We were going to save the Chesapeake Bay. That was what the job ad promised. It was only two years after Al Gore scared the bejeezus out of us, and it felt good to be doing something about the problem, and to be getting paid for it. There was no interview process; we attached our skimpy resumes to an email and were told to report for a shift shadowing experienced fundraisers. They packed us into a van that set out from an anonymous corporate park at 4:00 pm, when the heat would supposedly start diminishing and people would soon be arriving home from work. 

In the van were six young women—we would all have called ourselves girls. Three were experienced, three were on trial. I tried to discern if the other newbies were nervous, but overall there was an air of whatever-may-come between the three of us. We were all college students with hippie inclinations who needed cash to underwrite our extracurricular ambitions, like the album my band was hoping to record. 

There was a team leader, let’s call her Erika. She had unfussy brown hair and wore unflattering jean shorts (too long, too boxy), and carried a clipboard that conferred a hazy authority. She gave us the rundown: working in pairs, we would go door-to-door and ask for donations to protect the waterways that fed into the bay. We were given maps of tributaries, along with a list of at-risk wildlife. I asked if we could stress the threat to people’s livelihoods. “Fishermen,” I said. “Crabbers, shrimpers, et cetera.” I doubted that wildlife would be a galvanizing force, but then, I didn’t care much for animals. 

“Whatever you think will get either signatures or money,” Erika said. “Preferably money.” 

The other girls were silent, studying the pamphlets we would hand people. The front featured a large photo of marshland at sunset; the inside told readers how to make out their checks. I wasn’t sure what the organization would do with the money once we’d collected it, but I figured asking more questions would jeopardize my employment prospects. 

“If you’re hired, you’ll have a donation quota to meet, but since you’re on a trial, just do the best you can,” Erika told us. 

The van drove for forty-five minutes and parked in a housing development with no trees to shield us from the glaring late-afternoon sun. I was concerned; I burned easily, and sweating made me cranky. We’d been warned to wear good walking shoes, but all I had were Converse low-tops, which rubbed at bunions I refused to acknowledge. We were handed clipboards with petitions and more brochures, along with fanny packs holding pens and an envelope for checks. Erika paired us off, one experienced fundraiser, one newbie, and assigned each team three long, beige streets. My partner was Erika, who checked her watch and told us to be back at the van by eight. 

This meant I wouldn’t get home until after nine, so I texted my band, Pretty Things, and told them we’d have to bump rehearsal to 9.30. Job trial, I sent. It’s a glorious trainwreck, I’ll tell you all about it. 

“All right,” Erika said, touching my elbow and pointing down the block. “You take that side of the street and I’ll take this one.” 

I froze. “I thought we were working in pairs.” 

“I’ll be just over there. You’ll be able to see me the whole time if you don’t dawdle.” She strode off, flapping her clipboard against her thigh.

I texted the Pretty Things. If I disappear from the face of the earth, I was last seen in a leafless suburb west of the city. 

The sidewalk stretched and stretched. On the strip between the sidewalk and the road were paltry saplings, gasping for water, for a breeze. On the browning lawns were large, sheepish houses. We don’t know why we’re here either, they seemed to say. We just showed up one day and now they won’t let us leave. They all had vinyl siding, cosmetic shutters tacked next to the windows. I’d grown up in a house like them, and I knew they’d be ice-cold inside, full of unquestioned obligations. 

At the first house there was no answer. My knock echoed through a glossy foyer. At the second house a slender woman came to the door, preoccupied in a beautiful sort of way. She signed the petition but didn’t give any money. I admired her nails to her, and she gazed at them like she’d forgotten she had fingers. At the third house, a plump woman answered—the house behind her had all its lights on, and quilts and signs tacked to all the walls. She gave me a ten-dollar bill, but didn’t want her name or email address added to any lists. “You all will just keep emailing me til I die,” she said. “No offense.” 

