Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "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 thin 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.

  It is considerably more difficult to transform a penis into a vagina.

  Slice open the penis, beginning a scant two centimeters from the anus. Remember, the balls are no longer a buffer. By now they're in the container with the hazardous waste--though, interestingly, you will have preserved a good measure of scrotal skin, because this parchment will become both the new labia and a free graft to help lengthen the tunnel that will become the vagina.

  The incision will run the length of the penis (longitudinal is the word the surgeons prefer), extending all the way up to the glans. It is at the perineum where the cut is the deepest.

  You will then excavate all of the pulpy, erectile tissue beneath the skin, careful not to inadvertently hack the penile urethra. After the organ has been all but hollowed out, you may clip the tiny tube that links bladder with bathroom. Now, once and for all, sever the flap that is the cylindrical seat of one's life--axis, locus, hub, regardless of whether we are gay or straight, regardless of whether we are happy with the genitalia that accompanied us through our mother's vaginal canal or miserable with the little hermit crab who pokes out its head at the damnedest moments in time.

  With the penile skin put aside for the moment--though carefully preserved--you will insert a urinary catheter, a guest who will reside in your patient's groin for almost a week.

  At this point, you will shift from doctor to miner, though this may be, in fact, the most difficult part of the operation. It demands both pat
ience and skill. You will bore a vagina, dissecting a crawl space between rectum and bladder. This is the part of the procedure where complications are most likely. There is bleeding. Tissue resistance. And it is easy here to nick the lower intestine, to pierce the fine and sensitive terminus of the hose line that weaves its way through so much of the torso. Fistulae are possible. Abscesses are not uncommon.

  Neither, I imagine, are pleasant.

  Once the cavity is complete, you will take the penile skin you have painstakingly conserved, and you will turn it inside out as if it were a sock. Bear in mind that though the penile and scrotal skin help line the tunnel, they alone do not determine the ultimate vaginal length. You may want to graft skin as well from buttock and thigh. Pare off a fingernail-size piece of the glans--sensitive, reactive, just bursting with nerves--and insert the rest inside the burrow before you.

  Next, take that section of glans and affix it upon a little bulb of spongiosum just above the vagina, as if it were a piece from a little box of Colorforms. This will be the clitoris.

  Now, remember that birch bark-like skin that once housed the testes? Pretend you're back in preschool and fashion from it a two-dimensional sugar doughnut. Make sure it's slightly more oval than round. Voila! Instant labia. Apply around the vagina like a life preserver, hooding the clitoris at the top.

  Finally, pack the vagina with antibiotic gauze. Be generous; this is no time to cut corners or costs. Expect to load it with at least ten feet, and be prepared to fill it with twenty. The last thing you want is a spanking new vagina that becomes infected or (worse, arguably) begins to narrow before your patient can begin her regime of postoperative dilation--the routinized use of dildos to prevent the tissue inside her from closing.

  You will want to sew the packing in place with heavy silk or nylon sutures. Don't fear: It will all be gone in six or seven days. Catheter, too.

  If the genital surgery has gone well, then proceed with the ancillary work. Enhancing her breasts. Shaving the trachea. Touching up her cheeks or her nose.

  Altogether, it shouldn't take more than a morning. It takes much less time to make a vagina in an operating room than in a womb.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Wednesday, September 26

  DANA STEVENS: Amazing, isn't it? A university with eight thousand students gives me absolutely no guff. Doesn't do a thing to complicate my life. But a little elementary school with two hundred and ninety kids? They practically run the transsexual and her paramour out of town!

  Chapter 20.

  carly

  ONE AFTERNOON BETWEEN CHRISTMAS AND NEW Year's, my boyfriend from high school told me he had a male cousin who'd had pillowcases and sheets with ballerinas on them when he was growing up. The boy had in fact had two sets, one that was yellow with blue dancers, and one that had pink dancers on white.

  "I think he turned out okay," Michael said. "I mean, he seems normal enough now. His family didn't come to our house for Christmas this week, so I haven't seen him in over a year. But he never seemed freakish to me as a kid. Maybe a little effeminate. But I always assumed he was straight."

  Nevertheless, his cousin's desire for ballerina bed linens had clearly become a part of that family's mythology. The boy had been five and six years old at the time, and he'd outgrown his interest in the sheets by the time he was in second grade. But it was, apparently, something that came up whenever Michael's family gathered as kin.

  I heard lots of stories like that while Mom was in Colorado. My friend Rhea showed me a picture of herself in a family photo album in which she was wearing a plastic army helmet that she had camouflaged with fallen leaves and small branches. She thought she was nine when it was taken.

  "It was just a phase," she explained. "War got pretty boring once I discovered boys."

