Little Fish Read online

  “Yes,” Wendy said. “I remember Henry very well.” Then she shut her eyes. Shit. This was coming apart. How’s she supposed to not know me if—

  “He was like Ben’s son. So there you go.”

  “WHAT?”

  “So there you go!” repeated Anna, slightly more high-pitched. “And there are some letters and things. I thought she’d want to see. I … sat on them for a long time. A long time. But lately I have been. Remembering things, Aganetha would say. About Henry many years ago. I realized … perhaps it was not good to keep this secret. That’s what I feel. The Lord was telling me. So I just decided that this morning and now I called and got you.”

  Wendy opened her mouth, and it was dry as plaster. She touched her fingers to her hair.

  “But now she’s gone. And I don’t know who you are,” Anna said rapidly, shakily. “I’m talking to a stranger. About all this. I better go—no, I’ll ask a favour. I’ll ask you to tell one of Aganetha’s sisters. I assume they’re still alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you tell one of them what I told you, and ask them to telephone me? I’m going to trust in the Lord now that if you say yes, you will do it.”

  “Perhaps I can, indeed,” Wendy said dumbly.

  “Good,” said Anna. “They can look me up in the phone book if they don’t have the number. My address is right there too. They can come visit too, long as they call first.”

  “Okay.”

  More silence.

  “I’m going to be going now,” said Anna.

  “Have a good day,” Wendy said faintly.

  “My condolences about Aganetha. I thought about her often. She is finally with the Lord. Hallelujah.”

  “Hallelujah.”

  So many Mennonites these days, it seemed to Wendy, were rich. The humble old desperate towns of Rudy Wiebe and Sandra Birdsell books were gone, or at least shrunk, or fast on their way to existing only in traces, photos, myth, and books, and in the bedrooms of old people. In their stead were McMansions and Liquor Marts and gourmet coffee shops. The Liquor Marts closed at ten, and the coffee shops at midnight. There were big boxes and subdivisions and construction for new high schools and stores that sold fireplaces. The high schools had raffle prizes that gave trips to Vegas. They were the fastest growing towns in the province. Most rural municipalities were bleeding people, but Hanover and Stanley and Rhineland and La Broquerie were growing in double-digits—it had been a long time since Wendy had talked, really talked, to someone like Anna at all.

  And in the city. The ones in the city. Wendy worked at a gift store close to Polo Park, and every other wallet with five credit cards belonged to a Friesen or a Penner. They could spend seventy dollars on a scarf and ask if there was a charge for a plastic bag. They would buy books on mindfulness and Taoism. She would see Hutterites driving Hummers.

  Wendy stood in her nightgown, ratty skids of hair down her back, holding the phone receiver. She heard the alarm-drone noise of it being off the hook. Ben came into the kitchen and refilled his bowl with cereal. He took the receiver from Wendy’s hand and hung it up. “You miss that sound?”

  “No!” she said, high-pitched and startled.

  “What’s going on? Who was that?”

  “I—I—”

  “Tell me,” said Ben.

  “Someone called about Opa,” she said, the first thing that came to her mind.

  “No way.”

  “Yeah,” she said, returning to her normal rasp. “They were behind the times.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I forget,” she said.

  The best lies always come to you as you’re saying them, she’d been reflecting lately. It was planned untruths that didn’t end well.

  “Something Hildebrand,” she added. “It wasn’t important. The guy was an asshole—oh, and he kept asking me if I was a man or a woman. Wouldn’t let it go.”

  “What a dickwad,” said her dad.

  “Whatever,” she mumbled. “Is there more coffee?”

  “No. Make more,” Ben suggested. He poured his milk and went back into the living room.

  Wendy’s head was imploding. She made another pot and then went into her room and poured raspberry vodka into her coffee mug. She rarely drank in the mornings—but. Well.

  Downstairs, in her grandmother’s sewing room, there was a bookcase of photo albums labelled by year. Wendy put her hand on the earliest, 1961.

