nonfic by libby feltis

Becoming Robbie

I snuck a picture of my friend recently. We were catching live music at our favorite spot, and he was completely tuned into the band. His broad shoulders were squared, his jaw set to match. Long legs stretched beneath the table. His hands were folded, elbows pointed out, like he was announcing his presence in his quiet way. On this night he wore contacts instead of glasses—revealing dark, broody eyes. In a prior decade, he could have been a member of Menudo. He was undeniably handsome. I sent the picture to him later and said, “You look like such a Robbie here.”

*

Hopshire Brewery is too well-lit for a watering hole with blues music. You don’t go if you don’t want to be noticed. The tables are close together, so just the act of sitting causes commotion. Built before social distancing, the rows of long, chestnut tables feel more like a bingo hall than a place to sip craft beer and tap a foot to a cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom.” Maybe that’s why I notice her. She is well below bingo age and sports the short, cropped hair that screams woman-seeking-woman on the apps. 

And when a woman is totally pulling off a hairstyle, you must tell her. It’s a code among our sex. Or perhaps it should be. I flip around in my seat to face her table, where she’s sitting with another young woman. A pint in already, I blurt—

“I love your hair!”

“Mine?” she asks, looking half-surprised and half-startled.

“Yes, yours! That haircut looks great on you. I used to have short hair like that, and I miss it.” Now she’s blushing like someone unaccustomed to compliments, or at least compliments from strangers in a bar with fluorescent lighting.

“Aww, that’s really kind. Thank you so much.”

The ramping up of amps keeps us from saying anything more. As with all blues jams, it’s getting progressively louder as the evening draws on. Lead guitar scrambles for purchase against the bass. The regulars in the audience take turns signaling for the vocal mic to be turned up. Sometimes it’s less music and more wrestling match at jams; everyone wants to be heard. But the woman with the short hair doesn’t seem to notice. Newbies usually don’t. The novelty of stumbling across live blues in Central New York buffs away any rough edges or false starts. The beer helps, too.

I am up next to sing. I sip rum from the airplane bottle I snuck in with me (Hopshire doesn’t serve liquor and I don’t drink beer). Then I do my usual growling bit, letting out the feelings of the week. I try to connect with the audience—an interaction that feels more like interrogation in this room. I meet eyes with the short-haired woman and her friend and think maybe this is cathartic for them, too. I notice she sits with perfect posture and squared shoulders but sways her head and closes her dark brown eyes while I belt.

When I sit back down, they both compliment my singing, which instantly endears them to me. We make loud introductions over the hum of the room. “I’m Laura,” the short-haired woman says, but she pronounces it like Lau-duh, giving away her Latinx heritage. Her friend’s name is Sarah. I still don’t know much about Sarah, because the next thirty minutes are a frenzied conversation in which Laura and I decide to be best friends. It takes us mere moments to discover that we both property-share with our exes, because starting over in a new place takes more money than any of us have by ourselves. At the five-minute mark we move onto greyhounds and our firm belief in their art-deco qualities.

“They look like they should be wearing coiffed bob wigs,” I say. Laura and Sarah exchange looks that say, oh my god, yes.

“She says that all the time!” Sarah says.

“They’re just so elegant!” Laura says, gesturing with her hands emphatically.

“Exactly,” I say. 

The jam is winding down, but we manage to cover more ground in thirty minutes than some people do in a year. Laura doesn’t do small talk. I can already tell she is more of a ‘life, the universe, and everything’ kind of communicator. After the jam, we end up at a karaoke bar down the road because we aren’t done talking. Over pitchy versions of alternative rock songs, we exchange life stories. Laura asks questions like she’s interviewing a celebrity for Time magazine, then leans in and makes full eye contact as if she’s trying to hear what you aren’t saying. 

Her voice carries the remnants of a tongue used to speaking Spanish, her words carefully chosen. We both went to college for religious studies and now veer in the direction of the Gnostic gospels and all things witchy. We find power in music, in claiming sexualities the Catholic church would advise against, and in drawing lines in the sand with our dysfunctional families. But where my presence can feel like a roaring fire, Laura’s is akin to a candle keeping vigil for whoever needs it. There is something inherently pastoral about her. Perhaps it’s in the way she says, “Thank you for sharing that with me,” after I divulge something deeper than I mean to. Or maybe it’s because she seems to walk through life assuming everyone’s wounds are as deep as hers, rather than the other way around. She suspends judgment longer than most.

When I tell her about me appropriating Whoopie Goldberg in fourth grade, she doesn’t cringe (although, it is cringey). Instead, she laughs and says, “Even as a person of color, I think we all have complicated relationships with race. I think we are all learning and growing. And I’m sorry, but I’m just trying to picture you with those little, round sunglasses and braids in your hair.” She cackles—a laugh so innocent and ribbing it feels like a gift. I text her the next day to say my anxiety is making me regret telling her the Whoopie Goldberg story. She replies, “I release you from your anxiety.” When she texts me in the weeks that follow, she says things like, “I hope the week is treating you, Johnny (my husband), and Isaac (my son) well!” She even remembers the date of Johnny’s hand surgery and texts warm wishes that morning. Sometimes when I text her, she responds with, “I’m sorry. I’m out of beans for the day, but I would love to talk more later in the week.”

