Going Through the Change Read online

  She was nearly naked beneath. She couldn’t find any clothing that would fit her; her body had grown so huge. She was clad in a beach cover up that now only came to her hips and a pair of boxer shorts one of the girls had given David as a joke one Father’s Day. They were red with huge white hearts all over them.

  When she continued to weep, David sat back down beside her and simply pulled her to him. She wrapped her arms around him, turning her face away from his so he couldn’t see her whiskers. He rubbed her back with the palm of his hand in a slow circle, cooing soothing sounds and loving words into her ear.

  Twirling around, Linda suddenly grabbed David, pulled him to her, and kissed him. She knew it might be the last time she would ever get to. David murmured surprise, but soon was kissing her back. For just a moment, she felt normal, a wife loving her husband in their home and getting loved back.

  Then she felt it—not a tingling, not exactly. More of a tension, but warm. Not a hot flash, more like a rush of warmth. And it was down there.

  She pulled back from the kiss and threw herself to the other end of the couch, where she curled her body into a ball.

  David reached for her, obviously confused. “Linda? Corazón?”

  Linda fumbled in the blankets to find the source of the warmth. What was going on? It was like a spring inside her had tightened. She gasped when she dared to put her hand into her pants—she knew exactly what this was. It was the thing that grew on her. The pinga. The manhood. And it was stiff.

  Linda howled.

  David jumped up and rushed to her side. “Linda? Please, cariño, tell me what’s wrong? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

  “They can’t help me. No one can help me.” She sobbed without restraint.

  David took an angrier tone. “Linda. Tell me what is wrong.”

  Linda sat up on the couch and let the covering fall back. David’s eyes widened.

  “Can you still love me, David? Can you still love me if,” Linda stood, revealing the extent of her change, “if I am a man?”

  David hit the floor, passed out cold.

  atricia let out a low whistle as she walked into the laboratory in Cindy Liu’s basement. There was nothing about the rest of the house to suggest the state-of-the-art beauty of what she found there. In fact, the rest of the house was run-down, dark, and looked like it belonged to a blind eighty-year-old woman, which, Patricia guessed, it had, until recently. There were doilies on the end tables, for goodness sake. Cindy must have just moved in and left everything exactly as it had been when her mother lived there.

  But down here? That was a different story. Everything was chrome or white and sparklingly clean. There were stations for everything imaginable. Chemistry equipment, animals in cages, herbs and minerals, the touted isolation chamber from Germany, a desktop computer station with four different monitors, and a rack full of machines. Even if the devices were things she only half-recognized and understood, Patricia could see the quality of the equipment. She knew quality by its smell. One wall featured a row of glossy cabinets beneath a giant corkboard on which charts and graphs of various sorts were hung and spotted with post-it notes with Cindy’s spiky handwriting on them. It was a fully working lab, and Cindy was obviously utilizing it to the fullest.

  “Wow! You weren’t kidding, were you?” Patricia said.

  Taking the opening and running with it, Cindy told Patricia all about the experiments she was running, and the range of treatments she was developing. Patricia was amazed by the breadth of her friend’s work. She seemed to be running about fifteen experiments all at the same time, mostly connected to The Change, as she called it. Patricia already knew her friend was a world-renowned expert on women and aging, but she tended to forget Dr. Cindy Liu could well be described as a genius as well. Giving the tour had made her breathless, and Patricia had laughed, enjoying her friend’s energy and enthusiasm. She looked great. Obviously, this move was good for her.

  Cindy’s eyes glowed with pride, and she gestured broadly at the room. “Do you realize the work I can accomplish here? What I have already accomplished here? I have a lifetime of experiments waiting for me.”

  Patricia tilted her head and looked at her friend with concern. “A lifetime?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Patricia O’Neill. I’m too old to be talking about a lifetime in the future.” Cindy waggled a finger at her, which had the unfortunate effect of making her seem like a grumpy old lady, which was counterproductive to the argument she was trying to make.

