Mom gave me a hard look. “For God’s sake, Kissy, keep your pants on.”

Part 4 - Momland

Chapter 20 - Yawning

Mom had some trouble believing me that this had all started just that morning, that I had never done any dressing up as a girl or dating boys or anything along that line until Marjorie dragged me along with her.

“Honest, Mom,” I said, “I never thought at all about—about changing gender. I knew I had some problems with puberty, but I had no idea there were people out there who thought I was a girl. It caught me by surprise.”

“Well, it surprised me, too,” she admitted, “but it didn’t shock me. I’ve known for some time things weren’t—typical—for you. We probably should have had you to a doctor long ago, but you seemed so healthy.”

Mom decided such neglect had been a mistake—at least yearly exams for both of us from now on. Except for a couple of dental visits and eye exams, I hadn’t seen a doctor since I got my last childhood vaccination five years before. It especially embarrassed her, being a medical professional herself.

We talked about the clothes and things Marjorie had bought me and the money she gave me. Mom debated with herself whether she should make me give it all back but finally decided I could keep it. “You’re probably going to need more clothes,” she pointed out as a clincher.

We talked late into the night. Mom told me she would be calling in to get the day off so she could go with me to my doctor’s appointment. She also gave me the bad news.

“You’re on restriction,” she said. “You showed some really poor judgment, and you didn’t communicate. But to get to the bottom of what’s happening with you, you’ll need some room to experiment. So, no going on dates I don’t know about ahead of time. No accepting money or large gifts from people you don’t know well.”

She gave me a hard look. “And for God’s sake, girl or boy, keep your pants on.”

I had to cover my mouth not to giggle.

“So,” she went on, “I want to know where you are and who with at all times. Call or text me every two hours throughout the day if I’m not with you. Even if you’re just home alone. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am.” We both yawned.

“All right,” she said, glancing at the clock. “It’s after—2? 3?—but one more thing. There’s no one in this house named Davis. So, if you want to keep Kissy as a first name for your girl ID, okay, but I want you to use Parker as a last name. If we ever end up legally changing your name and birth certificate, that’s who you’ll be.”

She paused, thinking. “Kissy is a cute name, but you do realize how suggestive it is?”

I blinked. “You think I haven’t been called Kissy before? At least this way, I’ll own the name.”

“It’s not a common nickname or short for anything I can think of. But there’s not really a good girl equivalent of David is there?” Mom mused. “Dawn, maybe. We had a girl’s first name picked out for you before you were born.”

“What—what was it?”

“Eleanor,” she said. “We both thought it was pretty.”

I grinned at her. “That’s what I put down for a middle name at the doctor’s office.”

Mom grinned back. “Well, it was your grandmother’s name. All right then.” And we both yawned again.

It wasn’t long before we decided to go to bed.

“Be sure to wash all your makeup off, honey,” Mom told me as I followed her down the hall. “Do you have any makeup remover?”

“Just—uh—just soap,” I said.

She stopped and looked back at me. “We need to have a ta—alk,” but a yawn interrupted her. “Euhh. I’ll give you some pads tonight, but you’ll need your own stuff.”

“Pads?”

“Makeup remover pads.” Yawn.

I stopped at the door to my bathroom. “Uh—Mom?”

She turned. “What?”

“Can you help me get this corset off?” I asked.

She laughed softly. “That would be one way to punish you for not calling. Make you sleep in your corset.” She shook her head and motioned to my bedroom. “Go in. I’ll show you some tricks for getting in and out of the damn things.”

They were good tricks. One of them involved baby powder for putting one on and keeping a crochet hook in your purse for retrieving awkwardly placed laces and dealing with itches. She had to tell me, then show me what a crochet hook was. “A knitting needle will work for itches, but it doesn’t have the angled tooth at the end for hooking laces,” she explained.

After we got it off, and my bra, and the sticky little slabs of silicone that filled it out, there I was in front of my mother, naked from the waist up and feeling pretty itchy. “You’ve got marks where your bra and corset don’t fit as well as they should. And you need to wear an undercorset if you’re going to wear one all day.”

“Uh—,” I mumbled. Unsure of what to do with the chicken fillets, I stuck them together and wrapped them in the bra and stowed them in my middle dresser drawer.

“And you’ve got the cutest nipples, dear,” she laughed. “But almost no flesh behind them. We’ll see what the doctor says. Don’t wear your corset tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I agreed quickly. I wanted her to leave the room so I could deal with the itching.

