I sat in an Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks to be exact—the brightly lit yellow walls, the gleaming wooden counter with stools marching around it, huge plate-glass windows looking onto an empty, darkened street. The picture only lacked the requisite people, the nighthawks themselves, to fill it: dark-suited men in gray fedoras, a ginger-haired woman in a bright red dress. A waitperson did stand behind the counter, but not the white-suited soda jerk that came from Hopper’s brush. A young woman had replaced the young man. Instead of a peaked cap, she sported a crown of pink hair, which harmonized with the pink sweatshirt she wore, Town Line Diner silkscreened across it in white letters. And then, of course, I inhabited the picture. Another anachronism in my tan shirt and brown sweater vest with matching cords, hunching on a stool at the far end of the counter, trying to stay out of the picture and ruin it as little as possible, staring out at the empty street corner visible through those windows, willing her to appear.
“Here’s your soda,” the young woman said, setting a glass clinking with ice before me. “Can I get you anything else, or do you want to wait to order ‘til you see your, uh, friend?” She stumbled over the last word, apparently unsure if people my age actually met folks who qualified for the term date. Friend didn’t really apply, but neither did any other term, so I let it go.
“I’ll wait,” I said, then to make conversation and pass the time, “Slow night, huh?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure why we’re even open on Mondays.” She popped her gum and stared out glumly at the street. “But I’m not the boss.” With that, she meandered to the back. No doubt the cook offered better company than I did.
I sighed and pulled out my phone, another anachronism for Hopper’s period. Just six o’clock, precisely the time Michelle and I’d agreed upon. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t expect her to show up at all. I corresponded with a phantasm, a nonexistent person. Yet, someone inhabited those pictures in my—I mean Michelle’s—social media feeds. Someone answered my emails. Someone meant to out me.
The error message from Google showed up on my phone one Saturday morning in January as I sat in the barbershop on Main Street in Wakefield, awaiting my turn in the chair. The message warned me that someone had accessed Michelle Ford’s Gmail account from a new device in Arlington, Massachusetts. I scowled at the phone. Though I’d lived in Arlington briefly, decades ago, before I married Trudy, I never went there these days.
When I pictured hackers, I thought of men slouched over PCs in Ukraine or somewhere else in the erstwhile Soviet Union, not down the street in New England. With a shrug, I decided that if Boris possessed the tech savvy to guess Michelle’s password, spoofing a server in Massachusetts from behind the former Iron Curtain didn’t present much of a challenge, either. If he sought sensitive credit card information or PayPal or banking credentials, he’d hit a dead end. At that moment, as far as I was concerned, Michelle existed exclusively virtually, and her footprint was small. I’d only recently introduced her to social media, and she possessed nothing worth pilfering because she possessed nothing at all. Still, to be on the safe side, I changed the password.
“Take that, Ivan, or Katarzyna, or whatever your name is,” I muttered to myself as the barber called, “Next.”
I didn’t think about this peculiar incident again until Wednesday. In pajamas, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, I followed my usual practice and scheduled a picture to post to Instagram later that day. I planned to show off a beautiful pair of nude Annika perforated high-heel platform sandals I’d ordered. I’d taken the photo in a hotel in Newark after a focus group I’d attended for work, where there was no need to hide from Trudy.
To my surprise, I saw that Michelle’s Instagram inbox contained an unread missive. I tsked at this. I’d recently updated her profile to include the warning No DMs to avoid inappropriate comments and questions, and I had begun systematically blocking obnoxious correspondents like one shuluvr4u69. First, he’d demanded to know Michelle’s age. Didn’t anyone know that that’s a question a gentleman doesn’t ask and a lady doesn’t answer? Next, he’d insisted on inquiring into her gender.
