"Would you like me to write the superintendent? Or those people on the school board?" I asked Allison. "Teach them a little about gender dysphoria, maybe? Explain to them that I'm not some evil child abuser?"
But she said no, she couldn't believe that would help. Nor would she let me write letters to the editors of the local newspapers.
"In that case, maybe I should go to the next school board meeting," I suggested. "Maybe if we all had a chance to talk in person, they'd see that I'm not so bad. They could ask me questions."
But she declined that offer, too. She didn't say that my speaking out on her behalf would make things even more difficult, but it was clear that she felt that way.
"I don't think they'd listen to you," she said simply. "They'll see you in a dress--"
"I could wear slacks."
"They'll see you in women's clothes, and they won't hear a word you say. Whatever small part of their minds that might still be open will close up completely."
Meanwhile, some lackey from the superintendent's office interviewed the four parents who had chaperoned a field trip to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum back in September--September, for God's sake!--to see if Allison had been encouraging the kids to swim the length of the lake in their Nikes and then strip for some prepubescent orgy. It was ridiculous, but the parents were interviewed separately over the course of a week. Then, when this mangy fellow was done with the parents, he started nagging the bus driver and some poor museum docent.
The purpose was evident: Stretch the "investigation" out as long as possible, and thereby inflict maximum torment upon the teacher. Make her so mad, perhaps, that she'd take that leave of absence and just go away.
But Allison was certainly not going to budge. And why should she? She hadn't done anything wrong! Her lawyer--whom she finally called and met with at some length--reassured her that she was on solid ground and she couldn't possibly be compelled to take a leave of absence against her will. At least not because of her transsexual girlfriend. She--Allison's lawyer--didn't believe the field trip would result in any sort of disciplinary action either, but she cautioned Allison to wait and see what the superintendent did next before responding. For all we knew, after talking to the parents who'd been with the kids at the lake, everyone would see that she'd acted responsibly and the trip had been harmless.
Inside our home I did what I could to make her happy, and that, at least, gave me some pleasure. I tried to make her house a secure little oasis in which she was pampered and pleasured and cared for. I wanted her to feel every moment that she was living with a person who loved her madly and saw her as the most beautiful creature on the planet.
Some days and nights, I think, I actually succeeded. Not all, but some. I think there may actually have been weekend mornings and weekday evenings when she was able to forget the way her professional life was unraveling. Of course, that may be a fantasy of my own. I'll never know for sure whether she was honest with me those nights when she would say she was fine and allow me to rub her back till she fell asleep, or whether she was just being kind.
I stopped going out in public in Bartlett. I thought that might help Allison.
I started doing the grocery shopping in Middlebury instead of at the Grand Union within walking distance of Allison's house. The Middlebury supermarket was exactly 17.4 miles from the edge of the driveway, and I never left once without checking the odometer so that my anger at the world would be fresh when I squeezed peaches and tossed toilet paper into the cart.
I no longer used the Bartlett post office or the hardware store, I no longer went to the local pharmacy. I had my prescriptions for my hormones transferred to the drugstore beside my new supermarket. I no longer even filled up my car at the gas station in town, or stopped there for mints or a magazine. I no longer went to the video store.
The damnedest thing was, by Valentine's Day I'd started to look pretty good. That's an awful thing to admit, but it's true. One morning when Allison was at school, a day or two before Valentine's Day, I finally had the courage to swing open the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door in our bedroom and stand before it bare naked.
Not buck naked, obviously. This is a semantic difference of some importance to me.
But I stripped off my sweater and my blouse and my leggings, and I pulled off my panties and my bra. And then I surveyed the goods.
I knew my vagina was coming along nicely, because I saw enough of it every day during dilation. It had the dreamy, flowery look of endive, or the abstruse but beautiful edging of the bud vase that might come with a Middle Eastern princess's breakfast tray. My biggest--only, really--concern with it aesthetically? In the little thicket of pubic hair that was returning I had counted a half dozen gray strands. Not quite thirty-six years old, I thought, and I have to start thinking about hoary pubes.
Certainly there were other things that I knew about my transformed body, too. I could see my arms were ungainly for a woman--not chimpy, but a tad longer than I would have liked. I understood that my feet were large, though my ankles were oddly, unexpectedly exquisite. And I knew that I now wore a B-cup bra, because I'd bought Allison and me some new lingerie at the end of January to cheer us both up.
But I hadn't really studied my breasts, or considered them in the context of my whole physique. I hadn't explored my new body in toto.
I'm sure there are myriad reasons for that, but the big one was fear. Pure and simple, I'd been afraid to strip and stand nude before a mirror and really examine how I looked post-op. After all, I'd done virtually everything I could now with the unit I'd been given at birth, I'd gone about as far as possible. Oh, there might be minor surgical alterations, there might be forays into the health club (though sure as hell not the one in Bartlett), and there might be diets. But this was pretty much the body that was going to take me through middle age and then start to sag and fall apart.
