I remembered traveling south with my mother on a train. Her mother had died and she was taking Charlie and me to the funeral. We traveled at night and changed trains in the middle of somewhere in the South where the darkness and the heat and steam from the tracks colored the trip like a nightmare. The next day in the bright sunshine of Irmo, South Carolina, it was even hotter. My brother and I waited in an open car while relatives filed inside a gray-wood country church. I could hear the preacher praying, then someone shouting. Everyone inside seemed to be crying. I heard my mother cry. I knew it was her voice although I couldn’t see her. Her crying then had the same scratchy sounds as the ones she made when arguing with my father left her in one corner of the bed, nursing her eyes and swollen cheeks. The sound of tears always takes me back to Irmo and back to Connecticut where I was born. The years exchanged themselves within the same pain, from listening as my grandmother was eulogized to hearing my mother’s muffled caution beneath distraught whimpers. Over the years those sounds returned to me as if my mother and I once shared a language no one else could use. Not even Metro, when I told him about my first trip South.

I tried saying things with her clothes. Touching, then wearing them. The feel of nylon on my skin was electric. I’d go into the bathroom when everyone had left the house and search through the hamper for any discarded dress, bra, stockings, or scarves. I wondered how girls grew to fill them with the softest flesh. I tried old socks and underwear. Then I danced.

The full-length mirror was my audience. In small, graceful steps, sometimes even curtsying as if before a gentleman partner, I’d dip and whirl the dress as fast and as far as I could, with the wide hems flapping against the sink, tub, toilet. And when I felt most fully the woman or young girl I had become so magically, I’d dab just a little rouge on my lips and cheeks to accent the natural redness under my skin. And I’d dance again and again until sweat streaked my brown face like an African mask, and I’d stutter in short whimpers of pleasure in a voice not even my own.