ransvestia

When you've grown up small and light for your age as I did you get in the habit of using your tongue instead of your fists. It's a good habit, if you use a little discretion. I was angry, and anger is not conducive to discretion. When he made that last grab for my skirt and succeeded in raising it high enough to give everyone a good laugh, my tongue took over. It made me do what only a complete fool would do. I hit him where it hurt.

"Here," I said, raising my skirt like a can-can dancer, "have a good look. If it was a fairy I came in here for, I sure as hell found one."

―

The sound of their laughter and the first blows arrived almost simultaneously. I have never had such a beating. He hit me everywhere my face, my belly, my jaw. He knocked me down and picked me up and knocked me down again. He might have killed me if the bartender hadn't intervened. He stopped the beating, helped me straighten my clothes and sent me home in a cab. Bleeding and sore, I made my way down the alley and up the stairs. When I let myself in, Sally was there.

"My God," she said. "What happened?"

I told her. She helped me undress and into a warm bath. She ban- daged the cuts and made me climb into bed. Never had I known her to be so genuinely sympathetic."

I stayed in bed for two whole days, sleeping a lot and thinking a lot. By the time I felt good enough to get up, I knew what I was going to do. I called a friend and asked him to bring me some clothes, claiming that Sally and I had had a fight. Then I took all the women's clothing down to the incinerator where I could watch them burn. vowing as each garment shriveled and blackened, that if the inclination to wear such a thing ever came over me again, I'd recall this past few days.

That evening, when Sally came home, I told her what I'd done.

"Everything?"

"Everything," I said.

She went out, and in a few minutes was back with my clothes.

I should never have tried playing God," she said.

"I suppose I was playing God myself," I added.

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