As Valentine's Day approached, however, I finally decided to take the plunge. The little holiday would fall on a Friday, and it crossed my mind that it might be as good a date as any to allow Allison to touch my new vagina--that is, of course, if she had any inclination. Though I'd been making love to her for almost a month, it was only in the last week or so that my own libido had returned, and my Meehan-made vulva had come of age and was now ready for its metaphoric deflowering.
And so I peeled, prepared for all manner of disappointment and emotional devastation.
Instead I was pleasantly surprised. Really. I noticed instantly that my nipples were much smaller than a genetic woman's, and the areolae--though a shade of bay that was not unlike Allison's--were flatter. Flatter in dimension, and flatter in shade. But my breasts were a delight. They were--dare I say it?--downright perky. Let's face it, they were as new as a teenager's and so they had an unfair advantage over their generational peers. They floated before me just below the yoke of my collarbone, two happy orbs still oblivious to the ravages of gravity.
I didn't have womanly hips--which, ironically, would probably have made some genetic females jealous of me--and so a part of me would have liked a few extra inches down there. My figure was slender, but it wasn't the hourglass I'd been trained to worship.
My tummy was flat and firm, and my legs were hard-body luscious. Long, too.
I liked what I saw, I realized, I liked it a lot. Really, I did. I looked good: Womanly. Feminine. Ladylike.
And sexy as hell. Honest to God.
Forgive me, but it's an amazing sensation to feel for the first time that you are an object worthy of some desire. Especially when you don't feel such a thing until you're knocking on the door of thirty-six.
There were people who stuck up for Allison. All those parents who kept their children in her class showed their support. A lot of them may have signed that despicable petition--most of them, actually, a legitimate majority--but they weren't about to give up the chance to have their kids taught by Allison Banks.
And there were the now-over-the-hill, former hippies. All
ison and Will were only two of the dozens of Middlebury and UVM graduates who'd settled in Bartlett. The hippies had begun arriving in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a decade before Allison and Will, and lots of them had chosen to stay. They'd taken their prestigious degrees and gone back to the land on the defunct dairy farms in the area. They'd built geodesic domes, they'd married, they'd divorced and married again. They'd faced middle age, usually with rebellious teens of their own, and then had to figure out what it meant to grow up and old all at once. Few of them worked in Bartlett, but almost all of them had impressive jobs in Burlington, Montpelier, or Middlebury. Some were successful entrepreneurs, and some were lawyers. Others opened funky clothing boutiques and trendy restaurants. Some became architects.
And, bless their hearts, many of them defended Allison Banks's right to live with a transsexual lesbian. They wrote letters to the school board and to the despotic pinhead who ran her school, and they started a petition of their own--copying exactly the first paragraph from the original petition:
We, the undersigned, believe that teachers are role models. Their behavior in the classroom and their behavior in their community influences the children in their care.
We therefore support teachers like Allison Banks: Teachers who are tolerant and open-minded; teachers who have the courage of their convictions; and teachers who are receptive to the many kinds of beauty that can be found on this planet.
The wording in the second paragraph was a little too goopy for my taste--a little too peace-love-and-tie-dye--but the sentiments behind it made me weepy. I was very, very happy for Allison.
Allison, on the other hand, had decidedly mixed emotions about the petition. A big part of her was extremely uncomfortable with the notion that her name was in it. Certainly she knew she was a cause celebre, especially after that noxious doctrinaire of a principal had suggested in the school's newsletter to parents that she was getting obscene hate mail in her own classroom. But at that point she still didn't want to see her plight become any more public than it already was, and clearly she didn't want to be viewed as some standard bearer for gender tolerance. The personal, in this case, was anything but political, particularly since she'd first fallen in love with a person she had assumed to be male.
The second petition didn't get nearly as many signatures as the first, but that was due at least in part to Allison's reluctance to allow anyone to go house to house with it, or to solicit signatures in the grocery store parking lot. The petition simply sat on clipboards at the front register of the health-food store and the little bookstore in town, shops with clienteles somewhat more sympathetic to Allison's situation. No one ever actually asked anyone to sign it. Still, close to two hundred people eventually penciled their names and addresses on the little black lines under the second paragraph.
The pastor at Allison's church also stood by her. He was an elderly gentleman who was considered somewhat conservative among Baptist ministers in northern New England, but he thought the world of Allison and Carly. And so he and his wife came to her house for brunch after church on the last Sunday in January, walking there directly from the sanctuary so everyone in the center of town could see them. Then, a week later, he devoted his sermon to that beautiful moment in Acts when Philip baptizes the eunuch.
And the newspapers in Burlington and Middlebury both ran editorials that were sharply critical of Glenn Frazier, Judd Prescott, and the school board for allowing students to transfer from Allison's class into Carolyn's. The Burlington paper even chastised those parents who withdrew their children--though, of course, they didn't actually rebuke anybody by name.
