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“I don’t know.”
She hates that answer. She can’t think of anything better to say.
CJ pulls at the shirt, borrowed from a friend in a cut that doesn’t suit her but makes her look good and just plain wrong at the same time. She pulls at the pants, fingers burning with frustration, and then pulls off the shirt and tosses it to the side and only feels a little bad for treating Emma’s possession so carelessly.
She takes her bra off. She naively wonders if that fixes the shirt, but doesn’t want to put it back on.
“I thought you looked good,” Andy offers, sitting on the chair by CJ’s desk, taking sips from a bottle of beer. “Not that I’m complaining about this look, either, but…”
CJ shakes her head. She wants to take the pants off too but has nothing in reach to change into. “It’s not right,” she says. She doesn’t know what would be right.
“We’ll find something,” Andy says, but she sounds confused too. CJ doesn’t blame her.
She feels like she’s doing being a woman all wrong.
CJ’s not good at it. She never has been. Too tall, too loud, too awkward, too into sports and too into girls. Even when she wore the dresses she loved and went on dates with boys and saved up for a The Osmonds cd like the other girls in her high school. She’s doing something wrong that she can’t pinpoint.
Staring at herself in the mirror, she wants to rip her breasts off and she wants to find a dress in Andy’s closet and look hot the way other women do and she wants to never look at her reflection again. She wants to never be reminded she has a body to look at.
“I don’t know,” she repeats, even though Andy didn’t ask again. She wants to rip her hair out, shave it off, do something to it, and also thinks she’d throw up if she had to go through life without her hair. “I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
CJ doesn’t know what else she expects Andy to do, either. Andy seems to have no trouble at all being a woman. She’s a natural.
“What would you wear?” she asks, even though she doesn’t want to look like Andy, either. Her jealousy about how easily Andy is a woman doesn’t work that way. She doesn’t know how it does work. She’s always missing something.
“To the party?” Andy asks, already getting off the chair. “Picked a dress. Strapless, thought I’d be bold.”
She says it half teasingly, half confused, and CJ’s not sure what to do with her answer either. “To the speech tomorrow… my mom sent me one of my cousin’s skirt suits, you know the one who’s in law school back in Tennessee? She got pregnant, quit law school, and half her wardrobe went with it.”
“Right to you,” CJ adds. Andy laughs.
“Do you want to try the dress?” Andy offers. “I can get it for you. If it works, I pick something else.”
CJ kind of hates how easy that would be for Andy to do. She hates herself for making such a fuss, too. “That’d be nice, maybe,” she says anyway. “I don’t know why it’s such a big deal.”
“Me neither,” Andy shrugs. “But we have time.”
CJ takes the pants off and sits down on the chair while Andy leaves for her own room — barely used, really just to store clothes and old study books, but it’s good to have a room called Andy’s room when other students come over. She watches herself in the mirror, and tries to decide if she likes it better or even worse if she leans forward and creates stomach rolls.
She doesn’t figure it out before Andy returns.
It’s a nice dress. Simple, but in this bright orange that CJ would’ve guessed to clash with Andy’s hair and never would’ve looked at twice for herself. That’s the point, she tells herself now, and pulls it on without looking at the mirror and without looking Andy.
It doesn’t quite fit; she’s lankier than Andy, doesn’t have the curves to fill out a dress like this and still make people turn their heads. That’s not true. People turn their heads all the time; Andy likes to tease her for not noticing when boys at parties flirt with her. But the dress isn’t right.
CJ closes her eyes and pulls at the fabric blindly, pulls it a bit lower over her breasts and then looks in the mirror and catches Andy’s doting eyes. “Looks good,” Andy tells her, but Andy tells her she’s hot in the pajamas she’s had since she was fourteen. Andy’s unreliable, and doesn’t know what it’s like to have a body that’s just wrong.
Still, CJ asks “really?” and subconsciously flattens her breasts against her chest to the best of her ability. It doesn’t make the dress look nicer. It works better if she leaves them alone. “Not just to get this over with?”
Andy shakes her head. “You look good,” she insists. “And you can take your time.”
“It’s not vanity,” CJ feels the need to explain, even though she knows that Andy knows that too. “I don’t know what it is. But it’s not— I’m not trying to impress someone.”
Andy goes to stand behind her, arms around her waist, and CJ feels a little less wrong with Andy’s face so close to hers. Being a woman is a little less difficult to pull off if she can do it as Andy’s. “I know, honey,” Andy tells her. “You’re not vain. You’re just trying to figure it out.”
CJ tilts her head to kiss Andy’s lips awkwardly, and smiles when that makes Andy laugh. She turns around in Andy’s arms to kiss her properly, hands around Andy’s waist, her body flush against CJ’s. Andy grips her hips but makes no move to ride the dress up, doesn’t even try to move her hands beneath the fabric.