And on it went. I stood on their doorsteps, peering behind the women at the sliver of their lives, and they left me in the sun while they grabbed their pocketbooks, paying for the pleasure of sending me away. I hadn’t seen Erika since we’d knocked on the first doors; she slipped inside each house as if they’d been expecting her company. 

At the second-to-last house on the block, a man answered the door. He was wearing athletic socks and denim shorts similar to Erika’s, and a stiffly new Flacco jersey. I wondered if he had just changed after coming home from work, or if he could wear those clothes to work, or if he’d been home all day. I gave him my spiel. 

“Say I give you money,” he said. “Where exactly does it go?” 

“You have all the information I do.” 

He laughed. Then he said, “Come on inside. I have to find the checkbook, and there’s no point in you baking out here.” 

I looked over my shoulder. Still no Erika. I wondered if she sat down at kitchen tables, put her chin on her fist, received the housewives’ confessions. 

Flacco’s house was frigid, spacious, and impossibly clean. There were clumsy paintings in the hallway—his wife must go to those wine and painting parties. Perhaps she was at one now. Flacco and I were the only people in the house. I felt that. 

“Want a beer?” he asked, leading me into the kitchen. 

“Not in this heat.” I was wary of saying no without a reason. 

He was looking through kitchen drawers—an odd place for a checkbook. Maybe this was one of those homes where every piece of clutter, every speck of dust or splotch of grease, was hidden behind cabinet doors and drawer fronts. He kept darting glances at me. “Glass of water, then?” 

I was standing awkwardly across the room, clipboard held in both hands, shielding my pelvis. Ice water sounded like the silkiest ambrosia. 

“Nah, we have some for the team.” Yes, you heard me, there are many of us. I added, “Thanks.”  

“Well, I’m having a beer,” he said, and turned his back on me to open the fridge. 

I have a unique skill. It’s possible for me, under the correct circumstances, to appear to switch my gender. I’ve never met anyone else who can do it, and when I’d researched it, the internet took me to sites where people grappled with gender confusion. I was never confused. Most of the time I felt like a girl. And in the times people thought I was a boy, I felt like nothing at all. 

Flacco turned around, Corona in hand. His face went oddly blank, and he looked at the door I’d come through, then back at me, reconstructing his perceptions. 

I present as a slightly effeminate man, and in certain places this can be as dangerous as being a girl, but there are mannerisms that ease doubt. 

“You got any cash?” I asked, clipboard at my side, legs braced wide. “Since that checkbook ran off on you?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” He dipped into his pocket, held out a few bills. 

“Thanks, man,” I said, and stepped forward to take the money. “Every little bit helps.” 

“Sure,” he said, watching as I walked back to the door. 

Outside, the sun was solid, mean. I reached the sidewalk as a boy, but I was a girl again when I approached the next house, where a woman was pruning flowers that grew in giant pots on her porch. “Hey there!” I said brightly as I approached, and she straightened up, shaded her eyes with her hand, and smiled at me. 

***

I know you’ll have questions. I can’t explain exactly how it works. Do you know how many ways there are to trick the brain? We only see and understand what it lets us see and understand, which is usually only what it expects to see and understand.  

There are certain things I do to seem more convincing. I keep my hair an ambiguous length. My breasts are small, and my frame athletic. If I gain weight, I gain it in the hips, belly, and ass, so I try not to. My nails are clean and neat but rarely painted. I also tend to dress simply, in jeans and T-shirts, and rarely wear jewelry. Sometimes I feel like getting dolled up, slipping into the bodycon dresses the girls in my dorm wear on nights out, teetering in heels, but clubbing tends to put you in situations where it’s very useful to not be a girl anymore. 

Did you know Lauren Bacall trained her voice into a lower register? I love Bacall, I’ve seen all her movies. I adopted her signature nostril flare as my own expression of annoyance. She’s so good at seeming annoyed or imposed upon. She’s also excellent at crossing her arms. 

