Honest Critiques

My mom always claimed that the reason I came out a girl was because my daddy never went to church. Daddy claimed it was the other way around. He claimed he never went to church a day in his life because prayers never go anywhere, just float around our heads like swamp gas, stinking up the place. He had a reason to think that, of course. It's well-known Riddleback lore that not a single one of his prayers ever came true.

For starters, when he was a kid, he prayed every night that he'd grow up to be a famous magician with a mysterious handlebar mustache and quick slender hands made for plucking exotic animals out of thin air. Preferably one with a dramatic Houdini-style death to boot. But when, in his mid-twenties, it was discovered that the only facial hair he could manage to sprout looked at best like cookie crumbs and that his hands were more like mallets than they were wispy and quick, he had to set his sights a little lower.

He began concentrating instead on praying for money and women. He prayed for a supermodel and got my mother, all five feet, 200 pounds of her. He prayed for riches, but being a door-to-door rubber eraser salesman, could barely afford cheese puffs on a regular basis. None of his prayers ever seemed to be answered.

So when the time came for him to pray that his expecting wife would have a baby boy to carry on the proud Riddleback name, it really was no huge surprise that I came out missing a few parts he'd really been counting on.

With all those unanswered prayers floating around his head like mosquitoes, it's a surprise that he believed so vehemently that his prayer for an heir would be answered. But somehow he managed to eek out enough faith to believe just that. According to my mother, this is how it went:

"Margaret," he called to my mother, who was busy drying dishes. He was all red and sweaty from the vigor of his prayer. "Buy one of them footballs, ya hear? We're gonna have a boy."

My mom, never given to believing any statement of fact, waved a hand towel at him. "Oh, Cletus, now you know you can't count on those darn prayers of yours. Why, I think you're praying to the wrong person."

But Daddy was persistent, bringing home footballs and buying a large-pawed slobbery mutt, and eventually even my mom became a believer. They began painting everything in sight blue and even came up with a name for me: Gary.

I was born and after they were both finished crying over their misfortune, they made a command decision. The world might have seen them as pioneer battlers of sexism, but really they were just too lazy and forlorn to do anything else. They kept the footballs, the blue paint, and the name Gary. Even the big mutt, Juliet, stuck around. When I was five, I renamed her Fred so I wouldn't feel so unusual.

Still, they each blamed God for the fact that I was born sans-penis, either one way or another. They argued about it often, especially after it came to light that my mom would have no more children. They were stuck with me and they both hated the very idea of it.

"Cletus, quit blaming God," Mom would say. "You're the one at fault. If only you'd stopped praying long enough to go to church every now and then, that girl would be a boy right now."

"You're right," Daddy would holler back. "It's not God's fault. It's yours! Why just look at what your constant yammering about church has done!" He'd point at me as if I were Exhibit A in the Trial of the Riddleback Sins.

I didn't take their disappointment too hard. I didn't feel bad about myself particularly; I just tried to be what they wanted. I tried to be a boy. I rejected anything feminine, ripping heads off of any stray dolls that I happened upon, using fingernail polish for war paint, and always insisting on playing full tackle football with the boys rather than "house" with the girls. For my parents' sake, I ran the streets with no shoes, my feet as black as snake eyes. I scratched my butt in public and got quite good at blowing a snot right out of my nose and into the grass.