My neighborhood nail salon feels like a bordello: all the Vietnamese women lined up, the stations waiting for the clients, so much more luxurious than the flat concrete beds built into the brothels in Pompeii. These chairs recline, they vibrate and knead your back for you, and they're built big for wide American behinds. A patron's toes curl deliciously in a hot bath until a diminutive pedicurist lifts and pats dry her feet. One tiny Asian woman massages the client's feet and calves all the way up to her knees, while another does the same to her hands and forearms. Her eyes roll up in her head in ecstasy.

The clients all look so comfortable in their feminine drag. This is a world they've moved in their entire lives. I watch as a mother brings in her teenage daughter and her prepubescent one and gives both of them lessons, without seeming to, in how to be a girl. The teenager gets little jewels embedded in her toenail polish. The nine-year-old wants them too, and gets them. She wears pink flip-flops. Her perfectly straight blonde hair hangs down her back in a chic ponytail. She will never wonder, as I do, how femmy straight women manage the whole act. I never got girl lessons.

It's not entirely my mother's fault. I thought I should have been born a boy, and I felt like a boy inside, so I rejected all her attempts to feminize me. I hated dolls, and I wanted to play with my brother's trucks. Of course, what I did with them, while he was still asleep, was make families out of them. My mother wanted me to wear pink, which I hated, and to do ballet, at which I failed with determination and violence. So by the time I was about six, she had almost given up on the girl stuff. Every few years, even though she knew better, she'd try again. I remember her meticulously making up my face for my first junior high school dance, and how I felt like a clown and rubbed it all off immediately.

I want those girl lessons now. Is it too late? My short hair grew long during my last illness, because I wasn't able to go sit through a haircut. My friend Deborah puts my shoulder-length hair up in a French braid. It springs free as though it's alive, this wiry wild hair that will take no more direction than I would as a child. I watch Deborah twist her own hair up without even looking in a mirror. Is this easy femininity like language, something you have to learn before a certain age or you never will?

I want to ask my ex-stripper friend Maria, who always looks fantastic in her makeup, how to use the sparkly eye shadow that my cousin sent me to cheer me up when I was sick. I haven't the faintest idea what to do with it. It's okay if you're a teenager to walk around looking like a streetwalker or a clown while you get the hang of make-up, but at my age? If I ask Maria for lessons, will I learn how to put on makeup like a stripper? Would I like to feel her hand steadying my cheek, the light touch of the applicator on my eyelids? I could never have the confidence of the straight woman that this touch is safe, nonsexual, will never arouse any inappropriate feelings in me. When you're bisexual, the touch of other women isn't always safe.

The menu of an average day spa has so many ways to get touched by another woman: an herbal body wrap, a bamboo lemongrass scrub, an aromatherapy facial, a lavender pedicure, an essential oil scalp rub. I occasionally go to a spa in a fancy local hotel for a facial. Before the facial, you can use the spa facilities for as long as you want, including a sauna and a big steaming spa pool. The place is incredibly sybaritic, with private showers equipped with individual bidets where you can direct streams of pulsating body-temperature water, well, just about anywhere.

It's the only place besides the locker room at the gym where women wander around naked. I try not to stare, but it's hard. A few of the more uptight women wear bathing suits in the warm pool, but most of them are buck naked, and their casualness about it must come from their absolute confidence in their heterosexuality. I'm afraid if I look too long or hard at another woman's body I'll freak her out, or I'll be found out as queer and kicked out of the place. But this is Oakland, for crying out loud, the lesbian-couple capital of America. There must be dykes here. And even if there aren't today, how many of these supposedly straight women have had affairs with other women? Well, if you believe Kinsey, quite a few. What do they feel during a facial, or a full-body massage, or even when they get their scalps rubbed during a shampoo before a haircut? Do they enjoy another woman's touch? Is it safe for them, like slapping another guy on the butt during a football game is safe for guys?

I feel like if I pay for it, it's safer than if I don't. It's strictly professional. There are boundaries. Is this what guys feel when they go to a hooker? Am I objectifying my aesthetician who used to be a teacher and likes to discuss Plato, my extremely well-read hair stylist who gives me the critical skinny on all the latest plays and movies, my massage therapist with the law degree, even the incredibly cute little manicurists who were probably all physics graduate students back in Ho Chi Minh City?

I've never felt comfortable changing in a locker room, always preferring the bathroom stall. This was true even when I had a leaner, more athletic body. I couldn't bring myself to look at the bodies of the other girls in junior high and high school, or in the boathouse in college when I rowed for Radcliffe. A strong dyke once gave me a delicious backrub in the boathouse and invited me to the meetings of the Radcliffe Lesbians Society. She stopped being friendly when I introduced her to my boyfriend, but I did eventually go to the Radcliffe Lesbians Society meetings. They were held in a basement room with no windows, late at night, 10 PM, so no one could see us in there or even notice us sneaking in. The other women didn't quite trust me because I was bi. Later, I was the only one to list the Radcliffe Lesbians Society among my student associations under my yearbook photo. The real lesbians were too afraid to be out.

My androgynous husband thinks I'm a femme. He has no idea what a real femme is like. I won't even wear a bra, let alone high heels. He needs to live a week with friends of mine who color their hair, wear custom-blended foundation, get tummy tucks and breast lifts, and get sprayed with artificial tanners so their diamonds and gold will look better against their toned, exfoliated skin. But these habits are not the essence of what I mean by femme-ness, which I think of as distinct from femininity. I mean-what do I mean?

I mean having the ability to twist your hair into a topknot and stick a chopstick in it to hold it perfectly in place without using a mirror. Possessing the instinctual knowledge that your coat hem should be lower than your dress hem, and that your bag should match your shoes. Knowing which colors flatter your complexion, and whether you're a "winter" or an "autumn." Expecting men or butches to pay for you, as a given. Actually wanting to wear stilettos. Not feeling the least bit guilty with every visit to the manicurist, the hair salon, the aesthetician, or the department store for that free makeover that ends up costing you $120 in new beauty products. Because making yourself beautiful is part of your job as a human being, not a terrible waste of money and time, something to hide from your lover and be ashamed of, something you have to justify as necessary for your professional appearance at work, or your theatrical appearance at a reading of your work. It's your birthright.

And so is the pleasure you get as another woman's soft fingers massage your temples, brush back your hair, or knead your feet until you melt into your vibrating chair. It's not sex; it would never even occur to you that it's sexual. It's a service, and you're paying for it. You don't have to worry about whatever it is you're feeling as those small, smooth fingers move over your body, and you don't need girl lessons; you just need the perfect facial, a shine-enhancing color rinse, and a really first-class pedicure, maybe with a tiny rhinestone embedded in the polish of each perfect shell-pink toe.