Take a Lemon

I found Dad alone in his study the next day, watching the Bowl games. This time, he hadn’t even tried to ask me to join him, but I waited for a commercial and then sat on the arm of his chair and said, “Hi!”

Sadly, he flinched. He’d been doing that for most of the week since I’d told him my secret. “Marsh! Um… you didn’t… I mean, did you want to watch the game with me?”

“Would you like me to, Dad?” I asked, watching him carefully. Over the past few months, it had become normal for me to call him, “Daddy,” but that was one of those things that really seemed to bother him now, so I’d stopped.

“Um, well… you’ve never… I mean, of course, Pr – I mean, Marsh.” The pain in his voice tore at my heart. “I don’t know what to think, anymore… Marsh. I feel as though a giant hole has been torn in my heart and I can’t even do anything about it. You’re suddenly a stranger to me, and, well…”

“That’s why I came in, Dad. I think we need to talk.”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “Of course, M– Marsh. We really do.”

“Would you like to wait until half time?”

“No.” Suddenly decisive, he picked up the remote and switched off the TV. “This is much more important than which college is going to be able to boast about having the best record.” He stood and gestured to the armchair in which he had been sitting. “Sit down, M– Sit down.” And pulled over his desk chair to face me as I sat down.

“I suppose I’ve been avoiding you,” he continued, “and I’m sorry. You’ve been dealing with this for, what, three months now?” I nodded. “Then it’s about time I started to deal with it as well. I don’t want to ‘take over’ again. You tell me what you want to tell me. And… tell me what you want me to call you.”

Mom and I had talked about this a lot. It might have been easiest for Dad to pretend he didn’t know about me and go on calling me his ‘princess,’ and I’d gotten really comfortable with that. I’d decided that it was silly for me to worry about my masculinity being threatened, under the circumstances, and to tell the truth, I’d really grown to like the closeness Marsha had had with him. But I didn’t see any way to go back to that.

“You can just call me, ‘Marsh,’ Dad. It was my nickname as Marshall as well. Um… what would you like to know?”

He chuckled. “Neither one of us wants to go first, I see. OK, tell me what you… what Marshall was like. What kinds of things did you enjoy? Um… how were you… socially?”

“I had a lot of girlfriends, if that’s what you wanted to know, Dad.” He protested that it wasn’t what he was asking, but I saw him relax. “Um… and I was intimate with a number of them.”

“I see.”

“I guess that’s something very different between me and Marsha.”

“Um… yeah.”

“I was a bit taller then you, and not really athletic. But girls really seem to like a guy who plays the guitar, and I play – or rather played – very well. A lot better than I showed you the other day.”

“I see.”

“And I really can’t complain about you as a Dad – you’ve always been the greatest Dad a guy could ask for,” I told him.

“Well, I wasn’t trying to–”

“I just want you to remember something. I am a girl, now. I might not be the girl you remember, but I’m still… well, I’m not your son, now. I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m… I’m your daughter. It’s taken me a lot of time to come to terms with it, and I’m not saying that I like it, but that’s the way things are right now.”

“I see that. I’m sorry, Marsh. It’s just been a real surprise for me. And… I’ve been remembering that the last time I took you to the train, you asked me if I missed having a son. I’m afraid that I didn’t realize then why you were asking.”

“It’s OK, Dad. You gave the answer that Marsha would have wanted to hear. And… I couldn’t really expect you to miss me, when you never knew me.”

He nodded again.

“But now… I don’t know if I can change back, but as long as I’m a girl, I’ll be acting like one.”

“So it’s an act?”

I squirmed a bit. “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, I really do feel the things a girl in my position would feel, and that includes liking boys. It doesn’t mean anything about what I was like as a boy.”

“Ah, I see. I guess you might think your Dad’s being a bit overly emotional. It’s just a bit difficult to keep treating you as ‘my little girl’ given…”

“Yeah, I see. I just want you to know, that I’m OK with it. It’s actually easier for me. If you see what I mean. And I didn’t mean that I don’t need your help. I know that there are lots of things you can do for me that I can’t do for myself, including dealing with some aspects of this situation.”

“You seem to have managed pretty well,” he acknowledged. “You’re clearly a big girl now – I mean, a… well, you’re very mature.”

I laughed. “’Big girl’ is fine, Dad.”

He stood and pulled me into an embrace. “You know,” he said. “Children do change as they grow up, but this isn’t quite what I was expecting!”

We both laughed at that. With his arms around me and his chin nuzzling the top of my head, I felt a real urge to snuggle against him and call him, ‘Daddy’ again, but I resisted, because he really seemed uncomfortable with it.

“So, would you like to talk over the plan of action now, or when I take you to the train station?” he asked after a moment.

