As a little boy, Johnnie loved sitting in his mother’s grand bathroom with his sister watching her get ready to go out with their father. Sitting on the cold marble floor, his back pressed against the corner of her vanity, he felt that her cloud of perfume protected him from everything dark and dangerous in the world. As she smiled down at him and his sister, he knew that her face was the most beautiful one in the world. The three of them laughed as she draped herself in feminine scents and fabrics, then turned to do the same to his sister. He could sit still for hours as he watched the two of them parade around in heels and pearls, his sister’s feet barely big enough to keep the shoes in place as she shuffled from corner to corner, he felt his heart pump pure love through his body.
As Johnnie and his sister grew, the ritual became less frequent. His sister lost interest in their mother’s routine, preferring to go out with friends. The loud music thumping out from under her closed door narrated the fast pace with which she was insisting on becoming her own adult; her own woman. Johnnie still wanted to sit in awe, looking up at his mother who was still beautiful, still the epitome of femininity. But now that he was older, she closed the door to him, no longer comfortable walking around in front of a 12-year-old boy in her slip. When he asked her to watch, to feel the weight of the pearls around his neck, the shadow that passed in front of her eyes confused him. He wondered why the passing of a few years had changed an act that once brought closeness between a mother and son into something she saw as wrong and unsettling.
Watching his sister and her friends’ parade around at a sleep over, he felt a longing that confused him. His sister too now pulled away from him, closing doors that had previously remained just cracked enough for him to slip inside whenever he desired. The two remained close, but when her friends entered the house Johnnie was expected to disappear. He was expected to go be the young boy that his father bought baseball gloves and slingshots for. With each gift, his father would tell a story of the trouble he had gotten into as a young man, and Johnnie wondered how he could make himself become the man his father expected to see in him. He watched through the slightly open door as his sister and her friends danced and jumped around the room, watching their bodies starting to develop into young women, he held his own chest. He felt the absence of the soft curves that came so naturally to the young women around him. Seeing him lurking outside, his sister’s friend pulled him into the warmth and light of the room. The music pounded in his ears and the girls giggled, dressing him in their silky pajamas and making him join them. For any boy it would be punishment, mortifying to be brought in and surrounded by girls. But Johnnie, and the flash in her eyes told him that his sister noticed as well, was struck by how unembarrassed he was. Not since to sweet fragrance of his mother’s perfume all those years ago, had Johnnie felt so secure and serene.
The next day, Johnnie walked to the park with his friend. They threw around a ball and played in the mud. Johnnie listened as his friend explained what he had heard about sex as he eavesdropped on his brother. The story was meant to entice Johnnie, to make him notice the girls in school the way his friends were beginning to. But as his friend talked about sex, an act that seemed incredibly adult, Johnnie had never felt younger. The more his friend talked, the smaller and younger Johnnie felt. He had never felt the need to experiment with himself as his friend had, in fact he rarely touched himself at all. He thought of the part of his body that he was told was the difference between him and his sister. He felt that it was barely part of him. He thought it was ugly, something separate from himself. Then he thought of his sister and her friends again. Even in their awkwardness at moving around in bodies that seemed to move themselves as they grew, they had a comfort in their bodies that Johnnie had never felt.
He remembered walking in on his sister in the bathroom one night. The shape of her body was only just beginning to resemble her mother’s, but as she stared at herself in the mirror, Johnnie thought the expression on her face looked like their mother was peering out from it. The confidence in knowing that it was her body, the confidence in knowing that she belonged to it and it to her, it was an expression that Johnnie knew he had never made. As she grew into her body, Johnnie felt that he was growing apart from his own. He shared his space with it, but could not recognize it at night when he lay in bed with his eyes closed.
In his dreams, he always found himself back in his mother’s bathroom. But the position changed. Rather than pressing against the cold tile, feeling it against his back as it contrasted with the warmth emanating from her on his front, he was above. No, not above but within. He was now the one creating the soft cloud feminine haze, draped in fabrics and cold precious gems. He ran his hands down his side and felt the skin give way to soft curves rather than boney angles. His hands trailed across the counter tops in soft long patterns. The dream haunted him, not because he felt embarrassed by the feminine image of himself drawn up in his subconscious; but because he didn’t.
As the years continued to pass and Johnnie’s body continued to grow and develop, he began to look more like his father. However, on the inside he still clung to the comfort and of his mother. Each new muscle or extra inch of height felt like a step backwards and away from what he truly wanted to see when he looked in the mirror, rather than a step closer to the manhood he was expected to crave. Seeing the grins of triumph on his friends’ faces as they studied their own bodies only made him feel more alone and insecure.
His father often reminded him that it was time to “grow up” and “be a man,” but Johnnie couldn’t find the words to express the deep longing within him. So isolated, he felt that he might as well be one of the princesses from his favorite book of fairy tales. His fingers danced over the images of the pale young women in delicate gowns, their beautiful hair flowing in waves down their back as they paused in time forever, having mastered the perfect expression of beautiful desperation. Always and forever waiting for the young prince to rescue them from their solitude and reintroduce them to the world as a bride. They were destined for their happily-ever-after, Johnnie could rarely bring himself to turn the page and look at the new painting of the happier brighter princess. A part of him knew that he was meant to identify with the prince, handsome and strong ready and willing to fight for his young bride. Instead, Johnnie spent hours with the sad young women who were trapped just like him. He looked down at his body; his own tower keeping him from feeling the joy expressed on those faces hovering just above the elegantly scripted words “The End.”
After high school, Johnnie left to attend college in New York City. He was walking home from class one day when he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a beautiful Amazon of a woman. He was caught up in staring at her height and glamour, blue-black hair tumbling down her back like the Wonder Woman comics that he had spent hours reading as a boy. However, it was the Adam’s apple floating above the deep plunge of her top that made him stop walking altogether. The flash of recognition almost made him cry out, instead he instantly allowed his feet to fall into step behind hers.
She arrived the back entrance of a club, unaware that she had a shaky shadow entering right behind her as she headed to her mirror. As he let the door close behind him, Johnnie was instantly assaulted by the row of lit mirrors and a smell so familiar he could practically feel the corner of his mother’s vanity digging into his back. He finally allowed the tears to fill his eyes as he approached the woman who had unknowingly led him to the answer to the question he had been asking for over a decade.
She looked at him and felt as if she were looking at a mirror into her past when she had been a sad little boy full of questions that no one had the answer to. She took him under her wing; it felt to him like being wrapped up in gold, glitter, and warmth. Stepping out as a woman, Johnnie finally felt the pulls of puberty. It was as if it had just accidentally skipped past him the first time around.
As a boy, Johnnies’ friends had teasingly called him asexual, joking that he would never grow up. But a gossamer gown and a wig created an image very much like those princesses so elegantly displayed in picture books. Finally, Johnnie stepped out of the tower that he had carried around with him his entire life. Turning the last page in his story, he became the woman he had dreamed about becoming. Johnnie knew that it had never been her destiny to follow her father’s footsteps and be a man, but to finally welcome adulthood as a woman.