  Patricia grimaced. She hadn’t wanted to say it aloud, but that was exactly what she had been thinking. Neither of them were what you might call a spring chicken anymore. Cindy was almost a decade older than Patricia. She might have another ten or fifteen years before this kind of work was beyond her physical and mental capabilities, if she stayed healthy and was fortunate. It was hardly a lifetime.

  “You’ll see, Patricia. My best work still lies ahead. But, tonight, let’s see what we can do about your skin. Take off your jacket and blouse. Let’s see what we have here.”

  Patricia complied, cooperatively taking a seat on a massage chair, so her itchy upper back was exposed for Cindy’s examination. Cindy pulled up a small rolling cart with a variety of tools on it, including a large magnifier. She ran her small hand gently over the bumpy patch between Patricia’s shoulder blades. “What did your doctor say about this?”

  “Eczema. He gave me the same cream that didn’t work for me last time.”

  “You should have come to me sooner. Conventional doctors are either useless or an impediment to health.” Cindy spit the word “conventional” like it was a nasty bit of gristle in a steak.

  Patricia bit her lip. They’d had this conversation many times, especially in the years right after Michael died, and Patricia had no desire to plough the same fields yet again. The worth of conventional medicine was one of those “agree to disagree” subjects that was best left alone if they didn’t want to end up shouting at each other.

  It was true Michael had been misdiagnosed, and that the misdiagnosis might have contributed to his death. But Patricia didn’t believe that meant the entire medical establishment had to be written off. Doctors had kept her father alive for many years, after all. She’d had conventional medicine to thank for the rebuilding of her shoulder as well. But Cindy saw things in black and white terms, at least on this topic.

  “My former doctor is an asshole; I’ll give you that,” Patricia conceded. “I fired him. He waved me off when I suggested the root cause might be menopause.”

  “Good for you! What does he know about it, anyway? He’s just a man. For him, it’s something he read in a book. We live it. We are women. It’s all hormonal at some level.” She paused, filling a dropper with a pale green liquid and holding it over Patricia’s bare back. “This is going to sting.”

  Cindy dripped some kind of liquid onto the affected area. Patricia flinched. It did more than just sting.

  “Sorry,” Cindy said.

  Patricia forced her shoulders to relax. The apology showed how far Cindy had come. Once upon a time, she would have told Patricia to stop being such a baby, or not said anything at all, giving her entire focus to the sample she was collecting and ignoring the human it was attached to. Comparatively, this might be described as a proper bedside manner.

  Rolling the worktable aside, Cindy told Patricia she could dress. While Patricia buttoned up her blouse, Cindy busied herself sanitizing instruments and closing and labeling sample containers. Then she went to one of the side cabinets and pulled out a small jar of a greenish paste. She unscrewed the lid to the jar and sniffed the contents.

  “I’m afraid this stuff doesn’t smell very nice. I’m still working on making it more palatable in that sense. But it has proven very effective on my test subjects. I think it will help you.”

  Patricia took the jar and examined the contents. It definitely didn’t look as nice as the clear ointment her doctor had provided. This stuff was gre
en with flecks of brown in it and smelled of something dank and root-ish. Patricia found she kind of liked the smell. It reminded her of the barn at her grandfather’s farm somehow. She touched the cream, rubbing a small amount between her fingers. It was a little gritty. “Do you have anything that will help me apply it? It’s kind of hard to reach the spot.”

  “Apply it? Oh, no, Patricia. You’ve got to eat this, two tablespoons, twice a day.”

  Patricia felt the color drain from her face at the thought of consuming the nasty stuff.

  Cindy snorted and punched her on the upper arm. “You are so gullible, Patricia! Of course, you apply it to the skin. Let me get you a paddle I’ve developed for application.” She walked away, laughing to herself.

  essica Roark was feeling sorry for herself again. She had spent the afternoon watching weepy movies, a favorite solace, but Nathan would be home soon with their boys, and it was time to pick herself up and get a move on. She sat up and gathered up the used tissues in her hands.

  She couldn’t explain why she watched things like this, knowing they would make her cry. She found it soothing somehow. Maybe it was that she could cry over someone else’s problems instead of her own. In this movie, the young man reminded her of herself, before her surgery, when she wasn’t sure what her prospects might be. He was hurting and angry and lonely. But he found love, and through love, hope.

