Trans-Sister Radio

  "Good," I said simply, but I wondered if it would really be that simple. Tomorrow that would be all anyone would want to talk to her about.

  "No more," she continued, and her voice broke abruptly. A crack on the m that drew the syllable out into a long stutter, a little cry punctuating the final exhalation. And then she was crying soundlessly, her face buried deep in her pillow, her shoulders twitching away from my touch as if I had leprosy.

  "Allison, my Allison," I said softly, "what is this?"

  "No!" she hissed, and she turned toward me and then sat up in bed. "I'm not your Allison!"

  "I didn't mean anything, I'm sorry. Just tell me--"

  "I'm not your Allison, I'm not Will's Allison! I'm nobody's Allison but mine!"

  I sat up, too, but she wouldn't look at me. She had pulled her legs up toward her chest and buried her face in the covers on her knees. "I understand," I said. "I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry." I tried to touch her, but she wouldn't let me. She didn't exactly swat at my hand, but she brushed aside my fingers like so much dandruff or dust.

  "Just tell me why you're crying," I murmured, and then--because I couldn't find the words to pacify her, and I was feeling useless and ineffectual and utterly (the word here is chosen with care) impotent--I added, "I've never seen you cry!"

  I realized that I needed her help: I needed her to tell me how to help her--to tell me exactly what to do--because I was hoping, even then, to be her Savior Male. Imagine: Almost three months after surgery, and I was still having postmortem penile reflexes.

  Unfortunately, as I would understand in a moment, those few words were the single worst thing I could have said, because of all that they revealed about me. About who, in so many ways, I still was.

  But for a time Allison ignored me and continued to cry, her body shuddering with her sniffles. Finally she allowed me to drape my arm over her like a tent, but I was engulfing her more than touching her, and--though the thought crossed my mind--I didn't dare try to kiss the back of her hair.

  How long did she cry? I can't say. Time is pure torture when you're that sad, just ask any transsexual. It's excruciating and it's endless. A sailboat on a lake with no wind. Was it a mere ten or fifteen minutes, or was it considerably longer? Could she have cried without stopping for fully half an hour? Perhaps. Those tears, I know now, had been welling inside her since Trinidad.

  No, they'd begun gathering even earlier than that. They'd begun congregating on a ledge up in Lincoln that autumn afternoon when I first told her my plans.

  Finally she said in a voice barely above a whisper, "Never seen me cry?" It was a question, but it was asked in astonishment.

  "No," I said.

  "There have been whole days--weekends--when I cried all the time!"

  I nodded to myself, the words echoing in my head as if she had shouted them in a cave, and I realized something as disturbing as the fact that I had missed so much of her misery: I wasn't crying. And I should have been. I should have been crying, too. Sympathy sobs. An empathy wail. Some wholly justifiable weeping.

  But I would have had to will those tears from the reservoir; they weren't going to come on their own.

  And that meant something, too.

  I didn't dare speak, because I knew if I did, I would acknowledge what we both understood: It was time for me to leave. I knew it, and so did she. And this time, I was quite sure, she wouldn't stop me. Because she'd made her point. She'd refused to be bullied. She had, with the help of her ex-husband of all people, stood by her woman.

  And now she needed to get on with her life. And I with mine.

  At some point I did speak. And, unlike when I broached the subject in the past, she didn't offer even token resistance to the notion that I should return to my home in Burlington.

  Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if she had. I would have left regardless of what she said, because it was time. The experiment was over, and it had failed. That sounds harsh, but it reflects the reality of how I felt my last night in her bed. Not only was I the wrong person for Allison--gay, straight, I wasn't even focused that moment on monikers--the two of us together had replicated one of the most onerous male/female paradigms in the history of gender.

  A nurturing woman had given way too much to an insensitive creep of a man. She had been my teacher and my nurse and the one person in the world who had been there for me--no matter what. She had endured all manner of derision on my behalf, she had risked her place in her community. She had jeopardized her career, her future, her sense of herself.

  So much for transcending a few millennia of sex-role socialization, I thought to myself.

  Well, bully for us! Bully for me!

  Oh, I could tell myself that I had vacuumed for her and I had cooked for her. I could remind myself that I had even done windows.

  But in reality Allison hadn't gotten anything from me that she couldn't have gotten from a first-rate domestic.

  For a long moment she was quiet when I told her what I was going to do, and then I saw her nod. It was small, almost invisible. But it was real. Soon after that I believe she fell asleep--exhausted, I imagine, by all those tears and by the emotional toll that living with me had taken--but I would be awake through the night. At four in the morning I finally climbed from the bed that was already feeling foreign to me, and I tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. There I put a kettle on the stove for hot tea and baked that walnut-and-beer bread, and then I wandered through the rooms on the first floor of the house. I touched things as if I would never touch them again--the candlesticks on the dining room table, the couch in the den, the kitchen ladles and whisks and tureens that had become my unduly gynecic line in the sand--because I understood that I would never be back here again.

