Read Online The Shape of My Name by Nino Cipri - Free Book Online Page B

until high school, when the same was said of me.
    â€œWhat should I call you?” Dara asked me.
    You jumped in and told her to call me by my name, the one you’d chosen for me, after the week of indecision following my birth. How can I ever make you understand how much I disliked that name? It felt like it belonged to a sister whom I was constantly being compared to, whose legacy I could never fulfill or surpass or even forget. Dara must have caught the face that I made, because later, when you were out in the garden, she asked me, “Do you have another name? That you want me to call you instead?”
    When I shrugged, she said, “It doesn’t have to be a forever name. Just one for the day. You can pick a new one tomorrow, if you like. You can introduce yourself differently every time you see me.”
    And so every morning when I woke up and saw Dara sitting at the table, I gave her a different name: Doc, Buck, George, Charlie. Names that my heroes had, from television and comics and the matinees in town. They weren’t my name, but they were better than the one I had. I liked the way they sounded, the shape of them rolling around my mouth.
    You just looked on, lips pursed in a frown, and told Dara you wished she’d quit indulging my silly little games.
    The two of you sat around our kitchen table and—if I was quiet and didn’t draw any attention to myself—talked in a strange code about jumps and fastenings and capsules, dropping names of people I never knew. More of your cousins, I figured.
    You told our neighbors that all of your family was spread out, and disinclined to make the long trip to visit. When Dara took me in, she made up a tale about a long-lost cousin whose parents had kicked him out for being queer trans. Funny, the way the truth seeps into lies.
    *   *   *
    I went to see Uncle Dante in 1927. I wanted to see what he had in that book of his about me, and about you and Dara.
    Nineteen twenty-seven tastes like the chicken broth and brown bread he fed me after I showed up at his door. It smells like the musty blanket he hung around my shoulders, like kerosene lamps and wood smoke. It sounds like the scratchy records he played on his phonograph: Duke Ellington and Al Jolson, the Gershwin brothers and Gene Austin.
    â€œYour mother dropped in by back in 24,” he said, settling down in an armchair in front of the fireplace. It was the same fireplace that had been in our parlor, though Dad had sealed off the chimney in 1958, saying it let in too many drafts. “She was very adamant that your name be written down in the records. She seemed … upset.” He let the last word hang on its own, lonely, obviously understated.
    â€œThat’s not my name,” I told him. “It’s the one she gave me, but it was never mine.”
    I had to explain to him then—he’d been to the future, and so it didn’t seem so far-fetched, my transition. I simplified it for him, of course: didn’t go into the transdermal hormonal implants and mastectomy, the paperwork Dara and I forged, the phalloplasty I’d scheduled a century and a half in the future. I skipped the introduction to gender theory, Susan Stryker, Stone Butch Blues , all the things that Dara gave me to read when I asked if there were books about people like me.
    â€œMy aunt Lucia was of a similar disposition,” he told me. “Once her last child was grown, she gave up on dresses entirely. Wore a suit to church for her last twelve years, which gave her a reputation for eccentricity.”
    I clamped my mouth shut and nodded along, still feeling ill and shaky from the jump. The smell of Uncle Dante’s cigar burned in my nostrils. I wished we could have had the conversation outside, on the porch; the parlor seemed too familiar, too laden with the ghost of your presence.
    â€œWhat should I put instead?” he asked, pulling his book down from the mantle: