A Year Without a Name Read online

  Months before we ever spoke, I saw her lying in the grass in a blousy, open shirt, with a beautiful, severe-looking young woman. The woman held Anna’s head in her hands like a baby’s. Anna reached her hands up, her fingers tangled in the woman’s brown hair. They rolled around in the grass, books scattered around them. I projected unparalleled brilliance, self-possession, and fulfillment onto the scene. Anna still publicly identified with her assigned gender then. She had strong hands, a triangle of soft hair above her sternum visible through a gauzy white button-down. She was beautiful and poised. I walked around the rest of the day imagining myself in her body, as I often did with young men (or apparent young men) I admired.

  That winter, she introduced herself to me at a crowded party in a basement. Her dead name, the name she was given at birth, was a lofty one, from the Old Testament. I thought it suited her even though it would later seem unimaginable. We went from one party to another, then drove to a beach outside the city and talked until the early morning. I hadn’t met a boy before who listened to me the way she did. She asked me open questions about my family and my friends, about my interests, about my sexuality.

  I thought about her in the following days. I tried to visualize kissing her, being naked next to her. But in the fantasies I slipped into her body: her forearms became my forearms; her chest became my chest; her hands became my hands.

  She’d grown up in a book-filled farmhouse on the edge of an industrial city in central Massachusetts, where her Marxist parents had raised her to be suspicious of beauty, aware of its relationship to power. She wasn’t impressed by success in its own right: meritocracy was a myth, determined by access to resources. This destabilized my own story, the comfort I took in achievement, how I used it to protect myself against my shame. Her frameworks made the world into a new and unfamiliar landscape.

  Around the same time we met, my sister started getting famous. I saw it on the horizon before it actually happened: attention and opportunities drawing the outlines of a public space for her to step into. I saw her about to be swallowed and repurposed by a large machine, the intricate processes that Anna had made more transparent to me. Fame was a toxic substance that oozed into everything. People acted strangely when they knew they were near it. They wanted it and they revered it, but it also hurt them. It stuck to everything it touched, like sap. If you wanted to get rid of it, you had to amputate the part of you it was adhered to. At least, these were my paranoias. Anna didn’t treat fame like a triumph. She asked me about my grief and fear, let there be something to mourn. I was angry, scared of losing my sister, troubled that everyone assumed I was jealous and even more troubled that I might be.

  Anna watched my anxiety overtake me and, as a result, grew more diligent in her care. She made it clear my depression didn’t lessen her love for me. She drove to Rhode Island often to see me and lay next to me in bed while I cried and didn’t speak. I was learning that the organizing principle of her life—or, at least, the goal she strived for—was something more collective than I’d previously been exposed to. She saw more value in friends lying next to one another, with no clear goal in mind, than she did in the singular pursuits that often constitute success. As fame pulled my sister further into its machinations, and mental illness pulled me further into its swamp, I needed a new system to make sense of my pain. It was much easier to be critical than it was to feel loss. Beliefs seemed like better justification for anger than simple, inexplicable sadness. Anna supplied something like a new belief system: she didn’t celebrate what I’d been taught to celebrate.

  At that time, my closest friends except for Jessica were young men; white, Jewish ones from major American cities who had gone to elite private schools, like myself. My adolescence had been a practice in reserved control; I had a tight grip on my id, never let it make itself known. With these young men, I had to explode to keep up.

  They got me to break things and drink until I threw up, jump off cliffs into bodies of water. When they were angry, it was direct; they were sad when I didn’t show up the way I’d said I would. We often fell asleep in piles, like bears, and even though I didn’t like the way they smelled, it was an accomplishment to be one of them. Plus, they cherished me. And while this disgusted me, it also enabled my superiority, the primary means through which I convinced myself I didn’t envy them. Samuel, with whom I was closest, analyzed his own patterns with psychoanalytic mastery, then continued on brazenly, unchanging. I kept him close so I could gather evidence for just how different we were. At the same time, I studied him, selectively mirroring.