I imitate her in front of the mirror sometimes. I’ve also tried to practice my switch in front of the mirror, I’ve tried to understand it more than I do. But I can’t switch when confronted with the evidence of myself. I know too concretely who I am. Most days. Sometimes. 

***

Erika caught up to me at the end of the street. She asked to see my ledger. 

“Not bad, not bad.” Her forehead was shiny and there were patches of sweat under her arms and at the small of her back. “Okay, on the next street, try to get the full sixty dollars we ask for in the script.” 

“Script?” 

She took a sheet of paper off my clipboard and waved it at me.  

Our next assigned street was parallel to the first. As we walked toward it, I saw two of the other girls, one on a front porch, deep in conversation with a laughing old woman, the other taking a moment to count up her winnings under the deep shade of a well-developed tree. I was jealous of their route. 

“How are you doing?” Erika called, and the one under the tree rubbed her first two fingers and her thumb together and a gave bright smile. 

“This is important work,” Erika said to me. “We’re doing our part.” 

“Saving the planet.” My words came out hot over my lips. 

***

The second street was a dud. At half the houses there was no answer to my knock, and at the other half there were only tight-fisted weirdos. One woman’s foyer was a jumble of rusted bicycles—at least seven of them—and another came to the door in a short satin robe that during our conversation fell open to reveal a heavy, worm-veined breast. She didn’t seem to notice. It reminded me of a regular at Pretty Things shows, a tiny manic woman in her seventies who always wore loose white dresses that gaped every time she bent over, which she did a lot. She was an enthusiastic dancer. But her breasts were tiny, like mine, and seeing them didn’t feel forbidden. 

There were dogs on this street too, a lot of them, barking furiously when I rang the bell, charging the ankles of the people who opened the door, leaping up on me when they inevitably squirmed their way past those ankles. I’m not fond of dogs, and worked hard to keep the displeasure off my face. I probably gave a few Bacall-esque nostril flares by accident. 

What is it that gives each street its personality? I had known before knocking on these doors they would yield only crinkled five-dollar bills and two scrawled signatures. The houses didn’t seem embarrassed or self-conscious but resigned, hunching their shoulders to bear the sun’s weight. The sidewalks weren’t edged, and what tattered flowers there were flapped in a pathetic breeze. 

Across the street, Erika wasn’t doing much better. Her mouth was a grim line, and she wiped her forehead with her arm again and again. Save the Chesapeake Bay? Save the people trying to save the Chesapeake Bay! 

When we reached the far corner, Erika received my pathetic numbers with a grunt, and we walked together to start the final street before we could finally head home. 

***

The Pretty Things had been texting me, unperturbed by pushing back the hour of rehearsal, hounding me about the mysterious job trial, setting goals for our practice. Steffi had written a new song two weeks ago, and we were still figuring out how best to make it work. There were three of us: Steffi, Carter, and me. Steffi did the keyboards, Carter the bass, and I sang and played the trumpet. We had an unusual sound. 

But Steffi was a good writer, I had a breathy voice that suited her words, and Carter had a clear vision for how it would all sound best together. We gigged a lot locally, and were trying to scrape together enough money to record an album. I wished we had a second vocalist, because what I liked best was singing in harmony with someone else, that spooky off-center doubling that made melodies somehow both less important and more interesting. We’d brought in several potential candidates, but I was, apparently, not an easy voice to harmonize with. One girl stood with her finger closing one ear and her head cocked so far her other ear almost touched her shoulder. “I’m just trying to pin you down,” she said. 

Tonight, Carter had asked a friend of his to come in and give it a try. The guy was great, Carter assured us, and totally willing to jam without any promises. I was wary: I hated the concept of “jamming,” just noodling around with no intention, and I tended not to like male/female harmonies. The pairing changed the meaning of lyrics, made songs about yearning to change your place in the world into songs of sexual longing. One of the only exceptions was a record Bonnie “Prince” Billy had put out two years earlier, featuring the vocals of Dawn McCarthy. There was longing on The Letting Go, but it was a longing for lost things, for childhood, for a different version of yourself. Or, at least, a self you could understand, could enclose in a narrative, a version of yourself you could imagine someone loving one day.  

