Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (2 page)

In my earlier nonfiction I have used pseudonyms for everyone I know, with the exception of public figures. As I set about writing this book, I asked my boys how they would feel about my telling the story of our family. My son Zach turned to me and said, “Look, that’s fine. But this time, can you make me one promise?
Use our real names for a change
.”

This wish, among so many others, has been granted.

—JFB

A
LL WOMEN BECOME LIKE THEIR MOTHERS
.

T
HAT IS THEIR TRAGEDY
.

N
O MAN DOES
. T
HAT
’
S HIS
.

—
OSCAR WILDE

“I
DON
’
T THINK SO
,”
SAID MY FATHER
.

“H
E
’
S NOT MUCH
.”

James and Deirdre Boylan, with newborn Zach
.
February 11, 1994
.

Courtesy of the author

She sat alone
in the stands as the duel unfolded. Like me, she had no visible husband. I had a lump in my breast. She seemed sad. Our sons had swords.

I slid next to her on the bleacher, put my purse on the floor. Then a group of dads two rows ahead of us leapt to their feet, yelling. A boy was on the ground. His adversary stood above him, foil extended.

“Red card!” shouted one of the dads. “Red-card him, ref!”

The trainer from my sons’ school, Kents Hill, stepped toward the ring to protest. But a penalty was not called.

“Are you blind, ref?” shouted one of the dads. He was really upset. I’d never seen a dad all red in the face at a fencing match before.

“They don’t understand,” said the woman to my right. She was a tiny thing, like a budgie. In her hands she held a copy of
Cooking Light
magazine. “He was flèching him.”

“Fleshing?” I said. A lot of the minutiae of fencing was beyond me. Offhand this sounded like the word you’d use if you accidentally encouraged someone to wind up naked.

“Flèche,” she said. “That’s Ethan’s secret weapon.”

The dads in front of us were still hollering and booing. The boy who’d been upended was back on his feet, and now I recognized him. This was a young man we’ll call Chandler, the smallest boy on the Kents Hill team.

His adversary did a merciless ninth-grade equivalent of Muhammad Ali’s victory dance.
I am the greatest
. His facial expression wasn’t visible, what with the mask, but it wasn’t hard to imagine.

“That’s your son?”

She nodded.

“I’m Jenny Boylan?” I said.

“Grenadine Phelps?”
^*
she said. It would have been nice to be able to say that this was the first time I’d met a woman named after a liquor, but in Maine, there’s a long-standing tradition of naming people after bottles of alcohol. I’d known a Brandy, a Bacardi, and a couple of Sherrys. Brandy had once cornered me in the ladies’ room at a blues bar where my band was playing and tried to get me to make out with her. Things like that happened to me more than you’d expect, which at first I’d thought was just my own rotten luck but which lately I’d begun to worry was my fault. On another occasion, for example, I’d accidentally wound up at a convention of ventriloquists, in Kentucky. There’d been this whole scene with this one guy who kept coming on to me using his “muffle voice.”

The boys began to fence again, the gigantic Ethan and the tiny, terrified Chandler. Once again, Ethan charged at him, yelling as he advanced like one of the riders of Rohan: “Deaath!” He whacked Chandler’s sword and it flew out of the boy’s hand and skittered away on the gym floor.

“Flèched him again,” said Grenadine wearily, as if irritated that Chandler had not learned that her son only had one trick, and that this was it.

“I’m sorry, what’s flèching? You mean that charging thing?”

“Yeah,” said Grenadine. “You extend the arm and pounce. Ethan’s known for his flèche.”

Yeah, well, I thought, Chandler’s known for going to the bathroom in his actual pants.

The coach was now out talking to Chandler, who had his mask off. He was sniffing back the tears.

Another boy, an elegant and graceful young thing, picked up the fallen sword and returned it to Chandler with a small bow. He had hair halfway down his back, a huge cascade of blond curls tied in a braid.
He patted Chandler on the shoulder, whispered something encouraging to him. Buck up.

“Jeez, look at the hair on that kid,” said Grenadine.

“He’s got hair all right,” I said. My son Zach was admired for his hair in the same way her son Ethan was known for stabbing people.

But before I could explain this, Grenadine said, “My husband would never allow Ethan to have hair like that. He’d send him to military school first.”

I shrugged. I didn’t feel like defending Zach to a stranger. Was that really what I was here for, a conversation about hair?

Chandler had his mask on again and was back in the ring—more properly known as the
piste
, or strip. Zach stood to one side, watching the boy. He was the team co-captain.

“Kid looks like a girl,” said Grenadine. The way she said it, it didn’t sound like a compliment.

Zach looked like a lot of things, but a girl was not one of them, unless you were the kind of person who believed
long hair woman, short hair man
. He was tall and broad shouldered, my boy. The hair had made Zach very popular. There were a number of girls—some of them on the fencing team, in fact—who liked to do the braid. It was fairly obvious how much they all adored Zach. It wasn’t obvious to him though.

Below us, Ethan extended his arm and went charging down upon little Chandler again. But this time, Chandler parried and then seized right-of-way. He came forward with the riposte and scored a hit off Ethan.

The dads below me shouted their approval. “Atta boy, Chandler!” they yelled. “Push back on him! Slay him!”

“Oh, honestly,” said Grenadine.

The boys were now eyeing each other warily. They moved first one way, then the other, looking for an opening. You could feel the tension between them, Ethan looking for another chance to use his trick, Chandler emboldened by the hit he’d scored. There wasn’t much chance that Chandler was going to win this match, but you had to give him credit for staying in the game. Very quietly, I began to hope some
not-particularly-terrible thing might happen to Ethan, like the roof collapsing, or the boy’s having a tiny nonlethal coronary.

At the edge of the strip, my son Zach stood there watching his teammate’s progress. The men below me shouted again.

“It’s a good thing my husband’s not here,” she said, listening to the hecklers.

“How come?” I asked.

She sighed. “There’d be trouble.”

“Does he come to a lot of the matches? Your husband?”

“Oh, no.” There was a slight pause. Then she said, “He’s in Iraq.”

Ethan got another touch on Chandler, and the dads below me moaned. One of them—was it Chandler’s father?—held his head in his hands, as if he’d been called upon to witness his own son’s execution for crimes against the state.

“That must be hard,” I said.

She pulled into herself and did not respond. For a second it seemed almost as if the stranger were trying to hold back tears.

“It’s better with him gone,” she said, in a voice that was almost a whisper.

“Seriously?”

She nodded, and a tear brimmed over one of her lashes.

“Sometimes I hope he never comes back,” she said. “Sometimes I wish he’d get—”

Gazing upon the gigantic, merciless Ethan below me, I wondered if I could begin to imagine Grenadine’s married life. I pictured a menacing Ethan Senior bearing down upon the tiny, birdlike Grenadine Phelps, and winced. Junior had learned that pouncing trick from somewhere, and it wasn’t his mom.