Larks and Robins

“It’s all a wave. You’ll feel better soon.” 

I am in New Hampshire, visiting my partner Hugh’s maternal side of the family for the first time. Hugh has just whispered this to me, holding me in the cabin living room. I don’t know where anyone else is, but Hugh had flipped through the book I intended to read, one that I thought would be fun and benign, and advised me against it, saying “it’s not as calm as you’d want it to be.” 

It’s all a wave. In my head, I imagine a sine wave, beginning at 0, tracing its curve—a red line, in my mind—up to one, through π, down to negative one, then ending at 2π. I breathe in and out with the waves. Hugh joins me. I am calmer, a little. 

Why am I so sensitive here… now? I oscillate; I always do. Hugh has said before that I have the highest highs and the lowest lows of anyone he’s ever seen. We are going to contra dance tonight. You would think I’m about to be subject to something terrible by the way I am crumbling, shaking at the thought of such bright, such public, newness. It feels like too much, the feeling is too strong. But dancing––I love dancing. Why am I so deeply, horribly afraid? 

 

“By the end, you basically dance with everyone,” Hugh said, pausing the YouTube video he was showing me of a contra dance. 

“I didn’t realize you… switched partners.” In a matter of moments, I felt like I was losing my mind. This was when we were still in Seattle, a few days before leaving for New Hampshire. Hugh was trying to explain more about contra dancing to me, to try and make me less nervous about trying this style of dance that I had never done before. 

“Hugh, I just don’t know––” 

“And hey, they’ve started a new thing recently. Instead of the caller saying ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ it’s ‘larks and robins.’ Larks line up on the left, Robins on the right.”
“I guess that’s nice.” 

A feeling whipped up inside of me; the simultaneous horror of realizing I would have to let strangers get near me, put their hands on my waist, even––the thought of a strange man touching my waist alone began to make me nauseous––and that, on the other end, Hugh would just get to partner a string of pretty young ladies, all of whom would probably be feminine and conventionally attractive. I, for the sake of Hugh, and for the upcoming trip that I wanted to remain excited for, tried to push away these anti-fantasies. But it was too late––I was already jealous. 

Jealousy, as one of my greatest weapons against myself when I am feeling insecure, makes me feel guilty, evil. I knew it was wrong, unfounded––nothing had even happened yet, we were still in Seattle––and yet I didn’t do much to try and assuage the feeling. Normally, I would just sit in my own misery, saying nothing, until eventually Hugh notices and I confess the feeling. Then it becomes smaller, more realizable, and usually I see it for how silly it was. I want to let go of it, but it does not want to let go of me, this feeling that was burning up my insides.

 “I won’t do it,” I told Hugh. “There’s no way. I can’t.” Eventually, I amended it to “I’ll dance with your parents, your brother. That’s it.” 

 

A couple hours after this initial conversation, my friend Marysia came over, and we went to the gym. On the way, I talked to them about the contra dance situation. Marysia is a newer friend, but now one of my closest ones. They are, like me, nonbinary, but they define themselves as transmasc. My position on the trans to cis spectrum does not feel fixed; I try to pinpoint where I am, only to find my point has shifted again. Perhaps the tense I mean is the active one; I am not yet trans, but I am changing. 

I was explaining how contra worked to Marysia, who had never heard of the dance before. 

“...Hugh says the callers also say Larks and Robins instead of Ladies and Gentlemen now, which is good" 

“Oh yeah?” Marysia replies, “And the women are the Robins right?”

 “...Well yes––” 

“––Bye, of course they are”

“Isn’t that better than nothing?"

“Only if it actually changes anything.”

 

I started talking to Marysia about how nervous I was, about how I was afraid I was going to ruin everything with how jealous I felt. 

“And the worst part is, I’ve thought that like, down the line, I’d want to be able to go with you to a club and dance with people I think are pretty. But I hadn’t ever brought that up to Hugh before because I couldn’t bear it if the situation was flipped around. But it’s something I want to work towards.”

“And isn’t this the safest opportunity to work on it? I mean the way I would think about it is, you’re the most beautiful and the most perfect person he’s ever going to get. And maybe you’ll see him dance with someone else and get jealous, but at the end of the night, he’s still leaving with you. He’ll still be there.” 

“It’s just such a dumb feeling.” 

“It’s not dumb. It’s a feeling. It’s just information.”