***

This last street was going to be gangbusters. No embarrassment or resignation in these homes; they were brash and proud, faces turned full to the sun. Scorch me! they dared the light. 

The first woman—how had she aged so gracefully, like Sophia Loren in the ‘80s?—handed me thirty-five dollars and not only took a brochure but wrote down the date of a community meeting about lobbying for new ecological protection measures. 

House after house added to my fanny pack’s weight, and I was feeling pretty good about myself when I approached the last three houses on the block, even though no one had yet awarded me the full sixty dollars. 

I knocked on a black door with frosted glass windows, and a fit man with the open, eager face of Jet Li opened up. He wore clean sweatpants and a crisp black T-shirt and listened to me thoughtfully; his expressions were like clear water. He had a plain gold wedding band, and there was a Band-Aid in the crook of his elbow, as if he’d recently given blood. I could tell he’d given it for some worthy cause—not just a blood drive, but to test if he was a match for a kidney donation. 

“Oh, absolutely,” he said as soon as I’d finished. “Come on in.” 

I stepped inside without looking over my shoulder. The abundance of this street had given me a sense of security.  

This house, too, was impossibly clean. Was I just used to my own lackluster housekeeping? The floorboards gleamed, and the area rugs had the plush bounce that meant recent laundering. I followed Jet Li into the kitchen. There was a packet of ground beef defrosting on a plate on the counter. I knew the brand—it was grass-fed, expensive meat. 

“Taco night,” Jet Li said, following my gaze. “Want something to drink? I was about to make margaritas.” 

I hesitated. “Water would be great.” 

He took down a glass from a cabinet of neatly-organized dishware and filled it with ice and water from the fridge dispenser. There were photographs and wedding invitations pinned to it by magnets boasting the names of national parks. 

“What do you do?” he asked me. “When you’re not out saving our magnificent Chesapeake?” 

I didn’t mind him talking like he owned the Bay. He deserved to own it; it would be in good hands.

“I’m in a band,” I said. “We’re not bad.” 

“I believe it.” He smiled, and when he passed the glass to me our fingers touched. “What’s your sound?” 

It was always hard to describe Pretty Things. “Arty,” I admitted. “We’re a little out there.” The water was blissfully cold, with a mineral tang, and I sucked it down so fast a wrenching brain freeze clutched my forehead. I winced and made an unflattering noise. 

“Uh-oh,” he said, almost comically concerned. He laid a warm hand on my upper back. 

When the headache passed, leaving me with a runny nose, his face was very close, and his eyes were dark and warm. He was so clean, his health pressed against his skin from the inside. When he did wrong things, he did them in a way that made them good. 

He stepped away, still smiling. 

I was sweaty, hair damp, face probably scratchily pink, maybe even sunburned. I saw myself, slightly knock-kneed, still so painfully young, I felt every moment of my youngness, the years and years of humbling that lay ahead of me. 

I switched. 

“Whoa,” he said, and took an inadvertent step back. “Whoa, that’s—” 

“Shit.” I set the glass on the counter and turned to go. 

“No, don’t.” He grabbed my wrist, not hard, but as a suggestion. “What is that?” 

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I tried on a casual shrug. My voice was different, and this shrug wasn’t the one I would have given two minutes earlier. 

  “How do you do it?” He was looking at me so closely, not quite dispassionately. He was a doctor. That was what defined the touch of his hand, the touch of his eyes. 

I shrugged again. The switch had never stood up against such scrutiny. Usually it was a passing effect, a flicker at the edge of someone’s vision, which disappeared when they looked too hard. It only worked because no one wanted to look too hard. 

“Can you—” he gestured, “—go back?” 

“Sure,” I said, and pushed against it. Nothing changed. I tried again. “Not right now, apparently.” I cleared my throat. “It’s probably because you’re watching.” 

