Published in Issue 63.1: Winter 2024
Why Why We Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader A. Shaikh on why they recommended Emma Binder’s “What Would I Do For You, What Would Yo Do For Me?” for MQR‘s Winter 2024 issue. You can purchase the issue here.
As a reader, you dream of encountering fiction as heart-driven and nuanced as “What Would I Do For You, What Would You Do For Me?” When Cody unexpectedly finds himself back in northern Wisconsin because of his father’s cancer diagnosis, he’s faced with the tension of moving through his rural hometown, and his family, as a trans man. Cody’s fear of being clocked parallels the complicated discovery of passing—“hopefully the clothes will shield Cody tonight, lend him the authority his dad used to possess, as one of those people who moved through the world unquestioned.” Emma Binder insightfully engages with this fine line between terror and wish. Their story is as much a character study in queer masculinity as it is an exploration of the places we used to call home.
From my first read, I was struck by how the expansive rush of memory that haunts Cody’s visit is rendered in lush, incisive prose. “Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood.” As a writer, I found Binder’s sentences to be sharp yet abundant with feeling, woven together to make an indelible impression. I could not put this story down, and when I did, I could not stop thinking about Cody, and how his journey inadvertently mirrors moments in my own queer life. “What Would I Do For You, What Would You Do For Me?” mesmerizingly excavates themes of nature, gender, and the body. This is a story about trans coming of age, how “different selves arise in different environments,” and it offers the resounding surprise of hope. Past the grief of your childhood—Binder seems to say— exists a life of possibility. This story held my soul from the first read; I hope it might also tend to yours.
As Cody walks around Pearl Lake, he thinks these guys are crazy. It’s March, almost fifty degrees, and three men are guarding the tip-ups in their ice-fishing holes, sitting on a melting lake without a care in the world. He used to see this every year when he was growing up in Iron River. Dark starbursts scar the lake where ice has melted and thinned, but some people seem to think that you can just wander around the bad parts, as if ice isn’t all connected to itself. The men look like dozing bears in their seats, their small faces scorched pink from sunlight beaming off the ice.
For his part, if while Cody’s ice-skating he hears that muffled shotgun sound of ice cracking apart, he’s heading to shore. He’s watched videos of how you’re supposed to army crawl your way out of broken ice and it doesn’t look like something he wants to do. This is his first time in Iron River since he was seventeen—he hasn’t been home since his dad quietly kicked him out after graduation, since he left Wisconsin and moved to Chicago to live with Taylor and June. After that he got on T and moved with June to western Massachusetts, where they’d heard rural queers were living in communes and starting farms and living out some technicolor daydream of collectivism and love. It wasn’t like that, exactly, but it was better than anywhere he’d been before.
He takes the western route around Pearl Lake, toward a rock-knuckled ATV trail that will loop him back home. He’s been in Wisconsin for three days. Cody’s here to help around the house while his dad is in the hospital, getting chemo, and he’ll be around afterward, when his dad’s nauseous and bedbound. When Cody first walked into his childhood home, he shivered at the smell of mildewed wood paneling, plastic vacuum bags, dusty curtains, and corn oil. That smell melted his heart. It brought back everything good: watching PBS with his sister on the carpeted living room floor, wriggling into musty snow pants in winter, leaning on his mom’s shoulder in the kitchen before they left for church.
His sister, Molly, is the only person in his family he’s stayed close with during the past seven years, and she’s getting into town next week from Duluth. Molly has always had a way of acting as a translator between Cody and his parents, softening their words into something the other party could digest, if not understand.
Cody’s cell phone pings; it’s June, sending a video of their cat trying to claw up her sneaker.
Miss that demon, he writes back.
We miss you, June replies. How’s it going today?
Unbearable, he types, then deletes it.
He unzips his coat, keeps walking. He’s not sure what to say. It’s been heavy, visiting his dad in the hospital and tiptoeing around his mom like a stranger. But Cody had missed his mom, that house, and his twin bed, still wrapped in the soft flannel sheets patterned with blue and green train engines that he fought his parents for. He never envisioned returning to Iron River because he didn’t want to crave something he couldn’t have. But now he has the corn oil, the old sheets. He has the golden desk lamp pooling on his midnight carpet, where he used to sit with his knees drawn up at night, listening to burned Pantera and Metallica CDs on his Walkman. He puts his phone back in his pocket without responding to June. The sun hikes higher, raking steam off the ice. Two of the three ice fishermen have packed up and begun lumbering toward shore.
