New Wife: Bruce Six

[Excerpt from a letter left by Mr. Six on July 1, 1954.]

Dearest Max,
I am sorry I cannot be your husband anymore. I don’t think I could ever be your husband. All I ever wanted to be was your wife, but I can’t even be that. I will miss our babies, Franny and Barb, but you will find a better mother for them. You have your pick of the litter.

I never wanted to be a man. From when I was a little boy, I never wanted to be a man. I looked up to my father’s wives, hard-working Mormon women, and I wanted to be them. Yet I also loved to look for pretty, shiny rocks in the dirt, so people thought I was a normal boy. Until puberty came and I did not want to give girls those pretty, shiny rocks. I remember the first time I saw a piece of uranium and it felt like I saw a pin-up of Jean Harlow. Still, I was not a eunuch, and the pretty girls in the mining brothels tickled my fancy, except I wanted to be one of them.

Yet you know I am not a pretty girl. I am not even a pretty boy. I am a sad, dumpy, little man who started balding when he was twenty. I am not even a good conversationalist. I am not witty, like Butch [Two], or have exciting adventure stories, like Jake [Five]. I can only dump out boring facts about uranium or uncomfortable ones about prostitution. Yet out of everyone on the Los Alamos base, you sought me out. You defended me from General Groves who was yelling at me over breaking protocol. I shared my lunch with you in the cafeteria, and we talked about soda and growing up Mormon. We bonded over our shared ideology: libertarianism and a hatred for the Homintern.

After the bomb was finished, you proposed to me. You just wanted to have children and security, and I thought I wanted the same thing. But I unfortunately fell in love with you. I think I have been in love with you for a long time, maybe as long as first sight. You praise your emotional intelligence because you know when to tell a girl her man is no good. But you didn’t realize I was in love with you, and it hurt me like a knife in my heart when you talked about other pretty girls.

When you came home from that camp, you talked about Betty getting into hijinks, like running out off uppers and falling asleep by the campfire, but you also talked about going skinny dipping with Kath. You did deny that you did funny business with her, but I can’t believe you anymore. After all, you hide from me that the camp was not giving out vitamins, but testosterone.

Yes, I know about hormones, even though I am a geologist. I did read about Christine Jorgensen^[1], but I did not know how she did it. Then, while you were gone, I talked with Lulu. She was telling me about her time working as a maid in a New Orleans brothel. She told me about how men spend all their money on girls they think are in love with them, and the girls are giving their money to boyfriends and husbands who say they love them. Lulu says, like a scientist, she’s done the act as a man and as a woman, and neither are appealing. Lulu doesn’t understand love and funny business, and I wish I didn’t get love and funny business. But anyway, she used to be a little, effeminate black boy until she found a doctor who gave her estrogen on the sly.

That got me thinking: I am a doctor. I could get estrogen. I went to the pharmacy and told the pharmacist I needed estrogen for an experiment I was conducting. Everything was going perfectly until my damn colleague, Nigel, chose that time to come into the same pharmacy and asked what was going on, and why a geologist would need estrogen. I lost my nerve and told him it was just a prank. I lost my nerve for almost a full year …

Yet, I have the strength now. You aren’t going to be the only one in this marriage to change your sex. I would rather be the ugliest girl in the world than be a man anymore.