Ransvestia

"Come on, be a sport. As long as you've got to be in a dress, you ought to have some fun out of it. We could go to a movie, and . she added teasingly, "we might just have time to do a little shopping."

Aunt Helen was a very special person in my life. I suppose that some would say that it was because she bought me things and indulged me in a way my father and mother could not. True, she was a young widow with enough money to live a comfortable and gracious life, and to be generous to her niece and nephew. That mattered. What mattered more was the sort of person she was, a really loving person with little of the anger and hostility I often felt from my parents. Afternoons downtown with her were always a treat, errands to interesting shops, movies that always turned out right, ice cream sodas bought for me, perhaps a sweater or pair of shoes, perhaps a new car for my train or a baseball mitt. She never found it necessary to scold or make corrections, and she seemed to take a kind of pleasure in life's activities a sort of zest for doing things that I found marvelously infectious.

No, I didn't think it would be fun at all to have people think that I was a girl, not even for a little while. Being really a boy it was too difficult, too dangerous a task, to take the risk. On the other hand, I didn't want to risk her opinion of me either. I acquiesced, not because I saw any hope of having fun, but because she seemed to want it so much for herself.

She found the hat, a straw one with a brim and a ribbon hanging down in back. It, together with the coat and gloves, gave me an almost Eastery look, a look she found delightful.

We drove to town. At first any pleasure I might have taken in the deception was more than fully obscured by the fear I might be seen by someone who knew me, or just by being recognized to be a boy in a dress. But as waiters, clerks, cashiers, one after the other called me a young lady, I began to enjoy it too.

We came out of the movie with tears in our eyes, tears which for the first time in my life I felt free to shed, a sad movie in lots of ways, but a happy one too, because the people came through their sadness knowing that they loved one another. We dried our eyes, squeezed hands, and headed for our sodas.