---

 
The performance of the team was an anti-climax, but my experience of the trip wasn’t. I noticed, immediately, that the dynamic at the tables was completely different for me when I sat down as a woman. The dealer treated me differently. And at least five guys that night tried to come onto me.

The first time it happened I wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with it, and I'm pretty sure I came off as excessively rude. The second time I tried to pretend I was only there for the cards, and that didn’t work because it made me, a smurf, seem too interested in the game. Arun made me switch tables, and I tried just blending in. But truthfully, everything felt foreign. Even the hostesses who came around for drinks treated me differently. Everyone was somehow – I didn’t think of this at the time, but I did the next day – nicer.

I had to admit, weird as it seemed to be sitting in a skirt and shimmery blouse, I liked nicer. It felt good.

We played Friday and Saturday night in Atlantic City, then drove back on Sunday. Both nights I was the one who cashed out all the chips, on the principle that if Whitwell was watching the others, they’d find it hard to work out whether the team was winning or losing. Everyone on the team mostly ignored me during the actual play, and Lucy gave me all the chips to cash in the ladies room where there was less surveillance. I wasn’t sure it made any difference. For once, my paranoia wasn’t running full-throttle. Perhaps it was the distraction of playing as a woman.

On the Sunday night when the van stopped at my house, Arun stepped out to have a quick conversation with me. “Alex,“ he said, “I have a favor to ask of you.“

“Of me?“

“Yes. You don’t have to say yes now. But I'd like you to think about becoming our treasurer. We need someone to take over Henry's role. Someone who can be trusted to account for everything.“

“Me?“ I saw no reason not to be blunt. “I didn't think you liked me very much, Arun. Why choose me to take on a responsibility that big, if you don’t like me?“

“It’s not a question of like, Alex. I trust you. More importantly, the rest of the team trusts you. People know you're committed. They will be a lot more relaxed if you're holding all the money than, say, someone like Ziyen. No reflection on Ziyen.“

“What about you?“ It seemed an obvious question.

“I have a lot of other stuff on my plate, Alex. Henry was good at it. I need someone to help.“

“I’ll have a think about it. Does it mean I have to control all the money?“

“Most of it. Everyone will settle with you after each night. And you’ll make sure they have what they need for each round of play. You won’t need to hold all of it – we'll disperse the locations of our holdings – but you’ll be the one who signs for everything.“

“I’ll have a think about it. Is that okay?“

“Sure. Can you let me know by the end of the week?“

“No problem.“

Arun got back in the van and drove away.

 

~o~O~o~
 

I turned to go inside and saw a woman standing on the porch of the apartment downstairs. I knew we had new neighbors, but I hadn't had a chance to meet them yet. She waved, and I walked over.

“Hello,“ our neighbor said as I approached. She had a very broad New York accent, and I guessed (correctly) that she was from The Bronx. “I'm Beverly. Just moved in.“ She was a good looking woman, blonde, a few inches taller than me and maybe four or five years older, but she was clearly tired and she looked like she could use a trip to Stella's. She was balancing a baby on one hip. I guessed the baby, who was dressed in pink, was maybe 9 months old. Perhaps a little younger.

“Alex,“ I said. “I live with Pete and Talia, upstairs.“

“I thought so,“ she said. “I saw you leaving the other day.“ She hesitated. “That sounds wrong. I'm not being nosy or anything.“

I laughed. “It’s okay,“ I said. “It’s a quiet street.“

“You've been away?“

“I go away a lot, for work. How about you?“

“I'm not working at the moment,“ she said. “Since Samantha here.“ She looked down at the baby on her hip, who looked up at her beatifically. I'm not normally big on babies, so I didn't go all cooey and gooey, but I did smile back.

“Just you guys?“ I said, wondering how a single mother could get a lease on an apartment in Somerville.

“My husband is here … sometimes.“ The way she said that made we want to immediately ask her about why she said it at all, but I held my tongue.

“Well, nice to meet you,“ I said, lifting my carryon. “Please let us know if you need anything.“

 

~o~O~o~
 

When I came into the house, Pete was home with Talia, Jill and a friend, Virginia. It was probably the first time that Talia had been home at the same time as Pete and me for about a year.

Talia's friend Virginia was as out and proud as a Cambridge lesbian can be. She and Jill were sitting with Pete and Talia in the living room watching something on cable in black and white starring Merle Oberon. As it happened, at the time I walked in I was wearing a long brown skirt with a cream turtleneck cashmere sweater, brown ankle boots, and a caramel pea-coat Alice had bought me the Friday before.

Both Talia and Pete both stood up and gawked, like characters in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon, their eyes wide and their mouths slightly open. As I took off my coat I could see all three of them look at my chest, which was practically non-existent but padded enough to look realistic for an Asian girl.

“Stop perving on me,” I said, embarrassed, but as though there was nothing unusual about me wearing a skirt.

Talia sat back down. Pete didn’t. In fact he took my coat from me and hung it on the stand in the hall just past the doorway.

“Hey, Alex,” he said. “How was Atlantic City?”

“Boring,” I said.

“You look good” Pete said. I heard Talia snort whatever she was drinking back into her nose. Virginia and Jill laughed.

I looked at him sharply. He was clearly genuine. I blushed.

“Thanks, I guess.”

There was an awkward silence. I noticed all the women had gone quiet, observing the interplay between Pete and me.

“You want a beer?” Pete asked.

“Sure,” I answered.

Pete disappeared into the kitchen. I went and sat on a chair, not close to Talia but close enough that we could both watch the screen without being in each others’ eyelines. On the television a young Laurence Olivier was being dark and brooding.