“Interesting. What if I look away?” And he did, out the window over the sink that showed the taupe vinyl siding of his neighbor’s house.

I took a deep breath and felt to the core of myself, that red glow lodged under the heart and over the belly. Something fell away. 

 When I opened my eyes he was looking at me again. 

“Did you see it happen?” I asked. “What was it like?” 

“Hard to say.” He put a finger under my chin and tilted it upward with very gentle pressure, then encouraged my head to turn first to the left and then to the right. “Has no one ever described it to you?” 

“They’ve tried. The best I’ve gotten is ‘weird.’” 

He smiled. “It is.” 

“I think,” I said slowly, “It has more to do with the other person than with me. It’s how they see me. I’m not actually changing.” 

“You adjusted your mannerisms and your voice.” 

“I’ve practiced that.” 

He was nodding, elbow in one hand and the other braced against his chin. “Could you change back for me?” 

“Maybe. It’s not always predictable.” 

He gestured for me to try. 

I felt my way into his thoughts, his perceptions, and envisioned myself anew. My smallness, the bravado that masked deep uncertainty, the cravings I was horrified to realize he could see, and met his eyes again as a boy. 

He let out a small sigh. “Remarkable,” he said. He came up to me and put his gentle finger back under my chin, turned my face first one way and then the other. 

I was self-conscious, and shrugged again. 

“You think it has to do with me more than you?” he asked. “Really?”  

“Best I can tell.” 

His finger was still under my chin. His breath smelled sweet. Slowly, he slid his hand around the back of my neck. The pressure was perfect, comforting and supportive. He bent forward and kissed me. I hummed with pleasure before I could stop myself. Just before he pulled away, his tongue briefly probed my mouth, thoughtfully playful. 

I had never been kissed as a boy. I tasted my lower lip. 

A clock on the wall showed 7:40. “I should go,” I said softly. 

For the first time, his expression was muddy and unclear. “Okay,” he said. He, too, was speaking quietly. “Are you sure?”  

***

Outside, Erika was waiting for me, looking at her watch. “Finally,” she said when she heard the door. “I was about to knock but I didn’t want to ruin your flow. Holy shit.” This last came when she raised her head and saw me. 

“I know, I know,” I said. “Can you just be cool with it?” 

“I—what happened?” 

“It’s just a thing I can do sometimes, but something went wrong and now I’m fucking stuck like this. It’ll pass. I hope.” I held out the check in my hand. “Here. Sixty dollars.” 

“I knew you’d get it! The script works.” She took the check and tucked it into her own fanny pack. As we walked back to the van, I felt her peripheral attention focused on me.    

The ride back to the corporate park was awkward. The worst part of being stuck wasn’t the double-takes—I told you, I’m a confusingly effeminate boy—but the feeling inside me. When I was a girl, I had access to all my thoughts and feelings. It was like walking through the lighting aisle in Home Depot. There are lanterns on posts, chandeliers that glitter like disco balls, table lamps with Tiffany shades, the ugly, utilitarian ceiling fixtures landlords buy. When I was a boy, it was like being stage lit in a black box theater. That kind of light allows for nothing but performance. 

In fact, when I gig with Pretty Things, the lights in the venue sometimes trigger the switch. Or, rather, the feelings brought on by the lights in the venue trigger it. This gave us a unique stage presence. City Paper called it “a confusing sex appeal.” 

Twenty minutes into the drive, one of the girls tried to start a conversation about how inspiring it was to be saving the unique ecosystem of the Bay, but everyone was so preoccupied with not looking at me that no one responded. 

***

“Oh, shit,” Carter said when he opened the door, bass already slung around his body. 

“Tell me about it.” I pushed past him and slammed my trumpet case on the floor near the keyboard stand, where Steffi stood with her mouth hanging open. 

There was a stranger in the room, a tall, Grizzly Adams-looking stranger, with eyebrows arched in surprise. 

“Hey,” I said, and thrust my hand at him. “Sorry, I’m not usually like this.” 

