Patchwork People Chapter II The Good Man Hard to Find
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Patchwork People V: The Diner On Memory Lane free porn video
V. The diner on memory lane.
The last time Marcia had spoken to anyone in her family it was to her
brother Matt. That would be winter five years ago. They met in a 24-hour
diner by the side of a highway in Metuchen, New Jersey. Pointedly, it
was a restaurant Matt had never visited and no doubt never intended to
visit again. Through a series of emails and two brief phone calls, she
had explained the general situation and Matt's reaction had grudgingly
advanced from "this has got to be some kind of joke" to shocked
disbelief. But he would never move any further along the path to
acceptance than a mild fatalistic disdain, which he expressed with a
resigned sigh.
"Well you're still my brother and I love you no matter what. Nothing can
change that, I guess."
Exactly what he considered unchangeable he didn't explain. They never
saw or spoke to each other again.
He'd even been reluctant to meeting Marcia at the diner but ended up
reluctantly agreeing when she promised to "butch it up" so he wouldn't
be uncomfortable. She couldn't get herself to say so he wouldn't be
"embarrassed" but, of course, that's what they both meant. Marcia had
been "butching it up" during the last year or so of her increasingly
infrequent and truncated visits with Phoebe. Before these scheduled
visitations, Marcia would jam a baseball cap over her long hair, wear
her "manliest" girl jeans, and throw on a bulky sweatshirt in some
neutral color, basically any color fog might take. By this time in her
transition, the pretense of having to appear as "male" made her almost
physically ill, as if she'd been required to wear a corpse's filthy,
bug-ridden rags.
It was nearly three a.m. when Marcia arrived at the diner. Marcia was
five minutes early but Matt was already seated, arms folded around a
coffee cup.
Marcia hadn't seen her brother in some time but he looked almost exactly
as he did years before, highlighting even more drastically how much she
herself had changed. Matt was a little grayer at the temples, perhaps, a
tiny bit gaunter in the cheeks, but otherwise approaching middle age
hadn't altered Matt in any dramatic way.
"It's not right," he said, after Marcia's coffee had come. Matt had
already instructed the waitress that would be all they were having. He
seemed to think that by doing all the talking he could keep the waitress
from noticing Marcia at all. Even dressed nominally as a guy, she was
aware that she still looked female enough to give people pause, to
elicit double-takes. "Jesus Christ," Matt grumbled under his breath,
each and every time he noticed this.
No matter what might be said or unsaid between them lay the knowledge
that Marcia had never been the brother she should have been to Matt, nor
the son she should have been to their mother. What she had hoped was
that the revelation she'd made to Matt would go a long ways to
explaining why; instead, Matt seemed to add it to the never-ending debit
column of her personal failures. He was writing Marcia off now as a
total loss. That, Marcia realized now, was what this 3 a.m. meeting was
all about.
"What the hell is mom going to think?"
"I've talked to mom. She's understanding."
"Well, she'd have to be, wouldn't she?"
"I know I haven't been what she would have wanted me to be..."
"That's the understatement of the century."
"Listen, Matt, there's no need to get nasty. I've made mistakes, but
they largely the result of trying to be someone I wasn't. No matter what
you may think, this isn't one of my mistakes. I finally feel like I'm
getting it right."
"God simply doesn't make mistakes," Matt said, with the kind of prim
authority he could effect at times like this.
Matt wasn't especially religious, but he did go regularly to church. By
profession, he was a corporate statistician, whatever that meant
exactly. Marcia had never gotten it entirely clear in her head what
Matt did for a living no matter how carefully he explained it to her.
All she really understood was that her brother worked with figures,
which was an unforgiving fundamentalism of it's own kind. In his world,
it meant that things either added up or they didn't and there was no
room for anything in between.
The first time he dropped the word "god" in a conversation about her
transition, Marcia had been surprised; Matt had always resisted his wife
Patricia's old-fashioned Catholic religiosity, but, in retrospect, it
figured that he'd eventually find a correlation between mathematics and
religious orthodoxy. Especially after the personal tragedies he and
Patricia had undergone.
Unfortunately, Matt's faith hadn't softened him any. It hadn't made him
more understanding or merciful, as Jesus had preached; instead his faith
in a universe that added up had hardened his preconceptions into an air-
tight self-righteousness.
