Nova

Veronica Wasson

Nova rode her motorcycle right into the center of the town square. The engine farted and coughed and spewed white smoke. The women standing behind their market stalls glared as their customers choked and coughed on the fumes. But me a little pixie sprite of a girl, I jumped right onto the back of the bike and gripped Nova’s waist with my little hands. She opened the throttle and the beast shot us onto the thoroughfare, weaving between traffic, dipping to left and right like the debutante at the ball.

We stopped at a roadside diner and sidled up to the counter. One bathroom door said men the other said women. I perused the plastic menu, gliding my eyes over bright photographs of waffles, pancakes, omelets, french toast, turkey melts. Nova ordered a black coffee. She explained that she was purging. Just shitting out all the bad stuff. But I should get what I liked. I asked for a BLT and milkshake.

The waitress plunked the plate down in front of me and the cold cool sweating glass of milkshake.

Nova said nothing while I ate. Between sucks of milkshake I crunched bites of pickle spear. When I had finished and was wiping my grimy palms on my gingham dress, she fixed her dark eyes on me.

“Do you have a name?”

“Veronica.”

“Parents?”

“Yes.” I caught myself. “No.”

“Do you go to school?”

“Mostly I skip out.”

“Well you’re welcome to come with me but I’m biking across this blasted hellscape called america and it will be hard, very hard.”

Solemnly we shook hands and pledged eternal fealty.

When Veronica was a little girl she was an odd child. The adults did not say so, in so many words. But she could tell. They thought her responses to their questions peculiar. Such as:

“Aren’t you a boy? Shouldn’t you be playing with the other boys? Don’t you like the name you were given by your parents, who are so proud to have a son who will grow to be a man?”

“Very well,” Veronica answered them. “I shall, for now, go along with this pantomime, pretend to be a teenage boy, and when I am fully grown, will disguise myself as a bearded man as Athene took the form of Mentes King of the Taphians, and later will reveal my true form in a womanly blaze.”

And that is what happened, in fact.

As a young man, Veronica allowed her beard to grow wild and bushy like Almighty Zeus, like a mountain man, like a drifter. With her torn jeans and scavenged T-shirts, she looked disreputable and women avoided her, but certain men were drawn to her.

One such was Fontaine, whom she met one day outside a store that sold vinyl records. She was leaving the store, which was on the first floor of a brownstone, steps leading down from the entrance to the hustling sidewalk, and she stopped to light a cigarette. A young man scruffy in a knit hat and no shirt sat on the stoop. They smoked side by side for a minute, and then he asked Veronica if she smoked weed. Well of course she replied yes, and he asked if she wanted to smoke some weed in the park. And so of course they did. And that was how she met Fontaine.

Of course, this was when Veronica was a boy, and of course, Fontaine was queer and they made out in the park, high as fuck amid the dappled light and shadow cast by the leaves of scraggly trees, watched over by squirrels who chittered amongst themselves, exchanging their short staccato messages that said “Yes!” or “No!,” “Why!” and “Why not!”

His spunk tasted bitter, slightly salty, slightly sweet, slightly metallic. There is no right or wrong way to feel about semen. There is however the air growing chill in the late afternoon, and the way the light angles over the river, the skyline softening in the haze, dogs bounding after frisbees.

“Because I masquerade as a boy,” Veronica thought to herself, “I am expected to strut, to preen, to take up space, to have a certain violence about me, the potentiality for violence, a menace of squared shoulders, jutting hip, an easy nonchalance. But I am none of these things.”

“Because I masquerade as a boy,” Veronica thought, “I can slip into a room, I can join a conversation, speak my mind, have opinions.” This was true but also not true, because increasingly Veronica found herself dissociating from herself, foundered on her own shoals. Her favorite thing now was smoking pot with Fontaine while the squirrels darted about, their little claws gripping the bark of a tree, their little hands clutching acorns.

Fontaine at least did not ask questions, did not demand emotional intimacy. His kisses were pure, tasting of nothing but spit and cigarettes.

With Nova’s motorcycle between my legs and my arms wrapped around Nova’s torso, the engine shrieking, I could have orgasmed, shuddering in the slicing wind, in the distinctive monochromatic glow of the city at night. We cruised from place to place. Stopping at every greasy diner. Stopping at every queer bar. Stopping to piss or at a 7-Eleven to get coffee and a pack of cigarettes.

We lay together on a thin mattress on the floor. I lay with Nova’s warmth against my breasts. Her breathing was a slow movement.

Of course I fell in love immediately, with her record collection, her French press on the kitchen counter, the sagging sofa in the living room, the crocheted afghan, the philodendrons hung near the windows.