  When Jessica got her cancer diagnosis, she was already five years married. Her husband had stuck by her, of course. What else could he have done? But it was hard on him, which was hard on her.

  Nathan Fellicelli had steadfastly insisted to anyone who would listen that his wife would beat this “cancer thing.” It was a way of being supportive, she supposed, but Jessica felt an incredible pressure to show him and his connections she was that kind of strong. She needed to be a good poster girl for the corporate fundraiser, the bravely smiling woman who refused to be a victim.

  That didn’t leave much room for tears or talking about your fears. Unable to talk about how she really felt without disappointing her husband, Jessica found she didn’t have much to say to him. The silence was growing daily. It didn’t matter that she had beaten it, in the end. It had changed how they saw each other.

  Unlike the girl in the movie, Nathan had difficulty seeing past the illness, to see Jessica herself, more than the external effects of her struggle on him and their children. Maybe it wasn’t fair to compare her husband to the fictional love interest of a cancer patient in the film, but Jessica found she was doing so anyway, and her husband was coming up short. She was tired of being fair. She wanted to throw a good temper tantrum and let it all out.

  Because he had known her before, known what she had been like, and loved the old her, he mourned the pre-cancer Jessica. Maybe that was the difference. That Jessica had been a lot of fun. She had hosted parties, volunteered in the right charities, represented her husband proudly at formal events.

  She had been beautiful, too, glamorous, even. Jessica tugged at her worn yoga pants ruefully. It was hard to care about things like fashionable clothes anymore. It was even harder to listen to the inane chatter at dinner parties and events. It all felt so empty.

  The girl in the movie didn’t lose the man she had once known; she met him when cancer already had him in its sights. Jessica supposed Nathan had lost the woman he used to love, even though she was sitting on the couch today. She wasn’t the same person.

  It was true. Part of her was missing, something more metaphorical than her ovaries. Nathan was trying to believe she would find it, and be her old self again. Jessica didn’t miss her old self the way he did, but she wasn’t that fond of this new self so far, either. She wanted to be fun again, but she didn’t seem to enjoy the same things she once had, and she hadn’t yet figured out what might bring her joy now.

  Sighing, Jessica hauled herself off the dark leather sofa, automatically straightening the blanket she had pulled over herself as she watched TV and putting the remote back into the drawer in the coffee table. She looked back at the couch. It looked showroom ready. No sign it had been used. When she stood, she noticed an odd sort of tickling sensation in her stomach, but she tried to ignore it. She was probably just being paranoid again.

  She’d been back to the doctor what seemed like hundreds of times since her oophorectomy, three days before her thirty-second birthday. She kept feeling strange things and panicking. She’d never been so aware of every little thing her body did before. Now, every gurgle, moment of dizziness, or racing heartbeat sent her running to her oncologist. The doctor was nice, telling her it was better to be safe than sorry with her history, and they were always happy to run any tests she wanted for reassurance.

  Nathan, on the other hand, was becoming less nice. Jessica guessed there was a time limit for grieving for your lost ovaries, and she was past it now. He was right. All this moping about wasn’t changing a thing. She had survived, after all. The boys needed her back. He needed her back.

  It was time to step back into her old roles, pick up her life where she had set it down. They were lucky. They had already had children before her diagnosis. They didn’t really need a third child. Their lives were full. It was time to get back to normal. He was ready to get back to their lives now that she had beaten this thing. Wasn’t she?

  In the kitchen, Jessica picked up the tin of herbal tea her mother’s friend had made for her and began brewing a cup in her little Adagio teapot. “It will help with the depression,” Ms. Liu had written on the card in her bold, spiky, oddly slanted script. “Make you lighter.” Jessica didn’t know if it was helping or not, but it was very soothing and smelled wonderful. She couldn’t really remember what was in it, other than some special kind of ginseng. She’d drunk kind of a lot of it, though. She held the cup under her nose for a moment to savor the smell and then stood staring out the back deck while she drank it.

