Mrs. Fletcher(18)

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I’d like you to articulate the question behind your question. In other words, what are you really asking?”

“Okay. I get it.” Dumell nodded uncertainly. He looked a little more worried than before. “Uh, were there other ladies besides you on the team?”

Professor Fairchild had to give this some thought. “What if I told you that our players ranged widely across the gender spectrum? Would that be a satisfactory answer to your question?”

“I guess,” Dumell said. “But it’s kinda complicated, don’t you think?”

“I do,” said the professor. “And rightly so. Because there’s nothing simple about gender. Nothing natural. It’s an ideological minefield that we walk through every minute of every day. And that’s what this class is about. How to walk through the minefield without hurting anyone’s feelings or blowing yourself up.”

*

When class was dismissed, Eve headed out of the building with Barry, the bearded bar owner, tagging along beside her, totally uninvited. They’d been randomly paired off for an in-class exercise, and had spent the better part of the past hour exchanging “gender histories,” focusing, per the professor’s instructions, on moments of gender-related confusion, doubt, and/or shame.

“That was pretty intense,” he said. “I have ex-wives who don’t know me as well as you do.”

Eve didn’t say so, but she doubted Barry’s ex-wives would have complained about not knowing him well enough. He was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of guy, a blustery jerk who began his conversation by insisting that he’d never in his life experienced a single moment of confusion, doubt, or shame in relation to his gender identity. The story of Barry’s life, as narrated by Barry, read as follows: first he was a boy, and then he was a man. The path from Point A to Point B had been straight, self-explanatory, and fun to travel.

“I don’t get the point of all this navel-gazing,” he’d told her during the exercise. “I was born with a penis. End of story.”

Eve had tried to draw him out, asking if he’d ever wished he could get pregnant or breast-feed a child. Ted had once called the ability to bear children a female superpower—he was trying to cheer her up at a particularly bloated and trying moment in her third trimester—and the description had stuck with her through the years.

“It’s kind of a miracle,” she said. “Feeling that little person growing inside you, and then feeding it with your body when it comes out. I imagine most men would be at least a little jealous.”

Barry chuckled appreciatively, as if congratulating Eve on a good try.

“God bless the ladies,” he said. “And thank you for your service. I really don’t know how you do it.”

And then he’d launched into a long and needlessly graphic account of the toll that childbirth had taken on his first wife’s body—especially her breasts, which were never the same afterward, he was sorry to say. He’d hoped they would bounce back, so to speak—they were her finest attribute—but no such luck. At least he’d learned his lesson. When his second wife got pregnant, he persuaded her to bottle-feed, and it was a smart decision. The baby didn’t give a shit, and mama’s hooters—those were his actual words—remained miraculously perky. She did thicken a bit around the waist, but that wasn’t what caused the marriage to go south. They had bigger problems, most notably his affair with a twenty-five-year-old waitress who would soon become wife number three. With that one, he laid down the law—no fucking kids—and she was all right with that until she turned thirty, at which point she wasn’t anymore, and that was that.

“Jesus,” Eve wondered. “How many ex-wives are there?”

“Just the three. I’ve had a few girlfriends since then, but it’s not that easy to convince someone to be Wife Number Four. Believe me, I tried.”

In the classroom, Eve had listened to Barry’s checkered history with scientific detachment; the point was to write a profile of the subject, not to judge him on his shortcomings. Out in the parking lot, though, a sense of retroactive revulsion came over her, exacerbated by the fact that he was crowding her as they walked, occasionally bumping shoulders with her in a way that might have seemed friendly, or even intriguing, if he hadn’t just outed himself as a heartless creep.

“I’m a big girl,” she told him. “You don’t need to walk me to my car.”

“And I’m a gentleman of the old school. Nothing wrong with a little chivalry, right? Women say they don’t like it, but in my experience they’re pretty grateful if you hold the door or pick up the check or bring them flowers.”

Eve didn’t want to admit it, but she knew he had a point. Things had changed so much over the course of her lifetime that women her age had all these different models of behavior jammed into their heads—you could be a fifties housewife and a liberated professional woman, a committed feminist and a blushing bride, a fierce athlete and a submissive, needy girlfriend. Most of the time you could switch from one role to another without too much trouble, and without even realizing that you might be contradicting yourself.

“There’s some gender confusion right there,” she observed. “I guess I learned something tonight.”