Cody used to come to Pearl Lake when he was in high school to fish and be alone, but sometimes Molly came with him. If it was empty at dusk, they built a fire on the lake’s west side, where pines clothed the beach in green darkness. They tormented each other by pretending to see ghosts in the mist, trading urban legends about serial killers who lived in manholes and hunted teenage girls. They came home with splinters in their hands and sand in their socks. Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood.
Just one guy is left on the ice. Cody reaches the western beach, his sneakers slipping against wet sand. What’s a couple bluegill worth, he thinks, watching the guy in his wool hat, head slumped forward. It occurs to Cody that maybe he’s fallen asleep in his chair. Should he make a sound to wake him up? Cody looks away, trudges ahead. The guy’s none of his business. People want to hang out on melting lakes, that’s their problem. He looks back at the man. To Cody’s relief, he’s stretching now, beginning to stand.
The sun crests the pines east of the lake and climbs overhead, bearing down on the ice. In the distance the guy, who’s tall and barrel-chested, takes off his jacket and hat and looks suddenly much smaller to Cody. He has a full beard and a floppy dark mat of hair. He briefly meets Cody’s gaze, but Cody looks away. He knows better, at this point, than to wave at strange men in northern Wisconsin, whether it’s his hometown or not.
* * *
His mom has been polite to him. He can’t deny that. In the years he’s been away, they’ve talked sporadically on the phone, but this is the first time he’s been home since his dad kicked him out at seventeen—a period his mom calls that whole business, as if she had no part to play.
She’s been making him dinner now, feeding him neighborly gossip: the Harts’ teenage daughter got pregnant, the Markeseys had Mr. Pearson’s truck towed after he parked only half a foot into their yard. Cody watches intricate, careworn lines play against her face. She’s spent these years worrying, working late hours as an RN, praying at stoplights, deciding she doesn’t need to say what she might say. When they watch TV together, Cody has caught her staring at him with tears in her eyes. She’s going through something that involves him, but is private. He doesn’t know whether the tears spring from happiness or distress, relief or pain.
Cody wants to tell his mom he’s in love. In Massachusetts his friends just bought forty acres of land on a mountain in Leyden, where they’re building cabins and community gardens. When he’s not at work or home with June, Cody’s learning about permaculture, seeding schedules, how to work a circular saw and cut rafters. Everyone who’s armed with practical knowledge is primed to share it, ready to help everyone else make their homes, all these queers who spent so long merely surviving. In a world with so little to be optimistic about, Cody feels confoundingly optimistic about his own life, as if it’s grown wide and spacious without him noticing. At the end of the day, he goes home to June, the curly-haired Craigslist roommate he crushed on as a young trans kid in Chicago, afraid of his own desire. When they started living together, he used to try not to think about her, shadow-boxing the weight of everything he wanted but didn’t think he would ever have: love, family, peace. Why fantasize about being held by someone you think will never hold you? Why hurt yourself with a stupid, dogged dream? Since he was a kid, Cody tried to pretend he didn’t need anyone, didn’t want anything.
But now he has friends, a home, a place to feel safe. He has June. He wants to tell his mom that June is beautiful, smart, tough, and tender—and miraculously, she loves him back. He gets to be held. He’s started to let himself want things, even when he feels his prior self rioting against him: You want more than this? All this, which you don’t even deserve?
In Iron River, he feels shame digging into him like spurs. Its hooks are everywhere. His mom never brings him to the grocery store, even though she’s got a bad shoulder and could use help getting bags to the car. All the pictures of him in the house are from when he was a little kid, before he got to middle school and started wearing boys’ clothes. For the past three nights, he’s fallen asleep staring at the blue and green trains printed on his sheets, thinking he might as well be dead.
* * *
Before he sees anything, Cody hears a muted sound like a far-off rubber hammer on wood. He looks up just in time to catch the man and his folding chair go through the ice up to his torso. The man shouts. He spreads his hands on either side of the ice and tries to shimmy himself free. For a moment he seems to succeed, but the ice breaks again and he plummets underwater, disappearing for a moment before he resurfaces and gasps.
Cody stands stock-still on shore, heart pounding.
“Swim!” he shouts. “Kick your legs!”
If he goes out onto the ice to try to help this man, he might fall through—and then where would they both be? Should he call someone? Who would get here in time? The man has braced his elbows back against the ice and is wriggling, trying to kick his way out.
“Spread your weight!” Cody shouts. “Don’t stand up!” Without another thought, he begins to run out onto the ice. He treads lightly, as if running on hot coals. He can’t stand on shore and do nothing.
