Trans-Sister Radio

  DANA STEVENS: The thing is, I never was one of those Times Square transsexuals. It's not like I was hanging around street corners in Bartlett or Burlington, dressed like a slut and trying to seduce mixed-up teenage boys.

  Or, I imagine, mixed-up grown men. The sexually ... confused. I never was the sort of transsexual--the sort of person--who abused people, or tried to take advantage of them.

  Of course I knew transsexuals like that. I knew--I know--prostitutes. I know transsexuals who will do whatever it takes to get the money they need for their reassignment, and I know transsexuals who are simply so ... bewildered by their own sexuality that they're content to fill their bodies with female hormones, and keep their penises intact. They'll seduce anything that moves.

  But there are people who aren't transsexuals who are like that. Not straight, not gay, not bi. Omnisexual, I guess. Megasexual.

  Either way, that's not me. I've always been as domestic as a balloon shade or a perennial garden. And just as harmless.

  Chapter 31.

  carly

  MY VIDEO ABOUT THE BATTERY FACTORY WON A college journalism award that spring, and the local PBS station wanted to air it until I told them I hadn't gotten release forms from the people I interviewed. To this day, my dad says it's that prize that got me the NPR internship, but I think he could have gotten me the gig no matter what. He's very well-connected, and I really did have honest-to-God radio experience. Besides--and maybe this isn't beside the fact at all--I was willing to work for peanuts.

  Still, I was very proud of that award, and when I came home for a weekend early in March, my dad and my mom and Dana took me out to dinner. We went to a "bistro" in Montpelier because, my dad said, it was the very best restaurant in the state. Personally, I think we went there because he still wasn't wild about being seen with Dana in public: There wasn't an overhead light in the whole dining room, and the place was forty-two miles from Bartlett.

  Actually, 42.5: My dad's pretty compulsive, and he set the digital tripometer in his Explorer before we left Bartlett early Saturday night.

  Nevertheless, I was surprised that my dad was even willing to have Dana along for the celebration--and, likewise, that Dana even wanted to eat a meal with my dad. Apparently, however, in February the two had become downright chummy. Maybe chummy isn't the right word, because it makes it sound like they would have played golf together if there hadn't been eleven feet of snow on the ground. But it was clear that they were no longer at odds, and people who didn't know their history together might even have gotten the idea into their heads that they were friends.

  After all, it was my dad, my mom said, who had arrived at Mom's house the Saturday morning after the talent show with a kerosene heater and a big can of Bulls Eye Primer Sealer Stain Killer, and set up shop on the front steps. He and Dana worked a good part of the day together, first covering all traces of the obscenity on the door, and then--I guess since they had the heater and all that sealer--scraping and priming the wooden banister that hadn't been painted in years.

  Throughout the month, the two had continued to get to know each other. Once Patricia had decided to move out, my dad ate dinner more and more often at Mom's. And in the last week of February, my dad and Dana spent a fair amount of time together because of the radio tapings. The radio series hadn't aired yet when I came home in March, but the interviews were complete and the key segments had been cued. The station was planning to air the story over two nights in the middle of the month.

  Still, I wasn't prepared to see my dad and Dana hanging together like in-laws. That's really what it felt like in the car: Dad and Mom and Aunt Dana. Ol' Aunt Dana: my mom's sister, Dad's big buddy.

  Was this wishful thinking? I guess. I was nineteen, but apparently on some level I was still harboring delusions that my mom and dad were going to reconcile someday. And the seating in the car didn't help. It was my dad's car, so he was driving, and because I was the youngest, I climbed into the back before anyone could stop me. It seemed like the natural thing to do.

  And Dana certainly wasn't about to sit in the front seat, so she got in with me. The result? My mom and dad were together in the front seat, and Dana and I were in the back. It felt very fifties. Me and my maiden aunt.

  Yet the strangest moment of the night wouldn't occur until we were back in Bartlett. Dinner had actually seemed pretty normal. My dad got a bottle of champagne to toast to my award, and the waitress at the restaurant looked the other way when he poured the bubbly into my water goblet. Dana translated for all of us the two items on the menu that we couldn't decipher.

  Midway through the meal my head was so fuzzy from the alcohol--I've never been able to hold my liquor--that I almost told Dana how well she passed. She was looking, I realized, less and less like an aunt and more and more like a sister. My sister. I knew she was thirty-five, but she now looked considerably younger. She looked closer to my age than to my parents'; she certainly appeared a lot more than seven years younger than my mom.

  And, I realized, she was beautiful. Really beautiful. A stunner. Her skin was softer and smoother than mine, and it practically glowed with good health. And so while there may have been diners in the restaurant who thought she was my aunt and diners who assumed she was my sister, there wasn't a soul in the place who didn't think she was a lovely young woman.

  Yet it wasn't then that I realized my dad might now have seen her that way, too. That wouldn't happen until we got back to Bartlett and he was dropping the three of us off at my mom's house. That was the moment that to this day has struck me as so bizarre.

