A Year Without A Name

Was the problem gender—or me?

- Cyrus Grace Dunham

Two summers ago, I went to a beach in Northern California that’s famous for sea glass. I lay in the sun until the tide touched my shoes, then crawled around on my knees, combing for the luminous green pieces. I didn’t look up until I bumped into an older woman who was filling a leather pouch with shards.

“I like the green ones, too,” she said. “They’re real neon.” She told me they were from nineteenth-century Vaseline bottles that glowed if you put them under black light. She explained where all the colors came from. Amber from aromatherapy bottles. White from milk bottles. Red was very rare, and so were black and turquoise. Her favorite color—the hardest to find—was amethyst. She told me that her name was Venus, and I told her that my name was Grace.

“That’s my son’s name,” she said. “I know, it’s a little weird.” Venus disappeared down the beach, and I walked to a cliff with the goal of sitting still for an hour. I wanted to keep my eyes closed, to home in on sensations— which I rarely did. That afternoon, it was even harder than usual to focus, and I wondered if my encounter with Venus was a sign, if she was a messenger shooting arrows of meaning into my life, signalling something about the future. I knew it was a stupid thought, more of a wish than anything else.

My mom had me when she was forty-two. She tried hard to have me. On a green piece of paper, my parents made a list of all the names they might give me. My mom liked Esther, my dad liked Kay. They agreed on Grace, which was an idea, not something you could touch.

As a child learning to write my own name, I copied my father’s signature, which starts with the letter “C.” I liked to draw “G”s walking across the page, their tongues getting smaller and smaller until they became “C”s, just like his.