Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

53 - It's A Girl!

When Tammy had The Surgery, I sent her something from the FTD florist's New Baby collection. It was a pink teddy bear holding a balloon, with the words It's A Girl! printed on it in swirly girlie cursive. Tammy reportedly found it funny, although how much of that was a result of the nitric oxide still swimming around her brain I cannot say.

It was a few days later before I summoned the energy to drive over the hill for my obligatory hospital visit. My reticence wasn't due to a lack of concern. I was — understandably I think — a little hospital-ed out by that point and I hoped this would be the last one I'd see for a while.

Tammy had a large private room that was mostly wasted space. Vast swathes of bare floor and a paucity of visitor seating. The seventh-story windows looked out on a nondescript steel-and-glass office building. Off in the distance, I could see the skyscrapers of downtown choking on the smog.

When I arrived, Tammy was sitting up in her hospital bed, playing some mindless game on her iPad. Solitaire or Blackjack or something. She looked up at me and tried to smile, but winced instead. Remember what I said about how bad my mother looked in the hospital? Forget about it. Compared to Tammy she was Ms. Universe. Or at least third runner up. (Which is still pretty good for a grandmother in her sixties.) Tammy looked absolutely dreadful. Worse than I had ever seen her. And I had seen her with food poisoning, lying facedown on the bathroom floor in a pool of her — well, his at the time — own vomit, too weak to lift his head high enough to puke in the toilet. Tammy was pale and splotchy and ugly and weak and basted with sweat. Her face was still unmistakably masculine, with drooping skin that rippled as she registered small spasms of pain through the morphine.

And I know this isn't the most pressing issue facing the medical community, but would it really be that difficult to make a hospital gown that was flattering? Or at least didn't give the wearer a deathly pallor? Perhaps that would make for a worthwhile Project Runway challenge. Anyone have the number for Tim Gunn?

Anyway.

It was amazing to think that anyone would choose to subject themselves to this. It wasn't like repairing my demon-crushing injury or the preemptive strike against the malignant cells that were conspiring to kill my mother. It wasn't like spinal compression surgery or a kidney transplant or a hernia operation. It wasn't like putting in a stent after a heart attack or a metal rod to strengthen a bone. It wasn't like removing a cataract or an inflamed appendix or a bullet or a baby by Caesarian section. There was in fact no medical reason at all for her to be carved up and reshaped by a stainless steel blade.

It wasn't an entirely alien concept, though. When Tom and I were casting the ill-fated pilot The Scale — the one that didn't go because the new network president didn't want to "watch some ugly fat woman" — we also held auditions for the role of the ugly fat woman's mother. These were actresses between the ages of sixty and seventy (a couple were older, but lying about their age) pretty much all of whom we recognized from the TV of our youth, most of them in their day famously adorable or beautiful.

What we witnessed was a parade of horrors. Not because they had gotten older, but because nearly all of them had undergone some kind of cosmetic surgery — when the state of the art was not nearly as good as it is today — and the results ranged from disturbing to freakish.

Why in God's name would they do this to themselves?

(One of the few that didn't, by the way, was legendary comedienne Cloris Leachman. When she showed up for her audition, instead of shaking my hand like everyone else, she kissed me on the mouth. Then she told us that she was going to write a book about her life entitled Men I Haven't Fucked because it would be a lot shorter than the converse. A pistol, that one.)