“What would yours be like?”
Wayne was stuck on verse two of his Remembrance Day poem but didn’t dare ask her for help. His mother hated the way the school made assignments out of every holiday: Remembrance Day, Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, even St. Patrick’s. “It’s the same every year,” she complained. “I think they do it because no one in that place has a scrap of imagination. If it weren’t for pumpkins and reindeer and bloody leprechauns all over the walls, they wouldn’t have a clue what to be doing with the youngsters.”
Remembrance Day nearly drove her insane: every child in the school trying to imagine what it was like in the trenches and asking their mothers what rhymes with poppy. Maybe, Wayne thought, that was what the matter was with her now.
“My tent? Well… it’d have a string of Chinese lanterns, for one thing, and I’d find a way to have music.”
Wayne knew it didn’t matter what rhymed with poppy. He knew the difference between real feeling and doggerel you wrote for homework. Why did there even have to be words? He sank more teeth-marks into his pencil and tasted the paint and wood. Names of things got in the way. What was a poppy if you didn’t call it a poppy? If you just watched one and refused to give it a name. Thomasina was a good one for naming things in a way that still let you ask questions. That night in hospital, waiting for Treadway, she had tucked the cool sheet around Wayne’s neck and talked about his operation. Thomasina had not called it an operation, or a surgery.
“Those waters rushed, didn’t they.” Her hand had cooled his forehead. “They rushed over the landwash. Our bodies are made mostly of water, Annabel.”
“You’re calling me that again.”
“I am. Is it all right?”
“I liked it when I was little. I thought it was Amble.” He remembered it had felt like a name you would call a newborn puppy or a child you loved. “But it wasn’t Amble. It was your little girl. Annabel. I like that too.”
“Your mother and I were good friends. There were things we both lost. Things that have to do with you and why you’re here. But you have to wait for the doctor. And for your father. It’s not my place.”
“What did you call the rushing thing?” He had been half asleep. Treadway’s voice was in the hall. Thomasina went out to him. “Rushing… what was it?” The hall grew louder. “Dad?” Was Treadway shouting? Treadway never shouted. Wayne had not discerned the words. Rushing. Landwash. Annabel. Lost. He slept.
Dr. Lioukras had done his best. He believed you could talk to any child over the age of eleven as if the fully realized person inside had begun to open, and he had tried to use words that were true. The limitations of medical language were no greater, in his mind, than those of language as a whole. Science, medicine, mythology, and even poetry shared a kind of grandeur, as far as he saw. He had two copies of Donald J. Borror’s Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, which broke biological terms into their earliest known fragments, and he read it just for fun. But even Donald J. Borror was having a hard time helping him now.
“This is one time,” he told Wayne, who sat propped up in bed balancing green Jell-O cubes on a knife and letting them melt on his tongue, “when medical science has given itself over entirely to mythical names. A true hermaphrodite” — he said it as if the state were an attainment — “is more rare than all the other forms. It means you have everything boys have, and girls too. An almost complete presence of each.”
“Only my balls aren’t the same as the other boys’. I saw in gym.”
“Right. You have only one testicle. And your penis. If you weren’t taking your pills…”
“My pills are about that?”
“Yes. Your penis wouldn’t be as large as it is now.”
“What would it be like?”
“Hermaphroditism is so rare. It’s not certain. You would become more like a girl than you are now. You’re already a girl inside.”
“Inside?” How could he be a girl inside? What did that mean? He pictured girls from his class lying inside his body, hiding. What girl was inside him? He pictured Wally Michelin, smaller than her real self, lying quietly in the red world inside him, hiding.
“You’ve been menstruating. That’s what the fluid was inside you. Menstrual blood that couldn’t escape.”
“Has it escaped now?”
“We let it out.”
“But it happens again, right?”
“In girls, yes. Every month. But in your case we don’t know how often.”
“Can it get out now? New stuff?”
“We’re hoping” — Dr. Lioukras had eyes you could see uneasiness in right away — “that with new medication, it will stop.”
“But if it didn’t stop, would it get trapped again?”
“You would have to come in again, like this time, if it happened. You would need another gynecological intervention.”
So it was with names — suture, true hermaphrodite, menstrual blood, gynecological intervention — that the doctor had done his best to acquaint Wayne with the story of his male body and the female body inside it. Dr. Lioukras was not happy with the talk. He had wanted it to be about life, and possibility, not blood and stitching and cutting. He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text. Without his work, he told himself, many people would be buried early among the stones on Crow Hill, over the slow, cold inlet, and would feel no more joy, or life, or love.
Now, after the operation, Wayne felt the power of names in a new way. His father ate his evening toast, sometimes with a kipper. Jacinta crocheted. They did not look outside at the night. Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch.
His mother did not find her little white knife. Wayne wished he could find it for her. He was glad after supper when he saw her open her tin of crochet hooks. The tin was oval, and decorated with a woman in a white robe.
“How have you forgiven me?” She broke a piece of new green wool for the edge of a hat.
“For what?” Wayne liked watching her make something. Treadway was pouring a bucket of cement down three weasel holes he had found in the root cellar.
“Keeping the secret.”
Though Dr. Lioukras had told Wayne the name of his condition, the family had not discussed it. They had come home and resumed their old life, as if everything was ordinary. “You let me order my bathing suit,” Wayne said.
“The suit” — Jacinta laid her hook on the hat — “was such a small thing. That was nothing compared to not telling you.”
“You gave me the Niblets box to hide the suit in. And now the suit’s getting too small. Dad’s the one who didn’t say anything. The dog…” Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love.”
“I know. Love gets blocked if you dam it. Your father builds dams in his sleep. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” Wayne had a dog he could not love though he wanted to love it, and Treadway had a son he could not love though he wanted a son and he wanted to love that son. Father and son suffered from backed up, frozen love, and this ate Jacinta’s heart.