Judith Frank

excerpt from Crybaby Butch

Chapter 1

Not a Harley butch, not a working-class he-she with a D-A; a soft-cheeked Kevin Costner butch, a Paul Mitchell hair products butch. Not a breast-binding butch, not a cigarette-pack-in-the sleeve butch, not a square-jawed butch with calloused hands, not a handy butch; neither shattered nor wired: a glad-handing butch. Not off-kilter, not maddening, not hard to see: a sight-for-sore-eyes butch. But god help you: a cat under a human's touch butch, tail flickering. A guiding hand at the small of the back butch. A here, let me take that butch. A sleight-of-hand butch, between her thighs. A baby don't leave me butch.

After dinner, shuffling by in your slippers, you glance in and stop on a dime. Transfixed: she is crying. Alarm wails in you, then subsides; ah, she's watching Rescue 911. She's sitting cross-legged on the couch in pajama bottoms and a tee-shirt, with the tissue box by her side. Dabbing at her eyes, with an elaborate self-mocking clown-grimace, she gestures at the television and says, "It's so sad." Some ordinary citizens have been roused from the torpor of the everyday. At first they thought the cry was children at play; at first they were annoyed by the ruckus; at first they explained away the strange apparition. But now they have pulled a woman from a burning car, wrested a child from a flash-flooding canal, risked life and limb for a panicked puppy, fashioned makeshift ropes, harnesses, tourniquets, and slings out of their clothes. You sit down next to her and put your hand on her leg, because your femme in tears is cause for interruption of your work, your rest, or your prayer. She didn't ask you to.

What kind of hurt is this welling up in her eyes? What kind of girl is this, easily crying? You run your hand over her flanneled thigh, pressing at the knee, imagining touching her warm wet core, imagining some final perfect gallantry. An unkind person -- such as the femme herself in certain moods -- might say you are pawing your femme as she tries to watch television. It's a fact that at any moment you could turn into an oaf.

Later, there is always a reunion. The rescued person does not have brain damage, and the spinal cord was spared. Since his rescue, his relatives tell us from their fishing boat or their backyard barbeque, he is more sober, more happy-go-lucky, more appreciative, more careful. The rescuers couldn't look more homely, with their white freckled balloon faces and their babies crawling everywhere. The two of you sit there quietly, scrutinizing, marveling. She pulls her hand away gently. They're speaking in code, a language you could easily repeat by rote but can't quite crawl inside of. Those set-piece speeches can't answer the things you need to know. How saving a life made a difference. What life was like after being saved. Whether there will be a reunion.

You were never like the rest of the girls, you beat the boys at all their games. You fled when ordered to wear a dress, brooded in your private hiding place, played the husband when you played house, skinned your knees, kissed the pretty girl next door, were looked at askance. You wish that at sixteen, holding your breath, you'd walked into your first gay bar and seen women like yourself. That you'd been astounded, sized-up, mentored. For lack of imagination, or audacity, it didn't happen that way. It took another ten years for a femme to take you home, to teach you that you'd always known what to do.

The butch you jokingly call your sponsor is a slim blue-jeaned butch with a ponytail and a baseball cap. When she leans against a fence, legs crossed at the ankle, hands shoved in her pockets, your adolescence wafts back to you, warmer, like indian summer. She gives you things to read about butches, which your eyes gallop over so madly that you dizzy yourself. She says slily, "If you weren't a butch I would have snapped you up long ago," and you snort "Oho! You would, would you!" She says "Wear it like this"; she says "Face it girl, you were born to serve." She slides her wallet out of her back pocket and peels off bills with the unconscious charisma of a young dad. When her lover wants her to play yet another sexual role, she consolidates instead, putting Eddie the male hooker and Howard the suburban husband in the same men's group. She says "If you wear it around all the time it will come to feel like a part of your body." She calls you "my best butch buddy," and just once -- heartbreakingly -- "doll." She's a rude butch, who thinks her dick is bigger than everyone else's; over time, you learn that you can parlay your own hesitancy in this regard into what looks like a quiet self-assurance.

