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Lane Scott Jones| Longreads | June 25, 2024 | 3,835 words (13 minutes)
“At last! This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” —Genesis 2:23
In the seventh year of our marriage, on a cold day in October, my husband called me into the bathroom.
He was lying in the tub with his head submerged, but he sat up as I walked in, water splashing over the side. He wiped his face but didn’t look at me. From the halting way he began, I knew he was telling me something he’d been trying to say for a long time.
I watched the water lap around his edges, blurring and dissolving him. After 10 years together, I was so familiar with his body it had become an extension of my own. I could bring my eye to each point of him and know how it felt: the smooth skin of his shoulder, the surprising delicacy of his collarbones, the softness of his brown hair.
He never hid it from me. That surprises people. They ask, “Did you have any idea?” They imagine me walking in on him gazing into a full-length mirror, dressed in my clothes. They imagine the screaming, weeping, gnashing of teeth. But it wasn’t like that. As soon as he found the words, he laid them at my feet.
“I want to wear women’s clothes.”
Growing up in North Carolina, most of what I knew about sex and gender I learned in church. What to guard against: girls in spaghetti straps, girls in jean shorts, girls in low-cut tops. That girls who have sex are chewed gum, crumpled roses, licked candy bars. That boys will be boys.
I learned a surprising amount about oral sex from the Focus on the Family magazines stocked in the church library, with advice columns in the back where concerned parents wrote in about their teenagers. I read those scraps like a sacred text, carefully tearing out and ferreting away the pages to piece together a more complete picture.
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I met my first boyfriend at church. He was a lacrosse player and a recent convert. We had nothing in common apart from the fact that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other—in empty Sunday school classrooms, choir robe closets, altars, once the baptismal. We spent hours in the dark church parking lot in the halo of a street light. Exhaust fumes still taste like kissing to me.
It was nothing like they’d said. No one had mentioned how desire felt like power. How it coursed through you, animating you in new, unfamiliar ways. It scared him. He ran the treadmill of desire, guilt, repentance, and relapse. I took what was offered, then accepted the guilt of wanting it in the first place. A necessary flagellation.
I also met my future husband at church. I was 18.
After high school, I accepted a scholarship to Auburn University in Alabama. It was the first time I’d been away from home. I imagined reinventing myself, trying on imaginary identities like vellum dresses on a paper doll: a journalist, a visual artist, a published author. I saw myself moving abroad after graduation, or to New York City or the West Coast. I was ready to disentangle myself from my hometown church and all its restrictions. But college in the Deep South required a handbook I’d never been given. The rules and norms were incomprehensible to me—from everything that goes on during sorority rush to how my pageant queen roommate somehow always had the perfect powdered face of makeup.
My first college boyfriend was a Texan going through a quiet radicalization. God had told him to stop wearing V-neck T-shirts and shopping at thrift stores—a revelation somehow related to biblical manhood. We only ever kissed but, after we broke up, I heard how I featured prominently in his story of religious conversion: how I had led him into sexual temptation and how he’d triumphed over it. Instead of laughing at this, I absorbed it as a personal deficiency.
The day I met my future husband, our college minister had just finished his sermon, part of a series on Genesis. The ministry was housed in a white-steepled church that sat as the cornerstone of Opelika, Alabama, with a looming monument to Robert E. Lee and the Confederate cause in the courtyard. After the service, I was stacking chairs against the back wall when I saw a boy winding his way toward me. He was slim, with a mop of brown hair and a long stride. I’ll call him D. When he reached me, he stuck out an eager hand.
“Finally!” D said. “I’ve been waiting to meet you.”
D had been reading my music blog, full of album reviews and pirated songs. He was a musician studying piano and invited me to see a local band play the next night. At dinner before the show, his car got towed, and we spent the entire night tracking it down instead. We found it at an impound lot. He tried to talk me into buying bolt cutters.
We only ever kissed but, after we broke up, I heard how I featured prominently in his story of religious conversion: how I had led him into sexual temptation and how he’d triumphed over it.
D unlocked a sense of possibility in me. He did not make me feel ashamed. Only two years older than me, he seemed to have life figured out. He instructed me in lessons with the patience of a priest: Eating a banana calms the nerves, he told me. The key to making beautiful music is unwashed hair.
He grew up in an archetypal Alabama family—father a bank president, mother a homemaker—in a large brick house in a neighborhood of identical large brick houses. The family motto: “Don’t stand out.” But D had always been creative and strange, buzzing with dreamy romantic energy that chafed against his parents’ expectations. They worked hard to keep him contained. His mother wouldn’t let him try out for community theater. When he took up piano, they encouraged him to try sports.