“Interesting look you got going there,” Virginia said. “Very Saks Fifth Avenue.”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“I’m totally sure,” she said, and laughed, but in a friendly way. On screen Laurence Olivier was saying something passionate. Pete came back with beers for the five of us, and we watched the remainder of the movie in silence.

Eventually the movie finished, and then it was time for dinner. We ordered pizza and, when it came, the five of us talked about the same things we always talked about, as though there was nothing odd at all about me sitting there in a skirt and cashmere sweater and high-heeled boots.

I found myself occasionally self-conscious about saying something in a feminine manner. I guess it was because I was becoming more attuned to it with each hour I lived as a woman. To avoid collective discomfort I ignored it, and so did the others. Around 11pm Jill left with Virginia, and Talia, Pete and I went off to our separate rooms. I don’t know who was more exhausted.

The next day, I stayed home and goofed around on the Internet. I had become mildly addicted to a Usenet group, which was made up mostly of overeducated philosophy majors, and everything everyone else posted there was witty and erudite and made me long for my days at college. It was the first time I’d ever been nostalgic for Harvard. In between posts I browsed a few other websites, and between those activities and listening to music and going to the store for some groceries, the day passed without any effort at all on my part.

At the store, of course, even though I was wearing jeans and my Converse sneakers and no bra and a thrift-store jacket over a black sweater, the clerk called me ‘Miss.' I reflected, on the way home from the store, that after only two weeks it had stopped bothering me the way it used to.

Obviously, I was going nuts.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Thursday evening I phoned Arun to agree to hold the money for the team. If I was going to be part of the process, it at least made sense to ensure I had some measure of control over what I was getting involved in.

All the same, it felt like I had made a big decision, and I decided I needed to relax or it was going to bug me all night. So Pete and I went to the bar we liked best, Grendel's Den. It wasn’t too loud, the crowd was mostly a little older than most dive bars near Harvard, and the music they played was tolerable. I was still wearing my black Converse sneakers, jeans and a dark red tee, but it was a cool October night so I’d grabbed a new black jacket I’d bought shopping with Alice a few days earlier. I hadn’t bothered trying to gender myself in any particular direction, so I wasn’t wearing a bra or makeup, but as I’d observed over previous days, flat chested or no, most people assumed I was female, especially since the jacket made it hard to see my chest. As we walked in a guy held the door for me.

Cameron tended bar most nights we were there, and he was rostered on that night. When we walked in he did a quick double-take, but said nothing as we made our way to a table down the back. I walked over to buy the first round.

“New look for you, Alex,” Cameron said. He was a good humored kind of guy. “Is it still Alex?”

I blushed, and nodded. “Two of the usual, please, Cameron.”

“Benefits of a one-size-fits-all name, I guess.” He pulled two beers for us. “I was wondering why you hadn’t been around.” He laughed. “You look great.”

“Uh, thanks, I think,” I said, as I took the beers and brought them back to Pete. As I was walking back I was aware that Cameron was, uh, checking me out.

“What was that about?” Pete said as I sat down.

“What do you think?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He thinks I’ve had a sex change.”

“Oh.”

“Talkative, aren’t we?”

“Sorry. I’ve got a lot on at work right now.” Pete shook his head like he was trying to clear it, then took a drink when that seemed to fail. He looked a bit like a puppy when he shook his head.

“Good or bad?” I said, happy to change the subject.

“Good, I think,” he said. “We’ve made two more sales. Both security-related.”

“Which means you can’t tell me about them, right?”

“No, I can tell you. I can’t tell you the details. But one is to this English company, does something with security cameras. The English are nuts for that stuff, apparently. The other is a business down in DC, does something with robotic drones.”

“Wow. Sounds kind of scary.”

“It’s all good. It’s a lot of work, though. We’ve only ever done research until last year. Now we have all these extra guys, doing actual product work. I’m not used to having a … you know, actual people working for me.“

“Staff.”

“Yeah, staff. Weird, huh?“

“Are you a good boss, or a bad boss?”

“I’m your classic startup boss, I guess,” Pete said. “I’m working it all out as I go along.”

A woman came past our booth and I watched her give Pete the once over like she knew him. If he knew her he gave no flicker of recognition, but I noticed him watch her ass as she continued on down to the back of the bar.

“So how’s your work?” Pete said.

“Work’s okay.“ I said, and reflected that it was strange to describe playing cards as work. “It’s the other stuff that goes with it that’s driving me crazy. I’m thinking I should see a therapist about some of this stuff.” I said.

“You don’t need a therapist, Alex.”

I waved my hands over my body for effect. “You think normal red blooded guys do this?”

“Well …” Pete swigged his beer. “Drink up, and stop being maudlin. Therapy is for whiners and losers and people who can’t work themselves out.”

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “Mr. Well-adjusted.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you’re well-adjusted. Properly. You’re one of the few people in the world I know who can and will call shit, shit when it’s shit, but not because you’re cynical.”

Pete smiled. “I think that was a compliment.”

“In a shitty kind of way.”

“I’ll take ‘em where I can find 'em. Seriously, Alex, you really want to get a therapist? What can a therapist tell you that you can’t work out for yourself?”

“Isn’t it the classic Freudian thing that they don’t figure it out, they lead you to it?”

“Freud was a whackjob.” He finished his beer in a gulp.

“Yes, but that’s beside the point. The point is I don’t have the answers myself. And a year ago, I didn’t even have most of these questions.”

“Yeah.” Pete laughed. “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

I poked my tongue out at him.

“You look cute when you do that,” Pete said without thinking. Then, when what he’d just said had sunk in and I blushed, he avoided looking at me and got up to get some more beer.

As I watched him walk to the bar, I wondered what was going through his mind. A lot had changed in our friendship. This was the third time in two weeks that we’d had an embarrassing moment together. We never used to get embarrassed in front of one another. Ever.

