A Year Without a Name Read online

  The ashes of our childhood dog, Dean—for James Dean—still sat in a box in the corner of the living room. Dean was a wirehaired fox terrier, like Asta from The Thin Man. I’d been urging her to get another dog since Dean’s passing.

  She had grown up with collies—first Cindy, then Torney—living props in the perfect set that was her 1950s Jewish suburban childhood. She told me stories about Cindy when I was young and couldn’t sleep. Cindy escaping and coming back three days later covered in nettles and mud. Cindy falling into the garbage chute. Cindy eating her father’s cigars. Cindy, our very own Lassie.

  I imagined myself showing up at my parents’ door, basketball-sized collie puppy in my arms, wrapped in a bow. In the fantasy, I was taller, more muscular, flat-chested; broad shoulders and harder, rougher skin; overgrown hair brushed to the side. Handsome and stern, but with smiling eyes. Dutifully at my parents’ doorstep, the puppy in my lithe arms, I would be the messenger of my mother’s joy.

  I texted her back within five minutes and told her I would get the dog.

  “I’m going to name her Penny,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s perfect,” I said.

  Two days later, I drove into the desert east of Los Angeles to collect Penny from her breeder’s house. Breeder. The word mortified me. Likely for its connotation with the genre of porn—that is, “Mean stepfather breeds stepson who is late for curfew” or “Muscle daddy breeds innocent twink”—I watched when I was too anxious or depressed to do anything else. I didn’t even watch it to get off, just to be calmed by the manifested and rhythmic need of the top, and the docile willingness of the bottom.

  When sex became part of my life, at the end of adolescence, my “vagina” evoked nothing. It was a non-part. When others touched me, I floated up and away from the scene, imitating the arousal I’d watched them experience. Being touched tickled at best, stung at worst. But, false as my responses were, the performance of pleasure seemed to satisfy my partners.

  On my own, the only way I liked to touch myself was to insert things inside my asshole. When I started allowing other people to touch me this way too, I came with another person for the first time. It was the only experience I’d ever had of my body overcoming me, instead of the other way around. Getting fucked in the ass rendered me a boy for its duration. Afterward, I had to make do again with the reality of my anatomy.

  It started with my parents teaching me how to wipe. First, you took the toilet paper, folded it into a square, and wiped yourself. For the front, you used two squares folded into one. For the back, you used as many as possible, folded up into a wad. It was hard to feel clean after. If I stained my underwear, I wadded them up in a ball and hid them under my bed or in the closet. I went in my underwear once while a babysitter was taking care of me. She had freckles and wore spaghetti-strap tank tops and was from Maine. I stuck the underwear behind the dresser in the bathroom. A couple of hours later, she came out of the bathroom and said she knew what I’d done.

  After that, I decided I wouldn’t go anymore. It was too disgusting. I hated what came out of me. When I felt it coming I just tightened up and stayed still until the feeling went away. The longer I didn’t go, the scarier the thought of going became. It would hurt too much.

  I got stomachaches that made me fall on the floor crying. I stopped eating because my body was already full of food. My parents called a therapist, then asked me gentle questions like “Are you afraid to give up control?” and “Did something scary happen in a bathroom?” The questions didn’t help. I got so sick that they brought me to a doctor. The nurses and my parents held me down while the doctor put something called an enema inside me, which shot warm water up into my body. It was a scary, wet feeling that I hated, until the water came out, which tickled and relaxed me even though it made me cry.

  After the doctors held me down, I started putting my fingers and other things inside myself when I was alone. Different holes felt different ways. My body was like the shell of a hermit crab sometimes, or like the armor at the Metropolitan Museum. Putting my fingers inside myself felt like reaching inside the shell. I touched the part of myself that was warm and liquid.

  The year after I wouldn’t go to the bathroom, I started refusing to sleep. I worried that if I let myself sleep I wouldn’t come back. No matter how tired I was, I kept my eyes open and stared straight ahead in the dark. Once my parents fell asleep, I tiptoed to their bedroom and stood outside the door. Sometimes I got dizzy and nauseous from how tired I was, but I didn’t give in.