You have to be at the restaurant in fifteen minutes to meet a friend, but my, your femme looks luscious as she folds laundry on the bed. It is still early in your affair, when love has made her radiantly beautiful, and you gaze at her in astonishment.

You come up behind her and throw her on the bed, landing hard beside her, and reach for the button on the fly of her jeans; you unbutton and unzip them quickly and slide your hand in, down her smooth round belly and under the elastic of her underwear. Her head lifts tensely out of a pile of unfolded whites. She clutches at your hand in alarm and says What are you doing? You whisper It's okay, let me, it's okay, I am here with you. Come, you think, on this carnival ride with me.

You push your hand firmly down her jeans, knuckles scraping the hard seam at the crotch. Then reach in with two fingers, stroking, burrowing into her, feeling for moist spots. Your fingers sting where you have chewed the skin.

She still has that worried look, as she moves and adjusts to your hand. She closes her eyes as if against the sight of a misery and clutches at your shirt. All the while you're whispering, coaxing. Her thighs start to grip your wrist, and your hand starts to cramp as it moves inside and around her. Now? Now. Now? You tell her when, and she comes. Your heart freefalls, wings at full expanse.

You lie there, breathing hard. She sighs as you ease your cramped fingers out of her, and grins, her eyes still closed. You laugh, and flex your sore sticky hand. A few minutes later you gently kiss her once more and leave for the restaurant with her smell still on you.

So you know what she wants, alright. You are a cocky butch with the smell of cunt on your hands. But you can't help but wonder, backing out of the driveway: What if it hadn't worked? What if she had thrown you off her -- as later, she will -- with real fury? Well then you would have stopped. But without the final resounding okay, what would you have been to her? You might have had to throw your hands up in surrender. You might have had to go limp all over. You're like a ghetto kid who has made it to the NBA: if you weren't an awfully lucky butch you might be a criminal.

What did you do before you knew what to wear? It takes some courage to conjure that girl in peasant skirts, high-waisted slacks, blouses with shoulder pads, pumps, a pocketbook. Better to think you were always like this. A friend of yours once spoke derisively about a woman she knew who had learned to tie a scarf by reading fashion magazines. Better to have always known, to have fingers genetically predispositioned to scarf-tying, to not have to face your own gross hapless self. It was only years later, thoughtfully fingering your first necktie, that you realized your fingers had their own disposition and their own memories. Tying a necktie you know from your father, who died eighteen years before you had occasion to tie your own necktie. He must have let you tie his ties, you realized, your heart stopping just for a moment: you must have stood between his legs as he sat, working with clumsy kid's fingers, breathing through your mouth.

What did you do before you knew what to wear? Before you discovered with such pleasure your own fine appraising eye? It seems like such a small thing, to know what to lay against your breathing flesh. But you've learned that when you greet the question of what to wear with thoughtful pleasure, your life has changed forever. With most things you have to acquire your taste; you discovered a taste that seemed already formed and waiting, and looked over new expanses of cut and fabric with a wild surmise. It feels as though you never even had to practice, although in truth you have made some mistakes over time.

Some days you want your shirt open wide at the neck, to look like a smooth-chested teenaged boy. Some days you won't wear a necktie, only a bolo tie; some days you will wear a necktie, but only loosely, with the top button of your shirt unbuttoned. Some days you go softer butch, because you feel so square cut and buttoned up inside that the actual items of clothing make you look as though you're trying too hard, as though you're trying, and failing, to look like a man. But some days you are not wearing three items of women's clothing. Some days you wear men's jockey shorts, but never on the days you have a chiropractor appointment. Some days you're sauntering down the street in a three-piece suit, a fine figure of a butch; but you're crampy from your period, and your pants are a tiny bit tight in the thigh.

You learn to accommodate to small humiliations. Just because you're a butch it doesn't mean you can open every jar. You learn to be modest, not to say, "Why just give that here, little lady," but to wait till it's offered to you. So if you fail, it looks truly impossible, and if you succeed, it looks like voila! a butch to the rescue! Men must know this trick, at least the men you like: carelessly letting their authority spin to the floor, then snapping it back into their hand. At ease, hands not in fists but cupped and open and held aloft, doves fluttering out of them and up to the rafters.