My sense is that Allison and I would have been a very big local news story those first months after we returned from Colorado if either of us had been willing to speak to reporters. But we refused. We refused the Burlington Free Press and we refused the Addison Independent. We passed when a writer from an alternative weekly in Chittenden County phoned us, and when a reporter from the Montpelier daily paper showed up at our door. We said no to the NBC television affiliate, and we said no to the two radio talk-show hosts who called. We both wanted our privacy, and we both expected that eventually the tempest around us would pass. Maybe I just had to lie low a little while. Maybe if we could reach the end of the school year without a major explosion, people's interest would dissipate over the summer. Maybe, just maybe, people would grow to like me.
People, after all, had seemed to like me just fine in the years before my sexual reassignment.
Were we kidding ourselves? Perhaps. But I just wanted to get on with my life as a female--I certainly didn't want to remind people that I'd been born with male genitalia--and Allison simply wanted her old life back. She wanted nothing more than to teach, and visit with friends, and (I like to believe) relax in the evenings with the woman she loved.
And while people who listened to Vermont Public Radio that March might have assumed it was the obscenity someone had spray-painted on our front door that changed all that--that made us both willing to talk to the media--the truth is, we had changed our minds five days before we discovered what some horrible person had done. The front door had been vandalized on February 21, and we had found it on the twenty-second. But we had already agreed to go public on the seventeenth, one of the nights Will Banks had come to our house for dinner that month, and the very evening he had proposed his idea for a story.
"You are beautiful," Allison whispered to me in our bed on Valentine's Day, just after she pulled away from my mouth. I opened my eyes and looked up at her, and despite what I'd seen of myself in the mirror, I knew I wasn't nearly as lovely as she. Wasn't possible. She was smiling, the light from the candle dancing across her cheeks, but there was something going on in her eyes I couldn't quite decipher, a mystery in the tiny lines emerging along the sides of her face.
She rested her weight on her elbows and combed my hair with her fingers and then closed her eyes and kissed me again. I tasted blueberry brandy. I allowed myself a small purr. And then through the silk of my chemise I felt her running her fingers gently over my nipples, and down my ribs and my abdomen until she reached the hem at the end of the material. The hem at the end of the world, I thought. There's no place else to go but ... there.
I was wrong, and she dallied along the insides of my thighs a long while, sliding her body down mine so she could rub my legs and caress my ass with both of her hands and with her tongue. I spread my legs for her, telling her it was okay, signaling her that I was ready if she was.
She put one of her lovely slender fingers into my mouth, and I sucked it for a long while. She gave me a second, and I sucked them together, coating them both with all the saliva I could muster.
That night she made love to me with fingers steeped in spit, and with a little pink vibrator coated with orange-scented lube. I didn't come, but it didn't matter. It all felt heavenly, especially the notion that I was spreading my legs and there was a vagina--moistened and open and just oozing with nerves--telling my lover I loved her.
"God, I adore you," I murmured later when we were lying in each other's arms. My thigh was snuggling against her vulva, and her thigh was nestling beside mine.
"I know," she said softly. "I know you do."
She smiled at me again, and without any design revealed the otherwise inexpressible secret that was lurking in her eyes: She was sad. She was pitifully, earnestly, seriously sad.
Misery had softened Will Banks. Made him a whole lot nicer. Who knows? Maybe every arrogant man simply needs a good woman to humble him once in a while by walking out--though in Will's case, I guess, it took two.
But when he came to our house for dinner for the third time in two weeks, he actually extended his hand to me and gave it an appropriately gentle squeeze. And then he hugged me. He sure as hell wouldn't have done that when he'd joined us for lasagna two weeks earlier.
"That's a beautiful headband," he added, and I was flattered. "Blue and yellow look nice in your hair."
Granted, Alli
son got a much bigger and longer hug than I did, but the two of them had a lot more history together. I think it was in fact that evening that for the first time I really saw the friendship that had developed over the years between Will Banks and Allison, and finally understood it. After all, that first evening he joined us for dinner was the weekend Patricia had left, and he was just a basket case. The second time, too. Mostly, Allison was offering him emotional triage.
When he had dinner with us that third time, however, he was already pulling himself together and preparing to get on with a new phase in his life. There was a big cutout in the wall between the kitchen and the den, and I watched them chatting while I finished preparing dinner. They looked almost like siblings.
At least that's what I told myself then. God forbid they should look like lovers. The last thing I wanted was to somehow effect a reconciliation between my girlfriend and her ex-husband. I know well how distress can breed romance--I don't especially like support groups, but I know what can happen--and those two people were certainly in the midst of periods in their lives that could only be called blue. And so when I saw the two of them reminiscing about their years in college together or pondering the self-possessed young woman who was in actuality their daughter, I had a few pangs of apprehension: As I peeled the pears for the fruit salad. As I set the table. As I opened a second bottle of wine.