  During the day I stored up bad thoughts that I could flip through at night to keep me awake: people being killed by lava in Pompeii; people being buried alive; people waking up on the morning of their own execution; prisoners of war being tortured in dungeons; children being kept in basements by men. Everything terrible that had ever happened filled the dark, wrapping me up. Putting my fingers inside myself was the only way to calm down, to be in my body instead of lost in the chaos of the whole world.

  On the way east to get Penny, I stopped at a pet store in a mall to buy her the red collar and leash my mother had requested. I also browsed for metal ones, running my fingers over the spiked loops. Not for Penny; I had someone else in mind.

  “How do you put this on?” I asked a sweaty clerk.

  “Well, how big is your dog?”

  “Big. A big mutt. Um, sort of a hound. Big but with a medium neck.” I held my hands at my hips to show the imaginary dog’s height.

  “It’s better if you bring your dog in to try it on.”

  “He doesn’t live here.”

  I bought the largest size and packed it in my duffel bag, separate from the tote I filled with Penny’s future possessions.

  The breeder lived at the end of a dirt road, in a low house encircled by a chain-link fence, dividing its parcel of sand from the rest of the desert. Her compound was the last before undeveloped land, prickly Joshua trees quivering for miles, big, tan rocks at the horizon.

  The door of the house opened and two tall collies bolted out, galloping toward me. The breeder followed, her long brown hair parted in the middle. She looked like a 1960s folk singer.

  “Hiya,” she said. She talked like one, too.

  Inside, six bouncing collie puppies swarmed me in unison. They shook and pranced, vibrating.

  “Which one is Penny?”

  She reached down for the one with the shortest nose.

  “Hey, Cinnamon! Off! Off, Cinnamon!” She flicked a tawnier one off Penny and handed her to me, a squirming ball.

  “You should know,” she said, “that Penny may not be very comfortable around men. My friends come around sometimes, but I’m not friends with any men.”

  “You really think she can tell?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  She wriggled around in my arms while I tried to hold her, flopped onto the linoleum floor, and slipped over to her siblings. I worried the breeder would be able to tell Penny didn’t trust me and would refuse to let her drive back to Los Angeles with me.

  On the drive out to the desert, a child at a bathroom rest stop in Chino had asked me what I was doing in the women’s restroom. I’d thought for a second before saying, “I’m female.” The qualifier had slipped out, despite the fact that its premise was one I claimed not to believe in.

  “Oh,” the child had said. She looked me up and down, unconvinced, and ran after her mother.

  I sat down in a leather easy chair and the breeder put Penny back on my lap. She jumped off and ran up to her own mother, a tall, sylphlike creature with the grace of a unicorn. Penny hurled herself at her mother’s legs until her mother lay down on the ground beside her, so that Penny could curl up in the curve of her hind legs and stomach.

  “Will she be okay without her mom?” I asked the breeder.

  “Oh yeah, she’ll adjust.”

  “But how hard will it be at first? Will she cry?”

  “You can take a towel with her mom’s scent on it, if you’re worried.
”

  At the peak of my childhood sleep phobia, I slept with my face buried in one of my mother’s cashmere sweaters. The fabric smelled of Féminité du Bois, the discontinued Shiseido perfume she’d worn my whole life. She hoarded boxes of it under the bathroom sink. A scent- and texture-based pacifier, it made lying awake in the dark, engulfed in a cloud of the world’s most violent potentials, more bearable. At that time, I told her every day that I never wanted to stop living with her.

  “You’ll be ready when the time comes,” she said.

  Though I hadn’t believed it then, her prediction had turned out to be true. The space of childhood could no longer contain me, as much as I wished I could fit inside it. It had been one thing to exist inside the world my parents had created for me when I was a teenager and my sexuality lurked under the surface. Now my transgressions were too real to be pushed down.

  Penny, though: she was still too young to be ripped away from her mother. Unless she contained some desire I couldn’t see, the kind that made her unsuitable for daughterhood.

