Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "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.

  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--"

  "Oh, I think we still need to discuss that," Al said.

  "No, I really don't mind. I just don't want Audrey to see you living with that person."

  "So I'm supposed to sell my house and commute?"

  "Everyone knows he has an apartment in Burlington. Why can't you live there if you want to be with him?"

  "And drive back and forth?"

  "Folks do it," Rich Lessard said, shrugging. "Your ex-husband does it."

  "I like my house. I don't plan on moving. Even for a short while."

  "No one's said you should," Glenn said.

  "No, I did," Audrey's mother said. "That's exactly what I said."

  "But even that doesn't get to the real heart of the matter," Rich insisted. "Look, I'm in favor of gay marriage. Really. That sort of thing probably doesn't matter in some professions and in some places. But it does matter here. In this case. As parents, we have a moral obligation to ask ourselves whether we want our children taught by someone who's comfortable living in the center of town with a transvestite."

  "Transsexual," I corrected.

  "A man--"

  "A woman--"

  Glenn put his hand on my wrist and reflexively I yanked my arm away. "People," he said, as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn't pulled away from him as if he were a leech, "we're not here to solve anything this morning. We're not going to. We're here to listen, and here's what I'm hearing.

  "First of all, there's some concern about Allison's judgment. She shouldn't have been so public about this new ... relationship. Is that a fair word, Allison?"

  "It's fine," I said, sighing.

  "Second, there's some concern that her relationship, even if it had been completely private, may be inappropriate for a teacher."

  I looked at Glenn, unable to hide my astonishment. I couldn't believe he would say such a thing in front of parents.

  "Is that accurate?" he asked them, and some of them nodded.

  "A teacher is indeed a role model," Al Duncan said.

  "And, third, you're worried that her effectiveness in the classroom might be compromised--impaired, perhaps--by this relationship because she will no longer have the support of her students' parents. Right?"

  "I don't think anyone said that," I said.

  "No, but it's an excellent point," Rich Lessard agreed. "And very true."

  "Now, I understand a petition is circulating," Glenn went on. "Is that correct?"

  For a moment nobody answered, and then the men at the table seemed to move their heads just enough to suggest it was true.

  "What does it say?" he asked.

  Al Duncan pushed his chair back from the table for dramatic effect. "Before anyone says another word, I should note that I am not here as a member of the school board," he said. "I'm just here as an interested parent, because my son is in Allison's class."

  Glenn smiled cordially. "Point noted."

  "It doesn't cite you specifically, Allison," Bea said after a moment, when it was clear that no one else was going to open their mouth. "The petition, that is."

  "Oh, good."

  Rich folded his hands on the table, as if he were in a business meeting. "It says, very simply, that we expect a certain level of moral decency and propriety from our teachers. Nothing more, nothing less."

  "Did you define it?" I asked.

  "Did we define what?"

  "Moral decency?"

  "No."

  "Don't you think you should have?"

  "Look, I know what you're getting at," Rich said. "Morality is fluid. Morality is vague. Morality differs wherever you go. But there are certain parameters, and--at least in this community--there are certain expectations. That's all we're getting at."

  "And somehow I've violated them."

  "One man's opinion," Ken Hedderigg said, "but yes, I think so."

  "Okay," I said, and I resisted the urge to liken myself to Hester Prynne. But I thought instantly of the painting of Prynne that adorned the cover of the paperback edition of The Scarlet Letter that Dana had had us read back in July. In the painting, Prynne was holding her infant daughter, and she looked at once defiant and soft: a usually sweet, demure woman driven to anger by her community's moral condemnation.

  Prynne was, of course, dressed largely in black. Unfortunately, the A pinned
to her breast looked more like a varsity sports letter than the scarlet brand she'd earned for a crime.

  Hester Prynne, varsity athlete. All-county field-hockey forward.

  "Okay, what?" Rich asked me.

  "Okay," Glenn said before I could open my mouth, "Allison's heard your concerns. I've heard your concerns. Right, Allison?"

  "Right."

  "What do you plan to do with the petition?" the principal asked.

  "When we're done circulating it, we'll take it to the school board and see what they have to say--unless you give us a reason not to," Ken said. When he'd begun his response, he'd been looking at Glenn, but in the space of his sentence he'd turned his attention to me.

  "How many names do you have so far?" Glenn asked.

  "That's hard to say, because there are at least three copies floating around."

  "We're only doing this because we love our children," Audrey's mom said. "You understand that, don't you?"

  "Of course."

  "I mean, you have a daughter," she said. "Carly, right? I know she's away at school now. But I have to ask: What would you do if your Carly came home from college with a transsexual boyfriend or girlfriend?"

  It was a great question, one that had certainly crossed my mind that winter. But it was also one that I'd been careful not to answer, always relegating it to a remote crevice in my brain. That won't happen, I'd tell myself. It would be like getting daggered by lightning twice in a night. But the question clearly frightened me, because I knew on some level that regardless of whatever my final answer turned out to be, my initial reaction would be a shudder. No parent wants their child to fall in love with a transsexual. For the vast majority of parents in this world, the only thing worse than having a transsexual for a son-or a daughter-in-law would be to have one for a child.

  "If Carly came home one evening with a transsexual friend," I answered, not exactly lying but certainly not telling the truth, "I would offer to make them both dinner. And then I'd put out clean towels in the bathroom."

  "I couldn't do that," Audrey's mom said, and I thought her voice was going to break. "I'd be too busy crying. I'd be too busy crying for her and for me, and for her new friend."

  I curled my lips against my teeth, moved by her candor. I knew in my heart I'd cry, too.