  We pulled into the driveway, and my mom invited my dad in for a drink. At first he said that would be nice, and he got out of the car with all us gals and started up the bluestone walkway with us. But then he stopped midway between his car and the door and said he should probably take a pass.

  "It's fine to come in, Will," my mom said, wondering exactly as I was why he had changed his mind so suddenly.

  Did she then follow his eyes and see what I did? I doubt it; she doesn't think like that. But maybe she did. We never talked about it.

  "No, I think I'll go home and get some sleep. I'm really very tired," he said, and he gave me a hug. For the first time in maybe half a minute he took his eyes off the front steps about fifteen or twenty feet away, and the image of Dana that was there. She hadn't bothered to put her coat back on for the walk from the car to the house, and so she was standing on the top step in her leather boots and her skirt and her blouse. The porch light was casting her face in shadow but silhouetting the shape of her breasts, and I swear she looked like a fashion model. Tall and slim and proud. She was, without any intent at all, radiating sexuality like the confident, seductive women of all ages who fill the ad pages at the front of glossy magazines. Vogue. Mirabella. Vanity Fair.

  She was prettier than my mother, she was prettier than me.

  And while I don't think my dad made those sorts of comparisons, he couldn't help but notice she was gorgeous. He couldn't help but see, suddenly, that she was almost too beautiful to be around.

  In Plato's Symposium, Pausanias tells his drinking buddies that homosexual love is inspired by the "heavenly Aphrodite," the daughter of Uranus, and is far superior to heterosexual--or "common"--love. Gay lovers are in their way, therefore, the progeny of Uranus.

  We read The Symposium in a philosophy class, and of course every straight boy in the lecture hall thought Plato's inadvertent pun was a howl: Of course queer partners would turn to your anus!

  But from a digression in the course I learned the tidbit that Uranus was in fact the origin of the word some transsexuals use to describe themselves: urnings.

  "It rhymes with yearnings, doesn't it? I think I like it," Dana said when I shared with her my newfound knowledge. The term was a revelation to her, and so I felt very special when I unveiled it. "It's downright onomatopoetic," she added.

  "It sounds to me like a kind of turtle."

  "A baby turtle."

  "It
was actually a pretty common word in late-nineteenth-century Germany. It seems there was a big homosexual-rights movement there a century ago."

  "Big, perhaps, but apparently not very successful. I guess that little scuffle in Sarajevo deflected attention."

  We were sitting in the den at opposite ends of the big couch after our dinner in Montpelier, sipping orange spice tea. My mom had gone straight to bed, and I had felt badly for Dana. She'd seemed so awake. And so I'd offered to keep her company for a few minutes.

  "A world war will do that," I agreed.

  We were both quiet for a long moment, and I was very content. The room was warm and outside it felt like spring wasn't too many weeks in the distance.

  "She goes to bed early often these days," Dana said, staring down into her mug, and I was surprised by her candor. She had confessed this to me as if she were admitting a personal failure.

  "This is the low point of the school year for her--in terms of energy," I said. It was an ad-lib, but I didn't think it was half-bad. "There's still a long way to go, and she's exhausted from the winter."

  She had kicked off her boots in the front hall, and for a brief second my perception of Dana as a mesmerizing beauty was shattered, since her feet were almost as big as my dad's. But then she curled up her legs underneath her and once more she was that striking woman from dinner. The one who was complicating my mom's life, and I could tell was worried now that she was going to lose her.

  "You're sweet," she said, but she sighed.

  "It's the truth."

  "We'll see."

  "Really," I went on. "Spring's coming. That always cheers her."

  "This weather is just a tease. A brief thaw."

  "Before you know it, you'll be having sugar on snow at somebody's sugar house. Maybe the Murphys'. My mom likes the Murphys." Every year the Murphys invited us to watch them boil maple sap into syrup, and we'd drizzle the hot sugar onto the snow. It was delicious.

  Along with the sugar runs, of course, there would be mud. Weeks of quicksand and slop. And though the first crocuses would soon rise from the flat, brown grass and open themselves up to the sun, soon after that they'd be pummeled by snow. It was inevitable. A crocus lives a short, hard life in Vermont. Tulips do better, but the tulips wouldn't arrive for at least another five weeks. Maybe six. They came at the end of the spring.

  The last time there had been tulips, I realized, I had broken up with my boyfriend. That was how long it had been since I'd been involved. Almost a year.

  "I think there's more to it than cabin fever," Dana said.

  I shrugged. "Even if there is, I wouldn't worry. My mom is who she is, and there's not a thing you can do about it. You can't change her." There was a boy at Bennington who wanted to get serious with me, and we'd slept together twice in February. He was from a suburb of New York City, and his hair was a nuclear shade of orange. All of his courses freshman year had focused on biology and theater, which was actually a pretty normal combination for Bennington. But I just wasn't all that passionate about him. At least not yet. I thought he was cute underneath that hair, but I had a hard time seeing past all the henna.