"Is that what you said when Sam was born? That God doesn't make
mistakes?"
Marcia regretted the words the instant they'd escaped. Matt looked as if
he'd been slapped. "I'm so sorry," she said. But, of course, it was too
late.
Matt seldom got visibly got mad or lost his temper. It wasn't a virtue
so much as it was a matter or principle, a perpetual reprimand of their
long-absent, long-disowned father who, throughout their harrowing
childhood, was forever losing his. For a moment there, Matt looked
startlingly like the old man now, ready to turn the table over.
"I can't believe you said that, you son of a bitch."
"That didn't come out the way I meant it and you know it. I love Sam.
She's a beautiful wonderful child, but when she was born, didn't you and
Patty do everything you could to fix what was wrong with her? Didn't you
consult every doctor? Try every new and promising therapy? Were you just
okay with the birth defects? And when Pat got breast cancer, did she
just shrug her shoulders and consider it part of God's plan? Or is it
only a mistake when you don't like it and God's plan when you're not
personally involved?"
"What you're talking about is different. You're comparing apples and
oranges."
"No," Marcia said. "That's not an acceptable argument. You're not
proving anything by simply discounting what I'm saying, by dismissing it
out of hand with a clich?. It's not different. It's the same thing. And
if it's not the same thing, kindly explain to me how it's different.
Because I'd really like to know how you can look around at all the ways
that people suffer through no fault of their own and tell me that God
doesn't make mistakes. Unless you think that somehow Samantha was to
blame for her own problems. And Patty for her own cancer."
"You're a real piece of work, you know that? Your genetic make-up is not
an error. You were born a healthy human of the male species. That isn't
a disease like Downs or cancer."
"I beg to differ. There's a lot we still don't know about genetics and
sexuality, what makes a male or female. There are mistakes made. Even in
a world watched over by God. Did you ever think that's why God gave us
intelligence and the free will and curiosity to use it? That we were
meant to correct some of the inevitable glitches in Creation? Things
like AIDS and cancer and vanity and greed and, yes, a girl born in a
boy's body?"
Matt looked around the nearly empty diner now like a bird frantically
seeking an open window to escape. "I can't believe I'm sitting here in a
diner at three in the morning having a theological debate about
transexuality."
"Life is full of surprises, isn't it?" Marcia smiled.
Matt didn't. She wished that Matt were the kind of person who could see
the humor in the absurdity of life. That it was the very essence of the
human condition and all its real beauty and pathos were contained
therein. It seemed tragic to her that he wasn't that kind of person. To
Matt, the whole situation was merely pitiful and tawdry and
embarrassing. It was not something he wanted any part of.
"I've got to get going," he said, making a show of checking his watch,
which was unnecessary, since Marcia was aware of the clock on the wall
behind her and the fact that Matt's eyes had hardly left it the whole
time they were talking. "I've got a job to get to in a few hours," he
added pointedly. "Unlike some people."
Marcia had been laid off six months earlier and hadn't found regular
employment since. Actually, she'd been doing some freelance writing
work, but there seemed little point in explaining that to Matt now.
He motioned to the waitress. "Take care of yourself," he said, laying a
five-dollar-bill on the check to cover their coffees. "I wish you the
best of luck."
Marcia watched his tall, straight, distinguished form marching across
the parking lot to his Acura. When the time came, she would probably see
him again at their mother's funeral. Otherwise, Marcia knew that she was
probably seeing her brother for the last time.
She sat at the table long after Matt had gone, sipping her coffee, which
the waitress silently refilled. She watched the intermittent traffic on
the highway grow steadily heavier. The sky began to lighten. More people
started arriving at the diner. Truckers. Construction workers. A few
early businessmen. A new group of waitresses were straggling in for the
breakfast shift. The waitress who'd seen to her table was about to go
off duty. Marcia decided it was time for her to leave as well. She left
a ridiculously large tip. She was glad she did. On her way out the door,
Marcia passed the weathered-looking woman at the cashier counter. She
gave Marcia a tired, sympathetic smile. What she said next made Marcia's
unpleasant meeting with her brother all worth it.
"Have a great day, ma'am," she said.
* * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Sissypop!
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
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