In One Person

she used the toilet, she didn’t mention the matter of her privacy.
    “Yes, I know about that family of yours!” she said, laughing. She hiked up her half-slip, and—first lifting the wooden toilet seat—she peed standing up, rather loudly, but with her back to me. I didn’t see her penis, but there was no doubt, from the forceful way she was pissing, that she had one.
    I lay naked on the brass bed and watched her washing her hands and face, and brushing her teeth, in that little sink. I saw her wink at me in the mirror. “I guess you must have been a pretty good wrestler,” I said to her, “if they made you captain of the team.”
    “I didn’t ask to be captain,” she told me. “I just kept beating everybody—I beat everyone, so they made me captain. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could refuse.”
    “Oh.”
    “Besides, the wrestling kept them all from questioning me,” Miss Frost said. She was hanging up her skirt and blouse in the wardrobe closet; this time, she took her bra off, too. “They don’t question you—I mean
sexually
—if you’re a wrestler. It kind of keeps them off the track—if you know what I mean, William.”
    “I know what you mean,” I told her. I thought that her breasts were wonderful—so small, and with such perfect nipples, but her breasts were bigger than poor Elaine’s. Miss Frost had a fourteen-year-old’s breasts, and they looked small on her only because she was so big and strong.
    “I love your breasts,” I said to her.
    “Thank you, William. They won’t get any bigger, but it’s a wonder what hormones can induce. I guess I don’t really
need
to have bigger ones,” Miss Frost said, smiling at me.
    “I think they’re the perfect size,” I told her.
    “I assure you, I didn’t have them when I
wrestled
—that wouldn’t have worked out very well,” Miss Frost said. “I kept wrestling—thus, I kept the questions at bay, all through college,” she told me. “No breasts—no living as a woman, William—until
after
I was out of college.”
    “Where’d you go to college?” I asked her.
    “Someplace in Pennsylvania,” she told me. “It’s no place you’ve ever heard of.”
    “Were you as good a wrestler as Kittredge?” I asked her. She lay down beside me on the bed, but this time when she took my penis in her big hand, I was facing her.
    “Kittredge isn’t that good,” Miss Frost said. “He just hasn’t had any competition. New England isn’t exactly a hotbed for wrestling. It’s nothing like Pennsylvania.”
    “Oh.”
    I touched her half-slip, in the area where I thought her penis was; she let me touch her. I didn’t try to reach under the half-slip. I just touched her penis through the slinky material of her half-slip; this one was a pearl-gray color, almost the same color as Elaine’s bra. When I thought of Elaine’s bra, I remembered
Giovanni’s Room
, which was under the same pillow.
    The James Baldwin novel was so unbearably sad that I suddenly didn’t want to talk about it with Miss Frost; instead, I asked her, “Wasn’t it difficult being a wrestler, when you wanted to be a girl and you were attracted to other boys?”
    “It wasn’t that difficult when I was winning. I like to be on top,” she told me. “When you’re winning in wrestling, you’re on top. It was more difficult in Pennsylvania, because I wasn’t winning all the time there. I was on the bottom more than I liked,” she said, “but I was older then—I could handle losing. I
hated
being pinned, but I was pinned only twice—by the same fucking guy. Wrestling was my
cover
, William. Back then, boys like us needed a cover. Wasn’t Elaine a cover, William? She looked like your cover to me,” Miss Frost said. “Nowadays, don’t boys like us still need a little cover?”
    “Yes, we do,” I whispered.
    “Oh, now we’re whispering again!” Miss Frost whispered. “Whispering is a kind of cover, too, I guess.”
    “You must have studied something in that college in Pennsylvania—not just wrestling,” I said to her. “The yearbook said your choice of career was ‘fiction’—kind of a funny career path, isn’t it?” I asked her. (I believe I was just babbling, as a way to distract myself from Miss Frost’s penis.)
    “In college, I studied library science,” Miss Frost was saying, while we went on holding each other’s penises. Hers wasn’t as hard as mine—not yet, anyway. I thought that, even not hard, her penis was bigger than