D and I saw each other every day after the bolt-cutters incident. He would practice piano until late at night then climb the drain pipe to my second-story dorm room. I’d hear the velvety sound of my window opening and him hoisting himself in with practiced ease. He would shed his outer layers and burrow into my twin bed, pressing his icy hands against my warm body, fingers tapping against my hips, still silently practicing Bach.
A couple of months into dating, D arranged for a small four-seater airplane to fly us to the beach for a day. He loved sweeping gestures—always writing our love story in his head. We spent the day by the ocean and flew back to Auburn as the sun began to set in a blaze of orange and pink. The pilot leaned back and asked us, “Want to see that again?” Then he flew us up higher, westward, and gently back in time, where the sun hadn’t yet gone down.
That’s the only time I’ve ever seen the sun set twice.
We were in a hotel hot tub in Texas when D mentioned marriage for the first time. I was 19, in a red bikini, steam from the water making my skin flush pink. At first, I said no.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become. No one single future captured me, but the breathtaking collective possibility of them all. Yet, over the years, the possibilities had seemed to narrow: a thousand small reprimands snuffing them out.
Marriage was a small box, within a series of increasingly smaller boxes that I’d been pressed into over the years—by every boyfriend, youth group, church service, and unspoken expectation of womanhood. But I accepted the shrinking, the need to make myself smaller to fit the life I was offered. The other futures I could imagine began to feel blurry and uncharted. Marriage, like religion, promised certainty. When I eventually said yes, it was the relief of acquiescence. It felt so easy to become the kind of woman I was supposed to be.
Religion had locked me into a competition of womanhood, the ring on my finger the final prize. On our wedding invitations, which I designed, there was a banner at the top with Adam’s words from Genesis, the moment he first met Eve: “At last!”
We married my senior year. I skipped graduation. We left the wedding reception on a motorcycle, running out of gas on a dark Alabama road. I got a ride from a man in a white pickup truck while my husband of three hours pushed the motorcycle up the hill toward the nearest gas station. We had sex for the first time at 4 a.m. in a cold hotel room. I cried afterward. D fell asleep immediately. I took a shower, trying to comb through the tangles of my bobby-pin-studded, shellacked wedding hair, and cried even harder.
I’d never dreamt of marriage. I didn’t imagine a wedding, a dress, or a groom. My fantasies were of other things: the places I would go, the people I would meet, date, and break up with, the versions of myself I could become.
On the honeymoon, we performed the roles of husband and wife like child actors in a play. We went to white tablecloth dinners in our nicest clothes. We lounged in beach chairs, slick with sunscreen. We floated alongside the swim-up bar, barely legal drinking age ourselves, ordering sugary cocktails with names like “Dirty Banana” that made us sick.
I experienced my first anxiety attacks over the strangest things: how dirty the hem of my dress had gotten at the wedding, the color of my hair in the photos, a pen mark on my leather bag. I took long walks around the manicured resort in white summer dresses, feeling ridiculous in my diamond ring. Dread settled over me as I realized the days of dreaming were over.
On the last day of our honeymoon, D and I took a small boat out to sea. We were pushed out beyond the wave break and released into the vast blue ocean. The current carried us away from the shore until we could no longer see the resort’s red umbrellas in the sand. We drifted for what felt like hours. When the wind finally picked up again, we didn’t care where it took us, as long as it was back toward solid ground. We ended up at a small cove a mile downshore from the resort. We left the boat capsized on its side, hiking back in our bathing suits and lifejackets, scrabbling barefoot over the rocky coastline.
When we returned home as newlyweds, we told this story as a hilarious anecdote. But I could never quite shake that feeling of immense helplessness.
Marriage required voluntary amnesia. My own thoughts suddenly seemed dangerous. They threatened to reveal my new life as an enormous mistake. To cope, I began to detach small pieces of myself, a little bit at a time. I stopped journaling. I stopped writing. I stayed as busy as possible, turning up the volume on the outside world to quiet that inner voice. I boxed away my old dreams and turned the lock. I would love being married. I would be a good wife.
This ritual dismemberment took place over a series of months, then years. D noticed the change. “It’s like a light turned off in you,” he told me, a couple of years in. I pretended not to know what he meant.
Still, D remained soft and steady. Gentle with me. He loved it when I sang to myself around the house. He knew how much I liked cardinals, so he bought a tiny bird feeder to put outside my window. I sat at my desk, watching him outside in the sun, golden and smiling at me, while he secured it to the glass. He was always doing that: bringing me little offerings of beauty, like consolations for the life we’d agreed to.
