Trans-Sister Radio

  And so I decided to call Allie, even though it was ten o'clock on a Saturday night. I told myself I was merely phoning because I was going to report on how Carly's first few days back at Bennington seemed to be going.

  But Allie was out for a brief walk around the green when I called, getting some fresh air before going to bed.

  "She'll be sorry she missed you," Dana said. "Should she call you?"

  "Yeah. If she doesn't mind."

  "No, she wouldn't mind at all. You'll still be up?"

  "I think so," I said, and offered the number of the motel. Then, perhaps triggered by remorse for having mentioned Dana's plans to Glenn Frazier, I surprised myself by asking, "So, how are you feeling?"

  "Pretty good, actually. Thank you."

  "Do they have you on painkillers?"

  "Don't need them. I haven't needed them for a couple of weeks now."

  "That's good."

  "It is."

  For a long moment we both were quiet, and I was about to thank Dana for passing along my message and hang up, but Dana said, "Your station did a nice job with that farm story this week."

  "We did, didn't we?" I said. "Moira's a good reporter." Three days that week we'd examined how a once-rural village had lost every single one of its dairy farms since the Second World War and become a distant but tony suburb of Burlington. I was very proud of that package. Still am.

  "She is. But it was beautifully produced, all of it. The music. The timing."

  "I'll tell the producer. And Moira."

  "How's Carly doing?"

  "God, Carly's fine. We should all be so together."

  "You and Allison have done an absolutely stunning job with her."

  I agreed, and we continued to chat about my daughter and radio. I learned a little more about the two books Dana had written, and why I should consider reading George Sand. I don't think either of us consciously avoided discussing the Bartlett Elementary School, but the fact is, classrooms and school boards and disgruntled parents never came up. Transsexuality never came up. It was such a pleasant conversation that we were still on the phone when Allie got home, and I had largely forgotten that I was speaking with a person who'd been born a man.

  That night when I was falling asleep in the motel bed, it seemed instead that I'd been talking to some female friend of Allie's. A woman, perhaps, who'd come into her life after we had divorced and who--like most of Allie's friends--was intelligent and interesting and ... attractive.

  Quickly I disabused myself of this notion.

  Some men in this world would fornicate with anything, I reminded myself. But I wasn't among them.

  Chapter 24.

  allison

  IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR ME TO GO TO SLEEP THE Sunday night that I returned home from Trinidad and convince myself that there was at least a chance the petition was merely a nasty rumor. Ugly but--happily--untrue. After all, no one I spoke with had actually seen it: not Carly, not Molly, not Will. Not even Glenn, our school principal, who told me that he thought it was possible the last straw had been my decision to go with Dana to Colorado.

  "People were not happy when they heard," he said.

  "Well, how did they hear?" I asked.

  "How would I know?" he answered, but I could tell by the sudden churlishness in his voice that he was lying. I had a feeling they knew because he had told them.

  Nevertheless, I did believe him when he insisted that he hadn't yet seen the petition. He--like Carly and Molly and Will--had simply heard that one existed: It was just outside the Grand Union. It was being passed around in a church. Someone had seen someone holding one while standing in line at the post office.

  Sometimes there was the added conjecture of a name behind it. It had to be the Hedderiggs, it was likely the LaFontaines. The Duncans? Good chance--though it was possible that because Al Duncan was a member of the school board, he might have felt it was inappropriate to initiate a little grassroots activism against one of the teachers. Regardless, no one had in fact seen anyone soliciting signatures in a parking lot.

  Nothing had really changed in the thirty-six hours since I'd called Glenn from Colorado, and I doubt the petition would have even come up when we spoke Sunday night if I hadn't mentioned it. Mostly Glenn phoned because he wanted to discuss the meeting we were going to have with some parents Monday morning, and to chastise me once more for not, as he put it, "keeping him in the loop." He thought I should have warned him early that fall that I was in the midst of what had the potential to become a controversial relationship.

  "I just wish you'd told me back in September or October," he said again. "I just wish you'd warned me. That way I wouldn't have been blindsided."

  "I understand," I said.

  "I should know about these things before the PTA. I should hear about them before the school board."

  "You're right," I agreed. Because he was. Without fail I would have sat down with his predecessor, Sue Dixon, and explained to her that I was seeing someone who might raise some eyebrows in the town. But Glenn and I had barely known each other; we'd worked together less than three months when Dana moved into my house. Moreover, the little contact we'd had had been unpleasant: fights about field trips, squabbles about the Internet.

  And, of course, Glenn was male, and I'm sure that had entered into it, too. In some way, it would have seemed oddly deferential of me to have gone to him. It would have seemed like he was my father, and I needed his approval or his permission to see my new heartthrob.