I kind of liked being told I was cute. I also completely hated it. And I was worried about what it meant for the way Pete and I related to one another.

Pete came back with two more beers, and sat down. He pushed one of them over to me with a deep sigh of resignation. “What the hell, Alex. You want a therapist, go get a therapist. God knows you can afford it. Maybe if he’s any good I should go see him as well.”

Finally our conversation moved on to other matters. There was only so much time either of us could spend inside my crowded head. And then Vassily and Yana showed up and it was the four of us, talking and drinking, and drinking and talking. It turned out I liked Vassily a lot, especially when he was drinking: he was hilarious. But he was razor sharp, even while drinking. I could understand why he and Pete got on well enough to start a business together.

Yana was even sharper. We didn't talk a lot that night, but what little I did learn convinced me she was more than the equal of Vassily and Pete in the brains department. Plus, she seemed to have street smarts. Her I definitely liked, and as a couple she and Vassily were indomitable.

By the time we left the bar both Pete and I were mildly toasted. So when, after walking a couple of blocks, I started to get this paranoid feeling that we were being followed, and mentioned it to Pete, he told me I was drunk. Looking around, I couldn’t see anyone that actually was following us, so even though it kept coming back to me as we went down into the T, I figured he was right.

 

~o~O~o~
 

The next morning I slept in, but Talia was still in the kitchen when I got up. “What gives?” I asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she said, indicating the way I looked. I was only wearing a robe, but I could tell she meant the eyebrows and hair. And, you know, everything else.

I had never been really close to Talia – honestly, she was mostly the housemate that Pete and I didn’t have – but she always struck me as a straightforward kind of woman. I had met her years ago, though the record hospital, where everyone had been so snotty to Pete and me, but Talia and I had bonded in a loose casual way, and it was me that brought her into our apartment as a housemate. She was a terrible housekeeper and completely incompetent cook, which made her a bad housemate, but as she was never home it was never a real problem. She was overweight, under-groomed, and I had no idea what Jill saw in her physically, but I could understand the emotional bond they had. She was super smart, and from the little I ever knew of her, she was reliable, trustworthy, and good humored. She was incredibly knowledgeable about computing, in a really hardcore way. While we had both worked as sysadmins, she was a really good sysadmin. She knew her stuff, and loved her work. I had only been doing it for want of anything else to earn money, and had always treated it as a temporary thing, while Talia was completely immersed.

I wondered whether she had been put off, seeing me the other day on my return. Some lesbians have a problem with transsexuals or drag queens. Not that that was what was happening, in my case. I didn’t think I was transsexual. I certainly didn’t want to be a drag queen. I wasn’t sure what I was, but it probably wasn’t either of those things.

“Does it bother you?” I asked, pouring myself a cup of coffee.

“Not at all,” she said, smiling. “In fact I’m almost impressed, Alex. I didn’t think you had this kind of adventure in you.”

“Thanks, I think.” What did 'almost impressed' mean? I waved the coffee beaker at her but she indicated she was okay.

“So what prompted all of this?” She asked.

I sighed. I was getting tired of telling the story. So I said, just to be contrary, “It’s all about gambling.”

“You lost a bet?”

“Not really. I took on a challenge.”

“I’ll say.”

So I told her the story. Almost all the story. I mean, my vow of secrecy to the team was clearly shot to hell, and I was tired of living a secret life. I let her know about the idea of playing cards, but I reassured her that I was in it for the challenge, not for the money. I wasn’t going to tell her about the team, but as soon as I mentioned Arun, and gambling, she let me know that she knew about the team anyway. Of course Talia knew Arun from Harvard as well, but I wondered whether the extended lesbian mafia of Cambridge was in on our entire operation, and whether I should mention it to Alice, or Arun, or even Lucy. Before I could think too much about that she put her hand on my arm, across the table, and said, seriously, “You need to stay away from all that, Alex.”

“What?”

“I would have thought you’d have learned, that time with Arun in the chess club. That guy’s no good. You don’t want to have anything to do with him.”

I was slightly taken aback. I had no love for Arun, but he’d been true to his word since we’d been playing, and he had certainly made me a lot of money recently. I was surprised by Talia’s vehemence.

“Huh. I think he’s, you know, gotten a little better since –”

“– He’s no good, Alex. Take it from me.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She was deadly serious.

“The thing is, it’s my only income these days …”

“You gave up the job at Gene Systems?”

“Sure.”

“You gave up the sysadmin job?”

“That would be the one.” I wasn’t sure whether she was more upset with me for giving up what she perceived to be a perfectly good job, or whether her primary concern was my financial status. I suspected the former.

“I was getting shit for the way I look …” I said.

“Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem. But you look that way because of Arun, right?”

“Well, you know, I kind of volunteered.”

“Kind of.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled at me. “Who would have thought. Alex Jones.” Then she scowled. “Don’t think I’m letting you off the hook. You have to find another job.”

“Where am I going to find one that pays this much?”

“I thought you said it wasn’t about the money?”

“It’s not. It’s just …”

I had no good defense. But I thought she was overdoing the grudge against Arun.

“Find another job. I’ll ask around at work and see whether there’s anything going.”

No way on earth would a job at Harvard pay what I’d become used to. It wouldn’t even make me as much as the old job at Gene Systems Inc. About the only thing that was good about a job at Harvard was that it was almost impossible to get fired, and the health benefits were excellent.

I changed the subject to Jill. Talia and I sat around all morning, talking and gossiping, and we didn’t mention gambling or gender again for the entire rest of the conversation.