“Um, Dad…” I said. “Actually, I’m going to drive up with Jeremy.”

He held me at arms length and stared at me in surprise. “You’re…?” He shook his head. “OK, I need to get used to this. I should just think of you as Marsha and forget what you told me? Do a bit of doublethink?”

I look up at him, a bit red-faced. “I guess so… sometimes that’s what I do. I feel like I’m ‘Marsh’ when I interact with my friends and… boys, and ‘Marshall’ when I’m working on the problem of changing back. So, seriously… if you wanted to pretend that I was Marsha and treat me the way you did until last Saturday, that would be OK. I mean it, Dad. Daddy.”

He flinched again, only not so much.

“Let me think about that, Marsh. Um…” He sat down and gestured me back to my seat. “Let me talk to Marshall for a few minutes, then.”

I grinned. “Ok, here’s where we stand. I told you my friend heard where the lab probably is. When we all get back to school, we’re going to go and see if we can get in.”

“And then? What do you expect to find? People? Equipment?”

I sat back. “I really hadn’t thought that far ahead,” I admitted. “I just figured we’d find out and go from there. I guess… we’re probably not going to find any people, but maybe we’ll find something that they forgot which will lead us to them.”

“OK, anything you can find… if you can figure out where they’re hiding, I might be able to do something. With all of the secrecy, the ‘reputation of the college’ excuse doesn’t make sense to me. It’s possible, of course, but I’m betting that there’s some kind of lawsuit being threatened.”

“Really?”

He sounded comfortable now, back in his own element. “There could be a lawsuit from one of the victims’ relative forcing them to keep it all quiet, or possibly one threatening damages. If it were the latter, I’d expect somebody to try a class-action lawsuit and advertise a lot. Since I haven’t heard of any such thing, that seems less likely. So I’m going to assume that somebody outside of the college wants this all hushed up for some reason.”

“I don’t follow you,” I admitted. “How does that help?”

“Well, if I’m right, and we can get some evidence, we may be able to make the whole thing moot – and get the school to help us out here. But in the mean time, we can expect them to conceal and deny and make it as hard as possible to figure things out. And they might be able to put some pressure on people they think know more than they should. But if they were trying to get you to out your friends, that suggests that the guy who did the experiment isn’t cooperating, and they don’t know who the victims are.”

“And Dean Patterson…?” I asked.

“He knows that you’re part of this group. What he isn’t sure of, I think, is whether you actually know that the experiment is real. I certainly didn’t know when I spoke with him, after all. Sorry about calling him, by the way. I did what I thought made the most sense at the time.”

I nodded. “I know. If I had told you earlier… I’ve told Chad about this, too. Can he be in on the conversation?”

Dad raised his eyebrows. “Really? OK. Chad seems pretty level-headed.”

I told him about my agreement with Chad, and he said that he would discuss it with Chad, and maybe agree to call me together. That way we could all talk at once. Dad asked again if I wanted to watch the game with him, and I accepted. I think he was still trying to figure out whether to treat me as a boy or a girl, because at one point he started to explain the game to me and then caught himself and apologized. This was clearly going to be complicated.

And then, the one person that I had thought was supposed to be easy to relate to – my sister – suddenly turned on me. I’d asked her for her opinion on the dress I was going to be wearing back to school.

“Since when are you worried about what dress you’re wearing, Marsh?” she’d snapped.

My eyes bulged. “Haven’t I been asking your advice all along – well, the last two times I went out with Jeremy?” I countered. “We’ll be driving back together, and I thought it would make sense to look appropriate for the trip. This isn’t a date, but he’ll see me, and I don’t know how to dress for something like that. Is there a problem?”

“Just wear the green and blue,” she said, starting to close her door on me, but I stuck my foot in the way.

“Is there a problem here, Teen?”

“Why should there be a problem? Mom and Dad know everything, so we don’t have to keep secrets from them, right?”

“So what’s the issue?”

“There is no issue. Do you mind? I think I’m going to get a snack,” she said, and suddenly pushed past me.

She ran down the stairs and I almost stumbled, trying to keep up with her. She got to the kitchen ahead of me, and was already talking with Mom about something else and not looking at me. But whatever game she was playing, Mom didn’t seem to be in on it.

“Hi, Marsh,” Mom said. “Tina and I were about to make some cookies. Did you want to join us? You can bring some back to school with you.”

“Oh,” Tina said. “You know what, Mom? I just remembered that I have a report to write.” And she started to push past me again.

I guess she must have been a bit too obvious, because Mom snapped. “Tina!” and then when she didn’t stopped, called “Come back here!”

Tina didn’t stop, and Mom and I exchanged looks of surprise.

“Marsh, you get out the ingredients,” Mom said. “I’m going to go talk to your sister.”