Rope Bridge Crossing

The blizzard started sometime after lunch on Tuesday and by four o'clock it had buried the cars in the lot up to their door handles. I watched it pile against the lodge windows from a chair by the fire, a cup of instant coffee going cold in my hand, and I kept thinking the same thought over and over. I was supposed to be on a flight home. Instead I was going to spend several nights at a rafting outfitter in the Carpathians, forty-one years old, stuck with a box of repaired hiking boots and no way out.

My name is Roy, and I fix shoes for a living. There is one other thing about me that hardly anybody knows, and I have kept it that way for eleven years. Since I was thirty I have been dressing as a woman, alone, in my apartment, with the curtains drawn and the deadbolt thrown. Never once in public. Never once in front of another living soul. I had a dress in my suitcase, folded at the bottom under my work clothes like it could be hidden from God, and I had packed it on this trip for no reason I could name, because I never had a reason.

The base manager was a woman named Magda, forty-three, broad shoulders, gray coming in at her temples, hands that looked like they had hauled rafts for a living, which I later found out they had. She ran the place after her divorce and she did not talk about the divorce. She had already told me the flights were grounded, all of them, maybe two days, maybe three. There were six guides stranded with me and a lodge full of gear that nobody could move until the roads got plowed.

I do not know how she noticed what I was looking at. I thought I was being subtle. But there was a coat rack near the front door with a few women's jackets on it, leftovers from some group that had come through in the fall, and I looked at it twice. Maybe three times. The third time I looked up and Magda was watching me from the desk, not smiling, not frowning, just watching, and my face went hot enough to fry an egg on.

She got up without a word and went into her office. I sat there doing math about flights and roads and how many hours it would take to walk to the nearest town, which was a stupid plan and I knew it. When she came back she was carrying a pair of heels. Black, low block heel, size nine by the look of them. She set them on the table in front of me and stood there with her arms crossed.

"I saw you looking," she said. "Not at the coats. At the idea of them."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

"Here is what I am offering," she went on. "One hour. You dress completely, head to toe, the way you have been doing alone in your apartment for however many years it has been. You come out of that bathroom and walk through this lodge, in front of my guides, in front of me. And for that hour I do not call you Roy. Nobody does. You are 'her' to everyone in this room."

"That is insane," I said. My voice came out thin.

"Probably," she said, and shrugged. "The roads are closed. Nobody is going anywhere. Nobody here knows you and nobody here will ever see you again. You will not get an offer like this twice, cobbler. Think about it while the snow does its work."

Then she went back to the desk and left me alone with a pair of heels and my own heartbeat.

I want to convey how long that hour of thinking actually lasted. It was close to ninety minutes. I stared at the fire. I looked at the heels. I looked at the window where the snow was coming down so thick the world outside had turned into static. Somewhere in the middle of it I went to my room, unzipped the suitcase, and touched the folded black dress I had packed for a trip where I had told myself there was absolutely no chance I would need a dress.

The guides had gone to the sauna. That helped. Magda had cleared it with them somehow, in that way she seemed to have of arranging things without discussion, and the lodge was empty except for her when I finally stood up and picked up the shoes.

"The bathroom at the end of the hall," she said, not looking up from her paperwork. "Take your time. The hour starts when you walk out."

The lodge bathroom was big, meant for groups coming off the river, with a row of stalls and a long mirror over three sinks. I locked the main door and set the heels on the counter and looked at myself in the mirror, a forty-one year old man with sawdust on his sleeve from the boot repairs, and I thought, well. Here it is.

The dress came out of the suitcase first. Black, knee length, simple. I had bought it two years ago from a shop in my own town, paid cash, lied to the woman at the register about it being for my sister. It still smelled faintly of my closet at home. Getting into it in a public bathroom, even an empty one, was different from getting into it at home with the curtains drawn. Every noise from the heating pipes made me freeze. My hands were not steady and the zipper took three tries.

The stockings were worse. I had done it a thousand times alone, sitting on the edge of my bed, and it had never once been hard. In that bathroom my fingers would not work, and I rolled one stocking down my shin four separate times before I got it right, then sat on the cold tile floor for a minute breathing before I did the other one.

The shoes fit. That was the strange part. I had not asked for them and she could not have known my size, but they fit like they had been waiting. I stood up in them and the block heel was low enough that I did not wobble, and looking down at the black hem and the black nylon and the black toe caps, something in my chest unclenched that had been clenched so long I had stopped noticing it.

Then the mirror. I had brought nothing else. No wig, no makeup, because I had packed for a work trip and not for this. But there was a basket on the counter with the kind of things lodges leave for guests, and in it, impossibly, a small sealed lipstick, the kind you get with a gift set. Red. I picked it up and put it down twice.

The first time I applied it I got most of it on my lower lip and half up my cheek and had to wipe it all off with toilet paper and start again. The second time my hand shook less. I pressed my lips together the way I had seen women do in films and looked at the result, a man in a black dress with a red mouth, shaking, terrified, and absolutely certain that I was going to walk out that door.

I counted to sixty with my hand on the latch. Then I counted again, because the first sixty had gone by too fast to count as anything. Outside I could hear the wind working at the roof, and under it, faintly, Magda's pen scratching away at her paperwork like nothing in the world was happening, like a woman was not about to walk out of a lodge bathroom for the first time in her life.

I opened the door.

She looked up when the hallway floor creaked, and whatever she had been about to say, she did not say it. She stood up, walked over, and stopped a few feet away with her hands loose at her sides.

"Well," she said. "There she is."

I had not expected the word to hit me the way it did. Eleven years I had been a woman alone in an apartment with drawn curtains, and not one person had ever looked at me and used the word like it was obvious. I said thank you and my voice came out low and rough and I had to clear my throat.

"Can I ask you something?" she said. "Do you want to walk in here, or do you want to walk somewhere that counts?"

I did not know what she meant and I told her so.

"Out there." She nodded at the window. The snow was still coming down but the wind had dropped a little in the last hour. "There's a storage shed across the gorge. Rope bridge. Right now it's just you and me and six guides in a sauna, and nobody has to see anything. But a bridge is outside. A bridge is real." She shrugged those broad shoulders of hers. "Your call. I go either way. If you say stay, we sit by the fire and I teach you to fix a broken zipper and that's the whole night."

I looked at the window. I looked at her. I thought about the mirror in the bathroom, how I had seen only a man in a dress, because that was all the mirror in that bathroom could show me at that moment.

"Is there a mirror out there?" I asked.

"A full-length one. In the shed. Big old thing the guides use for wetsuits." She smiled a little. "So the question is whether you want to see yourself properly."

* * *

Getting to the bridge meant crossing the clearing, and the clearing was knee deep in packed snow. The cold went through the stockings immediately. I had not thought about that, obviously, because I had never once planned an outfit for outdoors, and I stood at the edge of