Trans-Sister Radio

  "How'd he wind up here?" Dana asked, just a hint of unease in the question. It wasn't Meehan himself who was making us uncomfortable, it was the place where he worked--his clinic. The walls of the waiting room were decorated with bullfighting posters and the yellowed covers of half-century-old Wild West Weeklies. The Venetian blinds on the windows were brown with dust, the tile on the floor was cracked with age, and the Naugahyde chairs that lined three of the walls had seen their best days before my daughter was born.

  There were magazines from an earlier presidential administration.

  "Same way, more or less. The mines. They drew most of us here. Only difference was, Cordell Waterman was a mining company recruit. Brought here a good twenty years before me by the mining company itself, because there wasn't a surgeon in the whole city at the time. He started doing the reassignment work about a decade and a half after he arrived when a chef in town who everyone thought was a woman dropped the bombshell that he was a man. At least anatomically. And the fellow had heard that Johns Hopkins was doing sex change operations, and he wanted his penis transformed into a vagina."

  "Why didn't he just go to Johns Hopkins?"

  Meehan shrugged. "Money, I guess. And he trusted Cordy."

  "And so Dr. Waterman did it?" I asked.

  "That's right. The surgeon in Baltimore sent him the diagrams, the instructions. Told Cordy exactly how to do it on the phone. And throughout the 1970s, the word just spread that here was the place to come if you'd been dealt the wrong cards at birth--especially once Johns Hopkins stopped doing the procedure."

  He rose from behind his desk and poured a stack of Polaroid pictures from a greeting card envelope into his hand, and then fanned them together as if he were about to perform a magic trick. They were not unlike ones Dana had been sent earlier that fall.

  "We really do very good work here," he said as he glanced at the pictures himself. "Mostly these are M2Fs, but there are some recent F2Ms as well. Really, really nice jobs--if I say so myself."

  I expected him to offer the pictures to Dana, but instead he gave them to me. "Dana and I are going to spend some time talking with my nurse now, Allison, so would you mind waiting in the reception room?"

  I stood, smiled at Dana, and--though I had no interest in them at all--took the Polaroids with me. I didn't want Dana's doctor to think I was a difficult partner.

  Meehan's receptionist was closer to my mother's age than to mine.

  "How long have you been with Dr. Meehan?" I asked. Her desk was across from the elevator, instead of a part of the tiled waiting room with the posters of bullfighters and cowboys. I didn't want to be alone, and so I decided to wait in the hallway with her.

  "A very long time," she said, without looking away from the computer terminal before her. She had pinned a plastic iris to the lapel of her blazer like a corsage. "I mean, I started with Dr. Waterman. I was here before he even began doing his work with the trannies."

  "Are you from Trinidad?"

  "I was born and raised here. Brought up my four kids here. I still have a daughter and two grandchildren living about a mile from my house."

  "I'm sure it's a lovely place to raise a family," I said.

  "Trinidad's coming back, you know."

  "I'm sure."

  "Now, as I recall from our correspondence with Ms. Stevens, you two aren't related."

  "Nope." Just friends, I almost added, but I stopped myself. Still, I couldn't bring myself to say the word lovers.

  "She seems very nice," the receptionist said.

  "She is."

  For the first time she looked up from her keyboard and terminal. "And you are very nice to be here," she said. "Usually the trannies come alone. Completely alone. Not a soul with them. No mom or dad. No girlfriends or boyfriends. No friends of any kind."

  "That's sad."

  "Imagine. Eight or nine days in the hospital, and no one you know with you. Terrible, isn't it?"

  "It is."

  "My name is Rose."

  "Allison. Allison Banks."

  She smiled and then noticed the envelope of photographs in my hands. "Would you like me to take those for you?" she asked.

  "Thank you."

  "Sometimes Dr. Meehan gets so carried away with his work that he forgets that some people don't need quite so much information. But he just loves his trannies. Meehan Maidens, he calls them. He just adores his Meehan Maidens. I don't think there's any work in the world he'd rather do."

  "Why?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Why?" I asked. Initially the question had been a reflex, but then I repeated the word with deliberation. "Why? Why does he love his ... work so much?"

  She tilted her head and seemed to grow thoughtful. It was as if she were about to try and explain to a preschooler why the sky's blue.

  "Well, I guess I could say, 'Wouldn't you?' but I suppose in this case that wouldn't be true. Would it?"

  I shook my head. "Nope."

  "You know, a lot of people in this town say terrible things about Dr. Meehan. And you can imagine the sorts of things they used to say about poor Dr. Waterman. Awful. Just awful! Some people would look at all of Dr. Waterman's horses or Dr. Meehan's house--it has an indoor pool and its own fitness center, which I'm sure you can understand are very rare in these parts--and they'd say they just did it for the money. But between you and me, there are a lot of people in this town who drive very nice cars, thanks to this clinic. Very nice cars. I think Dr. Meehan could probably be mayor of Trinidad if he wanted the job. He really could. It's just that all the people who love that man and the work he does keep their thoughts to themselves."