“I guess, to be fair, it is the most benign situation possible: it’ll be a dance with a bunch of old white people and maybe a couple of younger people.” 

“Maybe you’ll get to dance with a pretty girl, too.” 

“Maybe.” 

 

The supposedly-tiny dance in Nelson’s Town Hall is full of people, almost a whole half of them young. Maybe a few high school couples, but most of them look exactly our age, college or soon after. “There’s no way,” I say to Hugh, tears welling in my eyes as we take our shoes off and step into the main hall. “Oh, my god, I can’t.”

It’s hot, there are too many people, too many pretty girls. I hate my outfit. In a more neutral context, I feel like the outfit I’m wearing isn’t too feminine––but here, I walk in wearing a skirt and I look like every other girl in there, only I don’t feel like a girl––it makes me want to cut my hair off and get tattoos, or at least, wish I had elected to wear pants. 

Somehow, even though I knew contra dancing was going to happen on this trip, I didn’t bring anything I actually wanted to wear. Hugh’s mom, Susan, told me it was going to be hot, but that I probably shouldn’t wear shorts. So I wore my long paisley skirt, which I wanted to pair with a baggy T-shirt, but I didn’t have one that was appropriate enough for the setting. I settled on a cutoff tank top. 

Hugh shepherds me further inside the hall and we find benches to sit down on. The caller is in the middle of learning a new dance, so we would have a hard time jumping in anyway. Hugh’s parents watch for a sixteen-count, then hop in a line and immediately get swinging. Bob seems to fit right in to Susan’s hometown dance. If I didn’t know him, I wouldn’t be able to tell he wasn’t from here. Susan looks radiant, bubbling over with joy. She’s swung virtually her whole life; she apparently has a famous (in such circles) jig named after her.

At the start of the next dance, Hugh convinces me to join a line. The combination is thankfully pretty simple. It takes me a while to understand how pairs progress forward in line, joining other pairs, but I get there. I am swung by a lot of men. I am too busy trying to remember what comes next, or trying to spot my head in hopes of not getting horribly dizzy, to think about this too critically. I realize that the older guys are much more fun to dance with than the younger ones who are too loose with their grips. I actually have fun. 

Sooner than I expected, the dance is over, I go to sit down. I am overwhelmed with thirst, and go out to the car to grab my water bottle. Hugh, as promised, goes to find a new partner, an older woman who was new to contra. Luke, Hugh’s brother, is taking a phone call outside and we walk in together. “Do you want to dance this one?” he asks me. “Yes, that would be great.” 

As we line up, Susan looks over at us. She calls out to Luke. “Do you guys want to switch partners? Mine says it will be a hard dance for newcomers.” Luke calls back: “No, I think we’re good. We’ll figure it out!” He whispers to me, “That’s the guy that smells like death.” It takes me a moment to register that, if we were to switch partners, I would be the one having to dance with this old, pale, smelling-like-death guy. I shudder. “Thank god.” 

 

The dance with Luke was a hard one. We are an “inactive” couple on the way up the line, which basically means we don’t do much, and then get to swing and weave on the way down. It’s a long combination, and one that takes me a while to get right. By the end of the line, we’re having fun. While waiting for our next turn, Luke says to me, “Contra got way more fun for me post-transition. Now I don’t have to dance with a bunch of sweaty guys.”

 “I’m jealous. I honestly thought that with the whole ‘larks and robin’ thing the dancing would be a lot more mixed gender. But it’s still so rigid.” There wasn’t a single couple on the dance floor that was defying the traditional ‘ladies start on the right, gents start on the left’ norm. 

 “You should see it when my cousin Owen is calling, he prefers to dance the Robin’s side anyway.” We laugh. Luke continues, “I hope you get a chance to dance with Wren.” Wren is Owen’s nonbinary partner, the only person “like me” at this event. Luke is also trans, but he passes as someone AMAB, so it’s different.

“I do too,” I say. “Beats any of the sweaty old guys.” 

After the dance with Luke I take a break. Hugh goes for another round, dancing with a rather experienced older woman. The smelling-of-death man wanders around the bench area, asking me repeatedly to dance. I refuse. 

