Read Online The Best American Essays 2016 by Jonathan Franzen - Free Book Online
Authors: Jonathan Franzen
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Francisco, not on earth, but in myself. I am on the other side of something and I don’t know what it is. I wait to find out.
Real
I am proud for years of the way I looked real that night. I remember the men who thought I was a real woman, the straight guys in the cars whooping at me and their expressions when I said, “Thanks, guys,” my voice my voice, and the change that rippled over their faces.
You wanted me, I wanted to say. You might still want me.
Real is good. Real is what you want. No one does drag to be a real woman, though. Drag is not the same as that. Drag knows it is different. But if you can pass as real, when it comes to drag, that is its own gold medal.
I’m also very aware of how that night was the first night I felt comfortable with my face. It makes me wary, even confused. I can feel the longing for the power I had. I jones for it like it’s cocaine.
The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making faces, he was happy. But the process took so much work. I can’t do that every day, though I know women who do. And that isn’t the answer to my unhappiness, and I know it.
When my friend Danny gives me a photo from that night, I see something I didn’t notice at the time. I look a little like my mom. I had put on my glasses for him—a joke about “girls who wear glasses”—and in that one picture, I see it all—the dark edges of my real hair sticking out, the cheapness of the wig, the smooth face, finally confident.
I send a copy to my sister and write, This is what I would look like if I was your big sister.
I can’t skip what I need to do to love this face by making it over. I can’t chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like the something they want. Being real means being at home in this face, just as it is when I wake up.
I am not the person who appeared for the first time that night. I am the one only I saw, the one I had rejected until then, the one I needed to see, and didn’t see until I had taken nearly everything about him away. His face is not half this or half that, it is all something else.
Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.
A few months after Halloween, a friend borrows my wig. He has begun performing in drag on a regular basis. I have not. I bring it into the bookstore where we both work and pass it off to him. It looks like a burned-out thing, what’s left in the wick of a candle after a long night.
I go to see my friend perform in the wig—he has turned it into the ponytail of a titanic hair sculpture, made from three separate wigs. He is beautiful beneath its impossible size, a hoopskirted vision, his face whited out, a beauty mark on his lip. Who was the first blond to dot a beauty mark on her upper lip? How far back in time do we have to go? It is like some spirit in the wig has moved on, into him.
He never gives me the wig back, and I don’t ask for it back—it was never really mine.
CHARLES COMEY
Against Honeymoons
FROM The Point
M Y WIFE IS seated in a beach chair. She peers over her book and sees me approaching some seals hauled up on the sand. There are only a little over a thousand of these Hawaiian monk seals in existence. When they are discovered on beaches, volunteers rope off an area around them to form a zone where they can rest undisturbed.
So my transgression of one of these knee-high boundary ropes draws the attention of everyone who has been standing at the edge of the rope watching the seals. Hauled up, they look like smooth brown boulders lying on the sand. They don’t move. All spectators, wife included, hold their breath as I continue to bear down on the group. When I get very close—just a couple of steps away—the nearest seal heaves its head back. Its nose is suddenly drawn directly upwards. It lets out a double “ haauwll . . . haauwll ” that is Jabba-like: a wheezy barking
Real
I am proud for years of the way I looked real that night. I remember the men who thought I was a real woman, the straight guys in the cars whooping at me and their expressions when I said, “Thanks, guys,” my voice my voice, and the change that rippled over their faces.
You wanted me, I wanted to say. You might still want me.
Real is good. Real is what you want. No one does drag to be a real woman, though. Drag is not the same as that. Drag knows it is different. But if you can pass as real, when it comes to drag, that is its own gold medal.
I’m also very aware of how that night was the first night I felt comfortable with my face. It makes me wary, even confused. I can feel the longing for the power I had. I jones for it like it’s cocaine.
The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making faces, he was happy. But the process took so much work. I can’t do that every day, though I know women who do. And that isn’t the answer to my unhappiness, and I know it.
When my friend Danny gives me a photo from that night, I see something I didn’t notice at the time. I look a little like my mom. I had put on my glasses for him—a joke about “girls who wear glasses”—and in that one picture, I see it all—the dark edges of my real hair sticking out, the cheapness of the wig, the smooth face, finally confident.
I send a copy to my sister and write, This is what I would look like if I was your big sister.
I can’t skip what I need to do to love this face by making it over. I can’t chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like the something they want. Being real means being at home in this face, just as it is when I wake up.
I am not the person who appeared for the first time that night. I am the one only I saw, the one I had rejected until then, the one I needed to see, and didn’t see until I had taken nearly everything about him away. His face is not half this or half that, it is all something else.
Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.
A few months after Halloween, a friend borrows my wig. He has begun performing in drag on a regular basis. I have not. I bring it into the bookstore where we both work and pass it off to him. It looks like a burned-out thing, what’s left in the wick of a candle after a long night.
I go to see my friend perform in the wig—he has turned it into the ponytail of a titanic hair sculpture, made from three separate wigs. He is beautiful beneath its impossible size, a hoopskirted vision, his face whited out, a beauty mark on his lip. Who was the first blond to dot a beauty mark on her upper lip? How far back in time do we have to go? It is like some spirit in the wig has moved on, into him.
He never gives me the wig back, and I don’t ask for it back—it was never really mine.
CHARLES COMEY
Against Honeymoons
FROM The Point
M Y WIFE IS seated in a beach chair. She peers over her book and sees me approaching some seals hauled up on the sand. There are only a little over a thousand of these Hawaiian monk seals in existence. When they are discovered on beaches, volunteers rope off an area around them to form a zone where they can rest undisturbed.
So my transgression of one of these knee-high boundary ropes draws the attention of everyone who has been standing at the edge of the rope watching the seals. Hauled up, they look like smooth brown boulders lying on the sand. They don’t move. All spectators, wife included, hold their breath as I continue to bear down on the group. When I get very close—just a couple of steps away—the nearest seal heaves its head back. Its nose is suddenly drawn directly upwards. It lets out a double “ haauwll . . . haauwll ” that is Jabba-like: a wheezy barking
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