This woman seems to be wherever I am in the store. This is such a wonderful store...panties on little hangers, rows and rows of them. All the lace lingerie in rows, like multi-colored hedges. And I hear her say: "Dieses Mädchen ist ein Junge." I think this is what she says. Why I have dreamed that this kindly woman is German, or speaks German, I don't know.

She wears her hair in the style of an older woman, parted in the middle, forming two large buns on her ears. She is wearing an old-fashioned dress that is far from fashionable. She has a gray sweater around her shoulders.

I am now in her house.

It seems like I have been invited here for tea. She sits across the way from me, holding her cup and saucer.

I am embarrassed to be wearing a slip and stockings, but no shoes. Have I put the clothes away to dry, or something like that? She doesn't seem to mind that I am in lingerie.

I am nibbling on some kind of biscuit that she has baked.

I want to ask her why she said the thing she did: "Dieses Mädchen ist ein Junge."

How did she know? Was she talking to me, or to someone else? She said it more like a statement of truth, which, of course, it is.

The translation: The girl is a boy.

She has, by intuition, known what I was about to ask."How did you know the girl is a boy? Am I not shamed?" She puts down her tea and saucer, and holds out her arms to me. I find myself rushing to her, and like her daughter, like her child, I sit on the floor with my head in her lap, crying softly.

She strokes my hair. It is all right that I am really a boy. She understands, probably better than I do myself.

I look up tearfully.

She smiles warmly, and shakes her head, as if to say, "You shouldn't be so sad, dear. You shouldn't have to ever be sad."

She slowly begins to raise her dowdy skirt. She wears stockings that are heavy and seem to be held around her thighs by rubber bands. She is wearing very old-fashioned cotton underpants. With some effort, she raises herself slightly in the chair, and pulls off the underpants.

Of course, it is not a woman at all. There is dark-gray pubic hair, and a small, thick and plump penis...

I want to put it in my mouth, and look up at her, and show her my gratitude. But I find myself in her arms, instead, and she kisses my cheek like a grandmother.

She touches my lips, and I smile.

We seem to be singing an old German folk song together, and it just is that one phrase, "Dieses Mädchen ist ein Junge." We sing it softly, happily, just the two of us, sort of to the tune of an English nursery rhyme, the one that begins "London Bridge is falling down." I think that's what it sounded like. It was those words to that melody.