Part 9 of 29

Sunday, July 14, 2013
I'm getting better at cooking. Today I did a traditional Sunday dinner, naturally with Mary Ann's help, but I planned the menu, went shopping for the ingredients and found the recipes. We had roast ham with those pineapple slices and cherries pinned all over it - it looks pretty cool that way and isn't any real trouble to do. I think it looked just as good as the picture in the cookbook once I put it on the table.

It was accompanied by broccoli (cooks real quick in the microwave and tastes great) and garlic smashed potatoes. Smashed, not mashed. You roast the whole garlic head in the oven, then squeeze it on the potatoes and add butter. You don't even have to peel the potatoes, just keep the skins on. More vitamins and better flavor.

Suzy homemaker, that's me.
 

Monday, July 15
I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable around the library, but it seems I am even more comfortable as Angel the Girl. I mean, I simply no longer noticed that I'm dressed as a girl and wearing a bra and everything until something special happens, like having to use the bathroom or putting a book on a high shelf so I have to stretch and feel my breast forms pressing into me.

Or having some guy flirt with me.

Really! I was doing the Information Desk this afternoon (Yeah, me barely knowing where anything is after only a week!) when this guy came in. If I were a real girl I suppose I would consider him kind of cute. He was a few years older than me and looked kind of preppy, wearing one of those sweaters that intellectual jocks wore in the old 50s sitcoms. But he had a good body and a nice voice. (I don't believe I'm noticing stuff like this!) Anyway, he asked where to find information on Chinese art and I even knew the answer.

That should have been all, but then he complemented me on my necklace. It's a nice one, I gave it to Mary Ann for graduation but she let me wear it today. I just wish I could wear the matching ear rings but my ears aren't pierced. No way to hide that from Dad, so too bad.

Anyway, I thanked him and then he asks if I'm new here and I admit it. He starts telling me about the city and stuff and suddenly I realize he's offering to show me around. He's making a pass. At me!

Well, I got flustered, and damned if he didn't just pour on the charm and get me even more flustered. Nobody ever taught me what to do when a guy makes a pass at me; somehow Mom didn't think I would need to know that. I tried to be nice but distant, but I must have seemed like a complete ditz. I just didn't know what to do!

Anyway, he finally left and I managed to calm down. When I was able to think again I realized I ought to be flattered. After all, the couple of times Angel the Boy tried to flirt were complete disasters, I got shut down pretty quick.

Angel the Girl must be pretty convincing if some stranger is attracted enough to want to take her out, unless maybe the guy is just a compulsive flirter and doesn't care. Does that mean I have to hope the guy has good taste for flirting with me and getting me all discombobulated? The details I never thought of when Grandpa gave me the option to be a girl for the summer!

I told Mary Ann about it at lunch and she wasn't much help. She told me that if I was going to make a date with a stranger that he'd better have a good looking friend so she could come too. Is she serious? That would be just about the ultimate weird - a guy who looks like a girl going out with some other guy, double dating with his lover who is with yet another guy.

I'm getting even more confused than ever! I'm going to put on my nightgown and go to bed. With only Mary Ann in the bed with me, thank you!
 

Wednesday, July 17
Men are such boobs! I mean, when I read those articles in the newspaper about how men look at a woman's boobs while they're talking to her it always seemed like they were making a big deal out of nothing. Mary Ann laughed at me when I told her, then she said I spent an awful lot of time looking at her boobs. Did I? I'm obsessed with bras, but you can see them better from the back. Maybe I'm not an impartial judge of the situation.

I now have enough experience at the information desk to say that an awful lot of men want to look at my boobs, even without visible cleavage. What would they do if I could show them some cleavage? Maybe I don't want to know. Then again, I can't help wondering what it would be like to have real breasts of my own. I know that's a silly thought, I'm only Angel the Girl for the summer and then I go back to real life. College, study, job.

The only problem is I'm no longer so sure I want to go home and go to school like I planned. I love my family but after living with Grandpa and Eve and learning what freedom is all about I don't want to go back to the way things were. That's not only because I would have to return to being Angel the Boy, but being Angel the Child.