“Late, you mean?” He shook my hand and laughed at his own joke. 

“Can you even sing like that?” Steffi asked. 

“I switch during performances all the time.” 

“But, like, just for a second. I’ve never seen it— ” She searched for a good word. “—rooted  like this. What happened?” 

I would have told Steffi and Carter, if the three of us were alone. We enjoyed exploring one another’s most contradictory emotions—these conversations were the basis of Steffi’s best songs. But Grizzly Adams was watching us, amused and bemused, and he really did look like Grizzly Adams: not the popular conception of that character, gruff and woodsy, but like Dan Haggerty in the film, with his ‘70s blowout of both hair and beard. I’d never liked that movie. 

“Never mind,” said Carter. “We’ll just get started. Maybe singing will help?” 

“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t think so. I still felt spotlit, unable to see past my own hands. Carter’s living room had not made its usual impression on me, the beloved stained and ratty furniture, the collages he made from the covers of old romance novels.

We set up to play, Grizzly Adams lurking at the fringes. It was rude of men to be so tall. 

Steffi tapped a few gentle chords, a quick progression that let me know what song she had in mind. 

“Sure,” I said, nodding in time, tapping my hand against my thigh. These were not my habitual movements. Everyone in the room was watching me, and my face was burning. 

Steffi and Carter swung out into their sloppy dance. 

“When the Kokomo feelings fade,” I sang, “And the feathers cling to skin, there’s a bridge that spans the wide, wide river, there’s stairs that we can climb.” I sounded…fine, I supposed. Not truly like myself, but close enough. 

When I reached the second chorus, which is about meeting someone in an Earth-wide meadow, Grizzly Adams joined in. His voice was surprising, raspy and low, almost chant-like. I faltered for a moment, finding him there with me, but finished out a few lines before I stopped us. 

“Not bad,” I said, “But not quite right.” I would give anything to stop the light from shining so boldly into my face. “This song isn’t about love. It’s about recognition. It’s about rest.” 

In the darkness beyond my spotlight, Steffi was nodding. 

Grizzly Adams smiled, but he looked sad. “Don’t you think love can be recognition and rest?” He was older than the rest of us; for the first time I saw the sweet lines at the corners of his eyes. 

“Not in my experience,” I joked, but the joke felt wrong, and the reason it felt wrong was that it was no longer true. I cleared my throat. “Let’s try it again.” 

We approached the chorus, and sang about the wind that blows from nowhere to nowhere, and the way the meadow bends. 

Carter stopped us this time. “Could you try to meet him where he’s at? Could we try that?” 

I realized he was talking to me. I nodded, dazed and disorientated. My tongue felt thick and dumb in my mouth. 

Grizzly Adams locked eyes with me as we sang, and there was something in my stomach that hated it, just hated it, though my heart was pounding with need. 

We were back in the meadow, we were feeling the wind. It touched us both, and we touched it. 

That was what we had done, in the kitchen in front of the thawing beef and the national parks magnets and the clock showing the time crawling closer and closer to eight. We had touched, with hands and with mouths—ears, neck, stomach, armpit. He kissed the inside and outside of my elbow while covering my eyes with his cool, dry palm. I put my fingers against his tongue, pushed my face against the fabric covering his chest. I breathed in, and breathed in, greedy with breathing. Time was syrup, it was honey. I pushed my palms along his shirted shoulders, he dragged his along my back. Our hips met and stayed together, and I imagined what it would be like to take him inside me, the slow sweet bloom it would create, and bent my neck back to show him my surrender, but he brought no teeth there, just a trailing finger. He spoke low words into my ear and then licked it, and I came. 

At eight o’clock we sealed it with a kiss, a soft and silent kiss. There were no more words as he wrote the check, as I took it, as I left. The light was shining, flooding my eyes, it shined and it shined, and in that moment I wanted to be illuminated forever. 

“Okay,” said Grizzly Adams when we finished. “Yeah, that’s okay.” 

And it was.