“I hate to ask,” he’d written, “but these days, you can’t really tell anymore.” On those grounds alone, I ought to have blocked him, but at the time, I told myself to take advantage of this teachable moment. When I responded that TG women are real women, just like ciswomen, he asked for a picture of me to prove it. That did it. Sure, I took pictures of my face, but my makeup skills still required refining since I restricted myself to makeup practice whenever Trudy left the house or I went out of town. The last time I’d made the mistake of responding to such a request, the recipient blocked me upon receiving my picture. I decided to spare Mr. shuluvr4u69 the effort and blocked him myself.
But here was a message from him again. I scratched my disheveled hair, trying to trace the tortuous path of commands required to accidentally unblock someone. I recognized that next-to-last missive, his request for the photo of my face. Yes, he’d cheekily specified that. And then, I—Michelle—had responded to ask for his email address. But of course, I hadn’t. I sat back in the kitchen chair, mystified, head spinning. The latest message came in as I held the phone: “Wow! Thank you so much for emailing that picture of you! You’re such a pretty natural WOMAN!”
I checked Michelle’s Gmail account—nothing amiss, no new message strings. I checked my sent mail, but nothing appeared with a picture attached. My hacker had covered his—or maybe her—tracks. And yet, for all her careful work and cleverness in cracking Michelle’s passwords a second time, in deleting the email to shuluvr4u69, she’d left obvious evidence of tampering in Michelle’s Instagram account.
But just as I was pressing the “settings” option in Instagram—was my password the same one I’d used for my Gmail until last week?—the coffeemaker chimed, and Trudy called from our bedroom. I poured, prepared, and delivered her morning cup of coffee in bed—I didn’t want to raise suspicions by violating the sanctity of her morning routine with a variation in timing.
I let three weeks pass before I breathed a sigh of relief that my new, convoluted passwords left me back in control of Michelle. I celebrated Valentine’s Day with Trudy undisturbed by the possibility of unpredictability on Michelle’s part. Then, on Presidents’ Day afternoon, while Trudy did a bit of grocery shopping, I checked Michelle’s Pinterest account to discover a picture not posted by me on my board, “Shaking My Booties.”
I recognized the footwear in the unfamiliar picture. For weeks, I’d coveted these crushed velvet blue high-heel booties from Target. Unfortunately, to date, no opportunity presented itself for me to buy them. Yet, somehow someone read my mind and not only snagged those beauties but wore them outside for a photo op. Given my timidity and tentativeness en femme, I’d yet to go outdoors, let alone snag a selfie outside.
Even stranger, between the two booties a hauntingly familiar brass medallion was planted in the concrete—my company’s logo of a nymph with a looking glass riding a dolphin. The logo was embedded into only one stretch of sidewalk, the one in front of our old building in Back Bay Boston, the one we’d left two years ago. Unless she’d arranged a quick trip to my hometown, my hacker didn’t hail from anywhere more exotic than the Boston area. In that instant, my tormentor went from an amorphous figure from a far-off land to an aggressor down the street, someone with the opportunity to confront me face-to-face, in real life. I sagged in my chair, my breath catching. Was this interloper lurking among my personal acquaintances already, crouching in the shadows, ready to strike—by outing me?
I opened another browser window to visit Michelle’s Gmail account. This time, my hacker, whether intentionally or unintentionally, left breadcrumbs. At the top of my inbox, someone, under the guise of Michelle, replied with thanks for a present from an annoyingly familiar email address: shuluvr4u69@yahoo.com. She invited him to view his gift on her Pinterest.
“I’ve seen the pin,” I muttered. “And, by the way, it’s not your Pinterest.”
I scrolled down the message chain. Michelle’s expression of gratitude came in response to a note from the creep, indicating that—per her request—he’d visited Michelle’s Amazon Wish List and purchased the pair of crushed-velvet blue booties for her. Sometime ago, I had set up an Amazon account for Michelle, complete with a Shopping List, to help me keep track of all the things I wanted when en femme without the possibility of Trudy stumbling across a written list. At the time I set up this list, I felt completely secure in the knowledge that, unless the list is made public, no one can see it.
