Please let me look like a boy now, I begged whoever was responsible for this dream.
“Lorraine!” Dad’s voice was like a canon, breaking the stillness of the fog encasing me. “Lorraine! Can you hear me?” He looked worried. I hoped it was because he could see I’d changed. I could feel him touching the back of my head gently.
“Ow!”
“Does that hurt?” Mom asked.
I nodded, wincing.
“Is your neck sore?” Dad asked, feeling around my neck and upper back. I shook my head vigorously for no. “Well, I guess that answers that,” he smiled—a small, relieved smile. “How do you feel?”
“Dizzy.”
“What happened?” Dad asked.
“We were just playing hockey and we got mixed up and she fell and hit her head on the ice,” Jake spoke in a panicked rush. “It was an accident.”
“I’m sure it was,” Mom reassured him.
“Can you get up?” Dad asked. I desperately wanted to ask them if I looked any different, maybe even more like a boy, but I worried that this wasn’t a great idea. They didn’t seem to have noticed. My spirits began to flag. “Are you still dizzy?”
“Uh-huh.” Sadness enveloped me again. My head throbbed, but it didn’t seem too bad. I realized that nothing visible had changed. I was still a girl on the outside. Dad gathered me up in his arms and carried me inside, easing me down on the couch. He removed my skates and snow clothes.
“You okay?” he asked. I nodded. “I’m just going to talk with your mom—it might be a good idea to have a doctor see you.” I heard whispered discussions in the kitchen; they bustled around, spoke on the phone to someone. I stared out the living room picture window at the snow beginning to fall, the light fading from the short winter’s day. My disappointment deepened, and I remembered our plan to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas that night on TV. I thought about Lucy pulling the football out from under Charlie Brown every time he prepared to kick it.
I am Charlie Brown.
An hour later I sat high on a doctor’s table, dangling my legs over the side as Mom and a doctor talked in hushed tones near the door. I couldn’t recall ever being in a hospital and wondered if this might be a place where they could help me turn my body into a boy’s. It seemed like something that could get me in trouble if I asked. Something told me it was a big deal. Mom and the doctor finished their conversation and walked over to me.
“Sweetie, I’m just going to call your dad and let him know you’re being looked at now. The doctor’s going to check your head. I’ll be right back,” she said, giving my shoulder a squeeze.
“Okay.” She was often at her best in real crises.
“Hi, Lorraine. I’m going to feel your head and neck a bit,” the doctor said. “Okay?”
“Lori. I like Lori better,” I told him.
“Oh, okay. Sure. Lori it is.” He smiled as he palpated the back of my skull gently. “Hmm, there’s a good bump here. Does that hurt?”
“A bit. Not too bad.”
“Do you know if you sort of went to sleep a bit when it happened?”
“I dreamed I turned into a boy.” He paused, looking at me as if for the first time.
“Oh,” he said, feeling along the back of my neck. “That’s quite an adventure!”
“I’m supposed to be a boy, but I’m not. Not on the outside.”
“Okay.” He held up a finger in front of my face. “Try to follow my finger with your eyes.” I tracked his finger as it moved. “Do you feel sick in your tummy at all? Pukey?” I shook my head no. “That’s good news.” He reached for a light and shined it into each of my eyes. “Just follow the light for me, kiddo. That’s it, good.” I sat quietly as he wrote on my chart. “Alrighty, let’s find your mom and tell her the good news.”
Just then, Mom walked in, and I wondered if the good news could possibly be about getting my boy body. The doctor finished writing on my chart and smiled at my mom.
“Well, she’s had a good bump, that’s for sure,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “She’s got a mild concussion.”
“Okay,” Mom said. She sounded businesslike and ready for directions. “What should we do?”
“Well, keep her up for a few hours tonight, maybe until you and your husband go to bed. Then wake her every two hours, check that she isn’t nauseous or dizzy, maybe walk her to the bathroom.”
“That sounds serious.” Mom frowned.
“She’ll be fine—it’s just a precaution because very occasionally these bumps on the noggin can cause bleeding inside the brain. It’s very unusual for such a light bump, but we like parents to keep an eye on them the first twenty-four hours. After that, if all looks normal, you can rest assured she’s in the clear. If anything seems amiss, bring her back in right away.”
All I heard was A Miss.
DAD DOGGEDLY DOCUMENTED each Christmas with his SONY Super 8 video camera. Grainy images of the annual nativity play Jake, Katherine, and I earnestly performed in the living room—transformed into a theater on Christmas Eve—are forever preserved in their handheld jerkiness. Katherine and Jake never failed to strike devout, pious postures, Katherine’s face beatific and serene as she imagined Mary to be, and Jake serious and solemn playing the role I really wanted, a Joseph of few words.
Always the odd man out, I chose to inject comic relief into the nativity play, creating new, uproarious spin-offs of the Christmas story each year. In a zany frenzy, I’d trip and skip through each year’s performance as some combination of Falstaff, Puck, Red Skelton, Tim Conway, and Sammy Davis Jr., doing my best to jazz up the age-old narrative. Jake and Katherine patiently allowed it, tenuously grasping my inability to take the play—or anything else—seriously.
One year, taking advantage of one of the few perks of being a principal, Dad borrowed several huge floodlights and three microphones from school for us to play with over the holidays and we used them to enhance our performance. That year, instead of the usual recreation of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, we performed a concert as Peter, Paul, and Mary—the singers, not the Biblical figures—where we belted out an unforgettable version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” along with several other of the trio’s songs, bathed by the bright, hot stage lights as our parents shouted “Encore!”
Another Christmas, when we were temporarily living in Indiana while Dad was pursuing a graduate degree, we drove to Florida. Dad bought a Starcraft tent trailer, and he was eager to test it out over the holidays while traveling the US Southeast. Our ceramic farm animals and crèche remained back home in storage in Calgary, so Dad fashioned a nativity stable out of palm fronds, weaving them expertly as he sat at our picnic table. Katherine, who was four at the time, contributed her Gumby, Pokey, and accompanying rubber friends to fill out the nativity players—Gumby as Joseph; Pokey as the pregnant Mary.
Somehow during that Christmas in our tent trailer in Key West, Katherine became very ill. She lay on the bed that converted into the kitchen table, sweating and shivering with a fever of a hundred and four. Jake and I could feel our parents’ fear as they hovered over her, Dad snapping his fingers in front of Katherine’s dull, vacant eyes as she stared into space, unresponsive. I don’t recall how she recovered, but she did, and that was the first time I feared someone in my family might die.
Katherine was a sweet, eager-to-please, sensitive little girl who loved to sing to herself and dance, with or without music. The idea that she might