Laura talks like a therapist because she’s in therapy. The first time we hang out just the two of us, we meet at the Rhine House—a queer-friendly bar in Ithaca. I ask how her week has been.

“Kinda heavy,” she says between sips of cider, “I’ve been processing a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve been really struggling with my identity and this week my therapist asked me if I thought I could be transmasculine.” Life, the universe, and gender. I know what I signed up for on this friend date.

“And how do you feel about that?” 

“Honestly, it makes a lot of sense.”

I ask her what her preferred pronouns are, and she gushes and thanks me for being so nice but says she’s fine with all of them at this point. I tell her basic respect is the least we should be doing for each other as humans and that asking pronouns is the bare minimum. Laura doesn’t seem used to basic respect. I find out later in the evening that her mom physically and emotionally abused her well into her early twenties. It has been six years since she’s seen or talked to the woman. Still, Laura says, “I realized my mother is a damaged twelve-year-old girl trapped in a sixty-year-old woman’s body. There are certain things I just can’t ask of her.” Love, respect, and safety are three major things every child should be able to expect from a parent. Instead, Laura received fists, threats, and body shaming. She hints at sexual abuse, too.

“I’m so sorry you went through that,” I say.

“It’s okay.” Laura shrugs. “It is what it is.”

“Classic trauma response.”

We laugh at the way she shares horrible memories of her mother with the same levity someone might talk about their gaudy hairstyle in the ‘80s. She casually mentions being made to kneel on uncooked rice for hours as a punishment. But Laura never seems to be looking for pity, just connection. She shares rather than dumps. She asks questions like she’s trying to find our common ground. Then we wax poetic about gender and sexual identity—the way even the queer community seems to want to label everyone, to fit them into boxes that can be checked on a dating app.

“How am I supposed to label myself when inside I feel more like an orca whale than anything?” she asks.

“Why an orca whale?”

“Free Willy had a profound effect on me.”

We snort into our drinks, and Laura starts singing the Michael Jackson song from the movie’s soundtrack. I get what she means, though. Sometimes our spirit has nothing to do with our gender. I tell her I feel like a bear, which leads us to giving each other a tour of our tattoos. Hers are all clean lines and neat shading with special significance. I have at least three impulse pieces. 

Laura talks about how she might want to look in the future, as a man. As she describes a flat chest, full tattoo sleeves, facial hair, muscles, a masculine wardrobe, I realize she’s thought about this for longer than a week. Much longer. And the idea of presenting as a man excites her. When Laura talks about herself as a man, her face lights up the way mine does when I reminisce about my body at twenty-eight. In my mind, I get ready to change her pronouns.

*

We are thrift shopping for Laura’s new masculine wardrobe, and I watch as he piles plaid button downs, relaxed fit jeans, t-shirts, and track pants over one arm with decisive abandon. When I plop a soft, gray sweater over the pile, his smile explodes.

“You know me too well. Thank you, again, for doing this with me. It means a lot.” He squeezes my arm with his free hand.

“Are you kidding? Any excuse to thrift shop. I’m loving this,” I say, not wanting him to feel like I’m doing him a favor. It was my idea to do this as our first activity after Laura came out as transmasculine on New Year’s Day. I have been practicing his new pronouns at home with my husband, who has become the pronoun police since I confessed my fear of fucking up. But the truth is, the transition has been pretty seamless. Some things just make sense, and Laura being a man is one of them. It’s not that he’s not feminine, because there are some things about him that society would attribute to femininity. Like the way he is constantly apologizing or thanking people. Or the way he tilts his head and smiles like a doting grandmother when he tells you he’s proud of you. But Laura’s vessel makes more sense in male form. 

“So, I think I’ve picked a name, and you’re the first person I’m telling this to,” he says as we comb through racks of secondhand clothes. I pause, eyes big.

“Oh? Do tell.”

“Robin-Anthony. Robbie for short.”

“I love it! And I feel super honored that you told me first. Thank you, Robbie.” 

Robbie is getting misty in the middle of the Ithaca Reuse Center. We squeeze each other’s arms. The other shoppers are oblivious, but there is a trans man coming to life between the clearance rack and the shoe section. For the rest of the day, we revel in the joy of rebirth. At the second thrift store, Robbie finds even more clothes and a couple pairs of shoes. I hold up some olive green, tweed pants.

“How about these?”

“Automatic yes.”

“Because there is an old, Cuban man living inside you?”

“One hundred percent,” he says, laughing. I toss the pants into the already overflowing cart.

The cashier is super-chatty. With Robbie’s mountain of clothes to ring up, he has time to impart all his gay wisdom onto us. He’s wearing a red plaid shirt with blue suspenders and stone washed jeans. He looks like a cross between a children’s television show host and the lead singer of R.E.M. I half expect him to pull a bouquet of flowers out of his sleeve; he’s that animated. Still, he’s saying things that make him feel like Robbie’s fairy godfather. “It’s all about taking chances,” he says as he scans more tags. He doesn’t notice the two pairs of shoes underneath the cart basket and neither do we until we are outside my car. I point them out to Robbie.