Huge yawns caught both of us at the same time, and with a muttered, “G’nite, dear,” and a peck on the cheek, Mom trundled off to her bed.

When she was gone, I discovered I could not scratch my itches. I had to settle for rubbing them—gently. Maybe it was the nails or the waxing done on my hide, but scratching hurt.

I got undressed the rest of the way then staggered back to the bathroom to put bra, padded panties and corset in the sink under cold water. Mom had recommended it strongly, and I surely did not want to deal with whatever might be in those panties after it had dried overnight.

I didn’t take out my contacts; I had the kind you can wear for days or even a month.

I didn’t have anything on at all as I got back to my bedroom, but that didn’t feel right. I debated whether I should put on a pair of boy underwear from my dresser or dig out a pair of the panties Marjorie had bought for me. Hey, I thought as my blush lit up the room, I can get embarrassed even when I’m alone.

But I fell asleep somehow and didn’t know what decision I had made until the morning.

*

Dreams are weird. They have skewed logic and are made up of fragments of memories, suggestions, rationalizations and fantasies.

In a landscape I recognized as the old neighborhood on Massachusetts, I raced along on my trike. Rory, or an eight-year-old avatar of him, pursued me on foot, “Gonna get you, Davey,” he called, laughing. “I’m gonna tickle you silly.”

I was terrified, or playing at being terrified, and though I could have run faster on foot, I pedaled that tricycle as hard as I could, squealing and giggling.

Another scene involved a school playground, a couple of bigger kids were enjoying holding first graders down and making them eat dirt. I was screaming, “Rory, Rory, help!”

But it was Armand who showed up. He didn’t hit anyone. He just ran into them and knocked them down. He was a big kid who never looked like he paid attention to anything but got such good grades they had skipped him ahead a year. And he was still bigger than his classmates.

Sometimes he came over and sat near me when I was eating lunch. He didn’t usually say much, just sat there eating peanut butter sandwiches without jelly, four of them—watching me without staring or saying anything. One kid told me that in kindergarten, the teachers had spent a month teaching him how to look at something without staring.

I knew I was dreaming, but I wondered, how much of this was memory?

Armand was running into bullies again. “Don’t you hurt Davey,” he growled. “She’s my friend.”

Did I really remember that?

And then Cindy and I were playing. Cindy was my regular babysitter, the high school student sister of Rory. We were at my house. It was Saturday afternoon. Cindy was letting me help her paint her nails, and we were both giggling. Then I asked her to paint mine. She did, and I thought it looked beautiful.

Mom got home. “C’mon, Butterscotch,” Cindy said. “Let’s show your mom that you can be pretty too.” Mom was amused.

Dad got home much later, and he and Mom had a fight about someone named Deborah. “You kissed her,” Mom shouted at him.

Dad saw my nails and told Mom to clean them off. “You’re going to confuse him. He’ll think he’s a sissy.” I cried when Mom cleaned the polish off with a terrible smelling yellow oil. “And don’t hire that Beeson girl as babysitter again. She must be a pervert.”

Then they were fighting about Deborah again.

Later, I sat with Mom, and I asked her, “If I’d been born a girl, what would you have named me?”

“Eleanor,” she said. “It was your grandmother’s name.” Then she kissed me on the forehead.

But Rory and I were sitting in the swing on his patio. “This stinks,” he said. “Your dad is leaving, but your mom can’t stay in the house? Grown-ups don’t make sense.”

He was twice my size, taller even than Armand and almost as tall as my mom. I’d been crying, and he tried to cheer me up. “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll tickle you silly,” he threatened. But even being tickled didn’t help. I just kept crying.

School again. The bullies were chasing me, yelling, “Kissy! Kissy! A boy named Kissy! Give us a kiss, Kissy!” They hadn’t hurt me, but I was scared.

Rory came from around the fence between the middle and elementary schools. “Leave him alone!” he shouted. “Don’t call him names!”

“But that is her name,” they shouted. “Kissy, the boy who wants to be a girl.”

*

I woke up with Mom tapping on the door. “We’ve got plenty of time, honey,” she said when I answered her. “But if we get dressed and out of the house by nine, we can stop for waffles at Huckleberry’s Cafe.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I said it again, trying to sound less like Kissy and more like Davey. Dave. David. I pulled back the sheet and found that I’d been sleeping in panties, apparently with everything tucked up and the front of my pink underwear completely flat.