Hugh and I dance again, what he thinks will be the last one. This one is my favorite, for I have really started to get the hang of things. We help a new couple along. One person gets so frustrated they walk off the floor entirely, leaving their partner in the lurch. While we all agreed the dance was taught poorly, it sure was fun, and, according to the experienced folk, a new variation. At the end of that dance, and at the announcement of “one more,” a young woman, probably around our age, with a long-sleeved red floral dress, and long, lovely brown curls, asks Hugh to dance. Part of me wanted this to happen; I wanted to see what it would be like. Wren comes up and asks me to dance. Thank god, I think. 

The dance with Wren is exceptional. They offer to take the Lark side, since this is my first night and I’ve only been dancing as a Robin. We are one of the few non-standard couples I’ve noticed all night, the only one in this dance. 

“How long have you been doing contra for exactly?” 

“Less than a year. Owen introduced me to it.” 

“You seem pretty good for not doing it for very long,” 

“I’ve been going pretty consistently. I’ve been getting really into it.” 

Dancing with someone my size is different, nice, softer. Wren is wearing a long, brown skirt that picks up every time they spin around. They had their curly brown hair pinned back, so I could see that they had a sly undercut behind their ear, along with a tattoo I hadn’t noticed before. 

I also keep glancing over at Hugh. He is laughing, swinging, his hand around the waist of this laughing girl. I push my thoughts down. “Marysia would love this,” I think to myself. Hugh dancing with a pretty lady, and me dancing with a pretty ‘they.’ 

“Oh god, what are we doing next again?” Wren asks, laughing. 

“I think the cross-over thing? I don’t know what anything is called, sorry!” I start giggling too. We do the wrong thing, the people around us correct us. 

We keep chatting, laughing, giving each other those knowing looks that other people would define as flirting, but in queer they-them land, also mean that we are recognizing each other for what we are, over and over again. 

The dance is engrossing enough––at this point I am having real, genuine fun––that I sneak just a couple more glances over towards Hugh and his partner. In one, they are doing a fancy swing, with arms over their heads, both still smiling. But really, it was fine; the dance ends, and Hugh walks back over and asks me to waltz, the last song, finally. Turns out he doesn't know how to waltz at all, so I lead and try to teach him. Eventually, we give up and go outside. I am trying to stay calm, but seeing the same girl walk out with Luke is too much for me.

I look up at the sky. Hugh is asking me how I am and I won’t respond. I am not really jealous, but I am hurt all the same. I am wondering if I am cut out for all this, because it doesn't feel like I am. At the same time, I can hear pieces of Luke’s conversation with the girl. It sounds like they’re talking about guns. In another snippet, I hear her say, “the great goodness of God’s people.” Oh, I think to myself, she’s a trad wife. 

Bob pulls the car around and we all hop in, Luke included. “Oh my god, I couldn’t get out of that conversation fast enough. She’s fucking crazy, and she’s a fucking trad wife.” “I knew it,” I say, near around when Susan says, “Oh, we thought you were having a good conversation. That’s why we told you to take your time, we thought you two might be hitting it off…” Luke interjects: “Are you fucking kidding me? I was trying to find a way to politely excuse myself without her getting upset and spreading a bunch of gossip about “Susan’s son” to the whole town. Her name is Liberty, by the way.” 

My brain has stopped working. “How was she with you, Hugh?” Susan asked. “I didn’t know that was her name. She immediately asked me who I came here with, and when I pointed to Eden and said my partner, she asked if I had any other family, and I said my brother Luke. She didn’t say anything crazy towards me.” Susan asks what a trad-wife is. 

Eventually the conversation turns back towards the smelling-of-death guy. Susan tells me that she has never felt so uncomfortable during a contra dance, that the man would pressure her into doing all kinds of extra swinging, confusing the new folk, until Susan had to tell him a firm “No!,” something she has never done before at a contra dance. Even then, she said, he was still behaving so strangely towards her, trying to get her to dance more intensely, that she almost walked out.

 And there was the smell, which she is hesitant to bring up but does so eventually. “I told you,” Luke says. He seems to at least partially blame Susan for dancing with him in the first place. Do you not remember what it was like, I think to myself. I suppose it's harder when it’s one’s own mother. But Susan has been ingrained in the “old ways” of doing things, where girls couldn’t say no when asked to dance unless they were sitting out entirely. Through that later conversation on the car ride home, I will remain quiet, and try not to listen too intently. 

“Hey Eden, didn’t that guy ask you to dance before you and I danced?” Luke asks.

 I was hoping no one had noticed. “Yeah… he did.” 

