My father had bookmarked some of these “friends’” websites: Annaliese from Austria who, according to her page, “dresses sexy,” is “a size 12,” and “loves to go shopping.” Margit from Sweden, who “loves” bustiers, plush teddy bears, and “the color pink.” Genevieve of Germany, whose blog featured shots of herself topless on a nude beach and a timeline of “my second birth.”
“These pictures aren’t retouched,” my father said, unimpressed. “They aren’t as good as mine.”
“Where are your family photographs?” I asked. Suddenly, I’d had all I could handle of bustiers and second births. “From your childhood.”
My father gave her dismissive wave. “I don’t look at those.”
“But where are they?”
Silence. Then, airily: “Oh, somewhere.”
“Somewhere where?”
She shrugged, kept clicking through her images. Finally: “I keep all the old stuff, the important documents, in the basement. In a lockbox.”
“Could I see them?”
“It’s irrelevant,” she said. “It’s not me anymore.”
I looked at the clock; the day was half over. Day Five in the fortress.
“Dad, Stefi, please,” I said. “Let’s go out. You can show me the places you love in the city. Show me where you used to go in Pest as a child.”
“It doesn’t pay to live in the past,” my father said. “‘Get rid of old friends, make the new!’”
“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” I said. At any rate, I was here to see if I could make a new sort of friend: her. If only she could drop her age-old obstinance long enough to allow it. But our interactions were persistently one way: instead of mutual exchange, a force-fed guided tour of frou-frou fashions and hard-drive fantasies. When was she going to let in the daughter she wouldn’t let out?
“I don’t want to go to old places,” my father said. “It’s not interesting.”
“It interests me,” I said, hating my whininess, my own age-old obstinance.
“You are off the subject,” she said, tapping an insistent pink-polished nail on my notepad. “I’m Stefi now.”
One late afternoon, we stood in the kitchen, my father peeling an apple with her latest Swiss Army pocket knife. It was the “ladies’” version, she noted, with an emery board and cuticle scissors.
“Can I ask you a question?” my father said.
I nodded, hopeful. She was never the one who asked the questions. Maybe this was the start of an actual conversation.
“Can you leave your door open?” she said. “You close it every night when you go to bed.”
I drew back, speechless.
“Can you leave it open?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to be treated as a woman. I want to be able to walk around without clothes and for you to treat it normally.”
“Women don’t ‘normally’ walk around naked,” I said.
The blade snapped shut, and the conversational opportunity, if that’s what it had been, shut with it. She returned her ladies’ knife to an apron pocket.
That night, I closed the bedroom door. Then I reconsidered, and opened it a crack. As much as her intrusions disturbed me, I sensed that she wasn’t really targeting me. Or, if she was, it was only me as a mirror. After a while, a hesitant knock.
“Can you help me with something?”
My father was standing with her back to the door. She was in her bedroom slippers but still wearing her dress.
“I can’t get the zipper … Will you do it?”
I stood there for a moment, then reached for the zipper pull. I stopped when it was halfway down her back.
“You can get it from there,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
I watched her pad back down the hall. And wondered: how could someone so hidden be so intent on being unzipped? If, indeed, that’s what she wanted. All these exposures and disclosures seemed, literally, skin deep.
In the days to follow, my father continued her guided tour of surface ephemerality, leading me through the dresses in her closets, the lingerie in her bureau drawers, the cosmetics in her vanity table, the estrogen patches and dilation rods in her medicine chest, all the secret curiosities in her many Cabinets of Wonder. I couldn’t tell if she thought she was dispensing revelations or distracting me from the real secrets. Look at me, but don’t look at me. As the daughter of a photographer, I knew that letting light into a darkroom can illuminate the evidence or destroy it, depending on your timing. My father and I were in a battle over time, past and present. She wanted me to admire the decorations in Stefi’s new display windows. I wanted to know the contents of another sealed chamber: the lockbox in the basement.
On the sixth day of the visit, my father decided to lift the house arrest. “If you want to see something authentically Hungarian,” she said, “we could go to the Castle District.”
The Castle District, the former domicile of nobility, sits atop the two-hundred-foot-high limestone escarpment of Castle Hill, overlooking the Danube on the Buda side. It is now a high-toned tourist trap, home to the Royal Palace and, perched above that, the colonnaded Fisherman’s Bastion, a viewing terrace and promenade of turrets and parapets from which seemingly every panoramic picture postcard of Budapest is taken. It is as removed as my father’s own redoubt from the city I wanted to see. Still, it was out of the house.
We rode over in Der California Exclusive in the early afternoon. My father dressed for the excursion in a polka-dotted skirt, white-heeled sandals, and her usual pearl earrings. “Before I decided on Stefánie,” my father told me, “I was thinking of naming myself Pearl.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I like how it sounds,” she said. “Pearl” in Hungarian, which also serves as a female name, is Gyöngy. I flashed on one of my father’s attempts at forced feminization fiction, titled Gyöngyike Becomes a Maid: Confession of Sissy Gyöngyike—Let the Party Start. “Anyway,” my father said, “I love pearls.”
“And Stefánie?” I pressed. I knew that it was also the name of one of my paternal grandmother’s three sisters. “Did you pick it for your aunt Steffy?”
My father shrugged. No more divulgences were forthcoming.
There was no place to park and we made many circles in the camper before my father backed into a space of questionable legality. “It doesn’t matter if I get a ticket,” she said. “The camper’s registered in Rosenheim. They can’t get me.” She reached for the two cameras she’d brought, strapping one to each shoulder. I put my notebook in my back pocket. I was wearing blue jeans.
We descended the cobblestoned steps to the broad forecourt of