Church was the weirdest thing in the world when I was a kid. We went – my sister, my brother, my mother and father and me – to a very wooden congregational church in New Rye, NH. Women wore dresses and gloves and men wore dark suits and white shirts and neckties.
I loved watching my father tie his tie. He would let me hold the short end while he wrapped the long one up over the front around the back, over again and then up through the Y, tuck under the flap and presto. Then I got to tighten it, the reward for a job well done. It seemed miraculous to me, this handsome slip knot. A mystery not unlike others that lived in the church pews and up at the podium where Reverend Parker stood, old as a tree. There were pictures of bloody nailed up Jesus and head on a platter John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary (nice trick, my mother said). I liked going mostly because it was such a strange world and I was a kid that was drawn to strange worlds.
I did not understand the sinning part; as best I could tell I hadn’t sinned yet and I had no plans to do so. I just wanted to be a boy and while I was not sure that Jesus or Mary or John could be helpful, they seemed like my best bet for the few years that New Rye Congregational Church held hope for me and my life. I wanted to wear a neck tie, not a scratchy dress and shiny back shoes that gave me blisters on my heels. I wanted to run around with no shirt and do my chores outdoors – not iron pillowcases and stack them ever so neatly in the linen closet where they would wait for Saturday. For bed changing day. For the one I had just ironed last Friday to be whipped off into a rumpled pile and the new one smoothed into place. “Isn’t that nice” my mother would say and I would think “Isn’t what nice?”
I wanted to dump trash for a living. To mow lawns. To have sweat running from my face down my neck into the curly hair that I wanted to have on my chest rather than a training bra that I could not understand what was being trained. Were my breasts needing to be trained to stay in? Was I being trained to hitch them in? My sister had breasts that she lovingly cupped into place. She told me to pray to the Virgin Mary and I would have them too but I prayed to Jesus for curly black hair and I took my father’s razor and shaved my chest thinking of it like burning the field when you want the alfalfa to grow.
I don’t remember when we stopped going to church. It’s as though I can see the picture of our family sitting there together, my mother with her white gloved hands clasped in her lap and my father holding his hat with one brown trousered leg folded over the other. My brother, my sister and I are lined up like chicklettes beside her – aching to wiggle our legs and whack each other. The Reverend is warbling about doing unto others and the lord having risen, his old cracked hands rising up, pulling us from our seats to sing “Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature, oh thou of god and man the son…” We are singing and I am praying “please jesus god get going and make me a boy because I don’t think I can be a girl much longer. I am no good at it and I don’t like it and I don’t want breasts, I want a neck tie.” I can see the picture and then the picture is just not there and instead the picture is me running around the girl’s playground at school with some boy chasing after me, trying to snap my bra straps. And I don’t run quite as fast as I can.