  Some new birds had come to the little station she’d built for them last summer. She’d imagined standing at the window with her children watching the birds, but the boys were not very interested—they’d rather be outside chasing the birds away just to watch them fly. Maybe if she’d been able to have that third child, the daughter, she would’ve been more contemplative, more like Jessica.

  Mostly, Jessica watched alone, and was the only one to notice the little birds coming to enjoy the treats and the bath. A small yellow finch was there now, picking at the seeds she had put out that morning. He turned to her for a moment, cocked his head, jumped into the air, and was gone. Jessica gasped at the effortlessness of it. So beautiful. She felt a kind of giddiness in her gut, like she had been swinging at the park and had gone weightless for a second, a feeling like she might just vault into the sky.

  Just then, she thought she heard a car door slam. Shit! The house was still a mess. Jessica stacked the teacup next to the other used ones from the past couple of days and hurried to the living room. Just as she crossed the threshold into the living room, her bare foot caught under a rug and she went flying. She braced herself, tucking into a safety roll automatically. It took her a moment to realize she hadn’t hit anything.

  After a few seconds, she opened her eyes to find she was hovering, midair, about two feet above the glass coffee table. Jessica stayed absolutely still, afraid to move. If she fell into the table, she was going to be horribly hurt. Could she move? She took a deep breath and kind of aimed herself at the couch. Her body drifted a little that direction and then just sort of hovered again.

  Okay. This has to be some kind of dream. Right? She must’ve fallen asleep on the couch. So, if it was a dream, she should be able to figure out a way to move. Maybe it’s like swimming. Jessica stretched an arm out tentatively in a sort of Australian crawl. When she pulled back, her body shot forward a foot or two, bumping her into a picture frame above the couch and knocking it askew. Okay. Maybe crawl stroke is too strong. She decided to try a gentle breaststroke, and her body bobbed gently forward. That’s better. Another stroke. Thi
s is actually kind of fun. Maybe it was a good dream. The light bubbly sensation in her stomach was really strong now. She felt good. Effervescent. She decided to enjoy the dream.

  She bobbed around the living room and toward the stairwell. She didn’t notice she was continuing to rise until she bumped her head on the lighting fixture. She pushed off from the ceiling with her arms and went back down a bit, back to hovering halfway between the ceiling and the floor. She worked her way into the open two-story foyer and peeked out the window above the door. Yep, Nathan is home. He and the boys were closing up the mini-van and heading for the door now. She noticed she could read the decorative plate on the front, “Mama’s Taxi.” Jessica frowned. She’d taken a vivid dreaming seminar her junior year. You weren’t supposed to be able to read when you are dreaming.

  Jessica swam her way over to the banister a little awkwardly and grabbed on, trying to pull herself down. She could get her upper body down, but her abdomen and legs stubbornly floated upward. It was like the empty space in her belly had filled with helium, and gravity had lost its hold on her. She was going to scare the kids. Heck, she was scaring herself. How can I get and stay down? She blew the locks of blonde hair out of her eyes, noting the color had darkened as her hair grew back in.

  She heard Nathan’s key in the lock and tried again to pull herself down. She tucked her ab muscles and folded herself at the waist, like she’d done in gymnastics class, pleased to find that it didn’t hurt to do so. She pushed herself down and was relieved when her feet made contact with the ceramic tile. The relief quickly gave way to panic, though, when she simply bounced up, like the floor had been a springboard. She lost her hold on the banister and sailed toward the ceiling.

  Nathan came through the door, calling her name. Jessica was quiet, holding on to the chandelier with one hand, floating there, looking down at them. From her ceiling view, her children looked wide and squat, like they’d been designed by Duplo. The bald patch on the back of Nathan’s head was clearly visible and much wider than when she had last noticed it. Somehow, this made her want to giggle. She stifled the laugh, not wanting the boys to notice her. She let Nathan get the boys settled in front of the TV and then hissed his name when he came back to toss his keys into the bowl by the door. “Nathan! Don’t scream―I’m up here!”