Bending the Bloom

The first thing Nurse Brackett did was take my hands and turn them over.

"Soft," she said. Not a compliment. She dropped them like they were wet.

I sat on the edge of the examination table in a room that smelled of iodine and old carpet, my knees pressed together, the paper crinkling under my thighs. Fluorescent light buzzed overhead. A poster on the wall showed a diagram of the male reproductive system, all cross-sections and Latin labels, and I stared at it because looking at her was worse. She had gray hair cut blunt at the jaw and hands that looked like they could open jars that had defeated stronger people. She wore no ring. No watch. Just a plain face and a clipboard and the flat, unhurried manner of someone who had broken bigger things than me.

"Eighteen years old," she said, reading from the file. "Referred by Dr. Halloway. Reason for referral..." She paused. Tapped the page with one finger. "Effeminacy. Failure to develop appropriate sexual attraction. Excessive emotionality."

The words sat in the room like furniture.

"My mother thinks I'm sick," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"Your mother thinks you're a faggot," Nurse Brackett said. She said it the way you'd say someone had a cold. "And she's paying me a great deal of money to make sure you don't become one. Or stop being one. Whichever applies."

I don't know what I expected. A lecture, maybe. A pamphlet. Something gentler. But she just looked at me with those flat gray eyes and I understood that gentleness wasn't on the menu.

"Take off your shirt," she said.

"Why?"

"Because I need to see what I'm working with. Shirt. Off."

I did it. Slowly. I was thin then, nineteen pounds underweight according to the chart, and my ribs showed when I raised my arms. I had a mole on my left shoulder shaped like a comma and I was suddenly aware of it in a way I'd never been before, as if she'd be writing it down. She was writing something down.

"Stand up."

I stood.

"Turn around."

I turned.

"Your posture is a problem," she said. "You stand like you're apologizing for taking up space. Shoulders back. Chin level. Don't look at the floor."

I tried. My shoulders ached immediately.

"Better," she said, and the word hit me somewhere I didn't expect. I hated that it did. "Sit."

I sat.

She pulled a chair from the corner and placed it directly in front of me, close enough that our knees almost touched. She sat down and crossed her legs and folded her hands and looked at me for a long time without speaking. The buzzing light filled the silence. I could hear someone's footsteps in the hallway, muffled, fading.

"Tell me about the first time you knew," she said.

"Knew what?"

"That you were different."

I looked at the poster again. The diagram. The labels I couldn't read.

"I don't know," I said. "There wasn't a moment. I just always..."

"Always what?"

"Always noticed boys," I said. The word felt like a confession. "The way other boys noticed girls. I didn't choose it. It was just there."

She nodded slowly. Wrote something down.

"And girls?"

"Nothing," I said. "I mean, I can see when a girl is pretty. But it doesn't..."

"Doesn't what?"

"It doesn't do anything. Inside."

She set the clipboard on the floor beside her chair. Leaned forward. Her knees touched mine and I flinched and she noticed and she didn't move back.

"Here's how this works," she said. "You're not sick. You're not broken. You're a boy who was left alone too long with his own head, and your head told you a story about who you are, and you believed it because you didn't know any better. My job is to tell you a different story. A true one. And then to make your body believe it too."

"That sounds like conversion therapy," I said.

"It sounds like whatever you want to call it. I call it training. You're going to learn what you are and what you're for. By the time we're done, you'll look at a woman and feel something you've never felt. And you'll look at a man and feel nothing at all."

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to stand up and walk out. I wanted to call my mother and tell her she was wasting her money. But I didn't do any of those things. I sat there with my shirt in my lap and my shoulders aching and something in my chest that felt like a hook, pulling.

"What if I don't want to change?" I said.

"You don't have to want it," she said. "You just have to show up."

She stood and went to a cabinet in the corner, unlocked it, and took out a small glass bottle. Clear liquid. She unscrewed the cap and held it under my nose.

"Smell that."

I inhaled. Alcohol. Something sharp underneath. Something floral, maybe. It burned the back of my throat.

"What is it?"

"Something to help you relax," she said. She put a drop on her finger and touched it to the inside of my wrist. The skin went cold, then warm. "You'll feel it in about ten minutes. Nothing dangerous. Just enough to take the edge off."

"I don't want to take the edge off."

"That's the problem," she said. "You've been living on the edge for years. It's exhausting. You just don't know it yet."

She sat back down. This time she didn't cross her legs. She sat with her feet flat on the floor and her hands on her thighs and she looked at me like I was a project she'd already started.

"The volunteer will be here next week," she said. "Her name is Rachel. She's twenty-two. She's done this before. She knows what she's doing and she knows what you don't know, and she's not going to laugh at you. That's important. You need to understand that no one is going to laugh at you."

"Why would anyone laugh at me?"

"Because you're eighteen and you've never touched a woman and you don't know where anything is. That's a normal thing to be afraid of. I'm telling you now so you don't have to be afraid of it later."

The warmth spread up my arm. Slow, like honey. I felt my jaw unclench. I hadn't realized it was clenched.

"Rachel is not a prostitute," Nurse Brackett said. "She's a graduate student. She's studying psychology. She does this because she believes in the work. She'll be paid, but that's not the point. The point is that she's going to teach you what your body is for. And you're going to let her."

"Let her," I repeated.

"Yes."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you'll come back here and we'll try again. And again. Until you do."

She said it without threat. That was the worst part. She said it like weather. Like gravity. Like something that had already happened and I was just catching up to it.

I looked at my wrist. The spot where she'd touched me was still warm.

"Why do you do this?" I asked.

"Because it works," she said. "Because I've seen boys like you come in here broken and leave whole. Because someone has to do it and I'm good at it."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

She stood and opened the door. The hallway light spilled in, yellow and harsh, and I could hear the sound of a television somewhere, a daytime talk show, applause.

"Same time next week," she said. "Wear something nice. She'll notice."

I stood and put my shirt back on. My fingers fumbled with the buttons. She watched me do it and didn't offer to help.

"One more thing," she said, as I reached the door. "Don't touch yourself this week. Not once. Not even to test it. I'll know."

"How would you know?"

"I'll know."

I walked out into the hallway and the door closed behind me and I stood there for a moment with my hand on the wall, feeling the warmth still moving through my blood. The television laughed. Someone down the hall was eating something that smelled like onions. I was eighteen years old and my mother had paid a stranger to make me into something else and I had said yes.

Not out loud. But I had.