alcohol pads and stuff around with her everywhere. She’d just like lay out old syringes on the table at Veselka while everybody ate pierogies, just to be confrontational. But not so much any more.
It also explains why she’s been so goddam hung up on being trans. Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body. Normally she’s not all the way over being trans, but normally she is a lot more over it than this.
So, cool. Check. Noted.
She still has two hours to think about Steph and herself and Brooklyn and Kieran, but the bent-over little man who waits tables at six AM brings over her food and she slides her notebook aside and douses everything in ketchup.
14.
When Maria met her, Steph was this short punky femme with spiky bleachy multicolored hair and a ton of eye makeup. It was because of her more is better eye makeup philosophy that Maria developed the confidence to get as much onto her face every morning as she possibly can. But Steph was also this smart, angry little person with absolutely no sense of humor, in this way that Maria read at the time as super dykey. Maria was this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes she’d met when she’d been telling everyone she was a straight dude too, which meant that, in her social circle, she was kind of an anomaly who was tolerated, not really understood or respected. She was already out, she’d already been taking hormones for a while, but when she met Steph, Maria was still in the middle of the part of transition where you get harassed by strangers.
It was at a Christmas party somebody from the bookstore was throwing, but it was an interesting one because usually bookstore parties were mostly straight people. Like, queer people from the store would come and get wasted with the straight people because in neobohemia everybody’s cool with queers. But parties would usually be at straight folks’ houses and all their non-bookstore straight friends would be there. It was different the night Maria met Steph: this queer girl from the art department who’d leave in March to work at Random House was having a Christmas party at her big art-dyke loft collective apartment, way out past the end of Bushwick. That meant queer people Maria didn’t already know, kitschy Christmas decorations, a whole other vibe than she was used to. A vibe she’d known was out there without really knowing how to access it. As a theoretically straight theoretical guy, she had probably hung out with more dykes than the average straight guy, but it still wasn’t the sort of space she felt welcome in, or felt like she had access to, or really even felt like she belonged in. Actually it was kind of terrifying, not knowing what the unspoken rules in a space like that would be, or whether any of the queers at the party would be the kind of queers who had weird stuff against trans women.
So Maria felt like she was walking on eggshells all night, wanting to make a good impression and not say the wrong things to anybody—with an unsteady grasp on what the wrong things even were—so she kind of stood by the wall with a bottle of wine, trying to look like she wasn’t trying to look cool. Which is hard to pull off—she wasn’t totally succeeding. Folks came and hung out by her for a minute, she’d take the occasional lap around the party, but it is hard, man—being trans, at that point in a transition, it was characterized by this intense feeling of inferiority toward pretty much everyone. Look at all these girls, they know how to dress themselves, they know how to stand, they know when to talk and when to be quiet. Maria felt like she didn’t. She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.
She had mostly quit smoking, since you’re not supposed to smoke on estrogen, but in situations of excruciating awkwardness like that, all the
It also explains why she’s been so goddam hung up on being trans. Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body. Normally she’s not all the way over being trans, but normally she is a lot more over it than this.
So, cool. Check. Noted.
She still has two hours to think about Steph and herself and Brooklyn and Kieran, but the bent-over little man who waits tables at six AM brings over her food and she slides her notebook aside and douses everything in ketchup.
14.
When Maria met her, Steph was this short punky femme with spiky bleachy multicolored hair and a ton of eye makeup. It was because of her more is better eye makeup philosophy that Maria developed the confidence to get as much onto her face every morning as she possibly can. But Steph was also this smart, angry little person with absolutely no sense of humor, in this way that Maria read at the time as super dykey. Maria was this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes she’d met when she’d been telling everyone she was a straight dude too, which meant that, in her social circle, she was kind of an anomaly who was tolerated, not really understood or respected. She was already out, she’d already been taking hormones for a while, but when she met Steph, Maria was still in the middle of the part of transition where you get harassed by strangers.
It was at a Christmas party somebody from the bookstore was throwing, but it was an interesting one because usually bookstore parties were mostly straight people. Like, queer people from the store would come and get wasted with the straight people because in neobohemia everybody’s cool with queers. But parties would usually be at straight folks’ houses and all their non-bookstore straight friends would be there. It was different the night Maria met Steph: this queer girl from the art department who’d leave in March to work at Random House was having a Christmas party at her big art-dyke loft collective apartment, way out past the end of Bushwick. That meant queer people Maria didn’t already know, kitschy Christmas decorations, a whole other vibe than she was used to. A vibe she’d known was out there without really knowing how to access it. As a theoretically straight theoretical guy, she had probably hung out with more dykes than the average straight guy, but it still wasn’t the sort of space she felt welcome in, or felt like she had access to, or really even felt like she belonged in. Actually it was kind of terrifying, not knowing what the unspoken rules in a space like that would be, or whether any of the queers at the party would be the kind of queers who had weird stuff against trans women.
So Maria felt like she was walking on eggshells all night, wanting to make a good impression and not say the wrong things to anybody—with an unsteady grasp on what the wrong things even were—so she kind of stood by the wall with a bottle of wine, trying to look like she wasn’t trying to look cool. Which is hard to pull off—she wasn’t totally succeeding. Folks came and hung out by her for a minute, she’d take the occasional lap around the party, but it is hard, man—being trans, at that point in a transition, it was characterized by this intense feeling of inferiority toward pretty much everyone. Look at all these girls, they know how to dress themselves, they know how to stand, they know when to talk and when to be quiet. Maria felt like she didn’t. She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.
She had mostly quit smoking, since you’re not supposed to smoke on estrogen, but in situations of excruciating awkwardness like that, all the
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