Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden.
I receive the verdict on a Sunday evening. They’re supposed to give you advance notice so you can put your affairs in order, but the letter is postmarked from more than a month ago—I’ve never been good about clearing out my mailbox—so I don’t see it until two days before I’m supposed to begin my transformation.
They don’t call it a punishment in the letter. They use words like optimal outcome and mutually advantageous. But everyone knows what it is.
There’s no reason I should go to work on Monday, after reading their verdict. I have enough savings to last me through the transformation process, and I won’t need money after it’s done.
Still, the next day, I wake up for my morning run, as usual. I head to the office in a silk blouse and black pumps. I sit down in my cubicle, drink my cup of coffee, check in with my team. I’ll keep going through the motions of being a woman until someone makes me stop.
On Tuesday, the day of the first appointment, I coax my face into full makeup. Foundation, contour, highlighter, blush. I even curl my hair, which I haven’t done since my early twenties, when I was still crafting my identity around who I thought other people wanted me to be.
After I get to the Transformation Office, I feel a little foolish for dressing up. It’s a sterile, simple place, no different from all the doctor’s offices I’ve gone to for all my normal human ailments.
Resisting the urge to rub my mascaraed lashes, I sit in the pastel-colored waiting room and fill out the forms they give me. Name, age, occupation. Relationship status. Date of last menstrual period. Date of last sexual encounter. Questions that almost feel like accusations.
From the inner corridor, a nurse calls my name.
My Transformation Officer is about my age, a tall woman with an easy smile and steady hands.
She looks over my paperwork, enters it into the system, and gives me a bottle of pills.
“That’s it?” I say, clutching the pills, feeling foolish.
“That’s it,” she says. “One a day.”
“For how long?”
“You’ll need to take them for about two weeks,” she says, scribbling something on a clipboard. “Do you have someone you can trust who will be able to help you through the process? A friend or a family member, perhaps?”
There are so few people I’m close with these days. My friends from the cross-country team have all moved on, posting pictures of their growing families online. My colleagues are friendly enough in the office, but after I leave, they’ll put a new hire in my cubicle and forget I was ever there. Maybe that’s why I’m still in the same role I started in, while men hired after me scurried up the promotion ladder—because our bosses knew they’d need to replace me, for one reason or the other.
Who else can I tell? I could visit my sister. We were close, once.
But I need to think. I need to be sure.
When I get home, I put the pills down and go for a run.
I need the slap of my sneakers against the pavement, the wind biting my ears.
I run past smiling, pastel-painted houses with neatly mowed grass lawns. I always hated this neighborhood, hated living alone in a house with three bedrooms, but it didn’t make financial sense to move away.
One mile. Two.
A group of young mothers pushes their strollers down the sidewalk, laughing and chattering. One stops to pick up her child’s pacifier, which he’s thrown onto the curb. Wipes off the sticky residue with her fingers.
Maybe I could just keep running. Leave the pills at home and never go back.
I still have my body, my human body, which I’ve loved and hated in turns. My hands, my stomach, my strong legs.
Six miles. Seven.
My lungs ache. My calves burn. I keep running until I see nothing but trees.
But the Transformation Officers would find me, no matter how far I ran. There’s nowhere I can hide forever. They’d find me and make me do this in a more painful way, drag my family’s name through the mud, bring in lawyers and police to force me to comply.
I force myself to turn around.
Better, less humiliating, to face this head-on. To act like this is a choice.
There are so many kinds of gardens. Nobody told me which kind I would be.
Rose gardens for poetry majors to walk through. Herb gardens that could sustain a full Simon and Garfunkel song. Zen gardens made of nothing but rocks. I wouldn’t mind being one of those, but I don’t think they’ll let me choose.
I research them all. I stay up late in the blue light of my laptop screen, scrolling fervently, feverishly, as though this is a test I can ace if I study for it enough.
When my eyes hurt from staring at the screen, I walk into the bathroom. I fill my palm with tap water. I swallow the first pill.
In the morning, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I drive north to see my sister.
She’s still in her pajamas when she opens the door. Her baby bump is showing.
Jamie clings to her leg. He’s bigger than I remembered him being the last time I visited. Four now, I think, maybe five. Bowl cut, hand-knitted sweater, solemn eyes.
I give them each a cautious hug.
My sister’s voice is high-pitched and bright, a voice I associate with PTA moms. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”
I know she’s asking why I’m here. But the words sit like pebbles in my mouth. I roll them around, trying to figure out how to deliver them in a way that doesn’t feel obscene.
Her face falls. “Oh. You got your verdict?”
“On Sunday,” I tell her.
I don’t know how she figured it out so quickly. Maybe it was obvious to everyone but me.
She composes her expression back into one of maternal calm as she ushers me inside.