She knows the infield fly rule. And she knows why it's good if a runner gets on first with less than two out and the pitcher coming up (you are National League girls; you have taught her to scorn the DH). "Because then he can bunt," she once said, "right?"

"Right," you answered, "but say it this way: 'because then he comes up in a bunting situation.'"

She laughed: "A bunting situation," she said, with relish. And then later, at various moments during the summer, glancing at the TV, "Look honey, a bunting situation!"

But her favorite thing about sports is when they fall down; this makes her shriek with delight.

One day, before you were living together, you came over and flipped on the TV to the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. It was Princeton and Georgetown, and you blinked incredulously when you saw the score: tied, with five minutes to play. What? Your perception was screwed up; maybe you were in a dream. But no: those skinny Princeton boys were playing a complicated passing game, the Georgetown players flailing at them with helpless grace. She came into the room as you were standing close to the TV, disoriented with the thrill, and stood next to you. You explained the significance of this moment, what a huge upset it would be. She nodded, impressed, and the two of you sat down on the edge of the bed to watch it played out.

When Georgetown pulled it out in the final minutes, she hit you on the arm and burst into tears. "Why did you get me so involved?" she cried. You laughed, bewildered; it was just a basketball game. The thing is, when she gets involved, she can't detach, even for a moment. You put your arm around her and with the other hand you snapped your fingers, showing the proper amount of time it should take to detach after your team loses. One morning the four-year-old son of a good friend asked you which one of you is the mommy and which is the daddy. You had spent the night there; you were leaning against the kitchen counter and drinking coffee with your hair sticking straight up, while she was still sleeping. You started in on some rigmarole about how sometimes you're the mommy and sometimes you're the daddy and sometimes you switch off and it's very fluid, when she walked sleepily into the room and asked "What's the question?" You told her. She waved her hand and said breezily, "Oh that's easy, she's the daddy," and walked into the bathroom. You hit yourself on the forehead with the heel of your hand. Duh. What had you been thinking?

She's the one who fixes things, the one with special competencies. So people say, Oh, but you guys also swap roles. But at those moments you couldn't be farther from feeling as though you're swapping roles. The femme sitting cross-legged on the floor with a slight sweat mustache, screwing furniture together: the more butch she looks, the more transcendently femme she looks. You can only see one way. Sometimes your friends recoil from you as from a fanatic; and indeed, you have been soaked in a vision. She's standing there in sneakers and her jean jacket, impatiently jingling the car keys. Hey girl, she's saying in the quick tilt of her head, c'mon, let's hit the road. And here's what you see:

a woman who's going to take you for a ride
dark curls against a smooth white neck
a woman you would like to delay, insolently
yourself leaning back in the passenger seat and sighing
your legs easing open
her fingers unfurling around the keys
your face smothered in denim

You don't see her as a femme right away, maybe. You feel out in your head how you could be a butch to her, your fingers running expertly over the braille of your own hunger.

"No," you say firmly, moving her hand away, "not like that." Haven't you said this a million times before? Why can't you get the touch you want?

Her wrist stiffens and she pulls away, ostentatiously reaching for her book on the night table. You blow dust off an ancient shard: way back in the archeological layers of your time together, she touched you with a doubting hand, and when you pulled away in disappointment, your hearts sank and you entered a stone age. You are in a stone cycle, and it is vicious indeed.

She's so different, easily offering herself to you, turning rosy and convulsing as you whisper in your ear; and often, your hands and mouth glistening and the petals of your heart unfurling, you are glad and satisfied. But sometimes there's a rebellious murmur inside you, and you wonder what it would take to get you to that place. You've tried. Touched by her, you've gripped her hair and started flipping through the Rolodex of your fantasies -- the ones with the shuddering femme; with the handcuffed football players, horny and grass-stained; with the astonished teenager, ass clenching as an older woman unzips his chinos; with Batman bound and watching Robin get violated by the Joker's henchmen; with the women forced to their knees; with everything in them but yourself. You've lain there anxiously flipping from one to the other, listening for that fine high note in the distance, not yet audible, trying to imagine it forcefully into existence. But it's no use; you trust only your own practiced hand.