  *

  PART V

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Friday, September 28

  DR. JEN FULLER: I've heard some transsexuals liken their transformation to a butterfly's. They wake one day and they have wings. They're beautiful and they can fly.

  But it's not usually like that. You're too awkward, too insecure. You're still experimenting with your new identity.

  Usually it's much more like ... adolescence.

  Chapter 36.

  allison

  IT WAS AS IF DANA HAD NEVER LIVED WITH ME. I would wander through town or I would walk to the school, and nobody seemed to view me anymore as the local sex renegade or pariah. I was, once again, merely a schoolteacher. One of the dozen-plus who lived in the town. I was a neighbor. I was Allison Banks--Allie (still and always) to one of the village's more prominent citizens.

  When Rich Lessard and I would run into each other at the post office, we would make small talk. We were courteous to each other, we were polite. When Al Duncan and I would pass each other on the street by the bank or the bookstore, we would chat. We would laugh about the weather. Or his family's new minivan. He would ask me how Carly was doing at college.

  Once more, Glenn Frazier and I bickered only about my curriculum and field trips--though I no longer had the cloud of the maritime museum excursion hanging over my head. But Glenn and I stopped discussing my life, because, after all, my life no longer mattered to him. Or to anyone. I wasn't exactly invisible--one can never do what I did and not become a part of a little town's mythos--but I believe I was no longer actively discussed. The corkboards and counters at the stores that had once held petitions debating the importance of a schoolteacher's morality now had flyers for piano teachers and typists and young people looking for roommates. The petitions themselves were buried deep in someone's gray metal filing cabinet.

  My house seemed, suddenly, way too big for one person, and in late April I considered putting it on the market. But Carly came home from school two and a half weeks later, and though she only stayed with me until Memorial Day--that Monday she left for her internship in Washington--I was glad we had so much room. Neither of us is a big person, but somehow we manage to take up a lot of spa
ce. And so I decided I wouldn't even consider selling the house again until Carly had finished college.

  And then? And then who knew.

  The fact was, in less than a year I had met and lived with a transsexual, I had had sex with a woman for the first time in my life. I'd been excommunicated by a good measure of my community and then taken back into the fold without anyone saying a word. Without anyone even acknowledging what had transpired.

  I had been, for better or worse, on the radio two nights in a row.

  I had seen my daughter go off to college.

  Consequently, I wouldn't even conjecture about where I might be in three years, or who I might have become. Especially with that wild card called midlife looming large.

  For a while I was angry with Dana, and I felt I'd been used. She'd needed someone to take care of her during transition, she'd needed a woman to tutor her in the finer points of my gender. She'd seen the way I'd fallen in love with her when she was my male professor, and taken advantage of me.

  I found it interesting that when I was most angry with Dana that spring, I would inadvertently revert to male pronouns and a male image--to Dana Stevens before her reassignment. He used me, I'd think, and the image in my mind would be the man I'd once known who wore his hair in a ponytail.

  But then I would think to myself, How? How had he used me? Yes, I'd wound up as his model woman--her model woman--but I was the one who had called Dana back in September after she revealed to me her intentions on a cliff high in Lincoln. I was the one who had proposed that she move into my house. I was the one who had suggested she would need company in Colorado, and offered to go with her.

  And, in return, I had received a very great deal. I'm not sure other people would see it that way, I'm not even sure Dana would. But I did, and I don't mean simply the company or the conversation or the way my house seemed to smell of freshly baked bread all the time. Nor am I referring to the sex, which, though it often confused me, always left me deeply satisfied. More than any of that, first he--and then she--had given me the faith, however brief, that I might not wander unescorted through the rest of my life. We had been in love, and for months and months I had had hope--one of the greatest gifts you can give someone on the far side of forty.

  When I would realize that, my anger would dissipate. I would no longer be mad. I would even feel a twinge of what might have been guilt. Or, at least, disappointment in myself. What did it say about me, I would wonder, that I could only love Dana as a man? Was I really that intractable, that emotionally obstinate? Or was sexual preference so profoundly ingrained in my gray matter and soul that even the desperate attraction I had felt for Dana the preceding September--a desire that in the days before our hike to the cliff may have bordered on rapture--couldn't budge it?

  The irony there was inescapable. It was the man who had made me angry, but it was also the man whom I seemed to love.

  Still, I refused to see Dana that spring. Maybe in the summer when school was out, we would meet for coffee in Burlington. Maybe in a few years we would actually be friends--not unlike the way Will and I, over time, had built a friendship that transcended the fact that we shared a daughter.

  In April and May, however, I simply wanted to reclaim a semblance of normalcy. And that meant only seeing people who had no plans to challenge what had once been a biological absolute.