  Pictures of her dad as a baby.

  A lot with her dad and her Opa, wearing a grey shirt and huge owl glasses. Cute. Wendy’d always remembered her grandfather with bifocals.

  An adorable picture of her dad on a stool, filling a cup with water.

  Her grandpa in a field, wearing the same grey shirt.

  She sat on the floor, sipping coffee and flipping through more pages. He was always wearing a variation of the same big grey men’s shirt—That fits, though, she thought. Wear the same outfit day after day, your brain gets numb to how it looks or feels—Wendy shut the album. No. She hated going down that road. She hated analyzing the whys of trans girls. She had always hated it, and she hated how easy it had become; the bottomless hole of egg mode. It made her burn with anger, thinking of all that lost energy. You could do it forever, and she’d played that fuckin’ game years ago when she’d needed to, but she knew where that led and she was done with that game. She’d had a boy life. It was shitty and murky. So her grandfather probably had too and just never got out. So her Opa’d been a woman. Fine. Closed. She would keep the memory of her two grandmothers in her heart and that’d be that. Whatever. She drank the rest of her coffee in a slug and put the photo album back in the bookcase. Good enough.

  “Hey, we gotta go,” said her dad. “Get your stuff.” He refilled her coffee without asking.

  She put an ice cube in her mug and opened the fridge and her dad closed it and said, “Go go go, we gotta move!”

  “Jesus, relax!”

  “We have to go!”

  Wendy closed and opened her fists, letting anger flow out of her.

  She packed her things and added more vodka to her coffee. She lifted her moon-blue nightgown over her head and put on a white T-shirt with black jeans and a pink belt. She washed off her crusted day-old eyeliner, put it back on and added wings.

  She shouldered her purse and bag. Her dad was still packing.

  Wendy looked out on the yard again, sunny and bright and clear. It hit her—this might be one of the last times she’d stay in this house.

  Ben yelled to warm up the car. She went out and started the engine and put her shit in the back.

  It really was nice out—no wind, serene, sheltered by the poplars on the side of the driveway that her Opa had planted decades ago.

  Aw, hell.

  She grabbed her bag, took off her boots, and ran inside. Her dad shouted something again.

  “I’m coming, Christ!” She padded downstairs and put the album from 1961 in her bag. She hesitated, then picked another from the year her Opa had died and another from the early eighties.

  They drove into town where an old pasty woman with a kerchief sold perogies and gravy out of her mini-van beside the Walmart.

  “Twelve cottage cheese, frozen,” said Ben.

  “I’ll have three, fresh,” said Wendy.

  The woman turned to pack their containers.

  “I want a cigarette,” Ben mumbled.

  They drove back into the city. Her dad didn’t speak. Wendy hadn’t registered any emotion from him, that his mother had died. They had been on good terms—but he didn’t seem any different. Wendy’d wanted to learn to make those perogies herself some day, but her dad had forgotten how. She’d meant to ask her grandma, but she was dead.

  2

  Back home, the snow was mush and dirt. Wendy dropped her bags on the bed.

  She idly tapped her phone. She found herself typing on Facebook, “So maybe my grandfather was trans? Uh fucking what?” then deleted it.

  She didn�
�t want to look at the photo albums.

  Her clothes were all dirty.

  Crossing Portage and hip-checking the laundromat door open, she saw a new boy manning the desk. Hunched and stubbly with a grey V-necked shirt. Brown skin and thick black hair like the owners. Young and tall, unlike them. He smiled at her.

  Wendy went to the washers and took off her coat. She wondered how she looked to him. Her hair was in a long ponytail that rose up and curved down her back. She thought about her hair bobbing up and down and the pink belt around her pants as she bent over the machine.

