Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

13 - D Cup

It seemed like an eternity to me, but it was probably only a minute, maybe less, before she stopped writhing and lost consciousness. I looked down at her, not sure what I was supposed to do, if anything. As I wrestled with my indecision, I was startled by a deep and angry voice shouting at me.

"Hey, asshole!"

I turned and saw a bearded brawny guy in a varsity jacket approaching, his hands balled into fists. I was confused — and frightened — by his burst of hostility. "What the hell did you to her?"

It was then that I flashed on what he was seeing. He saw me — a six-foot-three man towering over a tiny, bird-boned woman with bruises on her face lying unconscious on the sidewalk. I took a step away from her. "Nothing!" I squeaked, throwing up my hands like I was being robbed at gunpoint.

A crowd began to form as Miriam's eyes fluttered open. A middle-aged woman with huge hoop earrings glared at me, then leaned over Miriam. "Miss, are you OK?"

A confused Miriam looked up at the woman's swaying earrings — and then the woman — with unfocused eyes. "Yeah. I'm fine."

I took a step towards Miriam, but the guy in the varsity jacket pointed a threatening finger at me. "Back off, man!"

"Do you need a ride?" the middle-aged woman asked Miriam.

"Should I call the police?" offered someone who I heard but couldn't locate in the burgeoning crowd.

Luckily, Miriam figured out what was going on and shook her head. "I'm fine. Really. Thank you." The crowd eyed me with hostility as I helped Miriam to her feet. I knew what they were thinking. Miriam was in an abusive relationship, but was too scared of me, or too in love with me, to get the help she so desperately needed.

Realizing there was nothing more they could do, the crowd grudgingly dispersed, shaking their heads. "He's never going to change, sweetie," an older woman in a colorful scarf advised Miriam quietly. "Don't kid yourself." She gave me a bone-chilling stare as she shuffled away.

In the moment, I was mostly concerned that I was going to get the shit kicked out of me by an angry mob, but in hindsight I realize that it was kind of heartwarming, all the concern that those people displayed for a total stranger, trying to protect her from the monster they thought I was. You hear a lot about apathetic bystanders, but that certainly wasn't the case on that balmy November evening in Westwood Village.

"So!" I clapped my hands together. "Who's hungry?" I was never very good at sounding upbeat when I wasn't. Or, for that matter, when I was. But I did my best, capping off my sentence with a smiling tilt of my head and an enticing upturn of my palms.

"Thank you," she said, her embarrassment as plain as the purpling bruises on her face. "But I think you'd better take me home."

I saw Miriam to her front door. I shook her hand and said something perfunctory about trying this again soon, which neither of us believed, and then she hurried inside. Before the door shut I caught a glimpse of her father in the foyer. His arm was in a sling.

What was with this family?

———————————

The evening had been stressful — not to mention surreal — but now that it was behind me, I knew there was a huge upside: I would get to tell Tom about it. For us, there were no dating stories less interesting than that of two people gliding through a night of frictionless frivolity. But the grinding gears of a dating disaster? That was pure gold. And I had just hit the motherlode.

So it was with great anticipation that I opened the front door to the apartment, expecting Tom to be on the couch where I had left him, reading another comic book or watching TV. Instead, I was greeted by a darkened room and the sound of footsteps thumping heavily up the stairs. Weird.

I slapped at the wall until I found a light switch — even after six months, I still couldn't remember where it was — then turned on the light and called out, "Honey, I'm home!"

I heard Tom's strained voice from upstairs. "I thought you were going to be gone til ten." There was a hint of accusation in the way he said it. I glanced at the glowing blue numbers on our VCR's clock. It was barely eight.

"So did I," I said, tossing my keys and wallet onto the garage sale Yin/Yang coffee table we had somehow convinced ourselves was classy. I heard a lot of movement above my head. "Do you have company?"

"No. Just me." And then he changed the subject. "I guess your date didn't go that great, huh?"

I laughed. "Oh, man! Wait until you hear this!"

"I'll be down in a second," he said. He sounded more relaxed now that the topic had shifted away from him and onto me.

But then I noticed something wedged in the corner of the couch. Curious, I pulled it out. It was lavender, with a little pink bow on it. A bra. It was, I reckoned, a D cup. (My former girlfriends had conveniently run the gamut from A to DD, so I had a pretty good eye for bra sizes.) I picked it up as Tom descended the stairs.

"Uh, are you sure you don't have company?"

"Uh, yeah." He arrived at the bottom in a T-shirt and sweat pants. His face was a little flushed.

"So this..." I held it up for him to see. "...is yours?" I laughed at the absurdity of the thought. But Tom was not amused.

"Of course it's not mine!" Both of us were surprised by the force of his response. Realizing he had overreacted, he downshifted into a more conversational tone. "I did laundry earlier and that must've still been in the dryer from the person before me. Got mixed up with my clothes."

At first blush, his explanation seemed perfectly reasonable. And one blush was all I gave it. Yes, I'm sure that if I had kept picking at the details — How did he manage to do his laundry in such a short time? Why weren't there wet clothes hanging on the patio? How did the bra find its way into the couch? — I could have demolished his story. But why? I had no reason to question his version of events. Our apartment building did have communal washers and dryers, so mix-ups were inevitable. And I now know that Tom's story actually hewed fairly close to the truth. The bra was from someone else's laundry, but it didn't get accidentally "mixed up" with Tom's laundry. He had stolen it out of the dryer for his own personal use.

But at the time, I was was satisfied that The Mystery of the Misplaced Over-the-Shoulder Boulder Holder had been resolved. I tossed the bra to Tom and headed for the kitchen. "I'm grabbing a beer. Want one?

"I want five!" He said it playfully, but there was still a tightness in his voice that struck me as odd.

Or maybe it didn't.

Maybe none of it did. Maybe I didn't have the slightest inkling that anything was off. Maybe it's only because of what I know now that the moment has become retroactively infused with portent. Maybe, like so much of our friendship, it had to be rewritten in my memory.

But even if I truly sensed that something was wrong, I was nowhere near understanding the truth about Tom. Especially since, at that point, Tom didn't understand the truth about himself.

I tossed a beer to Tom and cracked one open for myself. And then I told him the story of my date. A story about convulsions and an angry mob. A story about the assumptions that people make and how wrong they can be.