  Anna, unlike Samuel, was gentle, even effeminate. I couldn’t rationalize my superiority by dismissing her as a brute. She seemed at ease with words, with beliefs, with choices, with lovers. She became a voice in my head, like Amelia Earhart before her; when she wasn’t there, I heard her holding forth, a disembodied observer assessing my value in every moment. When I couldn’t sleep, I catalogued her insights and opinions, her intonation rolling over my consciousness.

  When I met Antonia, she remarked that Anna and I were similar. Was this why I worshipped her? Was she a more evolved version of me? The better one?

  I was sure that if Anna and I were pitted against each other in Antonia’s eyes, I would lose. I succumbed to apocalyptic fantasies of heterosexual sex between them, passionate and focused, charged with an intensity I could never reach. Every time Antonia told me they’d seen each other, I got off the phone woozy. I saw myself from the outside, crouching at a distance, watching them exist in their fullness. The only thing I had over Anna was that I, unlike her, was a woman. And women were superior. This, I had been taught. This, I knew.

  I picked Anna up at LAX. I saw her from a distance, hunched over in black leggings and a long black T-shirt, her hair dyed blond, grown out to her shoulders. I jumped out of my car and we hugged for a long time, without saying anything.

  We drove to the beach and lay on a big blue blanket in the sand. We ran into the Pacific in our underwear. It was freezing. She’d always been able to convince me to swim in cold water. Perhaps because I wanted to keep up; perhaps because she made it seem meaningful. She’s always looking out for heightened experiences, anything that makes two people feel closer together: drugs, matching tattoos, jumping in the freezing ocean. We ran back up to our blanket and lay in the sun, our arms under our heads and our legs crossed, mirroring each other. Our hair was similar in length, falling loose at our shoulders, and our bodies were more similar than they’d ever been before. Her edges had softened somewhat, and mine had hardened.

  A few days after she arrived, we drove the six hours from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, where Anna was visiting friends in Richmond. I’d agreed to drop her off, then experiment with “doing my own thing.” The I-5 is a death trail; it drops down into the Central Valley, past Ikea’s distribution center, through industrial farms, maximum-security prisons, and former Japanese internment camps. There’s one part of the ride that encases you in the smell of manure ammonia and dead flesh; on either side, hundreds of thousands of cows feed and drink from dark brown pools of brackish water. People call this ranch “Cowschwitz.”

  Halfway through the trip, when it was already dark, Anna told me that she had her first dose of estrogen in her suitcase. She’d gone to a clinic in Philadelphia before leaving. She’d been waiting, seeing what it felt like to know the substance was in her possession.

  My discomfort cut through the conversation. I got dizzy, heard my thoughts as a foreign voice, lost track of the road until I realized I was driving thirty miles per hour under the speed limit.

  I heard my voice performing congratulations, selfless support, compersion (a neologism born out of polyamory, which Anna had taught me, meaning “the feeling of joy one has experiencing another’s joy,” or the opposite of jealousy). But I yawned involuntarily, pulling in oxygen to mitigate the dizziness. My face got hot and my fingers and toes numbed. My response was too physiological for me to locate one emotion.

  Rapi
d-fire, I attempted to logic my way out of incapacity with calming evidence:

  (A) Anna was not braver than me for beginning hormone replacement therapy. (B) Estrogen would make her body curvier and I wouldn’t have to envy her shape the way I did now. (C) I didn’t need hormonal therapy to legitimize my gender nonconformity. (D) Physical transition was more urgent for her, because to be a transfeminine person in public is to be harassed, mocked, and watched in ways I’d never been and would never be. (E) She could medically transition and I could stay looking like a woman but knowing I wasn’t and the two didn’t cancel each other out. (F) There is no scarcity, there is no scarcity, there is no scarcity, there is no scarcity.

  Most important: Anna’s voyage was a righteous and divine one, toward the manifestation of her femininity. Becoming a woman: this I could understand, celebrate, defend.