When he gets to the man, Cody reaches down and grabs his arms and pulls him away from his ice trap. The man’s joints are locked and he’s heavy, but Cody’s flooded with the strength of urgency.
In his soaking-wet clothes, the man kicks his way out of his hole, and they crawl back on all fours together, Cody talking to him all the while: We’re going back to land. We’re almost there. By the time they reach shore, the man’s face is bone-white and his teeth are chattering like a snare drum. He collapses on the sand. Cody helps him out of his jacket, and then takes off his own thin canvas barn coat, wraps it uselessly around the freezing arms. He rubs the man’s shoulders, something he’s only seen in movies, to bring heat to the man’s body and to have something to do with his own.
“I’m okay,” the man mutters between chattering teeth. “I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I just need to get to my truck.”
“Where is it?”
The man extends a shaky finger toward a path in the woods, which, Cody knows, stretches about a quarter mile before reaching a gravel parking lot.
“The fucking,” the man says, struggling to spit out his words. “The fucking ice. Didn’t look bad.”
When they get to the truck—a lifted white Chevy, what June would call a Big Dick Truck—the man tries to unhook his keys from his belt loop, but his hands are trembling. Cody frees his keys for him, unlocks the driver’s side door and helps him into the seat, and then watches as it takes two, three tries of turning the key in the ignition for the engine to roar to life.
“I think you should go to the hospital,” Cody calls over the grumbling engine. “I know where it is. I can drive.”
The man shakes his head vigorously. “I’m fine,” he says, even as Cody sees him shuddering forward against the steering wheel. His lips and fingers are white. “I’ll warm up.” Cody feels the warm air blasting through the vents, even from where he’s standing outside the open door.
“You could have hypothermia. You should at least get out of those wet clothes.”
“I’m okay.” He shuts the door and peels away onto the gravel road. Cody watches the truck lurch forward, clipping a rock in the gravel lot on its way out. Not until the truck is out of view does Cody realize that the man is still wearing his own jacket—with his keys, wallet, and phone still in the pockets.
* * *
Almost two days pass before the man finds him, seemingly by chance. That morning over breakfast, Cody’s mom brought out grade school pictures, which she’s been keeping in the drawer below the kitchen telephone, as if she’s wanted them close at hand. She smiled over the pictures at first, but then began to cry. It’s enough to send him on a long, blistering walk. He’s circling Pearl Lake again when he hears padding footsteps behind him and a voice calling, “Hey, buddy!”
Cody turns around.
“I’ve been looking for you,” the man says, grinning. Cody recognizes his thick dark beard, his flannel shirt and wool cap. “In a town this small, I thought I knew everybody.”
“I’m just visiting,” Cody says.
“Well,” the man says, clapping Cody on the shoulder, “I’ve got your jacket to give back to you. It’s in my truck right now. Phone and wallet and everything’s still in it.”
“That’s great. Turns out I need those things.”
“Yeah, you got, like, twenty thousand text messages.”
Cody bristles, thinking of the man reading his texts from June. They walk toward the truck together, up the same path they walked before. Along the way the man introduces himself: he’s Greg Parham, works for Iron River Towing, lives just a mile and a half down the road from Pearl Lake. He must have fished on the lake a dozen times this month, in weather much the same as it was two days ago. Hasn’t heard of anyone else falling through the ice. Just an odd thing, it was. Now that Cody can look at him calmly, he realizes that Greg looks familiar, and they’re around the same age. Greg might be a little older, but probably his beard artificially ages him. They likely overlapped at school.
“What brings you to town?” Greg asks.
“Just visiting family. My parents live here.”
“Oh yeah? You from here?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a long pause during which Cody’s sure that Greg is trying to place him, trying to remember. But when Cody tells Greg his name, he shrugs.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Greg says.
When they get to the truck, Greg fishes Cody’s jacket from the cab and claps him on the back again. “I’d like to buy you a beer. I want to pay you back for helping me out.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Cody says, patting down his jacket pockets. Everything’s still there: phone, wallet, keys. “I just did what anyone would do.”
“You’d really be doing me a favor,” Greg says. “Making me feel better about the whole thing.” He leans toward Cody as if about to confide something. “Truth be told, I feel a little embarrassed. Never thought I’d end up in a fix like that. Woody’s tonight, at seven?”
Cody makes some kind of gesture between a nod and a shrug.
Greg grins. “All right, buddy. I’ll see you there.”
* * *
You can read the rest of this story and more great content in out Winter 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Emma Binder is a writer from Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. They have received a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Narrative, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