  Carly told me that she had listened to Dana's and my story on VPR in her dorm room. Listening with her were her roommate and a few of her friends--including Neil Shorter, a boy I could tell she was growing interested in, either because of or in spite of the pleasure he derived from coloring hair. Apparently, that spring it was a traffic-tape orange. Carly and I spoke on the phone both nights the programming aired, but she called me again on Thursday from the station with the news that we--her mother and her transsexual girlfriend--were all over the wires in two-and three-hundred-word increments. I wasn't surprised. The newspapers in northwestern Vermont had called my house and the school throughout Wednesday, though I continued to refuse to speak to reporters.

  I told Carly then what was the real news in my life: There would be no more stories about Dana and me, because we'd decided Tuesday night to separate. Dana had already moved back to Burlington. She asked whether there had been any specific trigger, and I told her there hadn't.

  "Just a chemistry thing, huh?" she said, using the expression she had heard me use perhaps a half dozen times when I would break off a relationship that had had some duration, or when I would report that a first date had been a bore.

  "Yeah, a chemistry thing," I said.

  "Were yesterday and today really strange?"

  I admitted that there had been awkward moments both days, but word travels fast in a village like Bartlett. People had seen Dana loading up her car in the morning. And so by the time I had started to walk home from school Wednesday afternoon, by the time I had stopped at the supermarket and the bank, I had the sense that everyone in town knew Dana had left. I could see it in their faces: In some cases they were masks of sympathy, in others there was relief they couldn't hide. The trannie was gone, and the sixth-grade teacher had regained her senses.

  Of course, it was nowhere near that simple. Regained my senses? Maybe, but with reason came despair. Before I knew it, I was in mourning, and the mourning grew deeper through April and May.

  Nevertheless, somehow I was able to stave off the full brunt of the depression until after Carly had left Bartlett for Washington on Memorial Day. But then it hit me like a train, and I was a mess through a good part of the summer. I'm not sure how I endured the last two weeks of school, how I managed to get dressed the final nine or ten mornings: I know there was one period when I went four nights without washing my hair. There was one day when my eyes were so red from crying, I wore a pair of old eyeglasses to school that were supposed to change from dark to light when you wandered inside, but they hadn't functioned properly in years. But that was exactly the point: I knew even indoors they would remain a dull gray and hide my eyes.

  Once school ended in the middle of June, I rarely left my house. At some point I planted my vegetable garden, but I have only the vaguest memory of kneeling in the dirt with a spade and a claw. And one day I must have planted the annuals that would fill in the gaps between the perennials that line the front walk, but I have no recollection of visiting the nursery where Carly had worked the summer before.

  I know Molly Cochran and Nancy Keenan brought me cold soups and salads, and Will came by for visits. I know Dana wanted to come by, though I wasn't ready to see her. Was there anyone else? Probably. But visits from other people were rare--and always unsolicited.

  I don't remember the Fourth of July, though every year there is an impressive fireworks celebration at the high-school athletic fields, and usually I sit on my terrace with friends and we watch the pyrotechnics in the sky. Not that summer. I don't even recall hearing the explosions high in the air above Bartlett.

  There's an expression that a bulb will burn brightest just before it burns out. Certainly that was true in my father's case. I was twenty-six years old when he passed away, and Carly was just about twenty months. He died of pancreatic cancer, and two days before he died--though he had opened his eyes no more than a slit in twenty-four hours, and his body probably had more morphine in it than blood--he sat up in his bed and told my mother and me and the hospice worker who was visiting that he wanted to be hoisted into his wheelchair and taken to see the lights on the boathouses that line a small stretch of the Schuylkill River near the Philadelphia Art Museum. The houses are outlined in white Christmas lights year-round, so you can just see their silhouettes against the night sky, and they look like giant gingerbread cookies held vertically against a black backdrop. Sometimes you can see their reflection in the river as well.

  My father had been a rower, and when he was younger, he would participate every year in the local regattas: the Dad-Vail and the Head of the Schuylkill. When I was very young, he would take me with him f
or more leisurely rides.

  And so we took my father to see the boathouses, and he smiled and was not unhappy. Somehow he had rallied, and briefly he resembled the man who had raised me. And then we came home and he slipped into a coma, and less then forty-eight hours later he died.

  My last months with Dana were something like that: I got sicker and sicker in January and February, but the night of the talent show--and the morning after, when our front door was vandalized and one last time I had to be there for her--I burned bright. I was strong and spirited and yet oddly serene. I was, briefly, at peace.

  And then I burned out.

  People believe that I have only a small role in the version of our story that aired nationally in the fall on All Things Considered because I refused to be interviewed through most of the summer. But that's only partly true. Yes, I had reclaimed my personal life, and the fact is, I probably wouldn't have talked to Carly about Dana and me with a producer and a tape recorder present in July. But both Carly and Will also understood how uncharacteristically fragile I had become, and they both made it clear to everyone in Washington that I would--that I could--have nothing to do with the programming until at least August. And even then there was no guarantee.