  Sometimes Wendy tried to remember what she looked for in girls before transition. She could never summon anything clear. She could remember how boys talked about girls when they thought girls weren’t around. She could replay, as if in third-person, those handfuls of penis-in-vagina sex. But never any inner thoughts or feelings. When she tried to zoom in on the emotions of those moments, they became diffracted, lost, in a way other memories didn’t. Wendy remembered a lot about being a boy. But she couldn’t remember that.

  She thought again about her body from the back. She’d always felt like more of a girl, imagining her body from the back.

  When she got quarters from the boy she said, “How’s your afternoon?”

  “Fine. I’m drunk.”

  She did a double-take. “Really?”

  “Just kidding. But who can tell?” he said.

  She laughed at that. Wendy had a deep, guttural, and unmistakably feminine laugh; it was something she actually loved about herself. She disliked her voice—low and unsexily raspy, passing like a female Tom Waits—but she liked her laugh. And it always showed. A smile tugged at the boy’s cheeks.

  “Can I help you?”

  Wendy gave him a five. “Did you just start working here?”

  “Yeah. My dad runs the place,” he said. “But I go to school,” he added quickly. “I’m a musician.”

  “Mmm. Well, I guess I should use these quarters.”

  “Give me a shout if you have trouble.”

  After loading the dryer, she came back.

  “I’m not actually drunk,” he said.

  “I know. What’s your name?”

  “Taj.”

  “I’m Wendy.”

  “Nice name.”

  “I like it.”

  “Your mom or your dad pick that?”

  “My dad,” Wendy said instantly, though she’d never been asked that question before. “He had a teacher named Wendy? Who he liked? I think. It’s funny—I don’t actually know the whole story behind it.”

  A clear thing Wendy did remember from boy life: She’d been a terrible liar. Maybe there is something to trans women being deceivers, she thought.

  She pulled a finger through her ponytail and sat back down. She watched Taj at his station, tapping his phone, washing rags, fixing a jammed machine. He didn’t see Wendy watch him, and she knew it. He had that obliviousness of men that she envied, even missed. The permission of it, anyway.

  After folding her clothes, she went back to him. “Still not drunk?” she said.

  “It’s a pretty hard job here.”

  “Would you like to be drunk? I live right around the corner. I have vodka.”

  She didn’t know why she said things like this.

  “Seriously?” he said.

  “Sure. It’ll be great.”

  He looked startled and turned to the clock. “I’m—I’m off in half an hour.”

  Wendy poured them drinks, then sat on her bed. “So, what did you do before you began your career in laundromancy?”

  “I was a poker player.”

  “Really.”

  “Online poker. For, like, five years.”

  “You can make money doing that?”

  “I did.”

  Eventually, he kissed her. That was nice. He kissed her hard, and he drew her close; his body felt electric. He smelled like lotion and soap. She could tell he was trying to be gentle as he touched her cheeks and the sides of her torso. They were on their knees on the bed with their pants pressing into each other and she kissed him deeply as she took off his shirt and put her hand on his back. He took off her shirt and put his mouth on her tits and kind of sucked and licked them. She whispered, “Bite, for fuck’s sake,” and he did and she felt lightning. She dug her hands into his hair and pressed him hard into her chest and he bit harder and wrapped his legs and arms around her and they fell over on the bed. They kissed totally and furiously. She didn’t see herself do any of this, like she had in the laundromat—she saw his shoulder blades and felt his skin; her body mapped the dip of his chest and the suppleness of his arms. She didn’t see herself at all. He kissed her for a long, beautiful time.

  Eventually, she ducked her head, and her hands went to his belt buckle. He shifted his torso to let her—then he went still.

  Wendy looked up. His eyes widened and narrowed all at once. “Wait,” he said.

  She looked at him placidly, her heart drowning.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Are you a man?”

  “I am not a man.”

  “Like …” he trailed off. “But you were. You were born a girl, right?”

  “I’m not—” she cut herself off, about to yell.

  “No?” he said quietly.

  “No,” she said, resigned.