 

~o~O~o~
 

A few nights later I went to Susan’s for dinner. It was just the two of us, because Tom was in New York on business. We had a good time, but as had been the case ever since “the eyebrow thing” as she’d come to call it, the conversation turned to being about me. I swear this was her doing: while I’m obviously talking about myself a lot, writing this story down, I don’t really enjoy talking about myself that much on a day to day basis, you know, because I’m not that interesting.

But Susan had a knack for steering a conversation wherever she wanted it to go, and after she’d established that I was confused (when was I not confused?), and that I’d thought about seeing a therapist, she recommended one to me. It surprised me, because Susan had never told me she’d been in therapy.

She shrugged. “I had a bad time in the year before I met Tom. You know that. Dr. Kidman really helped me get out of my head.”

“I am out of my head,” I said, and we both laughed.

“Sometimes,” Susan said, “you’ve got to have someone independent to bounce ideas off. Someone neutral, who doesn’t know you already and doesn’t bring baggage to the conversation.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, before?”

“What?” Susan said.

“That you were seeing a therapist.”

“You weren’t around a lot, Alex. For a while you were studying, then it was the new job, and then most of the time, it seems, you were playing cards.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. But it’s okay, you know? It all worked out. And we’ve seen a lot of one another, these past six months. It’s like old times.”

She handed me Dr. Kidman’s address and phone number on a piece of notepaper from the Museum of Fine Arts. “I think you’ll like him,” she said. “He’s not pushy.”

 

~o~O~o~
 

The streets were relatively quiet as I drove home from Susan’s, and it put me in a contemplative mood, so much so that I was wrapped up in my thoughts and didn’t proceed along when the light at Puttnam Avenue turned green. The car behind me honked, and I waved what I hope was a reassuring wave of apology and thanks as I set off. In the mirror I could see the car, what looked like a black Lincoln Town Car. Or maybe a Crown Victoria – it’s not like they’re easy to tell apart at night from the front.

We were about to cross that threshold from Fall into Winter, and the chill in the air gave the streetlights a clarity they didn’t usually have. Most of the houses were dark now, because it was late. Cambridge looks nothing at all like Nebraska, but there was something about the quality of the light, or the change of the seasons, that took me back to a night in high school, when John Ostermeyer and I had been tooling around downtown Lincoln in his father’s station wagon. I hadn’t thought about it for a long long time, but I remember, that night back perhaps eight or nine years earlier, was the first time I had ever wondered, in a more than abstract sense, what kissing a guy might be like. I was maybe sixteen? I can’t have been younger – John wouldn’t have had his license. I wasn’t thinking, at the time, of kissing John, but I asked him, just out of the blue as we drove along Vine Street, “John, have you every wondered what it would be like to kiss a guy?”.

And him turning to me, and laughing, but in a kind way, and – seeing that I was serious – became serious himself. “Yes,” he said. “I think every guy probably does, at some time in their life. I mean, I know girls who have kissed girls, I guess it’s the same thing, right?”

I thought he was very brave, just to be able to say something like that. How did he know I wasn’t going to turn his admission into a weapon to attack him with in public? The fact that he trusted me, that he would say something like that to me, seemed to me at the time to be the first serious evaluation of me as an adult that anyone had ever made. I felt honored.

He was polite enough not to ask me why I had brought it up. Instead he turned the conversation into a discussion about how good it had been the first time he had kissed a girl. And then about how it was totally different when you kissed a relative. And so we had this abstract conversation, for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, about the aesthetics of kissing, and how context was everything.

Man, we talked about some strange things, he and I. In summer we would sit outside in his yard and talk sometimes, but in winter, so long as it wasn't snowing too heavily, we would just drive around for hours and hours. The streets were almost always quiet in Lincoln, and gas was cheap, and there wasn’t anything much else for two teenage boys to do except talk.

Pete and I had been like that, in our freshman year, before we got enough money and ID together to be able to afford to go to bars and stuff. We’d sit in the WHRB studio, in the middle of the night shift, or in the old un-renovated common room in Matthews Hall, and talk about pretty much anything. I remember one night he and Aaron, our roommate in Matthews, were doing laundry, and we did some impromptu freestyle a cappella in the laundry while our clothes were washing. One of the TA’s had come in and looked at us like we were on drugs. Drugs? We didn’t need drugs.

I was thinking that Alice and I were getting to be friends like that, too. I knew I was lucky to have friends like Pete and Alice.

After I came through Union Square I noticed the Town Car turned onto Stone Avenue with me, and turned with me again when I took a left into our street, but it continued on past me when I pulled over a few doors down from my apartment. An odd paranoia made me wonder whether or not the Lincoln had been following me, but even as my brain processed that thought I rejected it. Why would anyone follow me? And if they did, why would they draw attention to themselves by honking at a green light?

I shook my head to try to clear it. I know, it’s a stupid physical gesture, but sometimes it actually helps, especially if it makes you feel stupid and gets your head out of your ass and into the real world. It was possible the car that drove past wasn’t the car that honked. It wasn’t like I had been watching my rear-view mirror the whole way home. I might have been paranoid, but I wasn’t that paranoid.

 

~o~O~o~
 

As I got out of the car and looked toward our place I noticed a whole bunch of stuff on the sidewalk. It looked like someone had just thrown a mess of stuff from our house, or maybe Beverly's, from the porch onto the sidewalk. I got closer and could see that it was lots of men's clothing, shoes, a few books, a couple of CDs. I guessed the stuff belonged to Beverly's husband Dave. A light snow was beginning to settle on all of it, melting as soon as it hit. I had never met Dave, and now I wondered if I ever would.

 

~o~O~o~
 

After Atlantic City we hit the Mohegan Sun again, without any problems. Of course, I went fully gendered, which is to say in a dress, a blue bias-cut silk thing that clung to the few curves I had and flared out at the hem. On Alice’s advice I had bought some actual proper high-heeled slingbacks to go with it. I was sure, with each suggestion she made, that I was getting in over my head, but I had to admit they were great looking shoes.