  Since I’d moved to LA, I’d scheduled multiple appointments at LGBTQ clinics to get testosterone. Each time, I found some reason not to show up. The drive was too far; I didn’t have the proper paperwork; I’d changed my mind. It was unclear to me what the act of scheduling the appointments even meant to me. I didn’t plan on telling anyone, just imagined a gradual squaring out in my jaw, becoming a little leaner, stopping before I grew any hair on my face or body and brushing the changes off as natural. But the closer I got to the appointment, the more disgusting the potentialities of the process seemed. Facial hair, body hair, fat redistribution, mood change, clitoral enlargement, change in body odor. I could fathom some of these as isolated changes, but together they added up to something grotesque and terrifying. How could anyone else love me if I was disgusted by myself? The knowledge that I wasn’t a woman was all that mattered, I told myself. If I could withstand my body without altering it, if I could will it to work for me, I would be strong.

  Anna and I had been talking throughout my internal lecture. I don’t remember what we talked about. I flipped back into presentness when she told me she’d chosen a new name.

  “Anna,” she said.

  Anna, the name of the brown-haired five-year-old who wore a pink bow in her hair and whom I kissed in the back corner of the classroom. Anna the palindrome. Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna.

  I dropped Anna off on the outskirts of Richmond, then drove north to a town where the Russian River empties out into the Pacific. From the cliffs above the ocean you could see the brown river water spilling into the blue ocean water, mixing together. No slow, sandy fade like the Atlantic coast, just cliffs, cut off, then the sea.

  I spent the next day walking around the town, which consisted of one gas station, until the sun set and I bought a six-pack to drink in my extremely damp motel room. I called Zoya a few times; she didn’t answer. I called Antonia, who attempted to comfort me by reminding me that she hadn’t gone anywhere, that we still loved each other, if in a different form. Still, I was certain neither she nor Zoya needed me anymore. And if neither one of them needed me, I was no one. I sobbed, sadness bubbling up from the irrational, indescribable place. It was easiest to call it heartbreak and reach for different objects in the shape of people.

  The sun set and I drank until I slept. The four hours until a reasonable bedtime seemed infinite and unnavigable. I could not stand to be self-aware. I drank until I didn’t even notice I was unconscious.

  I woke up early the next morning, dehydrated and angry at Anna. I wouldn’t tell her about or show her my anger; I’d celebrate the work she’d done to get to this point. I would show up for her, just as she’d taught me, as she leaped the bureaucratic hurdles of name and gender change: email addresses, bank cards, IDs, online accounts. People from the past would be notified of the new name, either by her or by an acquaintance, and they’d overperform their comfort with it to prove how okay they were with the transformation. I’d protect her even though I envied her, even though envy begets resentment. Why was I so slow?

  I was slow because the very idea of “transitioning”—starting hormones, getting surgery, even just changing my name—sucked me into a thought circuit with no end and no exits: I need this. The fact that I need this means I’m weak. The fact that I’m weak means I don’t deserve this. I need this.

  I went to a beach famous for sea glass. Green, blue, red, yellow, and amber shards, catching the sunlight. I lay in the sun until the tide touched my shoes; then I crawled around on my knees, combing around for the luminescent green pieces.

  I didn’t look up and bumped into an older woman who was filling a leather pouch with shards.

  “I like the green ones too,” she said. “They’re real neon. Nineteenth-century Vaseline bottles. They glow if you put them under black light.”

  She took me around on my hands and knees and explained where all the colors came from. Amber: aromatherapy bottles. White: milk bottles. She told me red was very rare, as were black and turquoise. Her favorite color—which was also the hardest to find—was amethyst. She told me her name was Venus and that she was from Rancho Cucamonga. I told her my name was Grace.

  “That’s my favorite name,” she said. “It’s my son’s name. I know, a little weird. I just liked it. I don’t like rules so much.”

