I Dream About Testosterone Now

There’s a large a-frame house that you can see from the road that winds through our village of Ojo Sarco. It’s towards the beginning, on the acequia side, soon after you turn off The High Road. It has a blue, metal roof that I envy every time I pass. Or maybe it’s green. Anyway, the roof looks brand new but that’s the blessing of metal roofs. They never age.

I have a crush on a-frame cabins.They look clean, tidied up and presentable. Every winter, the roof gently guides the rain and the snow back down to the earth — melting it, dripping it and on especially warm days, shoving it off in great clumps that make the earth shake. The roof seems to care about keeping itself clean.

When I meet the people who live inside this particular a-frame, it’s a Sunday. Sunday is the day for neighbors and consulting about how much manure they should put into their garden beds. My wife and I consult with Joan. She doesn’t know what to do with all the cow manure we bring her. “Just go ahead and turn it into your garden bed, Joan.” We all stand outside in the high, warm New Mexico sun looking at her four, low-to-the-ground raised beds. It’s March and we can feel that we’re standing at elevation. The kind of elevation where the sun burns you at the end of winter. We all need hats but only Joan has one. She has tied an orange plastic ribbon around her hat. “Look!” she says. “Now the hunters won’t shoot me.” Like basketball season, the hunting season passes me without my noticing. Is it March already? What animal does that mean we are allowed to kill? Deer? Turkeys? Elk?

Joan wants to introduce us to her neighbors, the ones who own the a-frame cabin next to her house and plot of land. We walk together, Joan leads the way. My wife behind Joan and me, behind my wife. We look like a small range of moutnains. My wife, the smallest mountain in the middle. Joan holds onto the top of her hat so it doesn’t blow away in the spring wind. We walk through cactus and sage brush, we walk through the cracked, parched earth. “All of this could use cow manure.” My wife says. We are now the number one, local resource for organic cow manure in our community even though we only have three cows. All of which produce an enormous amount of manure every day. We muck out twenty, twenty-five, thirty piles of manure every day. Of course, our little steer (a steer is a male cow who has been castrated) isn’t producing big cow pies yet so his manure is less useful for creating lush soil but we love him all the same.

Once we enter the property line of the a-frame property, we are greeted by a small, white dog who begins barking sharply at us. “Should we call them first?” My wife asks. She hates showing up unannounced. She has that east coast etiquette that I never learned. You know the kind? She says things like “Please pass the salt.” And “I appreciate you calling, have a great day.” She sometimes even says these things to me. As though the etiquette has become part of her love language, a courtesy that she extends to everyone she loves, not just strangers. But of course I say, “Nah, it’ll be fine.” We are activating a memory from another time and I am invested in the experiment — a time when neighbors came by because they wanted to, because they were trying to catch you before your afternoon nap and most of the time they didn’t. Most of the time they caught you just as you were laying down, dozing off.

Joan wants us to meet her neighbors because well, they are lesbians too. But they are lesbians of a different era — an era when people just dropped by unannounced. They are lesbians who were together before gay marriage was legal, before there were correct pronouns to be used, before they could call one another names besides, “roommate.” The tiny, white dog alerts the lesbians (who are still inside and trying to nap) to our presence. The dog looks back to the lesbians inside the house — should I kill? Joan waves with big, tall arms to the windows of the a-frame. “Heeeeellllllo!” She says over the wind. We walk toward the lesbians who are now standing on their porch. They usher us toward them. The dog leads us back to the porch, eager to show his owners what he found out in the desert: two young lesbians and a woman with an orange hunting ribbon tied onto her hat. Three hunting tags in total.

The lesbians open up their door to us and walk us inside their a-frame. We are now officially standing in the kitchen of their a-frame cabin. I can see the house is all one room now. Smaller than I thought. The slant of the roof only leaves room for a small loft that makes up the entire second story of the house. There is a long, wooden ladder that one could use to climb into the loft. The windows are tall and lanky, letting sunlight pour into the a-frame. It feels very New Mexican to me. Meaning, it feels like wood and sun, terracotta Saltillo tile and newspapers on the kitchen table with crumbs of bread around the corners of the paper. It feels like coffee and naps on a large, white duvet cover. No need to climb inside the bed for the nap. The sun is the comforter. The warmth is the nap.

Now I can see the lesbians clearly. They are obviously playing an old school butch and femme game but then again, so am I. I see that I am like the femme lesbian. She wears rainbow-colored glasses made of thin metal frames. I wear gold aviator glasses made of thin metal frames. I stand close to her so we can feel our similarities. Heathar, my wife, is like the butch lesbian. They both wear their hair short only my wife’s is brown with some white around the edges of her temples and the older butch woman’s is completely grey. Joan has also been playing her own game called, Find The Lesbians in Ojo Sarco. She is smiling proudly at all of us as if to say, “I told you so.”

The older butch lesbian reaches out her hand to all of us, one at a time. “I’m Karen. Sorry this place is kind of a mess. We just got up here last night.” She gives each of us a firm handshake like a proper butch. Her voice is low and sounds like she might need to clear it. Clear it Karen. Please, clear it. Karen wears sunglasses that she never takes off. Her wife, Elise then extends her hand to us. “And I’m Elise. We hear you have manure!” Elise smiles a tiny grin at all of us and comes close to hug my wife and I. I love Elise. Elise is invited back to wherever we are going next. “I love your glasses. They are super snazzy.” I say to Elise. She winks at me and turns to Karen as if she understands that Karen is waiting to speak.