I am struggling to describe this apartment, because what I remember is the rising and falling of Nova’s breath in the dark room, a single candle placed on the floor beside the mattress, draping a protective glow around our bodies. The sharp scent of Nova’s sweat and heat.

The monochrome night. Shadowing around us. As if the world could be held at bay, for just an instant but the instant lasted a long time, it lasted always, just then, held between two breaths, and I pressed my cheek against Nova’s skin and turned my face. There. Toward.

Fontaine worked odd jobs here and there. Handing out flyers. Moving stuff. He sold a bit of weed but only to friends and friends of friends. Five bucks in his pocket at any time.

Veronica liked his smooth chest. His cigarette taste. His sharp shoulder blades and long rough fingers. His occasional moments of faraway thought when his eyes seemed to telescope inward.

Always she remembered that she was only pretending to be a man but at times she found it almost comfortable. She could stride through the world, owning the sidewalk. She was wrapped up in layers of herself. Like the feeling of being bundled under heavy blankets. Sounds of the world came through muffled.

Like the low mumbled voice of Fontaine, who just then was explaining how to replace a head gasket on a car engine. She listened, vaguely, to the rise and fall of his syllables, soothed, knowing nothing of cars or car engines.

“You have to clean the mating surfaces of the engine block and cylinder head thoroughly. Any dirt or debris on these surfaces can cause problems with the new head gasket.”

“You know I don’t know anything about cars, Fontaine.”

“Look, this is important. In case you ever need to change a head gasket.”

Veronica snickered. Head gasket sounded like the name of a sex toy.

He leaned back on his elbows. Around them the weekend park-goers picnicked and walked dogs that shat on the dewy grass. Suddenly the spring weather felt eternally sad to Veronica.

She felt tears form in the corners of her eyes. She knew she could nudge this feeling of sadness, just a tiny nudge, and the tears would well up and spill and roll down her cheeks. Or she could clamp down on the sadness, shove it back inside. But it was too late. Fontaine had already noticed. His attitude softened. He grew tender. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her to his chest.

They rolled on the grass, grinding their hips together, fucking through their clothing.

“Stop,” she panted, laughing. “Everyone can see.”

He breathed into her ear, onto her neck, a hot breath that warmed her down to her crotch. “Nobody’s watching,” he whispered.

They sat next to each other on a park bench.

“Sometimes I think moods are just chemical,” she said.

He made a gesture like shooing away a gnat. It annoyed him when she talked about moods.

“You’re just like a girl. With all your mood swings. Me, I don’t have mood swings. I’m happy when life is good. And when life is bad, I do something about it. Whatever it takes. Any kind of hustle. You bet I do.”

She met up with Nova in a diner. They both ordered coffee.

“Sometimes I think these moods are just chemical,” Veronica said. “I’ve been pretending to be a boy, but secretly I’ve been injecting estrogen every week.”

“How can you ‘pretend to be a boy,’” Nova said. “How would that even work.”

It was true that Nova looked more masculine than Veronica, with her crew cut and leather jacket.

“I can pretend to be a boy because I know the secret codes. How to gesture. How to slouch. How to shrug and nod. When I fuck Fontaine and he opens to me like a woman. Maybe you wouldn’t understand.”

Nova blazed. “Of course I understand.”

“You’re wrapped up in your own thing. It’s OK. I don’t mind.”

She thought about Fontaine. His boyish quality, his mercurial face, often serious, often troubled, his silences that were not cold. She loved the little scar above his lip. His musky odor. The way he absorbed himself in rolling a joint. His carelessness and lapses of judgment.

If she were really a boy (she thought to herself), they could have been buddies. They could’ve shared a laconic friendship that consisted of scrapes with the law, petty vandalism, nights spent puking in an alleyway, hopping freight trains, and slugging whiskey right from the bottle. Two boys on a lark.

Instead she was here, on the back of Nova’s motorcycle, doing seventy-five on the freeway, the asphalt a smear of gray around them, like a churning river. Veronica could feel her heart in her chest, loudly. The wind sang a high keening wail.

Veronica had always liked boys’ adventure stories. The kind with pirates, castaways, sled dogs, rapier duels, jungle vines and quicksand, aerial dogfights, fist fights in train compartments, a boxing match with a clean fight, I want to see a clean fight boys. There was that camaraderie. Boys in their undershirts, boys sharing a cigarette, boys having a good clean fight. Take your blows like a man.

Instead, here she was, on the run with Nova, eating at hole-in-the-wall diners, sleeping at motels. Quickly locating the islands of safety in any city and any town, whether a whole district or just a dive bar with a telltale look, a certain name.