  The fact is, at my age, there are few people in this world whose approval I court or whose permission I need. Perhaps, on some level, I still look to my mother for approval. But I certainly can't imagine looking to the likes of Glenn Frazier for permission. Especially that winter, when we barely knew each other.

  "I haven't talked to Judd," Glenn continued on the phone, referring to our school superintendent--the fellow who supervised all of the public schools in our half of the county. "And I haven't asked any lawyers to be there. I don't think we're at that stage yet, and I think it would be inflammatory to have someone there. So, please, don't even bring that sort of thing up."

  "Why would I bring up a lawyer?"

  "Defensiveness, maybe. Self-preservation."

  "I'm not defensive. And I don't see what good a lawyer would do."

  "Fight or flight, Allison. You go with fight, you might bring up a lawyer. I can see it. I would."

  "I won't do anything of the sort. The idea hadn't even crossed my mind."

  "With any luck, it won't even come to that. With any luck, they'll talk, we'll listen, and we'll all go home friends."

  "That's all you want me to do tomorrow morning? Listen?"

  "That's all I want us to do. My hope is that once they've had a chance to vent, they'll get on with their lives."

  In the living room, I heard Carly turn on the television.

  "I would love to get back to my daughter," I said. "I've only seen her about ten minutes since I got home."

  "How was your flight?"

  "Bumpy."

  "Sorry to hear that."

  "Oh," I said, "I'm sure it was no worse than tomorrow morning's meeting will be."

  I told Carly about Trinidad, and how nice it had felt to be outside and warm on Friday. I told her how pretty the mountains were to the west, and how flat the landscape was to the east. I told her how sometimes it seemed the town was nothing but beauty salons and bars--almost everything else was boarded up or closed--and what a young man who worked at a bakery said people did there most Saturday nights: "They get liquored up and they get their hair done. Sometimes they do it in the proper order. But not always."

  I told her how I thought Dana was feeling, and about the sponge baths and the hospital food and how well she was handling the postoperative pain. I told her that Dana had taken her first, tentative steps as a woman the night before--a day and a half early, technically, but she had wanted me present for the commencement.

  I did not tell Carly about t
he gauze, or the dilation that would be necessary once the gauze was removed. I did not tell her about the catheter.

  Carly, in turn, told me about the snow that had fallen in my absence, and the days she had spent skiing. She told me about a New Year's Eve party she'd gone to.

  We spoke briefly about my conversation with Glenn, but Carly was careful not to bring up the things people in town were saying about me. Nor did she ask, I noticed, when Dana was planning to return.

  I met Glenn at his office early Monday morning, fifteen minutes before any of the parents were due to arrive. He was in the midst of taking down the drawings the kids had made weeks earlier of menorahs and snowmen and Christmas trees.

  "Now, I don't know for sure how many people will actually show up for a seven A.M. meeting," he said as he worked, sometimes pulling the masking tape off a picture so he could return it intact to the student. "It's supposed to be a small group. Emissaries, you might say. But as a precaution I said we'd meet in the cafeteria."

  "The cafeteria? It sounds like you're expecting a mob!"

  "Not at all. But I want to be sure there's a table big enough for nine or ten people--just in case."

  I said nothing but I wasn't reassured, and he must have sensed my dismay.

  "I doubt anywhere near that many will come," he added.

  "I hope you're right."

  He paused when he realized he had in his hands Lindsey Lessard's beautiful painting of reindeer. Lindsey was one of my students. "Her dad's coming, that's for sure," he said, and he held up the picture for me so I could see who he meant.

  "Is there anything you want me to do?"

  "Aside from finding a new boyfriend?"

  "That was really a despicable thing to say, Glenn."

  He sighed, exasperated. "You asked. Probably common courtesy should have precluded me from answering."

  "Or common sense."

  "Probably. I'm sorry."

  I nodded, as if his apology made everything okay. But of course it didn't. I'd known he wasn't going to be my friend or my ally when we went into that meeting, but I'd thought it was possible he might at least view himself as a mediator. As somebody neutral.

  I realized I'd been kidding myself. Glenn Frazier was anything but a disinterested party.

  Al Duncan sat beside Bea and Ken Hedderigg, while Rich Lessard somehow wound up at the head of the table. Audrey LaFontaine's mother--whose name, I realized with some embarrassment, I didn't know--sat next to Glenn, and I sat next to her.

  While two of the women who worked in the school kitchen started preparing lunch--the meal was still five hours away, but it takes time to make pizza and coleslaw for 290 children, even if the cabbage has already been shredded and bagged--Glenn chatted amiably with the parents about how they had spent their Christmas vacations. I smiled and kept my mouth shut. No one needed to be reminded of where I had been.