The only way I can figure that Mom and Dad let me stay here for the summer is that it was an Act of God. That's just about what it takes to get Dad to loosen up. I'm not about to ask Him for another miracle so soon after the last one. Even if Dad doesn't find out about Angel the Girl I'm not the same person who left home a couple of weeks ago. My doubts about what I had been taught were getting stronger before I left, now I realize that there are a lot of unanswered questions in the real world.

Grandpa says getting the answers to those questions is what life's about; if you think you have all the answers already you aren't living, just marking time. I guess I'm really living high because I have questions I could never have imagined only a few weeks ago.
 

Friday, July 19
It just occurred to me - Mary Ann has got the be the most wonderful person in the world. Why else would she be so wonderful, why else would she put up with me? I mean, she could have picked any other guy in the school and had them begging for her love, but she picked me. Conservative, confused, virgin, obsessed with her bra me.

How did I ever live before I met her? She fills an empty spot I didn't even know I had, being with her is so natural and wonderful I can't believe it. I can talk to her and tell her about anything and she understands. The funny thing is, she can talk to me about anything and I somehow understand her. That's something pretty special. Grandpa and Eve seem to have it, too. Maybe it runs in Mary Ann's family - it sure doesn't run in mine. I just hope our kids inherit it.

Our kids?

Did I say that?

Of course I did, it's right there on the screen. That sort of thought has been going around in my brain for a while now, but it seems so real when it lands on paper. I love Mary Ann, I've told her that and she says it to me. It's real, and I don't care if I just turned eighteen, it isn't some infatuation. At least I don't think so.

Funny, but for once I have to agree with Dad. He has preached on what love really is and it's one of the areas he seems to agree with liberals (radicals?) like Mary Ann's family. Not too long ago Grandpa was talking about what love is and even he pretty much agrees with Dad, except for the stuff about no sex before marriage.

Everyone must have heard of the way the Bible talks about love in 1st Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,

I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

I could probably write the whole passage from memory, I've heard it so often at weddings. Even if I didn't understand it until I met Mary Ann I still enjoyed it.

Robert Heinlein, my new favorite author, (reading him is one of the reasons I haven't been writing this journal every day) has a great quote:

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."

Simple, but it rings true. As long as I'm looking up quotes (I am an apprentice librarian, after all) there's one I remember from Ann Landers:

"Love is friendship that has caught fire."

Yeah, that's right. She talks a lot about trust and waiting and maturity and now I understand what she was talking about.

I'm in love. In love with Mary Ann and she's in love with me. Both of me.

Amazing!
 

Saturday, July 20
I enjoy being a girl. Grandpa was singing that song in the car on our way to the picnic today. I suppose it's better than listening to "The Music Man" but Grandpa's taste in music isn't mine. Musical preferences aside I did enjoy being a girl today.

It's something I never thought about being Angel the Boy, but girls have a lot more fun picking out clothes in the morning. Unless I was going to church or something I just put on a pair of pants and a shirt and went off to school. Since my pants were all black or gray I never gave a thought to matching colors, everything matched!

With Mary Ann and Eve to help I have gotten pretty good at choosing outfits that match. I really like doing it, it gives me a little thrill because it's something that only a girl would do.

I have to think about what I'm going to wear quite a bit, because even though Sylvia had very good taste in clothes she was still old enough to be my grandmother. She must have been a very young thinking grandmother, and I'm fortunate she stuck mostly to classic styles but a lot of her stuff is a bit dated.

Clothes for the library are no problem, a nice skirted suit works very well, even if some people kid me about being so formal. As often as not the other interns wear jeans and T-shirts but I don't think I could carry off Angel the Girl in jeans and a T-shirt. Besides, I can wear jeans and T-shirts as Angel the Boy, it seems kind of silly to be Angel the Girl and not wear a skirt.

Sylvia did have some very nice pantsuits and there's no doubt they were made for a woman, but I'm considerably taller than Sylvia was so I can't wear them. Her longer skirts are fine for me even if they don't sweep the floor like some of them were intended to do. I like the way high heels set them off, but I don't do that often because I still have a problem with being in heels all day.