  Outside, the breeder handed Penny to me, wrapped in her mother-scented towel. As we drove away down the dirt road, Penny kept her gaze fixed on the back window, staring at her former home receding into the distance. Long strands of viscous drool leaked from her panting mouth. I reached over and used the mother-scented cloth to soak the spit up. She whimpered. It looked like her eyes were filling with tears.

  “It’s gonna be okay, sweet girl. I promise. It’s gonna be okay.”

  My mother, intent on Penny’s safe delivery, purchased me an economy-plus plane ticket, so that Penny could stay crated at my feet, rather than having to fly in the cargo hold. But she spent the plane ride in my lap, intermittently staring into my eyes and inserting her long nose into my water cup. I didn’t read, watch a movie, even nap; instead, I spent the five hours petting her head, kissing the soft red hair over her eyes, a foot soldier of my mother’s love. The journey reminded me of a recurring dream I had in which I held my young self in my arms. At some point in the dream, I put young Grace down and followed her along an amalgamation of different streets, past willow trees, neoclassical buildings, a schoolhouse, a court building. I walked slightly behind, studying her sturdy walk, her hands swinging at her sides.

  Penny and I landed in Hartford and my parents met us by baggage claim. I saw my mother from a distance, a bowl of water and a bag of treats in her hands. I had already dressed Penny in her red collar.

  “I love you, Penny,” she said, holding her in her arms. “I know you had a long journey to get here, but I love you so much already.” The way she spoke to the dog was so familiar: soft encouragement and unconditionality, the way she’d spoken to me when I was a little girl.

  I may have given the impression that I was devout in my commitment to Zoya and, as a result, celibate. Actually, I’d fallen in love with someone a month earlier.

  Joshua had come to LA to visit Rex, a best friend who was staying with me while Lake was traveling for the month. Rex and I entered a kind of cohabitating symbiosis: we slept, ate, and bathed together; she encouraged me to redirect all the energy I’d been sending toward other people—Zoya, Antonia, my family—toward myself.

  Rex had told me a year earlier that if I met Joshua, another best friend of hers, I’d fall in love with them. Joshua was beautiful—long red hair, blue eyes, pale skin—and this made me feign disinterest in them.

  “I don’t think I’d like them,” I told Rex.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “Don’t be fooled by their container. They’re an alien.”

  Coming from Rex, this was the highest compliment.

  Joshua and Rex both ended up staying with me. Joshua was disarmingly kind, seemingly without expectations that their gestures of care and consideration would be returned. I went out for the day and came back to a house full of flowers or formerly ripped shirts repaired and folded neatly on my bed. They made themself breakfast and left me some too, the food divided into quadrants according to color, a cloth draped over the bowl to keep it warm. It’s not that I hadn’t been cared for before, but that the care I was used to receiving implicitly carried with it an understanding that it was a privilege to receive it, that it might be revoked if it wasn’t met with adequate gratitude. I can’t say whether this expectation was communicated in the care itself, or if my conditioning made me project scarcity. It has always been an honor to receive anything, anything at all, from a “woman.” In the receiving, I felt real.

  Joshua seemed honored to give. This was not the kind of woman with whom I was familiar. It quickly became clear that Joshua was not a woman at all.

  We went to the beach one day and I buried them in sand. A man walked by and told them they looked like a beautiful mermaid. Disappointment flickered in their eyes, and I recognized their dissociation. They transmuted in front of my eyes into an alien that had been consigned to an imitation of beauty, beauty that looked like womanhood. They were a translucent creature, full of spit and organs, orange-colored fur growing out of their pores in a long mane from skull to hips. It was absurd they’d ever been misrecognized as anything else. That absurdity had levity. It made me feel hopeful, less fixed.

  Walking back up the dunes from the beach, I asked them if they were a girl.

  “Oh,” they said. “Thank you for asking.” Their grin communicated how deeply the answer was no, how much of an impossibility yes was.

  The last night they were in town we stayed up late, talking. I told them about Zoya and they told me it sounded like loving her gave me structure.