“Welp, looks like I got some free shoes, ‘cause I’m not going back in there. I’ve already spent enough money today,” he says as he loads the mound of clothes into my trunk. He’s spent $125 at this thrift store alone. There aren’t enough days in a month to wear the clothes he’s bought.

“I bet he noticed them and threw them in for free.”

“That’s what I’m choosing to believe. A gift from the Universe.”

“Everything’s coming up Robbie!”

“It is! It’s been a good day. Can I buy you lunch as a thank you?”

If Robbie is rich in anything, it’s generosity. 

I don’t point out that he could use that money to pay for the shoes. I weigh my conscience and decide that taking donated items maybe doesn’t count as stealing. For financial reasons, Robbie is currently sharing a house with his ex and his ex’s now-girlfriend (who happens to be Robbie’s friend, Sarah). We rent land to my ex-husband for the same reason. He lives in a camper behind our barn. We are both living the American dream—appearing comfortable while teetering at the edge of poverty, feet fully submerged in debt. We decide to get lunch at the Ithaca Bakery, and I fight the urge to turn back to pay for the secondhand shoes. Robbie, however, seems wholly unbothered.

What does bother Robbie is the idea of inconveniencing his friends and loved ones.

After our shopping trip, he texts me to say he’s having a name crisis and wants us to refer to him as Laura until he figures it out. Over lunch we had talked about his new name more, and I said my guess was going to be Gabriel. Robbie furrowed his brow and said, “That’s interesting. You’re not the first person to tell me that I look like a Gabriel.” 

“I just want to be really sure,” he texts, “so I don’t keep bothering my friends with name changes.”

“We’ll do whatever you want, but I also don’t want you to think of your transition as an inconvenience to other people. Your true friends won’t be inconvenienced. They will be happy for you.”

Two days later, he texts to say his name is definitely Robin-Anthony. He changes his name on social media and alerts his other friends and co-workers.

Weeks later, Robbie is over for dinner. This time he brings us a small, framed print of a rooster for our farmhouse. Last time it was two leather bookmarks. We swap old pictures of ourselves to see what the other person will notice about us. Every picture of Robbie from adolescence—with long hair or makeup for a dance recital—makes him look like he’s a man dressed in drag. Except without the unbridled joy. It’s as if his mom was trying to paint a reality that wasn’t there. His eyes are boring holes in the camera; it’s a look of profound unhappiness. Even if he had never shared about his abuse, I could see it here. From age six on, his eyes are haunted in almost every picture. In person, Robbie sighs deeply, like he’s feeling those emotions all over again.

“I was so miserable then. I see that now,” he says. “I just knew something was terribly wrong—apart from what was going on at home. Turns out, it was my gender.”

I think about Robbie’s pictures from dance recitals—about how our experiences could be so similar and yet so different. Dance class was the place my body dysphoria went to disappear. I had a dance teacher who put emphasis on what our bodies could do instead of what they looked like. It was an even playing field for me and my bigger, female body. But as I look at Robbie’s face covered in makeup, his body revealed in a tight leotard, and the absolute betrayal in his eyes, I want to hug him. I want to hug him because he was so clearly in pain, and his pain was signed up for dance class and glossed over with red lipstick.

*

In a week, Robbie will return to Miami to reunite with the family he hasn’t seen in 6-8 years. He was just approved to start Hormone Replacement Therapy but is putting it off until he gets back. I’ve been referring to the trip as Laura’s Farewell Tour. He also seems to think of it as his family’s last chance to see him in his “butch-lesbian body” and to either get on board or not with the changes to come. When I ask if he thinks he is ready to see his mom he says, “What can she do to me now that she hasn’t already? The difference is now I know I can walk away.” And later, “If my uncles don’t accept me, I’m going to sneak into their closets and steal their vintage ‘70s shirts. And I’m going to wear them.”

“They’ll go well with your stolen shoes,” I say, and we both laugh.

“Did I ever tell you about the time someone was homophobic to me after inviting me to their house, so I ate the contents of their fridge?” The look of pride on his face only fuels my full belly laugh.

“You’re kidding me!”

“No. She was an evangelical Christian, and she was drunk. She said there aren’t gay people in the Bible, so she didn’t think Jesus liked them very much. So, I kept asking her to cut up more fruit and cheese. I ate every last thing in her fridge.”

“Like Templeton from Charlotte’s Web!”

“Exactly like that.”

I cackle this time.

*

When Robbie gets back from Florida, we’ll go to Hopshire Brewery to listen to the blues. He’ll wear a ‘70s polyester shirt, shoes the Universe gifted him, some stubble on his chin, and not a drop of makeup. I’ll wear enough makeup for the both of us. We’ll dance like an orca and a bear who just happen to be friends. And when he’s not looking, I’ll sneak a picture of him. I’ll text it to him later and say, “You look like yourself here.”