Veronica said to Nova, “When I was a girl, maybe five, and we lived in Florida, we drove past a lake where an alligator lived. That’s what my father told me. There, Veronica. There in the lake. It’s an alligator. He said to me. Look, look, look at the alligator. I could never see the alligator but sometimes I thought maybe I saw the alligator. Maybe I saw it. I knew it would never bite me. The alligator lived in the lake where the branches of cypress trees hung sleepily and the sigh of Spanish moss lulled me in the back seat. When the trip was long and the car kept driving, I got bored and lay on my back with my bare feet pressed against the window, the vinyl cool against my arms and the glass warm on the soles of my feet. The alligator was my secret friend. Sometimes it spoke to me. Not out loud, silly. In my mind. It said, ‘Little girls are tasty but I would never eat you. I would munch on a raccoon first.’ I remember a ranch with horses. I remember the hard gleam of brass casings. I remember spitting watermelon seeds while the lightning bugs glimmered.”

When she was five, already she was Veronica, although she didn’t yet know her true name. Later, she forgot who she was and was lost to herself for many years.

They passed a stand selling jewelry and knit caps. Veronica stopped to look. She fingered a silver and turquoise earring.

“This is beautiful,” she told the woman who ran the stand. The woman nodded. She had a ruddy complexion and wispy gray hair. She looked solid. Like someone who would know how to put up a storm window. Like someone who knew the names of plants.

Nova was trying on a knit cap. She looked at herself in the round mirror mounted on the display rack. She titled her head this way and that.

“It suits you,” the woman said. Her voice was clear and resonant and reminded Veronica of wind through cattails or the chiming of a glass clock.

Nova paid for the hat and they continued on. It was a sunny day and the promenade was filled with families eating ice cream cones, young couples arm in arm, tourists browsing the sidewalk stalls. There was a general air of jollity.

“I don’t remember my childhood,” Nova said.

Veronica looked disappointed.

“Look, it’s nothing personal. I just didn’t have a great childhood, that’s all.”

They stopped at a fish and chips place. Nova still wore the knit cap, pulled down over her ears. She licked the oil and salt from her fingertips, briskly down a row of fingers from forefinger to pinky on her right hand, the same hand that opened the throttle on her bike, caressing velocity from the great machine.

“Well look at it this way,” Nova said. “We both had childhoods of a sort, unable to live our selves. My trauma was the usual sort. A type of performance art. To survive. Cliched, I know. Just a teenage girl with the temerity to want not to be hurt.”

We cruise into another safe zone and Nova parks the bike near a bar that is thumping with rock’n’roll music. Inside has that smell of stale beer and body heat. We’re here to meet Nova’s local contact. To pass the time we drink beers and shoot pool. I am very bad and Nova sinks all the balls in their pockets, but I like the mechanical clunk as the ball drops somewhere within. I like to hold my cigarette in curled fingers, vamp suggestively, distracting Nova, who nonetheless coolly takes her shot.

She is staying cool and I am hot. I’ve got it bad. But we have to wait. Finally Nova’s contact arrives, a hard, compact woman what I imagine a paratrooper to look like, but she twists her napkin as we all sit together in a booth at the back of the bar, as I imagine a paratrooper never would do, until the napkin is shredded into tiny pieces on the table. “Nervous tic,” she says apologetically. “I need something to do with my hands, so I shred napkins, or I go crazy.”

“It’s hard to be this exhausted all the time. But when I go to sleep I’m rolling in my bed like staggering on the deck of a ship in a storm, just pitching stuff overboard, casting all the jetsam onto the sea. My dreams are sodden things, I wake up my hair tangled across my pillows like black seaweed after the tide goes out.”

“I don’t have time,” Nova says, idly carving her initials into the table with a penknife. “To listen to this shit.”

“We’re all running out of time. That’s not the issue. Time is just logistics. You move through your day. Sun rises, sun sets, moon over the city, scintillating on the river, that’s the passage of time. It’s not actually under your control, y’know? When time is stilled, that’s when you should be scared, when the insomnia creeps up on you, slashing the pattern like a knife slashed across an oil painting. There is the bucolic scene—a meadow, sheep, a shepherd—and there is the gash in the painting, the gash in the meadow, the sheep, the shepherd, through which you can see the face of the painter leering some lascivious bastard just staring at you through the gash.” She pauses, as if she’s run out of steam, and gaze cast downward sweeps the bits of shredded napkin into a neat pile. Then she looks up again, eyes steely now, once more the paratrooper. “You can crash at my place for tonight. You and your boyfriend.” Looking at me—“girlfriend? Whatever. But you need to be gone by tomorrow morning. I’m afraid it’s all I can offer.”