But when I logged onto Michelle’s Amazon account, I found her Shopping List empty. I hovered my mouse over the Wish List button, and everything I wanted materialized onscreen in excruciating detail. How had shuluvr4u69 accessed this list? Did the hacker e-mail him the link? Post it on a Web page?
I stumbled around the room, panicked, desperate for ways to stuff this particular genie back in her bottle, to convert this Wish List back into a private Shopping List. My skin crawled with a sense of violation as I considered all the shuluvr4u69s—alerted by the hacker—visiting this page, pouring over my inner desires like perverts rummaging through my drawers to find the pink panties among my white briefs. In real life, I prevented such intrusions, especially Trudy’s, by safely secreting my female clothes in a commercial storage space to which I alone held the key, but, to my growing horror, cyberspace offered no such security.
What did the hacker gain by all this? Getting a fanboy like shuluvr4u69 to buy items from Michelle’s Shopping List constituted a meager reward for all the effort of hacking.
If I were simply being blackmailed, why didn’t the hacker demand real money instead of duping admirers into cherry picking from a basketful of items, each one hundred dollars or less? To toy with me? It didn’t matter, I decided, setting my jaw grimly. Even if this were a simple matter of blackmail, I couldn’t report Michelle’s stolen identity. The cops could expose me just as easily as this thief and would-be extortionist. As usual, I had to take care of myself by myself.
With Trudy due back at any time, I postponed contemplating these existential questions. Instead, I opened my account settings and clicked on Your Addresses.
A familiar address, 9 Thorndike Street in Arlington, had replaced the P.O. box I used in Wakefield, where I sent packages to avoid Trudy’s questions. I’d lived on Thorndike nearly thirty years ago, before I’d married Trudy. Leaving that Thorndike Street apartment constituted the hinge of my life. Before moving out, I’d purged closets full of female attire and swore off damning frocks. I’d kept that vow, more or less, until the alluring anonymity of social media offered the irresistible temptation of being seen in cute, feminine clothing without being recognized in those clothes. A social media presence completely removed from my life with Trudy seemed a safe and prudent course. Now, someone stood to use it against me.
I chose vagueness when describing my Saturday trip to Trudy. She didn’t need to know I planned to drive all the way to the duplex in East Arlington where I’d rented the top floor decades ago in search of answers.
As I pulled into the old cul-de-sac, I noticed a woman in a bright red parka standing in the driveway of the duplex, hacking at the snowbanks on either side, tossing shovelfuls of crusty white stuff into the street. As I approached, walking down the street to avoid the mostly unshoveled sidewalks, I offered the woman a cheery “good morning,” and her equally cheery Boston-accented reply made me seriously doubt that I’d located Katarzyna. I also regarded her petite snow boots and concluded footwear in my size would practically fall off her.
I ascended a short flight of blessedly shoveled stairs, opened the front door, and stepped into the familiar, dim front hall. As my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, I leaned over and peered at the names beside the two doorbells, the one for upstairs and the one for downstairs. A yellowed piece of paper was taped beside the bottom button with the name “Michelle Ford” written in a hauntingly familiar script. I steadied myself against the wall, knees weak. What manically thorough identity thief replaced my P.O. box with my old address on my Amazon account, then went to the effort of putting my femme name on the mailbox and bell?
I pressed the doorbell, and a hollow ping sounded upstairs. Its echo faded, and I braced for the sound of feet descending the stairs, for the face-to-face meeting with the person stealing Michelle’s identity.
But no one came.
I rang again. Either the occupant was gone or they had decided to ignore me.
I shuffled downstairs and had nearly reached the street at the end of the driveway when a cheery voice to my right asked, “Are you looking for Shel?”
I’m Shel, I thought, furiously. How can I be looking for me?
“Yes,” I stuttered, turning. “I’m looking for Michelle Ford.”
“She’s not here,” the woman in the red parka said, shrugging before leaning on her shovel, apparently delighted to have the excuse to take a break. “I saw her go out earlier this morning to run errands.”