The experience was easier than Atlantic City, in part because I was learning, however slowly, how to deal with men. Mostly what I was learning was how much of a young woman’s time is spent repelling the advances of young and not-so-young men. I swear, one guy who was trying to hit on me late on Saturday night was old enough to be my grandfather.

I know it’s naive, but it had never occurred to me, before the eyebrows and haircut thing, the extent of the harassment young women face. On the way back from the Casino in the early hours of Sunday I mentioned this to Alice and she laughed. “Welcome to the sisterhood,” she said, but she meant it in a kindly way.

I noticed that wearing makeup and dresses and going to the effort to provide clues to onlookers of my femaleness resulted in a lot fewer unpleasant stares. There were still times, during the week when we weren’t gambling, that an occasional passer-by would stare unpleasantly at me as though trying to work out whether I was male or female. I could tell what was going through their minds just by following their eye movements. Usually (if the onlooker was male) they’d start with my face and then drop their eyes quickly to my chest. If they noticed that I had no breasts at all their eyes would pop back up to my face, to try to reconcile what they’d just seen, and then their faces betrayed, by turns, uncertainty, anger, even fear. One afternoon when I was down in Newbury Street buying some CDs a young female sales clerk actually asked her colleague, in front of me, whether she thought I was a guy or girl. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stood there turning bright red. Fortunately the other sales clerk at the counter admonished her and completed the transaction, without a word from me.

When I put on a bra under my t-shirt, even with minimal padding, I got no such looks or comments. Everyone just assumed I was a woman.

As a consequence, I started wearing a lightly-padded bra almost every time I left the house. Alice got me some silicon things she called chicken filets, which were more natural looking than cotton wool, although they felt a bit slimy against my skin if I got too warm. And because of Arun’s assertions that I could only play looking either entirely female or entirely male, I maintained the shape of my eyebrows. My hair started to grow out, but kept its layered shape. At Alice’s urging, I got it trimmed about twelve weeks later, so I looked neat enough to be someone with money. To simplify matters I went back to Stella. She didn’t seem to think there was anything remarkable that someone asking for their hair to all be hacked off a short time ago was now talking about growing it out. I guess her business was built on people constantly changing their minds.

 

~o~O~o~
 

We were all a little bit surprised that our lawyer’s predictions in Baton Rouge hadn’t come true, and there was probably a sense of unease for all of us each time as we walked into a Casino. Would this be the one where Whitwell had posted our photographs? Over the next few weeks we hit the few remaining East Coast casinos. We couldn’t make much from any of them without drawing suspicion, so at some point we all knew it would come down to a trip back to Vegas.

I’m sure I wanted to go to Vegas more than anyone, if only to figure out whether or not the game was over completely. If it was, then I wouldn’t need to keep up the charade any more. I could let my eyebrows grow out, give myself a buzzcut, and go back to my old life. God, I might even have to get an actual job. That would please Talia.

As I was now travelling and playing as a woman I was spending a lot more time with Lucy, Emily and of course with Alice. It just kind of naturally happened that in our downtime, between playing, or when we were getting ready to play, that the guys tended to bond with the guys, and I fell into the girl’s camp with Lucy and Emily and Alice. We did each other’s hair and makeup, helped each other choose clothes, planned where to eat, and bitched about the way the guys seemed to do nothing to organize anything. Alice took care of all our travel bookings, and Lucy, as our head of security, took charge of all the timing and logistics around arrival and departure from the casinos. I, as treasurer, took care of the books, and distributing the money.

Every weekend after play I sat with Arun and we deducted the principle, plus forty percent, which he said was our cost of operations and our buffer against losses. The rest of the money got distributed between each member of the team. I liked that aspect of being treasurer; it’s hard to be unpopular when you're frequently dispensing large bundles of Ben Franklins.

I opened a couple of safety deposit boxes to put some of the cash in. It seemed safer than keeping it around the apartment, especially since a good deal of it was officially our stake rather than my own money. Occasionally Arun would take the buffer money and put it somewhere else. I just noted the transactions and didn't ask too many questions. We were making so much money, it didn't even seem worth it to question where that forty percent was going.

I found I was becoming even closer to Alice, without a sexual component to our relationship in any way. She’d seen me in some of my worst moments, and hadn’t judged me. And after a rocky start, I found I was really beginning to like Lucy a lot more. She could be very snarky and bitchy at times, but she’d stopped taking that out on me, and I had realized that her cynicism and snark was mostly a cover for a pretty deep-seated inferiority complex. I joked one night with her that the main reason she liked helping me choose clothes was because she looked better in everything we tried on together, and while it was a joke, it wasn’t entirely untrue. In a quiet moment on a redeye back from McCarran one night, when we were seated together in first class, she said to me: “Alex, you know, you’re becoming almost like the little sister I never had.”

I looked at her suspiciously, to see whether there was a putdown in the comment, but she smiled. “I’m not winding you up. I like it.”

“I like it too,” I said to her. And the truth was, I did. I was still infatuated with Alice, but my relationship with Lucy was different. I felt like I had a real friend in Lucy. Through Pete I was seeing more of Vassily and Yana, too, and I was beginning to discover, with Yana, that it was somehow easier to just hang out with women, than it was with men. When I had been a guy, the only guy I could ever connect with had been Pete. As a girl, I could talk easily with several women, and especially with Lucy and Yana.

It made me wonder what there was about Pete. There was nothing feminine about him, but I had always been able to talk easily with him, too.