  Then he was standing, and his shirt was back on.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry! I don’t know how I feel about—I can’t—Jesus Christ. I have to go.”

  He left and started down the stairs. Then he came back. “Give a man some warning next time!” he said. “You don’t know what could happen! That’s not smart! Jesus Christ!”

  Wendy listened to him pull on his boots and coat and leave the house. Then she drank the rest of his vodka.

  Was it bad she wasn’t scared during any of this, she wondered. There was a time in her life she would’ve been.

  She felt sad. And pissed off. But it also felt nice to think about pressing him into her chest. And the way he’d kissed and wrapped himself around her. Wendy lay on the bed, watching the room rotate, fixing that feeling of his body in her memory.

  The clouds outside were swirling grey, like crystal balls. Everything was still and quiet. She lay there for a long time, putting off doing her laundry.

  She heard the mailman thunk envelopes into their mailbox and crunch away in the snow. Anna, she thought.

  Raina came home, and Wendy didn’t tell her about the guy from the laundromat. She did tell her about her grandfather.

  “That’s a discovery,” Raina said. “You must be somewhat shaken up.”

  “I am and I’m not.”

  “No?”

  Wendy curtly shook her head. “What’s the point? He was probably trans. It must have been terrible. What more is there?”

  Raina nodded. “I see.”

  “And I can’t tell my fuckin’ dad,” she added. “He couldn’t handle it.”

  “Of course not.” Raina opened cabinets and took out glasses. “The letters, though,” she said. “Does that not intrigue you?”

  “It does,” said Wendy. “But that feels different. I don’t know how I feel about it. That feels—”

  “Like disrespecting the dead?” Raina’s voice was calm.

  “Maybe,” Wendy said idly. “Have you eaten?”

  “Yes. But I have not had a beer. Would you like a beer?”

  “I would like a beer, thank you. And thanks for texting me at the funeral, I appreciated that.”

  “Of course,” said Raina. “And your family was—okay?”

  “Ah.” Wendy flicked the beer open and poured. “They were fine. They all believe my Oma went to heaven, and she was old and didn’t suffer. My family was the same as they always are. It’s fine.”

  Raina nodded. “I understand.”

  Wendy picked at her hands and steadily emptied her glass.

  They both sat in silence as flecks of foam dripped dow
n Raina’s sepia-coloured chin.

  Then: “Are you going to call this woman?”

  “I should,” muttered Wendy. “Do I want to? Probably not. I don’t think I want to talk about it anymore. How are you? How was work?”

  “Hard,” Raina said. “I had to go to the hospital and advocate for one of the women.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Father.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was going to watch some TV,” said Raina.

  “I’ll join you.”

  They went up to the living room on the third floor, and Raina put on a British TV show that she loved. Wendy sank into a cushion on the couch and let the accents wash over her, blue light flickering on their bodies. Wendy finished another beer, then ran to the corner store for Fresca to pour into her vodka. Back upstairs, she heard frantic knocking on the back door of the downstairs unit. Eventually she looked through the window, but there was no one, only other buildings and the back lane, fresh with the first caked-on layer of ice and snow.

  Their two cis roommates came home, said hello, and as usual, went into their rooms. Wendy settled back into the couch and drifted in and out, fog and words sailing by her, until eventually Raina laid a small, gentle hand on her shoulder and said, “Wendy, Wendy, I’m going to sleep, you should probably get to bed.”

  Down in her bedroom, falling onto her blankets, she was reaching for the light when she saw on her chair the bag for the hormones she’d picked up the week before. Lying open with the info pamphlet sticking out, the one she usually threw away. At the top: READ IF YOU HAVE NEVER TAKEN HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY BEFORE. Some deceiver.

  3

  “Can I see the pictures?” asked Sophie.

  Sophie paged through the first photo album as they sat on Wendy’s bed.

  “He was pretty,” Sophie said.