When we were children, she always followed in my wake, just two years behind me. She joined the drama team because I taught her how to act, joined the math club because I helped her practice algebra. It wasn’t until she had Jamie that she shucked off the shell of the goofy girl I loved and emerged as a calm, responsible mother I barely recognized.
We sit down around the coffee table, unsure where to begin. Jamie sits in the corner and plays with his toys, uninterested in grown-up conversations.
“So,” she says. “How does this work?”
“They gave me pills. I’m supposed to take one a day.”
“I really thought they’d give you more time,” she says, touching her throat. “I guess they know best, though. They wouldn’t have made the decision if there were still a chance.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hey,” she says, her voice soft with sympathy. “This isn’t your fault. It was just your body that betrayed you.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say,” I say.
She blinks, surprised.
I’m surprised too. I can’t explain it, the strange urge to defend my body from her.
Before I can apologize, my sister changes the subject. “Are you hungry? We just got some organic peaches at the farmer’s market. You have to try one.”
She slices her organic peaches into perfect yellow wedges for us, the color of an old bruise. She gives one to Jamie before she brings the plate over to the coffee table.
Before I can take one, Jamie tugs on my sleeve. “Guess what?”
I don’t have much practice interacting with children. I extricate my sleeve from his peach-juiced fingers. “What?”
“When I grow up,” he says solemnly, “I’m going to be a doctor. And a president.”
“Neither of those two jobs has very good work-life balance,” I say.
My sister gives me an exasperated look.
Jamie seems unfazed. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks.
I have no idea what to say. When I grow up, I want to be a Zen garden made entirely of rocks. I don’t think my sister would like that.
I’ve waited too long to answer him; the silence stretches long and thin. My sister bails me out. “Your aunt’s a grown-up, silly,” she tells him. To me, she whispers, “Sorry. They just had Career Day at school. He’s still excited about it.”
There’s another long, painful pause.
“So listen,” I say. “The Transformation Officer said I might need your help at the end of this. Would that be okay with you?”
She nods. “Of course. Maybe Mom and I can—”
“I don’t want you to tell Mom and Dad,” I say. “Not until after it’s over.”
Her brow furrows. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to be around when they find out,” I say.
I can already imagine how our parents will react to the news of my transformation. Unlike my sister, I’ve disappointed them often enough to be familiar with the routine.
My mother will wail. She will see my failure as her own failure. She’ll exhume her memories of my upbringing for the tiniest things she might have done wrong. And she’ll comfort herself by thinking of my sister and her healthy son, a reminder of all the things she did right.
My father will avert his eyes, sympathetic but uncomfortable. To him, my punishment will be a foreign thing that belongs in the domain of his wife and daughters, people he loves but will never fully understand.
My sister purses her lips, clearly unwilling to picture this. “Fine. I won’t tell them if you don’t want me to. But only because I think you should do it yourself. They deserve a chance to say goodbye.” She pauses. “And frankly, I think Brandon deserves that, too.”
I don’t want to talk about Brandon. I bite into a slice of peach. Sweetness bursts cold and slimy on my tongue.
Pill after pill after pill, for seven days in a row. Then, on the seventh day, the pain starts.
Still, I keep running, keep going back to work. I manage to hide my transformation for about a week, sneaking Tylenols and leaving meetings for frequent bathroom breaks. A few times of day, I vomit mildew-wet dirt. I hide fistfuls of soil in the disposal bin that’s only supposed to be for sanitary products.
One morning, a few miles into my run, I lurch to a stop in the middle of the crosswalk.
The pain scissors into me, worse than before. It feels like there’s something gestating inside me, sitting on top of my ribs. It punches at my midriff, threatens to tear me apart.
I double up, retching, but nothing comes out.
A few passersby give me concerned looks. I force myself to straighten up and keep walking, so I don’t have to face their pity. I limp-jog home, holding myself together with both hands.
My Transformation Officer looks disapproving when I tell her about my concerns. “You said you were on a run when it happened?”
“Right.”
She clucks. “You probably shouldn’t be doing anything physically strenuous at this stage. Just in case you accidentally damage what’s growing inside you. I’ll need to perform an examination.” She pulls on a latex glove. “Open wide.”
I do as she says. She reaches into my mouth.
I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend I’m someplace else.
“Try to relax,” my Transformation Officer says, over and over, “I need you to relax.”
At last I manage to loosen my muscles enough to allow her to reach her arm down my throat. I gag around her fingers.
She emerges with a handful of seeds in her gloved hand, dripping with my blood and saliva.
“Ah,” she says. “See? There’s nothing to be alarmed about. The pain is a necessary part of the process.”
I stare at the seeds. It makes no sense that those came out of me.