  "You're a very wise girl."

  "I just know my mom. I just know how Banks females think."

  "Are we growing apart? Is it possible?"

  "She'd have told you if you were. Honest. My mom has never been afraid to end a relationship."

  "This is different."

  I understood, and I nodded. Breaking up in this case would be tantamount to capitulation. It would allow all those parents who had taken their children out of my mom's class to conclude that they had been right; it would allow the awful people who had spray-painted an obscenity on her door to believe that they'd won. It would give license to the hundreds of adults who'd signed what my mom had come to call the "perversion advocacy petition" to presume that she agreed now that she had made a colossal mistake--that she fathomed the error of her ways and she saw how clouded her judgment had been.

  "This is very, very different," she repeated.

  "My mom's tough."

  "She is," Dana said, and then she looked at me intensely, her eyes just barely above the lip of her mug. "But the fact is, she didn't grow up as an ... urning. She never had to develop an urning's protective shell."

  The next day, I asked my mom what she thought caused someone to become a transsexual.

  "Ask Dana," she said.

  "I will," I agreed. "Still: Tell me what you think."

  We were walking around the green late Sunday morning, listening to the sounds of snow melting. Water running from the roofs to the rain gutters. Water flowing by the curb along the side of the road. Water splashing under tires and dogs' paws, and under the boots of the little kids who suddenly were everywhere. Winter was clearly coming apart, and I don't think it could have begun to end at a better time for my mom.

  "I don't think transsexuals become," she said. "I think they just are."

  "They're born?"

  "They're born. It's not like Dana's mother or father did something wrong, or made some horrible mistake while they were raising him as a boy. It's not like, I don't know, they gave him the wrong toys when he was a boy growing up."

  "What do they think of Dana's decision? Do you know?"

  "Well, I gather they're not very happy about it. But they don't blame themselves. They once did, apparently. At least her mother did. Her mother was convinced it was all her fault. She'd drunk too much when she was pregnant, and the alcohol had damaged some chromosome. Or she'd paid too much attention to Dana when she was little. Or she hadn't paid enough attention."

  "But they got over it?"

  "Well, they say they have."

  "I'm glad for them."

  "Me too. Though Dana does believe her mother has a screw loose."

  "Really?"

  "Uh-huh. But I think that's natural. All children think their parents are nuts. I assume my mother's nuts. Don't you think I am?"

  "Gee, Mom, why would I think that? Just because you invited a transsexual to move in with you?"

  "See what I mean?"

  "But you believe it's biological--being a transsexual?"

  "Yup," she answered, and she shrugged. "There are those theories about the size of some part of the brain. And there are people who say it's a chemical thing. Or a chromosome thing. Who knows? Maybe someday when they finish that human genome project, they'll have found the 'transsexual gene.' Or genes. But my sense is, whatever it is that makes someone gender dysphoric--I have no idea if that's a real word, but you get my drift--it probably begins with nature. Not nurture."

  "Hemingway's mom always put dresses on him when he was a little boy. Really frilly dresses. Made him look like a little girl."

  "Your point?"

  "There's a lot of transgender role-playing in The Garden of Eden."

  "Really?"

  "At least in bed. And at the barbershop. We read the novel last month." It dawned on me that transsexual literature was peppering my classes at college. First Plato, now Hemingway. It was like discovering a new rock group: Suddenly everybody seems to be listening to them, too, and wherever you go, you see their faces.

  "I don't think Hemingway had transsexual leanings," my mom said. "I suspect he had his gender demons, but I don't think he'll ever appear in the transsexual pantheon."

  "Probably not," I agreed, yet then I surprised myself by suggesting, "but I do think we all want to cross over a lot more than we realize. We all want to be ... other."

  My mom nodded and then asked abruptly, "Am I wrong about parenting? Did I make my little Carly a transsexual?" Though her voice was light, I could tell she was uneasy.

  "No," I reassured her, "you don't need to add that to your worries. But I'm lucky. It's so much easier to do guy things as a woman than it is to do woman things as a guy."

  "I like being a woman. I like being feminine."

  "I do, too. Sometimes. But not always."

  She sighed and put her arm around
my shoulder as we walked. "I like being a woman a lot. Really, a lot. And you know what? I like being with a man. It pains me so much to say that. But it's true. It is, for better or worse, just who I am. A gal who likes a man's lap once in a while."

  "Are you going to break up with Dana?"

  "I should, I really should. But I can't. I wouldn't know what to say, I wouldn't know where to begin. Because I do love her. It's just that ..."

  She didn't finish her sentence and I didn't finish it for her. I didn't know how. And so we continued to stroll around the commons, listening to the birds that were coming back, and savoring the warm midday sun on our faces.

  I returned to Bennington on a bus late that Sunday afternoon, aware that in eight days my mom and Dana's story would air on VPR. My dad told me that the program would be two segments broadcast on consecutive nights, beginning a week from Monday. Each segment would be about eleven minutes long and would begin at five thirty-one.