The playing itself had become routine, but it wasn’t without the occasional setback. As I mentioned earlier, counting requires concentration and commitment. A single missed count alters the odds. So far, I had a flawless record – I’d never, ever, called anyone in to a bad hand. But at smurf level I was the only one who had that record. Almost everyone else, Alice included, had had a bad night at some point. Because the Wizards bet big on every hand, they had to have complete trust in the count at all times. When the smurfs screwed up, it was costly for everyone. Playing at the small casinos, where we weren’t making as much anyway, meant we didn’t lose as much as we might have in Vegas with each screw up, but there were still several nights where we came home having wasted a weekend.

On the plus side, the fact that we had several bad weekends in three months meant we didn’t build up a risk profile at the casinos. The wizards, in particular, must have seemed like chumps.

Arun came through with some of the money from the forty percent he'd been banking, and we restocked our principle.

The fact that I was performing so well as a counter presented Arun with a problem. On the one hand I was having more problems with men at the tables. They always seemed to want to engage me in conversation, and that sometimes made it hard to concentrate. Following Alice’s lead, I bought an engagement and wedding ring combination for myself, with a beautiful diamond and ruby setting, in the hope this would deter them, but it didn’t have a great deal of impact. More than that problem, though, was that my appearance was beginning to attract attention again. And as Arun said, the one thing a smurf couldn’t be was distinctive.

I didn’t find out about this problem directly, but by overhearing Arun and Alice talking one night as I arrived for a team meeting. They were early, the only ones in the room, and when I walked in they hadn’t heard me enter. I was wearing my sneakers, and I guess I was light enough on the stairs that I didn’t make any noise as I came up the stairs. I could hear them talking, and I heard my name, so I stopped about eight stairs down, my head just below the top riser.

“I know you’ve been encouraging Alex, but you’re doing too good a job.” Arun was talking. “He — she’s looking too attractive now. It’s attracting attention. Can you do something to, you know, make her look uglier or something?”

“Alex chooses her own clothes,” Alice said. “I can’t do anything about the way she looks.”

“Yes you can.”

“No, I can’t. Look, Alex has been teaching me things about makeup and all that, not the other way around. You have no idea of the monster you’ve unleashed there. She’s taken to it like she was born to it.”

It’s always strange to hear other people talking about you in the third person. Especially if you’re a guy and they’re saying “she”.

“You’ll have to say something to her if you want her to change,” Alice said, firmly.

I smiled. Alice always stuck up for me. “Perhaps you should just promote her,“ she said. “Why not make her a wizard? You know we could use a woman in that role. And you have to admit, she’s got the acting chops for it. She can do anything.”

Behind me I heard Dan’s voice, and felt the weight of his footfalls. He’d just stepped on to the lowermost stair tread, with Emily behind him. I continued to climb, pretending I hadn’t been stopped and eavesdropping, and said hi to Alice and Arun as I entered the room at the top of the stairs.

At the meeting Arun decided we would risk Vegas again. All of us felt nervous about it, but we’d become too noticeable in Atlantic City and the other Eastern States casinos, and none of us were that eager to go south again. Arun gave us the standard briefing, but added a little extra at the end about our escape plans, and reinforced, once again, that we were under no circumstances, ever, to agree to go to a back room, or upstairs, or anywhere ‘for a chat’. None of us really needed the reminder. We all remembered what had happened to Henry, and we recognized the need to be extra careful.

At the end of the meeting, almost as though he had been prompted by Alice, Arun made one more announcement. I was being reassigned as a wizard, which meant one of the elves would need to volunteer to step down to smurf in order to keep our requisite number of counters. Lucy volunteered to smurf if someone else would run lookout, for which I was grateful. She was disciplined and resourceful and she always kept a cool head. Bob Kwak volunteered for lookout duty in her place, with Ziyen.

Arun explained to me that as a wizard I would have to dress a little more conspicuously and act more like a spoiled Japanese princess whose Daddy had given her the Black Amex card for the weekend. I wasn’t looking forward to looking more conspicuous, but I was quite excited by the opportunity to do some wild and crazy stuff, instead of the humdrum counting that usually characterized my visits to each Casino.

I carried a lot of the cash for the weekend, in my purse ($20,000), in the lining of my coat ($50,000), in my carry-on ($20,000) and in some pads I had sewn to give me a few more curves in my butt and hips. Stuffing the pads with cash was time-consuming, because it involved folding the money – hundreds – carefully into different shapes, and then wrapping them in a layer of spandex. Each pad held about $3-5,000, depending on whether I put it on my butt or my hips. It was almost like an exercise in origami. If I wore anything too revealing the pads would look very fake, but under jeans, and especially with a coat or long sweater, they just enhanced my femininity. If anything it looked like I had something of a bubble butt. I might even have enjoyed the experience of looking curvier if it hadn’t been for the fact that pads made of money were just plain damned uncomfortable.

Alice thought the pads were hilarious. She never carried more than $20,000 on her, in her purse or coat or backpack, at any one time, and refused to carry more, so it wasn’t an issue for her, but she thought the idea of me wearing them was entertaining even though the whole scheme made me look slightly pear-shaped instead of my usual svelte self. I didn’t ask Dan or any of the other guys where they carried their cash. That fell under the heading of too much information.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Because I had a lot of time on my hands I started seeing a lot more of Beverly, too. It started when she came upstairs one morning because a fuse had blown. I was the only person home, and I really didn't know anything about fuses, but I knew where Talia kept her toolkit. Beverly and I went down to her fusebox and tried to work out how to fix it. I knew enough about electricity to know that we should replace like for like. Anyway, it turned out that the kind of fuses we had in our building weren't the kind that could be fixed with a little bit of wire — at least not in a way that I felt safe about — and since I didn't want to burn the house down I took Beverly and Samantha with me over to Home Depot. It took forever to fit Samantha's child seat to the harness points in the back of my Jetta, and I began to wish our house was modern enough to have proper breakers. But eventually I got it in, and we set off, with Samantha making pleasant burbling noises in the back seat.

