as colors and numbers, quickly. Soon, the paper cards made their way down the rows, and I took mine.
“Alors, students,” she began, “we will now make ourselves name plates to announce our French names.” Murmurs of excitement and uncertainty filled the room.
“Ah, bon,” she smiled. “It is exciting, non? You will address each other in this class using only the first name you choose for yourself today. This is your French name. Votre prénom Français.” She walked to the overhead projector and turned it on to reveal a slide of French names—one list of boys’ and another of girls’. Immediately, the name “Sebastian” drew my attention. Just as quickly, I realized I couldn’t choose it. Resignedly, I focused on the girls’ list, hoping for a neutral name like Kelly or Lindsay, but there were none to be found. My friend Lynn leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Hey, you can use ‘Lorraine.’ You’re lucky.” I shook my head, indicating I disagreed. “How come?” she frowned.
“I’m gonna go for something different,” I said casually. Internally, I recoiled the way I always did at the mere sound of my first name, which I’d informally shortened to Lori years before. My parents had often told the story of how they’d been certain throughout Mom’s pregnancy that I would be a boy and had already chosen Peter for my name. When I was born, they’d briefly considered Joanne—Dad’s name was Joseph and Mom’s was Suzanne—or Josephine, after Dad’s twin sister. But, in one of those name-your-baby parenting fails, they inexplicably settled on Lorraine, despite neither of them knowing anyone named Lorraine.
I wrote “Renée” on a scrap of paper and passed it to Lynn. She raised her eyebrows and nodded approval. She wrote on the paper and passed it back to me. I opened it to read “Brigitte.” I gave her a thumbs-up.
Our family friends, the Smiths, had a daughter named Renée far younger than me. A shy, quiet blonde, she struck me as a girl I should model myself after—except for the blonde part, since my hair was sandy-colored. My plan also didn’t work in another key way: Renée Smith wasn’t into sports.
I made an executive decision that my Renée would be a sporty girl. In the ’70s of my youth, it was clear to me there were very rigid definitions of girl and boy; female and male, but I didn’t fit into either of them. I observed others working hard to fit into them, and I saw a few examples of boys in my class who were brutally treated because they were “soft” or “weak” in comparison to the rough and tumble “normal” boys. There was no space to be a sporty girl or a sensitive boy in those days. Gender roles were etched so deeply into my peers and me from birth that I still carry many of those attitudes with me today and have to work to confront them.
While I knew that hobbies and activities didn’t make a person a boy or a girl, as a boy going through life as a girl I felt I had to pick my spots. Making my Renée sporty was a political move, my stab at a world I thought should exist for me to test out, even if ultimately it might not end up a fit for me. Negative attention made me intensely uncomfortable and aware of my thin skin, and I feared that if I acted like myself, I’d be discovered as the imposter I was. On the other hand, I had a sense that I needed to act bravely so I could feel less miserable in those days of severe gender rigidity, and sports were my salvation. Such was the balancing act of my young life.
“Renée” would be my alter ego; I would become Renée. She would represent the girl I wished I could be, the girl comfortable in her gender—comfortable as a tomboy or as androgynous—who would make all the female puzzle pieces fit and take away my longing. I wrote “Renée” on the card and added a small drawing of a horse, the way I’d seen other girls in class do. As Renée, I would fake it until I made it.
THE DESMONDS WERE my parents’ good friends and went to our church. Mr. Desmond worked as a school principal in the Calgary Catholic School District along with my father. The two eldest of their five children—Kerry, a close friend and classmate of my brother Jake, and their only daughter Laura, a year behind me—went to our school. I didn’t know any of them well, but what I did know was that they were always kind, circling the periphery of my community and family. I’d never had reason to give them much thought until one Sunday at church.
The midcentury modern architecture of St. James Church appealed to me. I imagined the smooth, white vaulted ceilings, skylights, and few ornate furnishings to be the result of the mysterious Second Vatican Council I’d heard my parents discussing at various times—an apparently tectonic shift in papal ideology that I didn’t grasp, nor care to have anyone explain to me. I did know that it had loosened some of the rules we were supposed to live by—we seemed to have fish less frequently for Friday dinner, for one. The Church remained a puzzle to me and older, dank, traditional cathedrals only reinforced the feeling of darkness and mystery surrounding the religion I was born into.
I thought religion was supposed to be a comfort in people’s lives, but ours didn’t feel like that to me. Shadows and dark corners lurked everywhere, literally and figuratively, a powerful energy I sensed whenever I entered those “holy” confines. The musty smell and the slight chill in the air gave the impression that these interior spaces were not for exploration by outsiders. Even as a very young child, I knew I was an outsider.
The Desmonds sat in their usual pew one section to the left of where my family regularly sat. While some parishioners never strayed from their preferred places, we drifted around a general area about a third of the way back from the front, with no strong preference for either side—squatters among the permanent pew residents.
I felt a small pang of annoyance as I watched the altar boys, some of them friends of mine, lighting candles. I found church excruciatingly boring. I hated figuring out what to wear and thought perhaps wearing the cassock of the altar boys would get rid of that hassle, as well as saving me from boredom during Mass. Our church didn’t allow altar girls, which I thought was stupid, because other Catholic churches in Calgary did. But what I really wanted was to be an altar boy.
“Did you see Laura’s new haircut?” Mom whispered to me during the opening hymn. I located the Desmonds and saw Laura sporting a short, stylish cut—the sassy wedge many young girls and women had recently begun to wear, popularized by figure skater Dorothy Hamill. My stomach tightened. Sitting there with my shoulder-length, quasi-shag mop, reminiscent of mid-1970s David Cassidy, I knew exactly where this would go. For the rest of the service, I stole glances at Laura, my newly-appointed nemesis. It took exactly four seconds into our drive home for my mother to mention it.
“That is a really smart haircut Laura has there,” she said. Faint, distracted murmurs of affirmation came from the others.
“Mm-hmm.”
“You see a lot of girls with that sexy, short pixie these days,” she went on. I cringed. My mom had used the words sexy and pixie—horrifying in and of themselves. Pixie reminded me of some fairy or sprite and sexy sounded plain yucky referring to a girl my age. I waited for what I knew had to be coming. She turned in her front passenger’s seat to look at me in the back.
“You should get your hair cut like that,” she said with authority. “It would draw attention away from your chin.”
“I like mine how it is,” I replied. And what’s wrong with my chin? I refused to give her an opportunity to tell me. The truth was, I didn’t love my hairstyle; I wished it were shorter, but people already frequently called me him and he. This frustrated and upset me, not because they were wrong, but because I knew they were right. If I cut my hair short, I’d look so much like a boy that the shame I felt over the universe’s big screwup would kill me. Renée wouldn’t cut her hair that short.
Shame and
