan tree is already bare of fruit. Since I left the house only 40 minutes ago some birds, robins maybe, or waxwings, have eaten every single flame-coloured berry in anticipation of a long migratory flight south.
When I get inside the house, the cake and I go right to the kitchen. Not wasting any time, I use a paring knife to slice through the tape that holds down the cake’s broad, protective see-through dome. Once I gain access, I scoop about a quarter of the ice cream cake into my mother’s old mixing bowl. If you are a certain age, you know the type of bowl I mean. It is a very large bowl, with a soft tan glaze on the outside and a warm ivory glaze on the inside. It’s a perfect bowl for mixing birthday cake batter in. I’ve myself made many a birthday cake batter in this bowl. It is a family bowl, an iconic bowl.
I get a lot of joy from eating the ice cream cake from this bowl.
2.
The writing on today’s cake says, “Well Done, Amanda!” The last cake I vomited up read, “Happy Birthday, Amanda!” The one before that was “Get Well Soon, Amanda!”
I buy the cakes at four different Dairy Queens, staggering the purchases so the staff at any one location does not get too suspicious. It’s easy to order online and then just swing by the drive-through. I try not to make small talk at the drive-through window. I do not want Linda or Patel or Chico or whoever is working the register to notice me. I do not want to draw attention to myself because usually, depending on how things are going, I order between six to ten cakes per month. I have all the cakes dedicated to Amanda. I have bought so many cakes for Amanda that I am running out of declarations. “Happy Birthday, Amanda!” “Get Well Soon, Amanda!” “Bon Voyage, Amanda!” “We Love You, Amanda!” “Congrats on the New Job, Amanda!” “Happy Halloween, Amanda!” “Welcome Home, Amanda!” “A+ Job, Amanda!” “Looking Good, Amanda!” “Just Because I Love You, Amanda!”
The people at my four stores who write on the cakes must think Amanda is very loved, to be
getting at least two cakes a month.
It is true. I do love Amanda.
3.
I am not allowed to call Amanda “Amanda” anymore. She told us four years ago that Amanda is her “dead name.” We are all supposed to call her Aiden now. To keep the peace, we call her what she wants, but on my cakes, I still call her Amanda.
What she doesn’t know can’t hurt me.
4.
I am in hell right now. I am not supposed to tell anyone about it. I am supposed to validate and affirm, so that is what I do.
We had to take down all the old family photos over a year ago after “Aiden” explained to us that we were “triggering his dysphoria every time he came over,” and that if we did not take them down, “he” would cut all contact. Rather than argue with her, Rob and I took the photos down.
We had done the black and white frame photo wall when it became de rigueur in the western middle-class family home. We invested a lot of money in the project. Frames are not cheap. Did you know that? If you want to do a wall with 20 photos on it be prepared to shell out almost a grand if you get decent frames and good mats. Which we did.
We chose the photos as a family one rainy afternoon, and then I had all the images printed in a crisp black and white format so it would have the cohesive artsy look as seen in the IKEA catalogue. Then Rob and I, with the kids drifting in and out, spent an afternoon gaming out how to hang the photos in relation to each other using shapes we cut from brown paper. The flimsy paper squares and rectangles were cut to the exact size of the frames we’d bought. We hung the shapes up with bits of masking tape so we could eyeball which arrangement looked best. Rob made a fire in the fireplace and we shared a bottle of wine. We ended up ordering pizza for dinner because the project took almost the whole day to complete. That family photo wall had been a labour of love.
Given Amanda’s new rules our wedding photos and Josh’s photos probably could’ve stayed up, but what was the point? We decided to sink the project rather than leave the gaps where our daughter had been. So, they all came down. Amanda’s baby photos, Josh’s baby photos. Family snapshots of summer at the cabin. Amanda in her hockey gear, Josh in the treehouse in the backyard. The kids holding Mr. Nibs Bibs when he was five and just getting tubby. Grammy and Grampy with the kids in Banff. Amanda in her Brownies vest and Josh in his Scouts uniform. School photos. Holiday photos. A lone Christmas photo from the year that Amanda got her new bike.
The truth was that least half of the artfully arranged, carefully curated pictures that recorded our lives together before genderism came to call were deemed unclean by our daughter. There could be nothing which showed her with long hair or wearing a dress. Nothing which showed her smile, with a wide but endearing gap between her two front teeth. No holiday snaps from Wasaga Beach. No reminders that Amanda loved to cheer on the Flames at the Saddledome. Nothing.
How did we, her parents, come to be hostages to our baby girl?
The answer is in the question.
Amanda is our baby girl.
5.
Amanda never had the voice of an angel, but she had been an enthusiastic singer of pop songs. Now the testosterone she has taken for the last three years has left her with a croak that reminds me of when she sucked helium from birthday balloons. The difference is this croak is for life. Not reversible. No returns, no refunds. Caveat Emptor! I have done some research and I understand this condition can physically be quite uncomfortable because it is a bit like trying to grow a watermelon inside a banana skin. Amanda’s changing voice box, now all “jacked up on T,” is constricted by her already fully developed throat. Or something like that. Anyways, the point is, I will never hear my daughter’s old voice ever again. Not ever.
6.