  Chapter 25.

  dana

  AT FIRST MY NEW VAGINA HURT LIKE HELL. TRULY. And it seemed to hurt more after Allison left Sunday morning. The pain would begin like a bruise--and much of the area was indeed black and blue--but it would grow into something far more pronounced: the biting ache of a broken bone. But, of course, there were no bones involved. The hardest thing down there was gauze.

  Until Dr. Meehan stopped by Monday morning while making his rounds, I feared that I'd done something awful when I'd insisted on standing up for Allison on Saturday night. I was afraid I was going to pay some horrible price for my hubris, for what I can only imagine was a last vestige of male arrogance.

  A few times, I had phantom pains where I had once had a penis. Ah, my old friend, I would think, the words a regal British accent in my mind because I'd been reading so much Jan Morris in my hospital bed, even in absentia you manage to trouble me.

  Now that the penis was gone--most of it, anyway, and the parts that remained I'd already begun to view as vagina--I could regard it with the sort of benign affection we have for our friends' big sloppy dogs. It was no longer a massive goiter between my legs. It was, instead, that Alaskan malamute who insists on clomping into your yard, inadvertently trampling the rosebushes, and then--without any ill intent whatsoever--pooping right outside your front door.

  Maybe husky is too grandiose an image. I certainly didn't have a poodle of a penis, but I also don't want to suggest that Dr. Meehan had in the stirrups before him one surgical morning the big dog of dicks. Picture instead a good-sized springer spaniel. Or, perhaps, a petite golden retriever.

  I stayed in bed all of Sunday, but on Monday morning Dr. Meehan made his rounds and told me it was time to stand up. I didn't tell him I already had.

  "If I may say so myself," he murmured as he checked his stitching, "I do very nice work. You are going to have a perfectly lovely little vulva."

  Then he suggested I walk as far as the nurses' station, and I suggested we push the envelope and try for the gift shop.

  "There's no reason to press. You'll only risk bleeding," he said. "Maybe later today you can go, if you feel up to it."

  When I swung my legs off the mattress and pushed off with my hands, I realized he was right. It felt like there was a bowling ball dangling from my groin, and it felt like it was hung there with fish hooks. I couldn't believe there were women in the world who would voluntarily pierce their labia to add gold or silver rings.

  "It should smart a bit," my doctor said, his voice betraying absolutely no concern.

  I nodded. "It does." And while the pain was reminiscent of the soreness I had felt when I stood for the first time on Saturday night, it was considerably more pronounced. I realized with some bemusement that I'd been running on some sort of desperate adrenaline the night before my lover was due to leave. I was so determined to show her that I was getting better--growing stronger by the minute, so she needn't fear for a second that she'd be saddled with an invalid when I returned to Vermont--that I had performed a feat damn near Herculean.

  Still, despite the pain, for Dr. Meehan I walked. I walked as I had years earlier, when I hiked to the summit of Mount Washington one day with two friends from college: I shuffled, my knees barely moving, my feet as flat as two irons. I took baby steps, and still I found myself grimacing.

  But I plodded forward, out the door of my room and then down the hall to the nurses' station. Two of the nurses looked up and offered a polite golfer's clap. I hung on tight to their counter, rested, and tried to smile back. Then, much to my surgeon's surprise, I motioned with my head to the corridor that led to the gift shop and insisted on pressing on.

  "You think you can do it?" he asked.

  "I do."

  "I don't want to have to scrape you off the floor with a spatula. I don't want you to undo all that good work I did between your legs."

  I shook my head. "I'm fine," I insisted. Suddenly I had to get to the gift shop, and I had to get there for no other reason than the fact that I wasn't supposed to. I wanted to exceed Dr. Meehan's expectations. My expectations. Everyone's expectations. I wanted to get there for Allison.

  Wasn't it bad enough that she was living, in the eyes of her village, with a freak? I knew Allison hadn't been happy in Colorado, and I knew she was having second thoughts about me. I couldn't blame her. And so the last thing I wanted was for her to be burdened with a freak who was sickly: I wanted to get better fast, and the first step seemed to be walking.

  Dr. Meehan did not--as he put it with such delicacy--have to scrape me off the floor with a spatula. But my legs felt like Jell-O when we reached the shop, and I thought my vagina had been swabbed with battery acid. I gave my doctor my arm once I had touched the brass rack with the gums and candies and mints--home base in a children's game--and allowed him to help me shamble back to my room. I walked like a desperately old lady, but I was smiling inside as if I had just hiked every dirt-and loam-and mud-covered inch of the Appalachian Trail.

  When I was settled back in my bed, Dr. Meehan told me that another girl would be arriving at the hospital around lunchtime, and she would be having her final reassignment Tuesday morning. I could tell that he wanted me to visit with her, and so before he even made the suggestion, I offered to go and hold her hand that afternoon.

  There had been other transsexuals in the hospital when I was there, including an airline pilot who checked out soon after I arrived, and an elderly woman who left the day before Allison. I knew that a set designer for Las Vegas hotel shows had had her reassignment on Friday. But Allison had been with me until Sunday, and so I had made no effort to meet any of my peers. I had Allison, and that was all the company I needed. />
  By mid-afternoon, I felt sufficiently recovered from my marathon walk to the gift shop to go visiting. I hobbled first to meet Sasha, the girl from Vegas who was on day three of her road to recovery, but it was clear I would be unable to stay with her for very long.

  "If I were taller, you know, I'd have been a showgirl," she insisted, smearing a small tub of an "emergency" line cream into the wrinkles that ran like little dry riverbeds around her eyes. "I have just boodles of energy."

  I smiled in agreement and left as quickly as I could: I have never been very comfortable around people who use words like boodles, even if they claim gender dysphoria as their excuse. Transsexuality is no reason to talk like a moron, or to presume that energy and height are the only prerequisites to becoming a showgirl. Still, I was happy to see that she, too, was getting better.