Karen, like a man, seems like she’s used to women giving her space to talk because as any good lesbian knows, we all defer to the butchest butch in the room. So, we all turn to Karen. It’s her house, her butch rules and we obey. “I’m sure Joan has told you (Joan hadn’t told us) that I’m an environmental lawyer. We need to get our land out here in better shape. Get it ready for fire season. How much manure can you bring us?” Karen looks to my wife. Butch to butch. They will figure out the details, of course. But I don’t mind playing gender games. I’ve always liked it. Karen doesn’t know, however, that I am the more talkative one in our couple and so I surprise her by speaking. “Karen, we need to hire a teenage boy who can shovel all our manure and drive it around to our neighbors and unload it. We’re in search of one if you want to spread the word.”

Karen corrects me and says, “Or girl. Or teenage girl.” She pushes her sunglasses up on her nose but they fall right back down.

“Well, no. I really do mean a teenage boy, Karen. Sometimes you just need that testosterone, am I right?” I was hoping the, am I right would relax the lawyer in Karen. I am hoping my small attempt at humor will relax the need to rise to her own defense but I realize that maybe, just maybe, Karen is trying to come to the defense of all women everywhere. The histories of all the women inside of her rise and they take their seats on a high, cement wall and they just start throwing things at me. They throw banana peels (of course), they throw rotten apples, rolled up paper bags — they throw balled up Kleenex out of their own pockets. They throw fists in the air and shout incoherently. They throw crusts of bread, whole wheat and rye. I have upset the Feminists of The Past. You know, the ones who sit on the walls and all. The ones who protest while eating out of their brown paper lunches, apparently.

I didn’t think I would ever be that kind of queer woman who would say she needs a man, wants a man. In fact, the other day I said to some friends at dinner, “If I wasn’t queer, I doubt I would be married at all.” To which my friends relied, “Yea, because men suck.” Well, yea. Kind of. But it turns out, I am a queer woman who needs a man and who wants a man. I want many platonic boyfriends. I want platonic boyfriends who can build me rock walls, who can break down cement, who can make dump runs, who can wire the electrical properly in my house, who can dig septic lines, who can use chainsaws and who can dig trenches. Yes, I want so many platonic boyfriends. I dream about testosterone now. In fact, I dream in hormones. Because Karen, it turns out that when you live in rural America (maybe rural anywhere), when you run a five acre farm and homestead and when you have endless outdoor projects — you need bodies that tire less easily than a menstruating woman’s. You need bodies that don’t bleed. You need bodies that don’t go through a luteal and follicular phase. You need bodies that are endlessly willing, productive and strong.

And listen, my wife can use a chainsaw. She can chop wood, she can shovel manure with the best of them, she can manage burn piles and move logs — on a good day. But on other days, she is more hormones than human. She is taken by the cyclical menstruation that comes for all of us up to a certain age. Her body is not her own. She is (as am I) taken under the current and forced to stop, to rest, to sit, to lie down. As Miranda July says, “…in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.”

I imagine, because I didn’t have this conversation with Karen (because I didn’t quote Miranda July to her) that she might tell me that women are strong too — they can be just as strong as men. And I just don’t agree, Karen. I just don’t. I realize this now makes me a “bad feminist” in the eyes of Karen and maybe in the eyes of you too. Karen has worked hard (I imagine) to create a world where she feels equal or even more equally capable than a man. I get it. I respect it. I admire it. I was born in 1985. I missed all of that.

But now, I want to talk about biology and I never want to talk about biology. I think I want to talk about it because I used to be a woman who thought my need of men was quite obsolete. Aside from liking them and loving some very important men in my life— did I need men? Not really. Because a city is a great equalizer. It allows both men and women to call repair people when they need them. It allows both men and women to call AAA when their car breaks down. But rural America, oh rural America makes gender important and real once again. When my cow trips on a rope and falls over, you know what I need? I need some men, Karen. I need some burly, strong, experienced ranch dudes and thank the sweet smell of manure they live around here. (Cowboy Tim, you know who you are)

But I didn’t say any of this to Karen. I stood in her kitchen, looking at her wife’s rainbow glasses made out of metal and I nodded. I understood what Karen meant but I don’t think she understood what I meant. Perhaps she thought I was just another careless millennial — forgetting how hard she had worked to become a queer woman who could marry her love, buy her own home, have multiple credit cards and be a respected lawyer. But I hadn’t forgotten. I respected Karen in her a-frame house with her sturdy metal roof. It was by far more sloped and sturdy than my own roof which is in deep need of a serious sloping. But I also needed someone to take a chainsaw to the large logs in our woodpile and Karen sure wasn’t going to do it.

I tell this story to a lot of people now. I tell it to people who come and buy milk and eggs from us every week. I tell it to my mother. My wife hears it often. I tell it to my friends in my writing group. Because I want people to know that I am a woman who now needs men and I didn’t know that before. Even more importantly, I am a queer, feminist woman who now needs men and has serval platonic boyfriends at the ready. I am no longer interested in learning how to do all of these manual, physical things by myself. (I am still recovering from the Saltillo tile I laid one year ago, by the way.) I am now eager to delegate tasks (I make a lot of lists) to all of my platonic boyfriends because I have realized that being a woman who is trying to be a queer feminist — who is trying to do it all and be so smart and capable is just, absolutely exhausting.