Assigned at Birth

Dressing the Part

Besides suiting up in my complete Minnesota Vikings’ Chuck “Spin Doctor” Foreman football uniform hundreds of times, the desire to play what most little girls call “dress up” appealed to me only once. I didn’t care that my dad’s polished leather shoes with thin laces were much too big, as heavy as bricks and severely stiff. So what if his touring caps and stingy-brim tweed fedoras covered my five-year-old face? His suit jacket, fragrant with a hint of pipe tobacco, cocooned me like a warm blanket. I tried to figure out how to put on a necktie but after many attempts, one end always ended up way too long and the knot looked more like an extra-wide, tangled kite string. So when I saw a boy’s blue blazer with gold buttons hanging in the department store, I tried to alter my mother’s predetermined path away from the stupid, torturous dresses.

“No, no, no. Where are you going? The girls’ clothes are this way. We need to find birthday and Easter dresses.”

“But I like those clothes.” I used both hands to point, making double sure she was looking in the right direction. “The ties come with knots.”

“Do you see any other little girls in this department?”

My mother wore mostly beige and navy pantsuits because she liked them. My dad wore colorful striped ties and cuffed corduroy pants and, in the summer, white buck shoes and seersucker suits because he liked them. My sisters wore big leather barrettes, peace-sign belt buckles and bell-bottoms because they liked them. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t always wear what I liked.

The “time-to-look-nice” clothes in my closet consisted of dumb stuff, like the white blouse with a lacy collar sewn into a blue pleated skirt wrapped with a red-bow belt. And what was so great about those black shiny shoes? The buckles pinched my skin and the slippery bottoms made it hard to run and jump. The Lone Ranger would never have worn such icky shoes.

How come every time my mother reached her hand into my closet to pick out a “look-nice” outfit, the monster didn’t bother her? But every time I reached in, the slimy, wart-faced green ogre who lived behind the hangers would look at the dumb dresses, then look at me and laugh.

“You have to wear this! Na, na, na, na, na,” the ogre sang through cracked brown teeth and a Grinchy grin.

“I know I do, but why?”

“Because you’re a girl, that’s why.”

“Every girl in the whole wide world likes dresses and shiny shoes?”

“Yes.”