You try not to believe it's because you're the better lover, so much more attuned to her, but secretly you do believe that. You lie under her hands staring at the bugs in the bowl of the halogen lamp, imagining her to be bored or faintly disgusted or maybe just selfish. You hate her for the diffidence of her hands.

She is back from Christmas with her family, overfed and under-recognized, her face a little greasy. She has a slightly marionettish quality; she walks off the plane, her jaw moving on its hinges, saying things like "alrightee then" and "okee-dokee." They spent the whole time telling stories about some make-believe daughter, and changing the subject when she alluded to her actual life. They're not so happy with the queer she has become. You know that when they think of you, they think: bulldagger.

At home you put her in a hot tub with a magazine and a glass of ice water, and wait for her to quake back to life. When she does, she'll cry out and clutch you, and her tears will soak the neck of your grateful shirt. You'll recognize each other again. Till then, you patrol the place like a sentinel.

When she towels off, you peek in and see a gleam of something like affection, or maybe hostility, in her face. You follow her into the bedroom -- you can't help yourself -- get into bed with her and, feeling the chill of the sheets on your bare legs, take her hand. You offer her a neat breakdown of the problem into component parts, capping it off with six or seven solutions. If only she'll make her needs known; if only she'll take the bull by the horns. She regards you thoughtfully, and says she'd like to write a sitcom about you, in which every episode is about someone you know having a problem, and your coming in and fixing it. It would be called by your name, and have a theme song about how you can solve every problem in a minute.

One day she takes you with a cold fury. Ties you up and fucks you with a vibrator, at the same time that, with a gloved and lubricated finger, she fucks you for the first time in the ass. This gets your attention. You are riveted in place and also going through the roof. It takes a little while for you to come down and get organized enough to come. Afterward you turn on your stomach, your fists balled under you, slathered with your own excitement. You turn your face to her -- oh, she's so smug, holstering her pistols after she blows at their smoking tips -- and ask with your eyes stinging and a laugh burbling up from your throat, "What was that?"

She never does it to you again, even though you ask her to.

When you cry, you hear yourself crying in her voice. You feel your face crumple like hers, feel as though you're looking out through her streaming eyes. Crying is a language whose grammar you're only just learning, so for now you're imitating your best teacher. So much crying! You're a crybaby butch, giddy from crying. You learn to be seen crying, caught just as the tears swoop into your throat; you learn to breathe evenly, skimming atop the huge racking surf inside you. After a few weeks the skin under your eyes starts to burn. A recently-divorced friend recommends Puffs Plus, because, she says, they have lotion in them and though that makes them a little gross, they're easy on the skin. She takes you aside and says confidentially, "Hon, this is not the time for recycled products."

They can overcome you at any time, these tears. They're having their way with you.

Your face is so blotchy and sore you go to the linen closet and pick up the blue corn facial mask. "What would you like to dress up as?" she asked you one night, holding it in one hand, and parsley mint facial mask in the other: "A tortilla chip or a leg of lamb?" You were in trouble, in your last months together, and you were about to go away for a week, to get a life, as she had requested. And what she taught you was how to put on a facial mask. She joshed you into repeating the steps aloud: steam, apply, rinse, moisturize. You sat on the bed in your underwear with your faces immobile watching Nick at Night, wisecracking out of the sides of your mouths. She wore a towel as a turban, and you wore a headband she had fashioned for you out of an old pair of nylons, to push back your short hair.

You repeat the steps aloud. You feel the good cold burn of the mask. What would you like to dress up as? You sit down on the bed, acclimating to the pungent smell of cosmetics as the mask hardens and hardens. You put your hand tentatively to your cheek, and a little bit of it crumbles in your hand.