I felt my face turn pink. My feelings about Josh had changed.

Another Country -24-
by Erin Halfelven

Cyndy and John had spent the day shuttling another load of her stuff up from her Mom’s place on the coast, and after fetching Chinese takeout for everyone from Mah’s Kitchen, they spent the rest of the evening rearranging what used to be my room. This resulted in a pile of things for me to find places for in the trailer or let Mom toss them out.

Mom’s rules about serving takeout meant there were plates, cups and utensils to wash, but not a lot, and she and I soon had it all squared away.

“I saw that box of old plastic cars you boys put together years ago. Do you want to save them?” she asked as I unfolded a new dish towel to hang on the handle of the upper oven door.

By boys, she meant Dad, John and me. I shrugged. We’d spent hours smoothing the plastic flash off the pieces, gluing them together and painting them in colors like Nassau Blue and Vanilla Cream. That was four years ago, and the cars had all ended up displayed on shelves in my room. Cyndy’s room now.

“No good place to display them in the trailer,” I sort of grunted.

“I’ll find a place for the box in the garage,” Mom said finally. “At least Cyndy took all the dust off them.”

I made another noise.

“Do you think you could find a place for two of them in the trailer?” she asked, reopening the box. “Then you could rotate them and end up displaying all of them.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. I walked over to look in the box myself. The ’56 T-Bird, sure; there was a shelf high up above where the TV sat in the trailer. Just looking at the paint job on the model made me smile: a coral exterior with a black-and-white interior, and the little removable hardtop was that Thunderbird blue-green that looked so pretty next to the coral. “I’ll just take this one, for now,” I said.

Mom smiled and closed the box again. Before she carried it out to the garage, she said, “When I was in high school, before I met your father, I had a boyfriend whose father had a car like the one you picked out. But it was that scrumptious red they had in those days. Mark borrowed it for a few of our dates. We went to the drive-in and saw some horror movie that had giant ants in it.” She laughed. “The very next date, he wanted to go on a picnic, and I said, no thanks!”

I rolled my eyes but smiled at Mom’s story, and took the little plastic car out to my own space. I put it up on the high shelf above the little borrowed TV. Once John came through on his promise to take me to the BX at the air base to buy me a new TV for the trailer, I could give the 13-incher back to Mom for her kitchen soap-watching.

I clicked the TV on, flipped through the channels available and stopped suddenly. Some character had just mentioned the phrase “sex change.” A brief flash of worry that someone might see or hear what I was watching flashed through my mind, causing me to glance around, but I was alone in the trailer. I stood there listening for several minutes, trying to catch up with some prime-time soap opera storyline about a gay guy worrying that his boyfriend was losing interest.

The line I’d caught by chance seemed to be about someone wondering if a sex change would rescue his love life, but the characters moved on to discuss other fantastic features of soap opera plots like murder, kidnapping, amnesia and fatal diseases. I clicked on to another channel with a rerun of a movie I’d already seen, then just turned the set off.

I sat on the couch and stared at the dark screen. I didn’t think that what was happening to me related directly to anything in soap opera land. Doctor Hitchcock had tried to tell me that the growth of my chest wasn’t unusual and probably only temporary. It should have been reassuring, but….

Thinking logically was not working. I glanced again at the plastic model car I’d placed on the shelf above the TV. Josh had so admired the work Dad, my brother and I had done on it that I had considered giving it to him.

I felt my face turn pink. That had been several years ago. Josh had been—and still was— my best friend. But my feelings had changed.

Especially after I’d seen him naked.

I hadn’t talked to anyone about that except Chud, who had just accepted my information as being evidence that I was gay, like himself.

I got up and walked the length of the little trailer to the bedroom, turned around and walked back to the front again. I opened the door and used the little hook to keep the solid door open, then pulled the screen door closed. The night was cool, and somewhere off toward the highway, I could hear traffic. High up and even farther away, a jet engine changed from a muted roar to a distant shriek, then to a fading whistle.

The sound reminded me that in less than a week, my brother John would be leaving for assignment to a new post in Europe. He’d be in another country, leaving his young wife to stay in my old room until he returned.

I felt my face twist around the emotions involved in how my life was changing. I stepped out of the trailer, careful of the narrow cement block in the darkness, closing the door behind me to keep insects out, then circling the trailer to sit on the redwood bench next to the barbecue kettle. I faced away from the main house and the town behind me, and the airbase off to the south.

Out there somewhere in the darkness lay Muley Flats, the dry lake bed where miners had filled wagons and train cars full of gypsum, borax and other minerals for more than a century. Some things change, and some things stay the same while the world changes around them.

I didn’t really want things to change. Not when I didn’t know what they were changing into. I didn’t want to change in unknown ways, either. The world could find its own way if it just left me alone.

My eyes burned, and my nose was running. I wiped away snot and tears with my bare hand, then wiped it on the wooden bench. No one could see, so what did it matter?

After a while, the realization penetrated my skull that Josh was not going to come see me in my new personal space. Something about me seemed to frighten him now. I could understand that.

“I’m afraid, too,” I said aloud. Not of the hypothetical bears and lions that Cyndy worried about, but of Josh and myself and our changing relationship and of what was happening to me.

Eventually, I went back inside the little trailer and took off my clothes, including the bra and chemise, which I hid away in a drawer. I’d have to wear them tomorrow when I went back to school. I washed my face and went to bed.