She knows — they’ve learned, somehow, little by little — that if getting dressed is this much of a problem, Andy’s hands on her breasts or between her legs is too much to bear.
She knows Andy has questions. CJ can’t stand to think about what they — or her answers to them — might be.
*
By the time they graduate, CJ’s no closer to figuring out a pattern. She’s given up, if she’s honest. Some days are just bad.
Some days, CJ gets dressed without a second thought because most of the time the loose blouses, the flannels, and her jeans are fine, just fine. Some days Andy goes down on her and CJ loves it, some days CJ doesn’t even think about how wrong it feels on bad days.
Some days she can wear her skirts and blouses all day without wanting to rip her own skin off. Other days, she’s skipped an afternoon class because she had to get the damn thing off before she seriously started to hurt herself.
She never tells Andy how bad those days can get.
On other days, CJ wants to claw at her chest and wants to burn every pair of pants she has because there’s always something wrong about the way they fit her. The other days, Andy doesn’t touch her much, because neither of them have figured out how to do that.
Some of the other days, CJ fucks Andy with a strap they both use, and wears it still, just lying in bed in the physical discomfort it brings, long after they’re done. Andy never asks the questions that that might rouse in someone. CJ’s terribly relieved.
It never gets easier, it never gets more predictable, but when they leave college and go their separate ways, CJ still manages to learn how to trick herself into thinking it did get easier.
It helps, almost, but never quite enough, that no one in politics knows what to do with her womanhood, either.
In many rooms she walks into, she’s the only woman there.
It’s easier to be a woman, she finds, when there’s not that many to compare her to and no one wants her to be one anyway.
The men she works with love women and don’t like working with women and never let her forget that she’s a woman but are more willing to pretend they can forget if she doesn’t remind them of everything they dislike about women.
They like her better if she’s CJ instead of Claudia Jean, but they like her better if she wears skirt suits instead of pant suits because they like her legs, but they listen better if she wears the pant suits. She tries to care. She tries to calculate it. She tries to be good at this.
Men flirt with her more than they hear her out on policy, but she wins them elections anyway and she gets drunk on the drinks they buy her to celebrate and when she’s drunk it’s easy to forget the tug at her chest and the uncomfortable fit of her suits and the way she’s never gone a whole day feeling right and is running out of things to blame that on.
She likes tall men so her height doesn’t stand out, and she learns she prefers dresses that flow easily instead of the ones that hug her body, and it makes her feel right, almost right, when she gets her lipstick just right in one try.
She likes being pretty, she likes doing her hair and feeling good about it, and she’s fine with it if a man kisses her and tells her she has good legs and a good body and she can tolerate a joke about women in politics being distracting when they look as good as she does. She likes and tolerates and gets through the day so she doesn’t get why at the end of the week she’s still disgusted by her own existence.
It never starts making more sense. With age, it at least becomes easier to pretend.
*
CJ is 46 years old and sorting through a wardrobe with Andy Wyatt again like the past twenty-five years have not happened, when something finally, finally clicks.
Andy’s sorting through old clothes the twins are growing out of, deciding what can be packed up and given to Josh and Donna for their oldest. CJ’s sitting on the bed, pulling at her shirt the way she’s started doing again now that her life’s not busy enough anymore to distract her.
She does a half-okay job at pretending not to choke when Andy asks, like it’s normal conversation, if she mentioned that her sister’s youngest just came out as non-binary.
CJ manages not to stammer when she asks what that means. Tries her damn hardest not to start breathing noticeably faster when Andy starts talking like she did her research.
“—they ordered them a binder, did you know those exist? I didn’t. Binds the chest, like there’s no boobs at all. Apparently you can buy packers — these— oh what am I getting flustered about, these silicone prosthetics, in the form of a dick. To— you know, simulate- yeah. Evelyn didn’t want to buy that for a thirteen year old, and that’s— I get it, but I think, I mean- if they want to— you know, if Molly wanted— oh I don’t know.”
Realises she’s missed a lot of what Andy must have said before. She doesn’t ask Andy to repeat herself. She plays with the wedding ring on her finger and wonders if there’s a polite way to say it sounds like Evelyn’s youngest might just want to be a boy.
Andy is still going. When CJ interjects with her question, figuring she can be rude if it’s just Andy, Andy shakes her head. “They’re neither, but they’ve got all these girl— parts? I suppose. I guess you just don’t know for sure where the balance is until you’ve tried a few different things.”
It’s so pointed not even CJ can miss it.