The guy we spoke to over at Home Depot could not have been more condescending if he had made a career out of it. Perhaps he had.

The way Beverly turned him around was fascinating. She smiled and nodded and soon he had found what we needed and put the ribbon of copper into the holder part of the fuse for us. We walked out to the car and Beverly grinned at me. “Men have their uses after all“ she said.

“I hate hardware store guys.“ I said. “ I never noticed how much I hate them, until just then.“

“Hardware stores suck sufficient moose wang that there's not an unsatisfied moose within a hundred miles of any of them,“ Beverly said. “But they are a necessary evil. Thanks for the ride.“

Beverly was good at saying things like that. I hoped I had an occasion to use the moose wang saying at some time in the future.

After that incident Beverly started coming upstairs with cookies or cake each morning whenever I was in town, which was most weekdays. Sometimes I'd go downstairs to her place, although I tried not to do it too often because her place was frankly pretty depressing. It was clean enough, she kept it very well, but she just didn't have any money, and it was very spartan. Because it was the downstairs apartment it was also very dark. By contrast our place upstairs was in various stages of decomposition at all times, but it was filled with stuff. Beverly didn't even have cable.

It didn't seem like her husband was ever coming back. They had been married for just over 2 years, she said, and looking back she couldn't understand why she'd ever done it. From the stories she told me it seemed like she was well rid of him: he had only hit her once, but as we both agreed, once was once too often.

I had started to like Beverly, and I was beginning to value her friendship a lot, but I had never opened up to her at all about my real identity. I had grown quite fond of Samantha, and I had the feeling that if I was too forthright about my current situation vis a vis gender that it might mark the end of what seemed like a good friendship. Besides, I felt good that I could help Beverly out from time to time, driving her to the market, and bringing home the occasional small stuffed toy or some clothes for Samantha.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Playing again in Vegas was an anti-climax. It turned out I was a very good wizard. “This Japanese princess thing comes naturally to you,” Lucy said, laughing. She and I had hit a couple of the Vegas stores before we started playing, and I was decked out in a very short red silk sheath, with some staggeringly high black sandals. I found, to my considerable surprise, that it wasn’t actually that difficult to walk in them. In the store I had tried on a pair of wedges, and those were lethal. I knew I would have broken my ankle if I’d walked more than a dozen steps in those. You’d think wedges would be easy, because of more stability on the ground, but if they start to tip you can say goodbye to your ankle. The sandals were fine, even though they did have a 3 inch heel. I could feel my now-unpadded butt sticking further out behind me, as it always did with heels, but I didn’t feel in danger of falling over.

My hair had gotten longer again, and Lucy helped me put it up, with a lacquer hairclip she’d found that looked very Japanese. I had no idea where she’d found it, but it was beautiful. It had elaborate images of cranes in water inlaid in the lacquer. I almost hated to wear it at the back of my head, because I couldn’t see it.

As for acting the part, it didn’t seem hard. I pretended I didn’t speak much English, which limited my conversation, and I made sure to cover my mouth whenever I giggled, which was often. I flirted a little with the dealer at the second table I went to, a charming old guy who looked a little like Grandpa Rousselot, my mom’s father. The other dealers were women, and I was much colder toward them.

We all played well, and didn’t wrap the evening until around 5am. We played again the next night, limiting ourselves to Ceasars and New York New York, which was a place I hated but which we hadn’t taken much from in the past. It was Sunday night, and slow, so we finished at 3am so as not to draw too much attention to the size of our take.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Lucy, Alice and I decided to get the Monday afternoon flight back to Boston instead of the early one the rest of the team took. It gave us a chance to sleep in, and then we all went and got pedicures and hung around the pool at the Luxor, where we had been staying. At the pool I was more covered up than Lucy and Alice, with a T-shirt over my bikini top over my fake boobs, and my lower bits taped securely back, but any anxiety I had about being clad in bikini bottoms soon receded after lying in the sun for twenty minutes. It seemed like a particularly decadent thing to be doing with a Monday.

On the flight back I slept most of the way. I was starting to get used to two things: to the world seeing me as a woman, and to not having to work hard for a living.

I knew at least one of those things wasn't that good for me, but I wasn't ready to stop either.

 

~o~O~o~

 

A few nights after getting back from Vegas I got restless with laying around the house. For want of anything actually exciting to do I grabbed Pete to go roam around the Alewife T station with me. It felt like the kind of thing we used to do when we were both students, when we had free time, and did things without purpose. As undergrads, we had often just wandered around parts of Cambridge. We sat on the Common, talking. We played Nintendo for hours. Took random photographs of street scenes, graffiti, traffic lights, bottles or whatever with Pete's little Kodak digital camera.

I felt like I could capture a little of the pleasure of our undergrad years by having a similarly aimless evening. “Our lives“ I said pretentiously, “Are getting too directed. Waste some time with me.“

We drove over to Alewife, even though it was only about a half mile from our apartment, because getting across the junction of Concord Turnpike with Alewife-Brook Parkway as a pedestrian is atrocious and besides it was freezing cold. An old college friend of ours once said that Alewife is like a life-sized video game, and it really is the best description for the place – there’s the subway, the bus terminal, the gigantic parking station, the concourse, an outdoor bridge underpass, a deserted children’s playground, all massive concrete everywhere. It’s not very user friendly, but there’s something about the idea of a futuristic structure that turned into a dystopia that appealed to me, and Pete was happy to come along.

