TRANSVESTIA

"What?"

"Your wanting to be a girl."

"That isn't what I want."

"It seemed so to me."

"I thought you were serious. I mean, I thought you really wanted me to help."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"Well, I'm sorry they treated you so roughly. I hadn't planned on

that."

"But you had planned on embarrassing me?”

"I guess a little. At least I didn't want you to get away with it. To think you really could fool people."

"But, why..." I tried to push on, trying to really understand her motives. She cut me off.

"We'll take about it another time," she said, leaving the room.

A month passed a month of life in four rooms. I couldn't go out in dresses and she refused to give me back my own. I tried, unsuccess- fully, to order clothes over the phone, but she had arranged with the doorman to intercept all deliveries, and she simply sent them back. It was a month of reading, watching television, and doing housework. Friends came, but I waited out their visits in my room.

She went out even on dates. She claimed to be sorry that I couldn't go, but not sorry enough to give me back my clothes.

It was, in fact, one of her evenings out when I decided on another trip to the street. I wasn't being entirely foolhardy. For one thing, in two months, I had grown very accustomed to skirts, and felt quite at ease in them, at least around Sally. For another, it would be dark. And for a third, I planned to dress as inconspicuously as possible.

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