She looks away. She asks the polite questions about school and Evelyn’s husband’s reaction — she always forgets his name is Peter. She doesn’t really listen to the answers.
*
“I feel like a traitor.”
It’s only two months later. At Andy’s suggestion, CJ’s been reading the stupid (and far too relatable, far too close to her heart to be comfortable) blogs and forum posts on gender that Andy’s sent her.
She’s decided she doesn’t like the word non-binary. It makes her feel thirteen — she feels guilty about that too. She feels guilty about a lot of things.
Most noteworthy, she feels guilty that she really does relate to the idea of not quite being a woman. Of not being a woman at all, maybe, not even on the days where she doesn’t mind.
“Why?”
CJ glares at her, waves her hands like it’s obvious, and wishes she could be more frustrated at Andy’s lighthearted shrug.
“Alright,” Andy continues. “Not why, then… a traitor to whom?”
Andy doesn’t rush her for an answer.
CJ sits in silence, tapping her fingers on the wooden table, knowing the answer already but feeling it burning in her chest with every attempt she makes at opening her mouth and saying it. She feels sick; she feels monstrous; she feels like a traitor to her class even thinking about expressing the feeling.
Andy doesn’t repeat her question, doesn’t push her to answer, doesn’t tap her fingers or look around the room or indicate in any way that she’s bored or impatient or tired of CJ’s bullshit. She just waits; like she knows what’s coming.
“Women,” CJ manages eventually. No explanation, no elaboration. She doesn’t repeat herself even when she thinks the tilt of Andy’s head indicates she’d like her to.
“That makes sense.”
“So you agree?”
CJ thinks she does a good job at sounding casual about that question, thinks she does a good job at not sounding scared. The pity in Andy’s eyes makes her feel disgusted with herself for being so wrong.
“No,” Andy says, still calm. “Not at all. You made a whole lot of history for being an alleged woman in the White House — you did it while everyone was under the assumption you were, and treated you as such. This doesn’t— it doesn’t have to change that as an accomplishment. But I think it makes sense that that’s what you’re scared of.”
“Right.”
Andy grabs half a crust with some peanut butter stuck to it off of one of the twins’ plates. She offers the other half to CJ, who refuses with a laugh. CJ waits; she taps her fingers and she taps her foot on the floor and she looks anywhere except for at Andy too long as Andy eats her old crust agonizingly slowly.
“Does it bother you, that that’s what you’re known for?” Andy asks her then. “Not does it make you feel guilty, but… does being known as the first woman to be Chief of Staff feel wrong the way being called my wife feels some days?”
CJ’s told to take her time before she can even think of how much time she’d need.
Andy finishes the rest of Molly’s peanut butter crusts.
“It’s different,” CJ says quietly. “It’s a title, really. A— historical fact for the wikipedia page. No one meets us and asks you and this must be the first woman to serve as Chief of Staff.”
Andy nods. She smiles when CJ wipes the peanut butter off her mouth.
When CJ finally says “but it still feels wrong, sometimes. Less, and easier to take. But still wrong in a way that it shouldn’t feel.”
“Wrong enough that you’d want to correct people?”
It’s the only question that matters, really.
CJ can pretend all she wants that she’s brave about this — that she’s okay with the twins calling her CJ instead of mom and not at all scared that one day they’ll slip up at school and say that their mom CJ’s not a mom at all.
She can pretend that it doesn’t bother her that Andy alternates between wife, spouse, and husband, at home, always fondly, always teasingly, always paying attention to what feels best on any given day — but that the moment they step outside, Andy knows better than to risk it.
She can only pretend so long.
She feels like a traitor, she really does. She feels so guilty every time she’s praised for what she’s done for women that people have started thinking she just doesn’t like being complimented.
She feels so sick being asked what it’s like to be a woman at her level in politics because it’s been twenty-five years and CJ still struggles to find an answer, still wonders if she has a right to speak.
No amount of guilt-sick interview answers will actually be enough to find it in her to tell anyone outside her wife the reason why.
CJ doesn’t think it’s a matter of wrong enough. She doesn’t correct Andy on it. She shakes her head.
“No,” she manages. Tears jump into her eyes at the kitchen table. Her trousers fit better than they have all her life — prosthetics works. It’s something. Not everything.
“Not bad enough.”
Andy takes her hand. Kisses it. Reminds CJ that it’s been two months — two months of re-evaluating her whole life, every room she’s been in and every comments she’s received and every hours wasted trying to find a way to dress that didn’t make her want to be dead.
Two months is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
“You have nothing to feel guilty for,” Andy says when CJ’s been silent for long enough to make it clear she won’t respond to the reminder. “Nothing, CJ.”
CJ wonders how many more months it’ll be before that will sound believable.