I've bought a couple of things of my own, not many because nice clothes are expensive and I haven't got much money. Just buying pantyhose costs more than I would have thought, it doesn't take too long to get a run in them and then I have to throw them out. We interns get paid a stipend, but it about covers coffee and bagels in the morning, not a high fashion wardrobe.

The first time Mary Ann had me try on clothes with her in a store I was petrified. How come I can be Angel the Girl without thinking about it much any more but then suddenly realize I'm a guy in a place where there should be only women and get scared? I got over it, all I had to do is start thinking like a girl again, which is difficult when Mary Ann is standing next to me in her panties, but pretty soon I found I was interested enough in how the clothes fit to regain my girlish composure.

For the most part I like what Sylvia wore. Maybe it's because my Mom almost always wears dresses or skirts to please Dad; I like how Mom looks, she has style even if it isn't something you'd see in a fashion magazine.

Anyway, I think I look better in long skirts, they help hide the fact I have no hips to speak of. One of the things I bought was a pair of padded panties so I have a little more of a figure to wear clothes that are a bit tighter on me, but the thing gets hot after a while and it's like sitting on two bags of sand when I'm wearing it. I prefer loose, flowing clothing anyway. Maybe it's a good thing that Dad thinks mini skirts are the work of the Devil, I don't know what I'd do if I wanted to wear them.

I think it may be because I don't want to be sexy, I just want to look like a girl. Mary Ann certainly wears short skirts and they look just fine on her, but I don't usually let my knees show. They're kind of lumpy, anyway.

Anyway, we got to the park before Grandpa exhausted his repertoire of old songs and had our picnic. I was wearing a beautiful sundress with about twenty yards of lace and frills that left my arms exposed and let my bra straps show. A little voice that sounded a lot like my Dad was saying "sinful," but half the women in the park were showing bra straps, the rest had dispensed with bras altogether. It felt absolutely wonderful to wear that dress, more feminine than you can imagine!

Actually, I got a kick about displaying my bra straps. After all, hadn't I spent hour after hour looking at bra straps, fantasizing about bra straps, longing to be wearing my own bra straps? Now I was able to wear a bra all day long and let other people fantasize about my bra straps. Call it my good deed for all the boys who have strange obsessions like my own.

Getting into the spirit of things I stood there and batted my eyes at the big, strong, man in the group while he carried the picnic basket and the other heavy things to the picnic table. I suppose it's a good thing he was mumbling, I don't think I want to know was really saying.

One of the things he was carrying was a badminton set. Grandpa had to explain what it was, I had never heard of it before. Think tennis played with a whiffleball, but it's called a birdie. You can whack the heck out of the birdie and it just sort of floats down. Well maybe not floats because I had a hard time getting my racket to where the birdie was going to be, but it isn't anything like the speed of a tennis ball.

The hardest thing was remembering to slow down and move like a girl and not rush like I do when playing tennis as Angel the Boy. I worried about loosing my wig but once I got the feel for it there was no problem. In fact, the feel of moving and stretching in a dress was heavenly. I was very aware of my bra and breasts as I stretched and swung, a wonderful feeling, indeed. The hem of my sundress caressed my bare, shaved legs (no stockings, this was a casual day!) with every motion of my body.

I had visions of Victorian ladies gently playing on a vast, green lawn while the servants catered to their every whim. Wouldn't it be lovely to wear one of those formal Victorian dresses? I wasn't a very good player, but with Mary Ann's help we beat Grandpa and Eve in sort-of-mixed doubles play. Did they let us win? Who cares, it was fun!

The only thing I missed was not being able to swim, no way I could fake it in a swimsuit. The breast forms look natural when they're covered, but not in a swimming suit. I had to content myself with wading along the shore, which was lots of fun. Mary Ann and I held hands as we strolled, we were far from the only pair of women (or men) doing so that day, so no one seemed to care. We even kissed right there in public! More than once.

I enjoy being a girl!