  As usual, I wondered if it was a sign; the messenger of self-acceptance, shooting arbitrary arrows of meaning into my life.

  Afterward I walked to a cliff with the goal of sitting still for a few hours. I wanted to keep my eyes closed, focus on sensations, land back in my body. I let all the sounds wash over me and imagined I could hear every single thing happening anywhere: the wind; mountains growing; every car horn in every city; people talking and whispering; drilling, exploding, melting. The world coming together and wrapping me up in a textured hum.

  Early the next day I drove back to Los Angeles. At a gas station in the Valley someone in a suit and no shoes approached me. They asked my name.

  “Grace. What about you?”

  “I don’t know!” they said angrily. Then they turned and sprinted away.

  4

  S​OON AFTER ANNA LEFT, my sister’s chronic illness grew unmanageable again. In recent years, she’d gotten continually sicker as invasive uterine tissue spread throughout her abdomen, strangling her other organs, even into her legs and back. The part of me that believes the universe is governed by an unscientific but moral law of consequence feared that her ailments were conspiratorial: stop reproducing yourself, I worried her body was saying.

  After a few months of not seeing her—this was regular for us, even when we were in the same city—I drove across town to pick her up from a lunch meeting and bring her back to my house. She stepped outside the restaurant with a woman I recognized from an early 2000s sitcom. The woman appeared not to notice that my sister, however effusive she was, had a film of dissociation over her eyes.

  When we got in the car, she dissolved into her pain. I pushed the passenger seat back so she could lie horizontal and bring her legs up to her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, started breathing fast and shallow, a pain-management tool she’d been taught by one of dozens of care providers whom I’d tried to keep track of, all with different credentials, areas of expertise, and beliefs.

  She’d never seen where I lived, an orange and blue house I shared with Lake and a tawny, knee-height dog who looks like a fawn. When I first moved in I was worried I was going to fall in love with Lake. She treated making a pot of tea like an event and used the garage to make drawings of feminine entities with ropes growing where their genitals should be. A month into living with her, I said, “I have a crush on you.”

  “Just…don’t,” she replied.

  We’ve eaten most meals together since, falling asleep in her bed with the dog between us on nights when the house was cold or either of us was lonely.

  Inviting my sister over was an attempt to break a cycle of mutual hurt. I said our relationship only consisted of me entering the spaces of her life; she rebutted that I never welcomed her into mine. Our disagreements always became tautologies.

  In anticipation of lunch,
I’d imagined driving her to the neighborhood I lived in and pointing things out to her along the way: Elysian Park, where the city demolished the neighborhoods in Chavez Ravine so they could build Dodger Stadium; the abandoned Lincoln Heights Jail on Avenue 19, where they locked up cross-dressers in the 1950s; the LA River, a trickle of water in an angular flume of concrete. I wanted to pull her into my worldview so that we could find shared meaning, even briefly.

  I wanted her to meet Lake, the dog, drink tea with us, see the way we lived. This is my life, I thought. I’m proud of it. Maybe some part of me wanted her to envy it, too.

  She had clearly summoned all her available energy to get through lunch. She kept panting, half-asleep, while I drove. I abandoned my planned tour and drove home by the quickest route, trying to avoid bumps so the car wouldn’t shake her insides and make her body hurt more than it already did.

  During the drive, two of her doctors called; she couldn’t speak beyond a mumble, so I held the phone and talked to both of them, relaying what she had told me before she’d become incoherent—acute, numbing pain in her lower back and right leg; heavy bleeding; insurmountable nausea.

  The first doctor said he’d called in two painkillers, neither of which I could pronounce, to the Walgreens nearest my house. The second doctor said she needed to go in for surgery the next day. A removal of tissue, a scraping of her insides, a shift to the left or right of an organ. With the help of the unpronounceable painkillers, she’d make her way through the remainder of Sunday. At this point, being cut open and entered was a regular occurrence for her. The prospect of surgery seemed to calm her down. Relief at the possibility that something, anything, would make being in her body more bearable.