  The Hedderiggs, the Duncans, and the LaFontaines all went to the same church in East Medford, a congregation known throughout the county for its conservative theology and Republican politics. The men were solid. The women were deferential. And the softball team was amazing, because the teens in the church never missed a game.

  The Lessards, I thought, were members of the Catholic church in town, but religion really didn't have anything to do with Rich Lessard's antipathy toward Dana. He simply thought my lover was a pervert. Rich was, he informed me, a liberal Democrat with a very high threshold for tolerance, and the firm belief that gays should be allowed to be out in the military. He was the chief financial officer for the largest employer in town, after the lumber mill: a crunchy granola manufacturer of all-natural shaving soap and toothpaste and talc. His company's products rested inside my medicine cabinet and inside my daughter's backpack. The enterprise gave an impressive percentage of its profits to charity each year, and the employees--even the highest management--came to work in blue jeans and flannel shirts.

  Of course, religion was at best only a small part of the reason why even the assemblage from East Medford was concerned about Dana. Certainly they thought she was unnatural, and at one point Ken Hedderigg implied that he considered her a tad presumptuous to believe she understood better than God what sort of genitalia she was supposed to have. But, like Rich Lessard, most of their repulsion was triggered by the simple belief that Dana was twisted and freakish and sick. She may even have been, on some level, the sort of sexual predator who might not physically abuse children, but was likely, by her mere presence in the community, to encourage all manner of aberrant sexual practices. The fact that my students were in the sixth grade was especially troubling to the group: Here my kids were on the very cusp of adolescence and sexual activity, and there before them was a grown woman they respected--their teacher, of all things--who was involved with a transsexual.

  "He--" Ken began at one point, referring to Dana.

  "She," I corrected him, careful to keep my voice light.

  "No. He. You can call him a girl if you want, but I'm not going to do it," Ken told me, before continuing his thought: "He is clearly way too fixated on that part of his body. He is way too fixated on sex. And you can talk all you want about gender, but the fact is, you two didn't go to Colorado so he could have a gender change. You two went so he could have a sex change."

  We only had half an hour, so Glenn steered the conversation as quickly as he could to the specifics of what the parents wanted, and what they had in mind.

  "Mostly," Rich said, "we want to hear what you're planning," and he turned his attention to me. They all did. Even Audrey LaFontaine's mother, a lovely young woman who it was clear was reticent and shy and had mustered all the courage she had to come and confront me, pulled her beautiful wool shawl tightly around her shoulders and stared at me.

  I tried to smile, but I'm sure it looked forced. The room seemed, suddenly, too warm. It was the first Monday in January, and I was feeling flush. "What I'm planning to do about ... what? About Dana?"

  "Obviously."

  "My personal life, in other words."

  "Look, Allison, you're a teacher," Rich said. "You live smack in the center of town. That means--and it kills me to say this, because I really do view myself as a very open-minded person--your personal life has a public component."

  The room smelled of canned tomatoes and sweet basil, and I realized that at some point one of the women in the kitchen had turned a radio on softly. I heard country music: a crying steel guitar and the plaintive lament of a young fellow who has been jilted. The radio was, I decided, an act of courtesy: The pair hadn't wanted to eavesdrop.

  "Well, I'm not planning to do anything," I answered, and I crossed my legs under the table. I didn't dare cross my arms. "What am I supposed to do? Tell her she can no longer live in my house because some people don't approve? Tell her we can't be friends because we have some neighbors who don't like her?"

  "No one has said anything of the kind," Glenn said.

  "Of course not," Bea Hedderigg added.

  "Then what?"

  "Can I say something?" Audrey LaFontaine's mother asked, her voice as small as a girl's--Carly's, perhaps, when she was in elementary school. We all turned to her.

  "I can't speak for anybody else," she began, "and I don't want to. If you want to live with this person, Allison, that's your right. But my daughter really looks up to you. You're so important to her ... you just don't realize. And so I don't want her confused by your personal life, I don't want her getting the wrong message. I don't want her getting the idea that because you want to live with a person like that, it's okay--"

  "Though it most assuredly doesn't speak well of your judgment," Al Duncan said, cutting in.

  "No, but that's not my point," Audrey's mom said.

  "But it's an important point," Al said quickly. "Seriously, Allison, what's going on here? Why are you doing this? It doesn't show a whole lot of common sense."

  "All I want her to do is move," Audrey's mom said, raising her voice a tiny bit to be heard.
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  For a moment the table grew quiet, and everyone looked down at their shoes or into their laps. They looked at the red exit signs over the doors, or the posters that explained how to help someone who was choking on their breakfast or lunch. They didn't look at one another, and they certainly didn't look at me.

  "You want me to move?" I asked.

  She nodded and then spoke very slowly. "I don't mind you teaching here," she said. "Really, I don't. I don't mind you teaching Audrey, or teaching any of the other kids--"