“I haven’t seen this variety before,” she says. “But everyone’s body is different. The fact that you’re producing seeds already means you’re doing well. Maybe each of your friends can come take a clipping home, after they sprout.” She pats me on the hand, reassuring. “You’ll make a lovely garden. No more running, okay?”
I cup the seeds in my bare hand. They look like peach pits, large and round, pointy on the ends. Rough enough to whet my teeth on. I have the sudden urge to swallow them again, push them back to where they came from, where they were safe and unblemished.
With seeds sprouting in my stomach, I can’t go back to work anymore. The products of my transformation are too visible, too indecent.
Without running and without work, my days stretch empty and long.
My sister visits every few days, but she doesn’t want Jamie to see me this way, and she doesn’t want to leave him with the babysitter too often. I think part of her doesn’t want to see me this way, either.
Three days before my final pill, I clean the house. Wash all my clothes and slide them onto their wire hangers. Box up my books and my kitchenware and my athletic gear. This way, it will be easy for my sister to deal with my possessions. I’ll let her decide what to keep and what to donate.
In the back of one of my filing cabinets, I find a list.
In one column: Abigail, Leah, Rebecca. In another: Daniel, Noah, Samuel.
We made the list together, but it was Brandon’s list more than it was mine. He was the one who pushed for children, and I was the one who hedged and hesitated, even though it never mattered for him as much as it did for me.
For men, the failure to produce children can be overlooked if you perform well in your career. For women, there’s only one way to truly justify your personhood. One way to cement your right to take up space, to have a body.
But he was insistent, said there wasn’t any time left to wait. When I agreed to try IVF, after a year of trying on our own, he got down on his knees to kiss my stomach. Trailed his kisses down slowly, slowly, to thank me for giving in.
The first time I miscarried, only a month after the pregnancy test, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. Brandon brought me chocolates and tea, thinking I needed to be comforted, and I couldn’t bear to tell him I was crying tears of relief. My body had bought me more time.
By the third miscarriage, Brandon had started pulling away. I begged him not to go. Part of me knew what it meant if he left, that I’d have no more chances, that a letter would come in my mailbox one day.
I whisper the names on the list. Abigail, Leah, Rebecca.
Brandon’s handwriting. Brandon’s hopes.
Against my better judgment, I dial his number.
“Hello?” says the voice on the other side. Whiskey-dark, so familiar I’d recognize it anywhere.
I open my mouth.
Before I can speak, something kicks inside me.
My fist crumples around the list. I drop the phone. From the floor, the faint, tinny sound of Brandon’s voice sounds very far away. “Hello?” he says. “Anyone there?”
I rush to the bathroom and barely make it to the sink in time to spit out more of those rough, strange seeds. They’re larger now, scraping my throat on their way up.
It isn’t pain, exactly, the feeling of transforming. It has the same sharpness of pain, but it’s something different. More like an odd sense of becoming, one I haven’t felt in years. Maybe that’s what we all are, every woman who’s passed through this process. Failed fragments, returning to the whole.
I had a trans classmate in college who faced her verdict calmly, saying gardenhood was the closest thing to womanhood our society would ever let her be. Brandon told me afterward that he didn’t understand it. Why she would choose this.
The thought of Brandon feels small, all of a sudden. Just a speck compared to my vastness.
The phone is still on the floor, where I dropped it, beeping quietly.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. When I look in the mirror, I find two roses growing out of my eyes, petals unfurling in blooms of red.
On the day I take my final pill, my Transformation Officer takes me to my resting place.
It’s a short drive from my neighborhood. We pass a few gardens, carefully pruned, producing fruits and flowers for the families who live nearby.
She opens the door for me, helps me out of the car. We’re standing in an empty lot, one that might once have housed a parking lot. Now there’s nothing in the lot but gravel and dirt.
My body is no longer mine; I have no control over the ways it’s falling apart, the way it’s rebuilding itself. A bloom of wet lichen erupts on my shoulder, where she touches me. My intestines shift with each step, churning out green things, growing things.
“Lie down anywhere you like,” she says.
“On the dirt?” I want to say, but when I open my mouth, nothing comes out except wind and birdsong.
“Anywhere you like,” she repeats, as though she’s heard me anyway. “You choose.”
I lie down on the wet soil. There’s something about it that still feels wrong to me, the remnants of a humanness I can’t unlearn.
“Are you feeling all right?” she says.
I nod, and I’m surprised to find that I mean it.
“That’s good,” she says. “The hard part is over now. You don’t have to be anything you’re not anymore.”
I close my eyes and her voice fades away.
I dream of wild things. Of meadows where ancient plants still grow, wild grass under an age-old sky. A memory of something bigger than I am, bigger than I was ever allowed to be.
It doesn’t hurt anymore.
Moss sprouts between my thighs, flowers beneath my breasts.