We checked out the playground and then the bus station, and took a bunch of photographs that seemed oddly arty in their casualness and poor focus, and then went inside the actual T station so that Pete could get a burger. Then we climbed upstairs to the roof of the parking structure, near Pete’s car, and he ate the burger and fries off the concrete wall. It was freezing cold, and every time he took a bite out of the burger he had to put it down again quickly or else the corner of the ketchup-covered wrapper would fly up in the breeze.

In the distance you could watch Route 2 retreating over a hill like an electric river. I pointed at the lights of downtown Boston, in the opposite direction just to the left of the giant housing projects, and observed that we could keep an eye on things from here, in case it blew up. A few years later, when the Twin Towers came down, Pete reminded me of that night. He would remind me of our discussion one other time, too, but I didn’t know about any of that then.

I took a photograph of him on top of the almost empty parking garage. Digital cameras weren't very good back then and it didn't turn out too well, but I still have a copy of that photo and the others from that night.

We retreated to Pete’s car and sat on the hood. He lit up a joint. The carpark was pretty empty, so I wasn’t worried. We sat in silence for a while, just watching the lights, even though it was freezing. We had another joint. Then, out of nowhere, Pete said suddenly, “Alex, how do we fall into the things we fall into?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Love, life, everything.”

“Don’t start on me, Pete.”

He looked sidelong at me, and smiled.

“Do we fall …” he said, after a few more tokes … “No. Wait. Is the process of becoming … something you can strive for, or something that happens?”  

He handed the joint to me. “Or is it jumping into something and then something else happening in spite of the jumping? What is that, then?   Falling-jumping?”

“Are you talking about falling in love?” I asked, drawing deep. I didn’t smoke, didn’t really know how to, so I was never good with weed. I’d only ever tried it a couple of times before, in high school and college, but even though I wasn’t good at drawing it in, I could tell I was getting stoned. I coughed, and gave the joint back to Pete.

I was confused. We sometimes had deep philosophical discussions, especially when Pete got stoned, but usually they revolved around a particular issue I could understand. Was he talking about falling in love with someone?

“Is the active sense of falling, jumping?“ he concluded.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,“ I said. “Were you stoned before you lit this joint?“

It was beginning to snow. Four days earlier I had been sitting around a pool in Vegas. It all seemed surreal.

“Alex …” he said, but he stopped.

“What are we talking about, Pete?” I was freezing, and I wanted to get in the car, but I was puzzled. “Jumping in love? Seriously? Was that actual Heidegger you were trying to quote? While we’re stoned?”

“Never mind,” he said. “Sorry, Alex.” He jumped off the hood of the car and stuffed the last of his burger rubbish into a plastic bag. I looked at him as he came back from trying to find a trash can, trying to work out what was on his mind. I usually knew what Pete was thinking, but sometime in the last few months I’d lost that knack. I didn’t think he was actually thinking of stuff he'd learned in Philosophy 203. There was something else going on.

It started to snow more heavily, and we both had a coating of snow on us before we even got in the car. Sometimes snow comes on you gradually, and sometimes it just dumps on you, and that night it reminded me of senior year in Lincoln, when John Ostermeyer and I got stuck one night, up near the university, when my mom’s car wouldn’t start. We had been freezing, both wishing we had cellphones even though nobody we knew had cellphones, and then the sky opened up and just dumped like an inch of snow in about ten minutes, so fast that it didn’t get a chance to melt off the car. We were alone up on the campus, in the middle of the parking lot that was turning white, just like the Alewife parking lot was turning white in front of Pete and me, and that night in Lincoln my mom’s shitty Neon refused to do anything.

I gave a little cheer when Pete’s hand-me-down Buick started first time, and he looked at me like I was crazy.

Maybe I was.

 

~o~O~o~
 

After three months waiting I finally got my first appointment with Dr. Kidman. The guy sure was popular. His office was in one of those bland buildings on Mass Avenue that usually indicated the doctors had some affiliation with the hospital, and the waiting room was packed. I picked up a National Geographic from the table, and discovered it had a feature on Greece. I looked at the date on the cover – 1972. The magazine was almost as old as I was.

It was a good thing the magazine was a museum piece, because it was sufficiently interesting to keep me engaged for the hour I was kept waiting. I had no idea Greece was so undeveloped in the 1970s. It looked like Cuba does now, frozen fifty years behind the times.

When the receptionist finally called me and I entered his office, Dr. Kidman, like everyone confronted by the discrepancy between my appearance and my full name, did a double take before offering me a seat. It actually unsettled me, that time, probably partly because I was nervous about seeing him, and partly because I’d gotten used to people just assuming I was female. Nobody had taken that second look for months, or if they had it had been because they were guys with one-track minds.

Dr. Kidman had a professorial look about him to go with the nameplate on the door. He was younger than I expected, but he somehow contrived to make himself appear hopelessly out of touch. He dressed older than he looked. He was bearded, with expensive rimless glasses and one of those awkward tweedy jackets doctors seem to go in for over a plain blue shirt and black pants. If I’d had to guess I would have taken a punt that 90% of what he was wearing came from Brooks Brothers.

I sat down in the comfortable chair Dr. Kidman indicated, and he offered me some Evian, which I accepted. “So, um …” he began. He didn’t seem at all like the genius Susan had assured me he was.

“Alex,” I finished for him.

“So, Alex, I uh, I understand you’re Susan’s, ah …” he was searching for a word here. “Sibling?”

“Her brother,” I said. It was alarming how discomfited he seemed to be. I wasn’t sure he was the right therapist for me.

“Well why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself.”

“Well, some of it you know, you know. Susan and I grew up in the same place, same parents, all that stuff.”

“Tell it to me anyway,” Dr. Kidman said. “Something tells me your perspective will be different.” He smiled, and I realized he was making a joke. Maybe I could like this guy after all.

 

~o~O~o~