  “She’s your invisible dog collar,” they said.

  We turned the lights off and held each other in the dark. Soon we were rubbing against each other. I gyrated with a clumsy fervor that defied all my rules of composure and control. We squirmed around, worms in dirt, until we were a clump, and we came, and we were worms in repose.

  They left Los Angeles the next day and I found a letter under my pillow, written in red ink. “I’ll get you a real collar,” it said. “I’ll take you on long walks, and if you ask nicely, I’ll let you walk around by yourself, too.”

  Later that week, they sent me a stainless steel collar in the mail. A bone-shaped tag hung from it, engraved with the words “Good Boy.”

  So, after leaving Penny with my parents, I took the train to Joshua’s Chinatown apartment, the metal choke collar and dog tag in my duffel bag, amused and creeped out by a narrative coherence. Delivering a dog to my mother, then delivering myself to my new owner.

  They led me to their bed, a piece of yellow foam they’d cut in two and stacked on top of itself. Their cats, a tabby and a calico, slept curled up in piles of clothing on the floor. They ordered me to go get my collar. I dug through my duffel, handed it to them, and then got on my hands and knees while they clasped it around my neck. They clipped on a leash. They slowly, carefully, submerged their entire hand inside me. Then, slowly, the other. At first, I watched myself fill up from the outside. But as they addressed me directly—good boy, good boy, good boy, good boy—I was pulled into presence. Full from deep inside myself, barred from escape.

  Afterward, I lay on the yellow foam, crying. The nice thing about being a dog was that it was okay to feel pathetic. It was okay to need your owner, to let them control you. Show up, eager and open, willing to love and be loved. Derive purpose from making one’s owner proud. The same life every day. And it was much less sinister than being a boy.

  At first the healing swell of new love kept my depression at bay. But by the middle of summer, I couldn’t get out of bed. Either my medication stopped working or my depression became too unwieldy for the meds to contain it; either way, my desire to disappear crossed over into a suspicion that it was best not to be alive. I went home to hide in my parents’ house while I “cross-titrated” off one antidepressant and onto another.

  If language fails me here it is because language fails me here. If I sound clinical it is because it is easier to be clinical. Writing is
inherently optimistic for me. A leap of faith that, if I try to communicate, I will be understood. So for me one of the main symptoms of depression, of hopelessness, of total, all-encompassing cynicism, is to lose my belief in writing and to stop being able to leap. Why describe something when I’ll never be understood? Why not simply rely on the definitions and diagnoses provided by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders?

  F64.1: Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults

  F41.1: Generalized Anxiety Disorder

  F50.89: Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder

  F42.2: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

  Yes, that’s me. Here I am. I am F64.1, F41.1, F50.89, F42.2. I am full of Fs and 4s and .s. I have a 6, a 5, an 8, a 9. I have two 2s. If you understand me, what I’m called, will I stop feeling like a body suspended alone in some part of the universe without any other floating matter, astral bodies, specks of light on the horizon? It’s either metaphors or numerical codes. At least the latter is less dramatic.

  When I was able to get out of bed, I helped my parents cook and pick and wash vegetables from their garden, or watched British serial crime shows with them. There was a comfort in adolescent regression. Feeling trapped was the closest I knew to being held. The only thing I looked forward to doing was walking Penny, who was now twice the size she’d been when I first picked her up in the desert.

  Much of my day revolved around Penny’s cycle of needs. I took her around the perimeter of the yard, so she could grow familiar with the boundaries of her existence. I picked her up and carried her over the boundary, so she could only conceive of leaving if escorted.

  In the mornings, I sat outside and watched Penny wander around the yard. She never went so far that she lost sight of me. Sometimes I caught her eating whole hydrangeas off a bush. The petals stuck to her lips and eyelashes like snow. She liked to sit under trees and watch leaves fall slowly, side to side. Her body stayed still but her eyes darted back and forth. Every few minutes I’d beckon her over, just to watch her barrel toward me and crouch at my feet.