Cross-Cultural Gender

My former roommate, Cornelia, is about to head back to Germany for the summer. So last night she had a going-away situation to officially mark her departure.

The dinner party was a quaint affair in a loft about ten minutes from where I live. I didn't do the dinner-party aspect of it, though, because I got home when it started and I felt I needed some unwinding time. So I took it. When I got there, the people had just finished rifling through whatever it was they had eaten, the remnants of which were some blue chips in a big bowl. And a tasty tasty pitcher of mojitos (a dangerous summer-type drink, to be sure).

Sitting around the table were mostly Cornelia's co-workers from ABC Carpet. All were older than I, some of them by much, and they weren't American. Turkey and Russia were represented as far as I could tell, and there were a couple of others who kept their conversations confined to the space between them. All of the conversations were like that, in fact, so I decided to enter the one between Debbie, one of the few in attendance I knew, and Irena, one of the Russians.

I approached them by greeting Debbie who will soon be studying philosophy at Northwestern and who I hadn't seen in a while. After the cheek kisses, she began to introduce me to Irena, but she had redirected her attention across the table. At this point I took a mojito sip to wait for her attention to return. And then.... "Hey," she said to the man with the G-Shock watch sitting across the table, "do you know who he looks like."

She was pointing at me. Now, I'm pretty sure I would have ignored it in other situations, amused at the 1,543rd gender mis-identification I had been the subject of. Maybe it was the shot of tequila I had when I got home or it could have been the mood I was in -- the one being where I am not totally concerned with protecting anything on the inside, therefore not caring much about what people will think of me.

"She," I corrected her matter-of-factly, void, however, of any offended tone.

"What's that," she asked, hoping she had not made the mistake she now knew she had.

"She."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"That's all right. It happens all the time. I wrote my thesis about it."

"Your what?"

"My thesis." She was about to say "what" again, as she leaned in a bit toward me, but changed her mind and decided to look to Debbie for some help.

"Her what?"

"[Debbie's Russian translation of 'thesis,' which sounded much more like a description of a dissertation, but I let it go.]"

There was some recognition from Irena, but I wasn't convinced.

"It's just a big paper. It happens all the time. People think I'm a guy."

"You know why they do, don't you," Irena said, as if she had the grand answer and was about to fix all of the problems that she perceived I had.

"Because I look like a guy?"

"Well, yes," she said, but there was more.

And she ran her hand up and down through the space between us as though she were describing my outfit. I knew what was coming. "And because you try to--"

"I don't try." Stopped her short. "I just do. If I dressed like her," I said, pointing to Debbie who was wearing a white skirt that rested just below her knee and a black tank top, "I would look like a drag queen." She laughed.

"And your voice. Your voice--"

"Yeah. Deep. Freak of nature, I guess. And check out the size of my feet." She laughed. I smiled. And so it began. Soon after, I was sitting down next to Debbie and talking to Irena about gender and sexuality. How it's taboo in Russia. How, men especially, are ridiculed and can be arrested. "It's not like that here."

"Yes it is," I said. "It's easier now, though. I'll give you that."

By this time, she had engaged her Russian compatriot, Nutella (swear to god) who wore too much make-up but who I liked, to help her explain the state of gay Russia. "Yeah, I heard about this," I said. "My therapist is over there now talking about me to a bunch of Russian therapists about how to deal with Russian gays coming out." (Ok, she's not talking just about me, but it sounded better at the time.)

"You have therapist? Why you have therapist?"

"Are you crazy? Everybody needs therapy. Especially if the therapist looks like mine."

"No, no, no. Do you know, the therapists I sell the rugs to are crazy. One said she couldn't buy this rug because it had boxes on it. And she said she would end up counting the boxes over and over again. See? Crazy. You don't need therapist, you talk to family and friends."

This went on for a little while, but by now, the entire table was listening. "The gay people think will sleep with just anybody, this guy this guy this guy," she said.

"What about the straight people who ho?" I was feeling on a roll, cuz I was about to have her tell me the difference. But she looked confused, so Debbie had to translate. And then came 'adomineva.' "It's about adomineva."

I nodded. "Ok." I waited to hear more about dominance in patriarchal Russia, which contributed to the bigotry we were talking about.

"Do you know what this is?"

"Yeah," emphatically. "Adomineva." Then a pause and more confusion from Irena. "Adomineva?"

"No! No! Adomineva, adomineva," she said, slapping my forearm. Hard. Now I was baffled, lost in a translated mess far from anything resembling a point. I looked at Debbie for a line.

"Adam and Eve, Eva," Debbie came back with under her breath. Ah. Got it.

"Katya [she called me], listen to me. Domineva -- you know how everything begin with Adam, and then he took from his hip--"

"His rib," Debbie and I corrected her in unison.

"Yes, yes, rib." I wanted to tell her I learned about this when I was four but didn't stop her. She continued, going to the men who go to work and the women who stay home. Ok, why are we talking about this again? I let her go on. Ten minutes later, after trying to interrupt a few times by assuring her Russia didn't corner the patriarchy market, I realized she was lost in her own translation. Apparently Debbie's Russian is worse than Irena's English. With the conversation exhausted, my point lost, and my mojito tapped, I sat back in my chair.

Irena then started reading palms, or, rather, the fatty outside of the hand that forms with a firm fist. Apparently everyone's having babies. "Read mine," I said, shoving my fist at her, "but don't you tell me I'm havin' kids, cuz that's not gonna happen."

"How you know it doesn't happen?"

"I do. Just look at my hand."

"I see you will have kid, one, but it won't be yours from the beginning." Well isn't that convenient?

"Irena, what about wealth and girls. What do I have to look forward by way of love and money?" She looked for a second or two and then someone butted in from four feet away --

"Can you tell if it will be a girl or boy?" For fuck's sake. Give me my fist back. Irena would later tell me that I would be very happy and I asked her where she saw that. She said she didn't see it on my hand but could just tell. All right, sister. So that was last night. Tonight was a much more interesting party situation in Williamsburg after hitting Gingers' Brooklyn pride festivities.

I was there for about twenty-three minutes then Paige, Sonia and Sara and I took off. And I have to say, no matter how drunk I am, which I wasn't very, I will always take pleasure in a detailed conversation about grammar and punctuation. I guess it gets bad when you end up diagramming a sentence on the back of a Heinekin label to help somebody identify the subject of a sentence. It was quite pleasurable, fielding questions that have stumped people for years about commas, semicolons and possession. Big dork, I am.