  There was a window on the wall beside the elevator, and I could see it was starting to spit snow.

  "So why does he love to work with transsexuals?" I asked again.

  She shrugged and gave me the smile that it shames me to admit I probably offer my sixth-graders a hundred times every year: Tolerant. Patient. Condescending. "He makes them happy," Rose told me. "In some cases, he makes them happy for the very first time in their lives. Imagine being able to give that gift to someone. It's a blessing, it seems to me. It's a blessing."

  The bed beside Dana was empty, and the patient advocate who brought us there told us it would probably remain empty, barring a bus accident or a natural disaster.

  The advocate was a tiny woman named Maura, whose hair was a massive waterfall of silver and blond wings and waves that fell to her waist. "You have no reason at all to be nervous," she told Dana. "Dr. Meehan does this all the time. It's like a tonsillectomy. Why, last week he took care of an airline pilot, and a seventy-seven-year-old girl who'd been living in a camper-trailer for twenty years while she saved her money for the procedure. They're both still here if you'd like to meet them."

  "If there's time, certainly," Dana said, pulling up the blinds on one of the windows. Despite the clouds, in the distance we could see the Huajatolla.

  "Now, you're here for bottom and top--well, partial top."

  "Excuse me?" Dana said.

  Maura looked at her clipboard. "We call it bottom and top. I was just confirming that you're having the genital reassignment tomorrow as well as a tracheal shave. But you're not having any breast augmentation."

  "That's right. My breasts seem to be coming along just fine, thank you very much."

  "All you?" she asked, glancing at Dana's chest.

  "All me. Well, all hormones, I guess."

  "How long?"

  "Not quite a year."

  She nodded, and I think she was impressed. "The main thing I want you to know is that I'm here for you," she said. "I'm your representative. You can't ask nurses to mail a letter for you and you can't ask Dr. Meehan to get you a magazine in the gift shop. But you can ask me. You're going to be in bed for a week or so after your bottom's been done, so you're going to need some help. Well, I'm that help." Maura turned to me. "How long will you be here?" she asked.

  "I leave Sunday."

  "Wow. It's really
sweet of you to stay that long. You're a lucky girl, Dana."

  "Lately, it seems."

  "No, really. I almost never see out-of-towners stay in Trinidad a full week if they don't have stitches to hold them."

  The airline pilot was going to leave the next day, and hoped to be flying again by Easter. She had an ex-wife who no longer spoke to her, and twin boys whom she apparently scared. They were in the third grade. They were, she said, her only regret.

  The woman who'd lived in a camper had a little dog for company and didn't seem to mind that she wasn't healing as fast as Dr. Meehan would have liked.

  "Even if I die today, it won't be so bad," she said, petting the little terrier who was allowed into her room for parts of each day. "After all, I'd be leaving the world the way I was supposed to come into it. That's not a bad exit."

  Then she showed us a beautifully embossed surgical record that Dr. Meehan had issued so she could have her birth certificate updated. At seventy-seven, she'd been reborn a girl.

  Dana was settled into his hospital room by quarter to three, and I offered to go back into town to get the sorts of provisions we realized would be necessary in the hospital. I think I was looking for an excuse to get away.

  The snow hadn't stuck to the ground, so the little city seemed particularly haggard and gray. Even the Christmas decorations in the shop windows looked tired to me. I wandered into the drugstore on Main Street, surprised at first that it was open: Some of the tubes of fluorescent light along the ceiling had burned out, and I'd thought for a moment that the store had closed early for some reason.

  I had the list of cosmetics and magazines Dana had requested, most of which I figured I could find at the pharmacy, but I knew I'd have to drive to the electronics store in the strip mall north of town if I had any hope at all of finding an AC adapter for a laptop computer.

  I had been staring at the mascara and eye cream a long time when I realized the pharmacist was talking to me. I saw a clock on the wall over his shoulder and was surprised to see it was almost three-thirty.

  "Do you need some help?" he asked gently.

  "No, thank you," I murmured, and I tried to smile. "I guess I was spacing out a bit."

  "Are you okay? Would you like to sit down? A glass of water, maybe?"

  I shook my head. "I'm fine," I lied. "I was just lost in thought for a second."

  "Try ten minutes."

  "Ten minutes?"

  "Uh-huh."

  The aisle was narrow, and I allowed myself to lean back against the pegboard rack of dusty brushes and combs and hair clips. I kept seeing that seventy-seven-year-old's surgical certificate in my head, and I realized that in the next week Meehan would issue a new one for Dana, too. The male Dana would really and truly be gone, the original Dana would no longer exist. Instead there would be a Meehan Maiden, a born-again woman with a legal piece of paper from the doctor who'd made her to commemorate her birth.

  "It's been a really long day," I told him.