  And Heather, who I really hadn't been friends with since seventh grade, insisted I come over to her house and into her bedroom. "Boxer shorts," she said, opening her lingerie drawer to me and pulling aside a top layer of bikini briefs. "I started wearing boxer shorts at college this fall."

  "Why?"

  "It turns me on."

  "No," I said, shaking my head. "Why are you telling me this?"

  She shrugged. "I thought you'd understand."

  Moreover, when my friends weren't sharing with me their tentative forays across the Great Gender Divide, their parents were volunteering their opinions about Dana.

  "I don't normally have time for those daytime talk shows," Rhea's mom said, "but when my foot was operated on a few years ago, I watched them a bit. They're addictive, they really are. And one day, one of them had on a group of transsexuals. They seemed very nice. They really did. But it's so clear they're no happier now than they were before they were changed. And none of them has the slightest idea how to dress."

  And, of course, the really frightening wolves came out of the forest en masse once my mom and Dana were gone. People I barely knew wanted to tell me what they thought.

  "He must know how inappropriate it is to dress that way around children," a teller at the bank told me. "Of course I cashed his check for him, but he made everyone in line very uncomfortable. Especially Joyce Lavigne. She came in with her little girl when your mother's friend was here, and when she saw him, she turned on her heels and left. And I can't blame her, Carly. Really, I can't. Can you?"

  A day later I was at the service station getting Dana's car inspected, since I knew she wouldn't feel up to it when she returned, and the fellow who worked there said he didn't think Dana should be allowed on the road.

  "And why not?" I asked.

  "If he had an accident and there was blood all around--his blood, I mean--it would be a hazard to the rescue folks. They shouldn't have to worry about such things."

  I explained that Dana wasn't HIV-positive, but I might just as well have been insisting that a moment earlier I'd returned from a magical land with a tin man who talked and a scarecrow who danced.

  And on New Year's Day when I wandered from Dad's house to the pizza parlor to get a slice mid-afternoon, an elderly couple I didn't know stared at me while I waited for it to be reheated. Finally the man got up from his booth and said, "Our granddaughter is in your mother's class at school. None of us are happy about that, you know."

  "No," I said, "I didn't know." But certainly I did. I'd been hearing that sort of thing for almost a week.

  I had never met my mom's new principal, but I knew she didn't like him. And so I didn't either. I knew they'd had run-ins, especially over some field trip to Lake Champlain in early September.

  Of course, my mom had had run-ins with his predecessor, too, but I always had the sense that my mom and Mrs. Dixon liked each other. Mrs. Dixon was considerably older than Mom, and I think she viewed her as a sort of charismatic but renegade daughter. She was always telling Mom that she didn't understand the politics of her job, and it mattered when a parent complained--even if the complaint was unfounded. I remember one spring Mom did a unit on the homeless in Vermont, and she took the class to a part of the Burlington waterfront that hadn't been gentrified and then to the emergency shelter. She had a social worker and the manager of the shelter with her all the time, but you can't be everywhere every second, and a homeless person on the waterfront said something off-color to a couple of the kids. Inevitably, some parents protested, and my mom and Mrs. Dixon had one of their chats.

  But I'm certain that their chat was, in the end, pretty amicable.

  Even if my mom and Mr. Frazier didn't get along, however, I always tried to be polite when he called. He was, after all, my mom's boss. By the time he phoned the Friday after New Year's, I was half expecting his voice on the other end of the line. It had been that kind of week.

  "She's not here," I told Mr. Frazier as I surveyed the little mountain of clothes on my bed. I was trying to decide what should stay in Bartlett, and what should come with me back to college. My dad was going to drive me there later in the mont
h, so I could pretty much take whatever I wanted. "Should I have her call you?"

  "Is she still in Colorado?"

  I hadn't realized he knew she was there, but I shouldn't have been surprised. The whole town seemed to know.

  "Yup."

  "Does she return tomorrow or Sunday?"

  "Sunday."

  "Well, let me think. Even if she gets an early flight out of--what, Pueblo?"

  "Colorado Springs."

  "Of course. Even if she gets an early flight out of Colorado Springs, she won't be home until dinnertime."

  "Actually, it will be after dinner. I think her plane lands around eight-thirty."

  "And that's if there aren't any delays ..."

  "Right."

  "I'll be up late. Would you ask her to call me, please?"

  "I'm sure I'll talk to her tonight. Want me to have her call you tomorrow?"

  "From Colorado? Yes, absolutely. That's a great idea."

  "Any message?"

  "No. Just have her call me. It's important."

  At dinner that night, I told my dad and Patricia that Mr. Frazier had phoned.

  "He sounded a little annoyed," I said.

  "I'm sure he is," my dad said, slicing a ravioli in half with his fork. "He's the new guy in town, he has to establish himself. And your mother's little escapade has made his life very difficult."