The Situation

33

In my second to last year working at the main grocery store before moving to Colorado, I went for my break. The break room was the old upstairs apartment at the store where Joe and Dorcus had once lived, to get there one had to walk into the back room, past the long dairy cooler room, then turn left to walk past the sides of the dairy cooler and freezer room to reach the stairs. Once I went through the swinging doors on the start of this route, 'Betsy', a cashier, and her boyfriend were also taking a break and had settled atop a pallet of grocery boxes by the far corner of the dairy cooler. She normally wore thick lensed glasses but at this moment wasn't, for some reason. She shouted toward me, ''What sex are you?''

This question stunned me and I didn't know how to respond. So I chose to ignore it and kept on walking toward them on my way to the break room. ''What sex are you?'' she again shouted as I approached. And I ignored it. When I reached the corner where they were, I turned left toward the stairs and Betsy was dismayed because I hadn't said anything. Her boy friend told her who I was and she explained that, without her glasses she had been trying to guess who I was and she started-out with the most basic question of asking what sex I was. But I pretended not to hear her explanation, too, as I had pretended not to hear her question.

I went up the steps to the break room and found it empty. And I broke into a cold sweat and shook. You see, it wasn't that I thought she was trying to insult me with her question, but simply that I didn't know the answer...

By the last two weeks of seventh grade, my nipples started to hurt and chafe against my tee shirt. Lying on my stomach made them hurt more, so I stopped doing that. As I lived in a family that didn't talk about things unless we really had to, I just kept this to myself. A few weeks after school had let out, Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet came for a visit and as part of the visit was the obligatory picture that my mother took of me posing with them. When the picture was developed I saw myself in it and was shocked to see two round mounds pushing out from my tee shirt at chest level. Checking in the privacy of the bathroom mirror I discovered that my breasts were developing.

This came as a complete surprise to me as I thought I was a boy. I mean, I'd been peeing standing up for all those years! But even that was becoming more of a problem as the tissue around what I'll be calling the 'nub' was expanding and covering it up. But to me, that was the least of my problems as the breasts were the most obvious. Picking through my apartment closet, I discovered that my larger tee shirts were best as they were baggy and I could lean forward to keep them from clinging onto my chest. This also helped with the chafing problem.

Still, when time came for more pictures I felt the need to play it safe and lean forward and rest my hands on my knees if I was seated. When not seated, I would make a face, thus people's eyes would be drawn to my face in the picture, not my chest.

With the top half of the situation addressed, I found that all that extra tissue developing by the nub was very pinchy and uncomfortable. This was improved when I was walking with mother through a department store on one of our Saturday errand runs and saw that the guys' underwear section not only had briefs on display, but baggy looking boxers as well. As the baggy tee shirts seemed to help, I asked mother to buy me a set of the boxers. They helped too and so briefs were a thing of the past.

Summer time would have been the perfect time to have made new local friends in the area, but given my uncertainty about what was happening to me, I pretty much just kept to the tree house or apartment when not at my father's or working at the store.

August came and we reached my Thirteenth birthday. As I had turned down the offer to have another day of friends gather at the apartment, my mother arranged to have a gathering at my eldest brother's new apartment which he shared with his girl friend and my not as older brother. My not as older brother had moved into the family home when he returned from his Wyoming trip and taken a job at the main grocery store to save up money and go to College. He started out at a dorm room that Fall, which reminded me of the back room my maternal grandfather Bumpa had been in when he first went to a nursing home, but then moved into an off-campus apartment for the remainder of that year. College hadn't worked out and he returned to live at my eldest brother's apartment rather than move back in with our father at the family home. He had joined eldest brother's painting business and they all had used the apartment to experiment with color schemes and styles. With the fresh paint their apartment, the upper floor of an old house, was really homey unlike mom's apartment with its white painted walls, or the old family home with its now faded and peeling wall paper.

After dinner we sat at the couch with me in the center as I was given and unwrapped my presents. The present from my not as older brother was the ''Wings Over America'' three album set by Paul McCartney. Given my confusion by this, my brother explained that Paul McCartney was in the Beatles to which I became excited and said, ''Oh, a new Beatles album!'' No, it was explained further, that since the Beatles had broken up, Paul was now in a new band, 'Wings', and this was an album of their live concert. ''oh,'' I said and put it aside with suspicion. Though it turned out to be a great gift that introduced me to a new band that I came to love as the years rolled on.

To commemorate the event of my birthday, my mother took a picture of us sitting side by side on the couch and I was stuck. She was taking the picture from the side and if I leaned forward to make my tee shirt drape, it would block the view of a sibling, so I made a face just as she snapped the picture. A self developing 'instant' picture she only saw my face once it became clear and she was not happy. But she withheld her displeasure until we reached the apartment after we left my brothers'.

I went straight upstairs to put away my new gifts and she came up after me and demanded to know 'why I had taken up ruining her pictures' that Summer. At first hesitant, she insisted I tell her, and so I did. She seemed confused by my explanation so I lifted my shirt and showed her. She became quiet and pale. Then she told me to keep it a secret and not to tell anybody.

She avoided taking more pictures of me for the next few years and that suited me just fine.

Four years later I was in the break room at the main grocery store still stumped as to what I should say when people asked me what sex I was. Then it struck me to pull out my driver's license where it had an 'M'. So, legally, I was male. With the full force of my legal identification backing me up, when asked or filling out a form in the future, I would state 'Male.'

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