  "It's almost over," he said, trying to comfort me. The pharmacist was Native American, with a magnificent aquiline face: long and narrow, and the color of a mesa at dusk.

  "It is, isn't it?"

  "The sun probably fell behind the mountains while you were shopping."

  Supposedly, you can't prevent a person from killing himself, if that's what he's determined to do. If someone is resolute in his decision, there's no way in the world to stop him. The same, apparently, was true of the transsexual. Of Dana.

  "I should get back," I said.

  "You're not from around here, are you?"

  "No."

  "Visiting someone at the hospital?"

  I nodded, and I could tell instantly that he understood.

  "You on any medication?"

  "No."

  "Okay, then," he murmured, and he led me to a corner of the store filled with vials of tiny pills and little bottles of brown tinctures. "I don't normally do this," he added.

  "Do what?"

  "Offer unsolicited counsel," he said, and he handed me a bottle labeled St. John's Wort. "Each capsule's four hundred and fifty milligrams. Take two a day."

  "What will it do?"

  "Maybe nothing. Maybe something. It's a natural antidepressant."

  "Okay," I said, and I was grateful. There in the store I peeled off the plastic that was pasted around the lid, and I swallowed the first pill that fell into the palm of my hand.

  Tuesday morning before Dana was wheeled from the room, we kissed. I could tell I had the orderly's sympathy.

  In Trinidad, it seemed, I had everyone's sympathy. Regardless of whether they imagined that Dana and I were siblings, or whether they assumed we had once been married, they felt sorry for me. They felt for my loss, and they viewed me as some wondrous angel of a person for staying with Dana.

  "If anybody comes along with the trannie," Maura had said when we'd had a cup of coffee Monday evening, echoing Dr. Meehan's receptionist, "it's Mom. Sometimes Mom will stick around for a few days, but that's about it. And she's usually numb. It's like she's the one who's been given the anesthetic."

  Back in Vermont, of course, I didn't have anyone's sympathy. There, I knew, I was merely viewed as a lunatic--or, in some people's minds, as a pervert. Someone who shouldn't be allowed in a classroom with children.

  When I could no longer hear the gurney as it squeaked its way down the corridor to the operating room, I sat down in the chair in the corner by Dana's bed and stared out the window at the mountains. I realized it had been almost exactly thirty-six hours since Dana and I had made love for the last time. Quickly I corrected myself: made love for the last time in a way that most people did. Or, at least, could.

  We'd had sex before going out to dinner. Despite the hormones and the testosterone blockers--despite the surgery that was imminent--Dana had left one last erection.

  "Isn't hotel sex hot?" Dana had asked when we were through, and I'd simply purred my concurrence. I didn't dare open my mouth and say a word, because I knew my voice would break and I would cry if I did. And so neither of us said anything about the fact that this was the last time Dana would ever be inside me.

  We might be together as a couple for months or years or even decades; it was possible we'd be making love again by Valentine's Day. ("I tend to heal very quickly," Dana had told me. "Physically, anyway.") But never again would Dana sink into me, or would I reach down and open myself up to--and the pronouns are everything here--him. Never again would we move our hips together the way we once had, never again would I sit upon him and ride him and be, literally, filled. Never again would we be together as a woman and a man.

  Dana had reassured me constantly throughout the fall and then as winter arrived that nothing would change between us, except for that act. With the exception of one of the ways we made love, nothing at all would be different.

  "It's not like the person is changed on the inside," Dana's friend Jordan said to me once. "When Dana's wheeled into post-op, it'll be the same old Dana. Oh, a fraction of a pound lighter, maybe. But trust me: It will be the same human being underneath all that surgical gauze."

  On one level, I prayed that would be the case. But I also realized that my life would be easier in so many ways if Dana was changed and I didn't love the new person Meehan was about to start sculpting in the operating room down the hall. Perhaps the two of us would simply go our separate ways, and people would kid me when we met on the street in Bartlett:

  "Was that a weird phase, or what?"

  "Allison, we thought you had lost your mind."

  "What were you thinking, girl? What were you thinking?"

  If Dana turned out to be different and we were no longer in love, I could resume the life I had known before we had met, and I would no longer have to plumb those parts of my psyche that were probably best left unexplored.

  A male nurse I'd never met before put his head into the room and asked me if I needed anything. I shook my head no. Suddenly I wanted to get away from the thi
n little bed in which Dana had slept, the sheets still stained with the rust-colored antiseptic that had been painted the night before upon groin and torso and thighs.

  The hospital gift shop wasn't open yet but the cafeteria was, and I went there to read newspapers and sip coffee, and to wait for the doctor to finish with Dana.

  Chapter 19.

  dana

  IT'S EASY TO REMOVE THE TESTICLES. YOU SIMPLY make a small midline incision across the scrotum, tie off the spermatic cords, and exhume the testicles from their little balloon of a purse. This is known as an orchidectomy.