D’s gender identity did not emerge fully formed. It seeped into the edges like a developing Polaroid, both of us puzzling to make out the full picture. When he was a kid, he would dress up in his sister’s clothes when no one was home. He had always loved dresses and lace and long hair. He was drawn to the softness of womanhood, the parts of himself it allowed him to access. Neither of us was sure what it all meant.
We reached a tenuous agreement: D could explore his gender identity—but only so far. Only as long as it didn’t threaten the life we’d built. Where that line was, neither of us really knew. Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.
In public, D still wore his usual clothes and didn’t want to be called by new pronouns. He, too, had long ago locked part of himself away. He hated the feelings that were rising up now, decades of religious conditioning at war with the swelling music inside him. Near daily, he would swear off these feelings altogether, repeating never mind like a prayer. He started having panic attacks.
Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.
I watched him nervously for signs of femininity, chastising myself for my vigilance, but still fretting as his hair grew longer and I saw smudges of eyeliner. I found myself acting strangely territorial over womanhood. Possessive. I’d spent a lifetime trying to meet its exacting standards and feeling the shame of falling short. My alarm system had become highly attuned to any deviation. Now I couldn’t turn it off, even with my spouse. It was the meticulous pruning of aberrant ideas I’d been taught since girlhood. Except now I was the one demanding uniformity, both the prisoner and the guard.
One day that winter, I opened his underwear drawer to put the laundry away and noticed a flash of color and lace toward the bottom. My stomach jolted. There was that invisible line. The black ones were fine, but it was the tangles of red, pink, fuchsia—hidden the deepest—that alarmed me. I quickly closed the drawer.
I felt a churning unease at the renegotiation of the terms of our marriage. Until then, we had played our roles perfectly: good Christian man and woman, husband and wife. Resentment tightened in my throat. I had sacrificed so much of myself to fit into this marriage. So why couldn’t he? Of course, we both felt claustrophobic. Of course, we both felt stifled, suffocated, desperate with grief at the parts of ourselves marriage required us to abandon. I thought that’s what we’d agreed to.
That day in the bathtub, D broke the agreement, said the thing that couldn’t be spoken, the whispered possibility: What if there is more for us out there?
D decided to go back to church.
It had been seven months since the bathtub confession, and over a year since the pandemic lockdowns had begun. We had stopped attending church by that point. But we had gone to couples therapy on Zoom. We had been shopping in the women’s section of Goodwill in matching blue face masks. I had dressed D in my clothes and started a shared Pinterest board.
We were bumping up against that invisible line more often now, feeling its shock like an electric fence, its boundaries momentarily illuminated. D’s panic attacks became more frequent. The frantic beating against the locked door in my mind grew louder. We ignored it all with the desperation of two people who weren’t ready for their lives to change.
It was this desperation that led D back to church—the place we had always gone for assurance. Even condemnation is a kind of certainty. D went to the office of the unmasked pastor who gave D, unhelpfully, a book on how to resist the temptation of homosexuality. The pastor had a cough but told D, “Don’t worry. It’s just a cold.”
We were bumping up against that invisible line more often now, feeling its shock like an electric fence, its boundaries momentarily illuminated.
D got COVID first. I followed a few days later. Initially, it was almost a relief. The emotional torment of the existential identity questions was replaced with the more immediate, bodily torment of illness. After months of relentless talking and arguing, we were finally still. We lay together in our big white bed, exhausted and feverish, watching YouTube videos about the deep sea.
The deepest part of the known ocean is the hadal zone, named after the Greek god of the underworld. No light can penetrate. The pressure there would crush you immediately.
We relaxed into quiet companionship, letting our hot eyes rest on the unknowable black water.
Only five percent of the ocean is thought to be accurately mapped; the other 95 percent remains a mystery.
Over the last few months, new thoughts had begun to emerge from the depths of my mind like creatures from the abyss. I was surprised to find my resentment toward D had morphed into jealousy. Both marriage and religion had required exile from ourselves, a systematic suppression of our true identities. It was an adaptation that felt necessary for survival. But as I watched D explore, interrogate, and reinvent womanhood, changing the rules before my eyes, I wondered if I had been wrong.
Over the next few days, as D recovered, I grew increasingly worse. My breathing became irregular. I stopped eating. On the seventh night, I woke up at 3 a.m. with a sharp pain in my abdomen. Stumbling into the bathroom, I was so hot I tore off my clothes. In the mirror, my reflection seemed to glimmer like heat waves.