Was Shel at my house at that very moment, chatting up Trudy the same way I was talking with this woman? No. She didn’t know where I lived, only the P.O. Box in Wakefield—I hoped. In any case, the woman leaning on the shovel stared at me, expecting some sort of reply.
“Okay. Thank you,” I said and started toward my car.
“Can I tell her you came by?”
“Sure,” I said. “Tell her Shel—,” here, I stumbled again. It made no sense in this situation to call myself “Shel,” even though I used that nickname all the time. My hacker had even appropriated the nickname, along with so much else. “Tell her Shelby stopped by to see her.”
The woman regarded me curiously. “Shelby?”
I nodded.
“If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” she said, “are you a relative of hers?”
I swallowed. “M—my twin. Yeah, she’s my twin.”
“Fraternal, then?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Well, you sure do look like her, and you are about her age.”
“Are you her roommate?”
“No, I’m her neighbor, Lisa.” The woman pulled off her right glove and offered her bare hand. “I live downstairs.” She nodded toward my old building’s ground floor.
I took her hand. It was cold, her fingernails manicured a shade of pink. I wished for the thousandth time that I could paint my own, too.
In the privacy of my office, away from Trudy’s prying eyes at home, I opened my Gmail account.
On February 24, 2019, at 9:16 a.m. Shel Ford <Ford.Shel456@gmail.com> wrote:
Who are you? And don’t just say, “Michelle Ford” because we both know that isn’t true. You have no right to assume her identity or hack my accounts. Why are you making my Amazon Shopping List public and stealing from it? How long have you lived at 9 Thorndike Street (my old address)?
On February 25, 2019, at 9:54 p.m. Shel Ford <OttaMyShelFord@gmail.com> wrote:
I have every right to be Michelle because that’s who I am, after all. You left Michelle behind 30 years ago, and I’ve gone on ever since. You, on the other hand, have pretended to be someone else. I know all those passwords because I know YOU, everything you think and do. You, on the other hand, have denied my very existence for decades, blinding yourself to me—and all I am.
I was content to ignore you, just as you denied me, for all these years—until I started seeing these social media posts in my name. I have a life and friends and I care about protecting my reputation as much as you care about protecting yours. That said, you have good taste. Despite our current disagreement, we have a great deal in common. In any case, I’m making the list public, so that admirers like shuluvr4u69 can buy me things. But I’m a generous soul. Feel free to stop by anytime and borrow whatever you’d like. We’re the same size, after all. Just let me know when you’re coming so I can make it a point of being around. 😊 After all, I’ve lived here 30 years.
Maybe it’s high time we met face-to-face.
That’s how I found myself sitting in an Edward Hopper painting just after six on a Monday night. The door’s clinking bells announced the arrival of more customers, and the waitress reappeared to take their orders. I, of course, looked up each time, swallowing hard to push my heart down from my throat, but none of these new arrivals—single males, a couple—could have been Michelle, and none of them showed the slightest interest in approaching me.
“Changed your mind?” the waitress asked from behind the counter.
I fought the urge to slide off my stool and slink home. At 6:15, I’d obviously been stood up, but I’d told Trudy I’d be working late and getting dinner on my own, so if I left now I’d have to scrounge up something to eat. I grabbed one of the laminated menus from the counter. I decided on nothing more creative than a chicken sandwich and set the menu down.
Through the plate-glass window, I saw a woman walking down the street, a hood pulled over her head, obscuring her face. For a moment, I was terrified Trudy had tracked me down. But this woman wore a long, impractically white wool coat. Trudy insisted on dark-colored coats that hid dirt, obviating the need for trips to the dry cleaner. The woman reached the door to the diner, pulled it open, and, strutting in her blue suede high-heeled booties, stepped inside. I leaned forward dreading and welcoming the moment of truth.
Toni Artuso, an emerging/aging transfemale writer living in Salem, Massachusetts, recently retired from a thirty-year career in educational publishing. She is transitioning, as well as trying to accelerate the emerging and slow down the aging. Her stories have appeared in Fiction on the Web, 96th of October, and The Broadkill Review.