Amanda is going bald. Which seems strange to me because she is only 24 and a woman. She wears her hair short, because short hair matches her “gender.” Her 1950’s brush cut style emphasizes that the “T” is causing her to have male pattern baldness. This never occurred to me as something I would ever say.
The cake is slowly melting in the bowl, by the way. I like it to get quite soft on the inside before I dig in. When the cake is fresh from the deep freezer of the Dairy Queen, the intense cold makes my teeth ache. I should use Sensodyne toothpaste. It is made for people who suffer from sensitive teeth. It penetrates deeply into the tissue of the tooth and brings relief when used regularly and also, I think I might be going insane.
7.
Amanda has no breasts anymore.
No, no. Not to worry. She did not get breast cancer. God forbid.
Although I sometimes think what Amanda did get was gender cancer.
No. Amanda had perfectly healthy breasts. They were neither large nor small. Just a regular sort of average set of tits, which, I suppose, were put into an incinerator in the hospital in Winnipeg where she had them cut off. She went in with breasts and came out without them.
We spent a few days in an Airbnb in Winnipeg after the surgery before we flew home to Calgary to finish her recovery at our house. It was ugly. The garish liquids from her drains were gross. The stitches were purposefully rough so that she would have more scarring, not less. She was high on pain meds but otherwise she seemed ecstatic. She had decided to forgo keeping her nipples because her gender dysphoria was on the “nonbinary side.” Or something like that. It was something like that, I think.
Honestly, sometimes I feel myself leaving my body when she talks to me now. I just zone out. It is not unusual, really, because I had a terrible childhood, full of sexual assaults by men and boys, so I know how to disassociate. I just never thought I would do it with my daughter in a Boston Pizza conveniently located on Macleod Trail South, just a few blocks from the Dairy Queen where I picked up our very first ice cream cake, a few weeks after her double mastectomy. That cake had read: “Congratulations, Aiden!”
8.
Now my 24-year-old daughter has a voice that creaks like a rusty hinge, male pattern baldness, two angry red scars where the bottom of her breasts used to lie, and no nipples. The year is 2023. I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
My son Josh is a shadow.
My husband Rob is a broken man.
Rob had easily loved Amanda before Aiden. She was daddy’s little girl before she’d moved out and went to MRU, before she changed her name and before the testosterone made her so very angry. Rob had loved her before she made him pretend that she was now one of the guys. He loved her before he had to convince his parents that it was wonderful for Amanda, their granddaughter, to become Aiden, their grandson. Now Rob is "401: Page not found". I miss him.
As for me, I resent finding myself thinking, ‘I’m so glad my mother died without seeing this!’ on a daily basis.
Ironically, my mom died of breast cancer back when a double mastectomy was not called “top surgery.” I didn’t have to nurse my mom through her post-op mastectomy, but I know now what it would have been like. We live and learn and you seriously cannot believe how surreal this is.
9.
Amanda is going for laser hair removal on her left forearm. Do you know why?
Let me tell you while I climb the stairs to the master bedroom, where there is a decent sized en suite bathroom. I have my mother’s bowl cradled in my arms as I go up the steps. Inside the bowl is a Jupiter of melting chocolate ice cream and salty caramel sauce. The dessert spoon’s handle has slipped below the surface of the melted ice cream. This irks me. I hate a sticky spoon.
Amanda is getting her arm hair removed so that within a year or so she can have her right forearm flayed nearly to the bone. This tissue that is “harvested” from her arm will be rolled up, stitched together, and attached by several Doctors Frankenstein to her groin. They call this procedure “bottom surgery.” Nothing to see here. Move along, folks, just a little bottom surgery. The complication rate is extraordinary and, of course, a tube of rolled-up arm flesh does not a penis make. But hey, we must “affirm” or expect suicide. Or so Amanda assures us. It’s her way or the grave. So, it’s her way.
10.
Well, here I am, at the bedroom door. You will note as we go inside that the walls are a painted a pretty robin’s egg blue, a colour I chose in better days. There is decent wool carpeting with very good underpadding throughout the room, but it stops at the threshold to the bathroom. Here there are cool, neutral sand coloured tiles and unremarkable white walls. The walls are completely covered in the family photos we had to take down from the living room. I could do this because Amanda never comes in here.
I set the bowl down on the closed toilet lid and get comfortable on the floor, sitting on the fuzzy cotton bath mat that usually rests outside the shower stall. I pick up the chilled bowl, fish the spoon out of the sweet soupy mess, and lick it clean. Amanda looks down at me from a picture frame. This is the photo where she is in her hockey uniform, and she is leaning forward with her stick as if to flick a puck into an empty net. She shoots! She scores!
With the spoon licked clean, I begin to eat in earnest.
Listen to Autumn Leaves, read by You’ve Got Terfmail on Youtube.
Afterword
Eva Castor submitted this gut-wrenching piece to CBC's Short Story competition last fall. Her intention is not to win the contest but to leverage the opportunity for creative activism—to peak* the judges who will be required to read her writing on this subject.
We think this story is a total winner: concise and effectively written, entirely moving, and especially relevant. But will they even shortlist it? Would they?
*The term "peak trans" is used by sex realists to describe a pivotal moment of disillusionment with transgender ideology.
コメント