When I woke up on the cold bathroom tile, I was naked and terrified. I was certain this was what dying felt like. I had only one thought: to get back to D. I fought toward our bedroom, knocking into furniture as my vision went dark at the edges, and collapsed at our closet door. D found me there and laid me on the bed, stroking my damp face until my panicked breaths grew steady.
Our love had always been a balm for the ways we’d been forced to shrink over the years. We had entered into this marriage as confused evangelicals, barely in our 20s, trying so hard to play the roles of husband and wife. We had both changed so much in the past decade, but the shape of our marriage had stayed the same. The pressure was crushing us both. I thought of our first date, with the bolt cutters, the sense of freedom and possibility D had unlocked in me then. They were doing it again now.
I fell asleep with D watching over me, their cool fingers on my cheek. When I woke up the next morning, my fever had broken.
A month later, our marriage was over.
What I thought would feel like exile instead felt like escape.
We left the Garden and went in separate directions. D went west, to California, a land of lush abundance. I went east, to New York and New England, and then across an ocean to Portugal, Italy, and France.
We had entered into this marriage as confused evangelicals, barely in our 20s, trying so hard to play the roles of husband and wife.
Everything seemed open, all those glorious branching futures I’d seen when I left for school, back within arm’s reach. It was a time of freedom, confusion, and expansion. I would no longer tolerate exile from my own mind, not for a god, not for a marriage, not for a moment longer.
I walked along the Seine, summited the Swiss Alps in a swinging cable car, sunbathed naked on the rocky beaches of Croatia. I ate sticky figs in Tuscany, golden-yellow custard tarts in Lisbon, and buttery croissants in Biarritz.
In Orvieto, I visited a cathedral with the story of Genesis carved in bas-relief on its marble façade. In the panel Creation of Woman, Adam lies asleep on the ground, side cut open, rib removed. Eve has emerged from his body and sits upright, looking God directly in the eye. The tree’s branches drape heavily overhead, dense with fruit. This is before the serpent. Before the apple. Before knowledge. Before escape. Yet in the tilt of her head, I think I can already see the wild seed of desire beginning to grow.
I saw D again in San Diego. It was exactly a year after we’d both been so sick. Two years since the bathtub. Ten years since the bolt cutters. Her thick brown hair was long and pulled back, the California sun catching glints of gold. Champagne glitter fizzed on her eyelids. She had chosen a new name for herself, one that meant “beloved wife.”
We met near the water and walked past a hostel she had stayed at once, right after the divorce. She said, “I want to show you this,” and we snuck in as another guest was leaving. D went to the front desk and said, “This is my ex-wife. Ex-wife? Is that right?” She turned to me and we both laughed at the term. “I wanted to show her around.” They wouldn’t let us in, so we walked along the boardwalk. The sun was setting, illuminating the water on either side of us. We talked about D’s new life in California.
She had been in the art supply store recently, wearing a miniskirt and platform boots, and an older woman had approached her. D felt nervous, thinking of all the white-haired church ladies in Alabama and Tennessee, but instead, the woman had complimented her.
“Just look at those legs,” the woman said. “You could be a Rockette!”
D laughed, then dropped her paintbrushes to do a couple of kicks for her.
Listening to D tell the story, the barefaced joy of dancing for a stranger in the paint aisle, I was reminded of all the reasons I had fallen in love with her in the first place.
What do we call that thing that beckoned Eve? The promise of truth, of being able to look at one’s whole self—the full picture, not just the sanctioned parts—and to rest in the knowledge that it is good? Whatever it was that beckoned her, beckoned me too. It sought me like a serpent, whispering possibility. It tempted me with promises of knowledge and freedom, harmony with my mind, instead of constant battle.
We walked back along the boardwalk while the sun sank below the horizon. I thought back to our date on the airplane, that ridiculous show of love, when we had been flown gently back in time and discovered a second chance.
Womanhood as defined by the church, marriage, and the South had been such a tight box to fit into. It couldn’t hold the entirety of me or my spouse. I can’t say what was happening in D’s mind during all this—I witnessed her becoming but I will never understand what it was like.
What I do know is this: I didn’t realize we had permission to change until D showed me. She took the first bite. And then she extended it to me, gleaming like forbidden fruit, an offering from a beloved. Our eyes were finally opened. At last.
Lane Scott Jones is a writer from North Carolina now traveling the world full-time. She is currently working on a memoir. You can subscribe to her Substack newsletter here.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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