“So, when he was asking me to switch with you and Luke, it was because he wanted to partner you!” Susan says. 

“I guess.” 

“I’m so glad you told him no.” 

And, like I told Hugh later, but couldn’t bear to say in the car, he had asked me to dance several more times that night, each time I was sitting alone between dances, taking that same insistent tone that he apparently took with Susan. I try to keep my head down and the tears out of my eyes on the long, winding road home. 

Why me? I can’t understand it. There were other, more fem-presenting, more younger looking women than me. Maybe this happens to anyone gendered as a woman so often that it even still happens to me. But god, I feel like I get attention from men this age all of the time. Maybe less now that I’ve cut my hair. 

 

When we get back to the cabin, I ignore any attempts at post-dance pleasantries and crawl straight into bed. Now I am crying. Mostly about having to dance with all the old men, the old guy who kept asking me to dance, and the image of Hugh laughing with Liberty as the flash of contrast that plays in my head over and over. At some point, Hugh says, “I understand why you would be jealous.” 

Something inside of me feels like it is ripped open. Not my heart––no, I am not jealous of this––but my liver or my stomach. I realize I am feeling shame. Shame that I am different, that I can’t wear a pretty dress and curl my hair without feeling disembodied, that I am not pretty in the ways I am supposed to be. That I can’t go to this ostensibly-progressive dance, that still basically adheres to the same gender binary, and feel normal or even good afterwards. 

“Did you ever look over at me when I was dancing with Wren?” I asked. “I did. You looked happy.” And I was, too, somehow. 

 

“I had a dream last night,” I say to Hugh the next morning. I often dream, but I rarely have ones so obvious. “...that I was completely alone. In this world, you didn’t exist. I was losing my friends, one by one, until the last person said it was over between us too. I was in my apartment, alone, miserable.” 

“My crying in the dream wakes me up, and there you are curled around me, and I remember where I am, that you are here, and that the friends I have are real too. I guess I scared myself so bad last night that my consciousness warped everything into that nightmare.” 

The day is dreary. The weather hasn’t been great the whole time we’ve been here, partially because it’s earlier in the summer, and partially because of leftover storms from hurricanes that have been blowing up from Florida. Luke plays music all the time. Mostly stuff that I can’t stand, either because it’s so vulgar and he’s playing it in front of the whole family, or it’s a song that I could stand but now I can’t because he’s playing it for the 20th time. Sometimes, though, he plays music by the Crane Wives, a folksy band that I don’t think I ever would have found otherwise. 

One lyric, “Won’t you stay with me my darling / when the house don’t feel like home,” is haunting me. I find it stuck in my head even before I know what the words are, humming it throughout the day, my mantra for these times. 

 

“Also I, like, wanted to ask; how is it here, with all the family, being in a straight-passing relationship?” Luke and I are alone in his grandma’s basement, resetting her homemade rat trap. 

“I’m glad you asked that, actually, I’ve been wanting to talk about it. It’s uhh, okay. It’s weird, though. I don’t know whether I should be outright telling people or not––” 

“Like Tanner and Lucas?” 

“Yeah exactly. And like, hearing ‘girlfriend’ every single time I’m being introduced to someone is weird too. I usually use ‘partner.’ In Seattle, most of my friends are queer and so there’s not really a question about it.” 

I have a hard time expressing my big feelings about everything to Luke. But the fact he even brought this up at all was affirming. At least someone, outside of Hugh, knows about me. Luke, in the best of times, is turning out to be one of the most considerate people I know. A couple days ago, the three of us were on a run all together, when Hugh blasted ahead without warning. Normally, I don’t mind him doing this when he asks beforehand, but he didn’t. Instead of sprinting up with Hugh, which is what Luke would do normally, he stayed and kept his pace even with mine. “Thanks for hanging back,” I told him. “Of course, I think having someone to run with is important, it’s nice to have someone to chat with.” I didn’t tell him I was about to stop when Hugh took off, all motivation having fled my body. 

“Thanks again for asking,” I say again to Luke, as we’re heading back upstairs, having successfully reset the homemade rat trap. “It’s nice to be able to talk about it with someone.” 

“Of course I just wanted to see how you were doing, you know, if it was weird or anything.” 

“Yeah, and I mean it is a little, but it’s okay.” We rejoin the rest of the family, who are all now in the living room, chatting with Grandma Lynn. The conversation calms me, at least temporarily. 

