“Oh my god, you came to me first? You absolute psychopath.”
“She can say no! You can say no!”
“Who is she?”
And so Ames gives the particulars, the way you might introduce yourself to a new acquaintance: your work, where you’re from and if you’re a New Yorker, your neighborhood, and maybe, if your sangfroid is really pumping, your age. For Katrina, Ames reports these variables as: his boss at the ad agency; she’s from Vermont but has lived in New York since college; she’s got a two-bedroom in Brooklyn, and she’s thirty-nine; she had a miscarriage before. But having repeated these facts, Ames feels like he hasn’t said anything important, anything that captures Katrina at all, or why he thinks she’d share raising a baby.
A dog bounds toward Reese, interrupting his explanation. Reese gives the dog a pet and the dog’s owner apologizes. In refocusing on what he had been about to say, Ames attempts to dispel from his mind the slivers of moments, opinions, and impressions particular to his intimacy with Katrina that obscure the bold plain structures of her, in order to describe her as a dispassionate stranger might see her.
“When I first met Katrina,” he says, “she seemed kind of basic to me. Maybe it was because she was my boss and so that was part of her professional distance. But as I got to know her, I came to see her basicness as a disguise, or a defense mechanism. But not something conniving or intentional. It’s more like she’s layered all this weirdness together in her life experiences, from growing up in Vermont, then leaving her husband, and just a fundamentally idiosyncratic personality; and then, as though she’s shy about it and doesn’t want anyone to notice, she’ll cover that with being a foodie and doing Pilates or whatever. But underneath, she’s wild. Not at all conventional. She might go for this.”
“What’s she look like? I want to picture her,” Reese says.
He considers pulling out his phone to show her a photo, but he doesn’t really want to get into a moment where Reese is comparing herself or evaluating the looks of another woman. “She’s average height, kind of delicate. Really cute toes.”
“You perv! That doesn’t help me see her. Is she a blonde? You always liked blondes.”
“No, straight brown hair. She’s mixed-race, actually. Her mom is Chinese and her dad is Jewish. But she got her dad’s last name, Petrajelik, and freckles all across her nose, so she passes as white with white people. In Vermont, she grew up with only white kids around, so she says it was a shock when she went to Amherst and other Asian kids immediately recognized her as Asian.”
Reese laughs. Of course that would be the case. Same story, different minority: No matter how easily she passed as cis among the cis, passing as cis among other trans women never happened—they had trained their entire lives to see signs of transness, and hope alone dictated that they would detect those signs in Reese. “Great, she and I already have something in common,” Reese says. “We’re both almost cis white ladies.”
Ames had had more than a couple of conversations with Katrina about race and Katrina always expressed a sense of dismay about her passing. “Yeah, you two both pass. But I don’t know if she’s as aspirational about it as you are. Almost the opposite: I gather she feels something lost by her passing as a white lady.”
“She grew up entirely in Vermont?”
“Yeah. But not just Vermont, like, rural, back-to-the-land Vermont. They didn’t even have a TV until she was a teenager.”
“Primeval.”
“She loves pop culture, the way kids whose parents didn’t let them have sugar love candy.” Katrina’s stories from her early childhood struck Ames as cribbed from a cautionary post-hippie novel. The kind of story where idealistic types end up starving out on a commune somewhere, flower crowns wilting to reveal a grim human nature hidden beneath.
In first-generation style, Katrina’s mother, Maya, had staged a twofold rebellion against her immigrant parents. First, Maya insisted upon becoming an artist, and second she met in an art history class, and later insisted upon marrying, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn named Isaac. Before college, Isaac’s Zionist parents sent him to live on a kibbutz in Israel for a year. At eighteen, he volunteered for the Israeli military service, which nearly lost him his U.S. citizenship. Within the year, he found himself participating in the incursions into Lebanon that came to be known as the 1978 Operation Litani, a participation which, to his parents’ great dismay, disillusioned him to Zionism and, in the process, religion in general.
He returned home with signs of what might now be called PTSD and convinced that his stint in the promised land made him some kind of farmer. This conviction remained with him throughout his romance with Maya, through his dropping out of college to elope with her, until at last, he spent an inheritance from his maternal grandmother on a tract of land in Vermont. At that point, as close to being a farmer as he’d ever been, he moved his newly pregnant wife away from her disapproving family to a drafty farmhouse on twenty acres of granite hills not far from the border with New Hampshire, promising to convert the back porch into a light-filled art studio for her work.
After a couple of poor seasons trying to raise vegetables and sell them to restaurants and farmer’s markets, Isaac met a man who introduced him to a Danish system of raising mink for fur. So for the majority of her childhood, Katrina lived on a mink farm, where her daily chores included feeding a mixture of pureed meat and dried fish to hundreds of slinky river predators stacked in twenty-four-by-forty-eight-inch cages.
“Fur is really so gross,” Reese says. “I’m lucky I could never afford a fur coat, because that kind of raw barbarism is a little bit sexy. I wouldn’t be able to resist flaunting it.”
“Yeah,” Ames agrees. “She has a picture on Facebook, from like eighth grade, where she skinned a mink in front of the class as her science project. The student newspaper took the photo. It’s like, of a pretty, gawky girl smiling in front of a pile of red gore.”
“Horrifying,” says Reese happily. “No wonder she pretends to be norm-core now.”
Ames’s favorite story from Katrina’s childhood was the one where a young black bear broke through a screen window and into their house while the family was out. The bear crashed around the kitchen, broke two bottles of red wine, then trod through the resulting wine puddle, leaving red paw prints all over the seventies white carpet and cream-colored couch. Isaac came home and, enraged at the property damage, charged around the house brandishing a fire poker, convinced that he had the skills to engage a bear in combat. Maya, by contrast, arrived home carrying Katrina in one of those toddler back-slings and clapped her hands in delight.
Mink pelts were never as lucrative as Isaac had been promised by mink breeders, and so the couple faced dire finances at times throughout Katrina’s childhood. Within two weeks, Maya had sold the paw-printed couch to some rich New Yorkers with a nearby ski lodge, who displayed it in a position of honor, the perfect conversation piece for their friends to admire. In fact, the couch sale was so lucrative that Maya forged a bear paw, poured out another bottle of red wine, and embellished the bear’s paw route to include two other chairs that she went on to sell.