Lastly, they had to decide on a name for me. The name they decided on, of course, was Dolores.
I never asked them the obvious question. We were always very close—they were loving, generous, supportive parents—but they were older, remember, they were of the “greatest generation,” they could have easily been my grandparents, and topics surrounding sex seemed to make them uncomfortable. Perhaps less uncomfortable than I thought, true—perhaps they were waiting for me to start the conversation with them, perhaps they had very deliberately determined to pretend I was normal until such a time as I broached the topic of my unusualness with them. I guess…
* * *
—
Once, in the shower with my mother—I was four, maybe five years old—I asked her why mine was different from hers, and she told me that everyone was different, some more different than others, and that no one really knew why people were different, and that it didn’t matter, especially down there, because the only people who should ever, she said, be allowed to know what we looked like down there were people to whom it wouldn’t make a difference, people we knew to love us already, who wouldn’t be able to help but find everything about us, including whatever we had down there, beautiful.
Quaint answer, right?
But it was delivered to me with unflinching sincerity—at least that’s how I remember it—and I accepted it without any hesitation. Why would I hesitate? It came from the person I loved most in the world, and hearing it made me feel safe. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe that love conquered all. If it were true, then the world was good. So, for a while, I did—I believed it.
When I got a little older, and boys and girls—and girls and girls, and boys and boys—started judging each other’s bodies the way kids will, I ceased to believe that love conquered all, and I remember that it didn’t actually bother me so much. It didn’t bother me because my body was regularly adjudged to be lovely. I was always considered an attractive girl, by children and adults alike. But I do remember thinking, “Don’t talk to Mom and Dad about this. It will worry them. It will make them sad. This isn’t how the world is supposed to be. The world is different than they think it is. The world must have changed while they weren’t looking.” And so I didn’t. Talk to them about it. I never did. I really felt very protective of them and, even if it kept us from knowing one another better, I admire myself for it to this very day. I admire that little girl’s restraint. Most days, I do.
* * *
—
So perhaps, in the end, it was only me who’d been uncomfortable. Not with sex, or with my body, but with talking to them about either. Perhaps, I’m saying, I’d projected that discomfort onto them. In any case, between myself and my parents, there was always—except for that one time in the shower—total silence surrounding the topic of sex, gender, genitalia, etcetera. A total silence I was afraid to break—one that I was afraid would break them, were I to break it.
* * *
—
I did come close just once, however. Just before going off to college at Berkeley. I was only fifteen, which, I guess that’s its own separate story, but for now let’s just say I was one of those probably-annoying polymathic wunderkinds who spoke four languages and read in nine. But as I was saying, I was only fifteen, and my parents were, understandably, hesitant to let me go somewhere so far away from home at so young an age. They were hesitant, rather, to allow me to enroll in college at all, and they were flat-out refusing to send me to Berkeley. They were insistent that if I were to enroll anywhere, it would be at UT Austin, so I could continue to live at the house with them. I wanted to go to Berkeley so badly, though. Berkeley or Stanford, but especially Berkeley—I wanted to begin my adventures out in the world, on my own, and I had romantic ideas about northern California, especially San Francisco, and…Well, you know how teenagers can get when they fixate on something.
So there arose a moment in one of our arguments when it occurred to me that I could say to my parents that they had no idea what was best for me, that all my life I’d been ashamed of what I was, afraid of what I was, and that the one thing I’d ever really needed was for them to talk to me about what I was, to let me know that they loved me despite what I was, and that they’d failed to do so time and time again. None of which was true. Yet I was about to say it anyway. I was right on the verge. And I was sure it would win me the argument, that with just a few declarations, I could scandalize and emotionally blackmail my poor parents into saying yes to Berkeley.
Looking back on it, I’m not sure that would have worked—but I was sure at the time. Luckily for me, though, I didn’t follow through. I didn’t make those false declarations. I think I would have hated myself for years if I had. Luckily, my mom—who was, by that point, more a witness to the argument than a participant—my mom had unsleeved her cure, Jamey, and it was standing on the kitchen-table placemat in front of her, making cute faces and kind of hula-dancing for her, trying to cheer her up and so on, and…Do you remember those “I’ve Got the Cure?” public service announcements from a few years ago? the ones from the Parents Against Violence In Our Schools Initiative? Well, this could’ve almost been the plot of one of them—I could’ve been a spokesperson. Really. Because I thought, “Either I overload on my mother’s cure, or I will lose control of my temper and make these declarations that will hurt my parents, declarations that can’t be taken back and will haunt our relationship forever.” It was a weird thought to have in 1991. Cures were still fairly expensive, and “cathartic overload” hadn’t even caught on in New Age circles by then, I don’t think—I mean, those PSAs certainly hadn’t aired…I guess I’d probably overloaded three, maybe four times by then at most? Anyway, maybe it was the novelty of the thought that convinced me it was right—who knows?—but I didn’t doubt its validity, and the choice was an easy one.
I snatched Jamey up, then bashed it back down.
“Dolores!” my mother shouted, and I started to cry—not for Jamey, or for having lashed out, but with a great sense of relief. I’d nearly done something awful to us, but I’d stopped myself.
They scolded me for “not being very nice,” but then, once they’d noticed my tears, they embraced me, and I, in so many words, I told them that, yes, I was nice, and that I planned to always be nice, but that I needed them to let me go to college in Berkeley, that even if they didn’t let me go to college in Berkeley, I would continue to be nice, but I would never be very happy about it, I would feel like a sucker, a sucker who continued to act as though simply being nice could ever get her what she really wanted and deserved even though she knew it wasn’t true. And they listened to me. And within a couple days, they changed their minds, and later that year, I enrolled at Berkeley. What a happy ending, right? They were such good people.