 

But I still can’t stop freaking out. I tell Hugh later that day, after some minor incident that sends me spiraling, “I feel like I am about to boil over, all the time. Normally, I feel like it takes a lot for the ‘meter’ to fill up, or that a lot of things have to happen for me to get seriously overwhelmed. But right now, I feel like the water level is basically at the top, and it just takes one little thing for me to overflow.” Maybe I’m still recovering from contra yesterday, but it feels like I can’t handle even the smallest inconvenience anymore, the slightest change in plan. I try to recharge my battery, shutting myself in Hugh and I’s room as he helps clean up after lunch. It’s raining, again, pouring so hard that I know by later this afternoon, the weather will clear. 

A few hours later, we––Hugh, Luke, and myself––are sent off to pick wild blueberries. Hugh thinks I’ll enjoy the time away from the rest of his family, and I agree. It sounds nice to spend time outside.

Luke drives us up to a hilltop farm some ten minutes away. The little farm is an unsupervised U-Pick, with a little blue stand you can leave cash in, with no recommended donation amount––another one of their family traditions. We spread out and, after a little while, find bushes that haven’t been picked through, tossing the little blueberries into the small to-go containers we have each strung around our necks. The three of us find each other eventually, and get to chatting again. I realize how comfortable I feel around Luke, especially compared to the rest of Hugh’s family that I have slowly been getting to know more on this trip. We find a tick full of blood (thankfully, none of ours, probably a deer’s) and ogle at it for a while. 

Getting back into the car, Luke asks, referring back to our earlier conversation, “So you prefer partner to girlfriend?” ‘

“Well here it doesn’t matter––” 

“––But in general?” 

“In general, yeah, partner.”

“And so pronouns?”

 “Erm…” I stumble around. I feel like I’m ‘coming out’––why do I feel like I’m coming out, this is so dumb it’s literally just Luke––

“––So…they?” he says, correctly interpreting my silence. 

“Yes––” I pinch my thumb and pointer finger together, then spread them apart. “A little bit.” 

Later, I agonized. Why did I say that? It’s not a “little bit.” With all my friends, it’s always, and has been for the last two years. At work, it’s she/they, only because I’m too afraid of constantly having to correct people if they misgender me. 

But is this what actually “coming out” to everyone else––my parents, the rest of Hugh’s family––would feel like? I had been actively avoiding this feeling for over two years now. In college, we would open our weekly literary journal meetings with names and pronouns, I would avoid saying mine. Back then, I was embarrassed to be the only non-cis person in the room––even though I still hadn’t taken the leap to being a full-on “they/them.” 

This was also in part because of my old partner, Blue, who when we were together would ask (then insist) on using ‘they’ pronouns for me. “I don’t want to be seen as a collective,” I would say, or I’d cite a Clarice Lispector quote that has stuck with me: “Ant and bee are not it, but they.” I didn’t think I was queer enough, part of a collective enough, to call myself they. “But you feel nonbinary, don’t you?” “Of course I do. I’ve felt that way my whole life.” How the pronoun made me feel when someone, or a stranger, used it in reference to me back in those Portland days, felt irrelevant. I thought it would have to be all or nothing. “But I don’t mind ‘she’ sometimes,” I would counter to Blue. “Just say your pronouns are they/them and enough people will call you ‘she’ that it’ll be like you’re using she/they anyway.” This was all confusing to me too.

 In reality, I was scared. Maybe I was just conflating my obsession with Blue with my true feelings, maybe I would try they/them pronouns for a while and go back, just like they did. In reality, I think I knew deep down how true my feelings were. The possibility of a change with so many cascading effects to me was terrifying. I wanted to pick something only once everyone was ready to listen to my choice. But yet––when I asked my friends Georgia and Norbert to use ‘they’ pronouns with me, and then hearing them do so––felt right. In this safer, quieter context––one without presuppositions of what I was going to do, just more so a reflection of how I felt––hearing ‘they’ felt true. Truer even then with those Portland strangers, much more than it felt when Blue was. A scratch was being itched that I could never find before that moment. 

Luke doesn’t say anything to my tiny little crab claw, the tiny gap holding all of who I am. He just gives me a demure smile as he slides into the driver’s seat and shuts the door behind him. But he will see through my shyness and use ‘they’ pronouns for me anyway.