Veronica held fast to the idea that she held within herself a stable identity, and that she was solid, actually here, in fact real, whatever that might designate, living deep in the wilderness of herself, waiting here suspended in a golden afternoon for Nova’s return from the outlying suburbs where a cul de sac could spell the death of one’s resolve and every strip mall was arranged dutifully in a row.

This was Veronica’s condition for survival. To hold herself lightly.

The door opened and Nova strode into the room, motorcycle helmet under one arm.

“I’ve just been to see my shrink for my weekly session,” Nova said. “His office is out in the suburbs, an office park near the freeway exit by an auto dealership. There is a real estate office and a cannabis dispensary, fast food places, a vape shop, and an adult store that sells marital aids and lingerie. Men in khakis and button-up shirts work at the auto dealership, men in oil-stained jumpsuits work at the service center around the back. The men eat lunch at the fast food places. They get their e-cigarettes at the vape shop. As far as I can tell, the adult store has no customers, has probably never had a single customer. Bored office assistants line up outside the cannabis dispensary.

“My shrink’s office is down the hall from a water filtration business and a holistic healing center. There is a laser and electrolysis clinic on the first floor. I sit in the waiting room pretending to read a back issue of National Geographic. Glossy color photographs of scuba divers and coral reefs.

“He sees me into his office, walking behind me. I sit on the sofa. My shrink is a Freudian of the old school. He wants to fuck me. He calls this countertransference. The analyst’s desire for the analysand. He wants me to suck him off while he sits in his chair. I’m hot for him. I admit it. Then he turns me over and fucks me on the carpet.

“He wants me to grow my hair long. He says it would look better. More feminine.” Nova runs a hand over her crew cut. “I told him I’m keeping it short. He accused me of resistance. He said that unconscious resistance is a phenomenon common in psychoanalytic patients and that patients must confront their unconscious fears and desires. For example my fear of the Feminine. ‘Daddy,’ I said—I call him Daddy, it just came out once, I meant to say ‘Doctor’ but it came out ‘Daddy’—he called this a parapraxis, a Freudian slip—‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘I’ll never be femme and I think you like it, just how you like it when I call you Daddy.’ Of course he tried to turn it around—asked me how that made me feel—but I saw him twitch, just a little, just one eyebrow. He’s not very expressive. Even when we fuck, he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t make any noise at all, he’s efficient and methodical, but he knows how to get me off. Don’t think that he’s a selfish lover, because he isn’t. I don’t kid myself that he’s in love with me. I’m certainly not in love with him. He’s a bastard, in fact, and I hate his guts.”

Veronica wondered what it all meant. Why this abjection. When Nova seemed so tough.

Sometimes Veronica wondered if she understood womanhood at all, because it seemed to her that Nova, who after all had been born a woman, it seemed to Veronica that Nova struggled mightily with it, that womanhood was a slippery intractable problem, impossible and yet demanded by those who would claim that it was easy, and if Nova, even her, then what chance had Veronica to succeed in this endeavor when her parents her peers her teachers were united in their belief that this was not possible, that it was impossible for Veronica to be anything other than the man they said she was destined to remain. It made her want to scream.

The hardest thing was to forgive herself. The true story of the little girl who colored every page with indigo and periwinkle, who was friends with alligators, who laughed squinting into the sun, mouth open wide to the summer air, who read in wonderment the words in story books, patiently collecting within herself strand by strand the necessary strength to suffer the perilous journey ahead, the journey through boyhood and manhood, scratching the days into her arms and into her thighs and nearly going down, nearly pulled beneath the waters of the self.

At a roadside diner, Veronica wrote a letter to Nova that she planned to mail someday, perhaps years hence, when these adventures were a faded memory.

The letter read:

I was always wanting to be submerged.

I was never wanting to be me in my body.

I was always feeling my palms sweaty and my fingers awkward.

I was sometimes deep within.

I was never letting another touch me in certain places.

I was always touching another in certain ways.

I was occasionally drifting lazily into sleep.

It happened sometimes that I got it right.

It happened sometimes that I was under the fullness of you.

It happened sometimes that the poetry was movement.

It never happened that I wanted my pain but sometimes I was welcoming it.

Sometimes I was thinking something thoroughly.

Sometimes I was tricking myself into wanting something in a certain way.

I was sometimes allowing myself to be hurt in ways that I wanted.

I was sometimes forcing myself in a way to be the sort of person I was being.

But I was always in the end Veronica.

Veronica bought a postcard that showed the exterior of the diner and addressed it to Fontaine. She tried to think of something to write but couldn’t, so instead she reapplied her lipstick and left a perfect red imprint of her opened lips in the space for a message. It would have to do. He could infer the rest.