Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  The first part, he said, would be mostly about Dana and gender dysphoria, wrapping up with her romance with my mom. That was the word he used: romance. He said it without any sarcasm at all, like he viewed their relationship now as one of the world's great love stories.

  The second part would be about my mom's confrontation with the school, and there would be interviews with parents on both sides of the conflict.

  "Given my friendship with your mom, I've scrupulously avoided listening to any of the tapes that will be used in that segment, or making any suggestions about content," he said, smiling. "Call it journalistic recusal."

  On the bus, I wondered if the show was yet another reason why my mom didn't want to break up with Dana. The program had grown to mean a lot to both Dana and my dad, and maybe she figured that breaking up with Dana now would ruin their effort.

  But I also understood that it was a lot more complicated than that.

  The next day, I decided to wear makeup and a skirt to my classes, and then to the radio station in the afternoon. The skirt was short and my tights were black, and so no one said anything about that. But some people noticed the lipstick and eye shadow, and tried to figure out what kind of statement I was trying to make. Neil Shorter, my new friend with the nuclear lid, thought it looked very sexy and said I should let him henna my hair that night, and I almost said yes because he made it sound just like foreplay.

  The only person who I think sensed what I was doing was Jamie Sloan. She wasn't usually at the radio station on Monday, but she stopped in after work to get some new CDs to listen to at home so she could decide whether they were worthy of airtime.

  "Aren't you the little Barbie," she said when she saw me.

  "Overkill?"

  "No, not at all," she said. "Very, very feminine."

  That night Neil and I had sex for the third time, and it was incredibly hot. Dressing up, I decided, was fun. It made every day seem kind of like Halloween.

  Chapter 32.

  will

  PERHAPS BECAUSE I HAD A FIRSTHAND FAMILIARITY with divorce, I didn't view myself as particularly romantic at midlife. Maybe, I decided some moments, I never had been.

  Yet my sense was we were all pretty romantic when we were young, and I didn't suppose I had been an exception. There had certainly been a time, after all, when I had convinced myself that we were all destined to meet that one special person, and I had my Allie. As a young man, I had imagined that Allie and I would spend our entire lives with each other on this planet, and then, in some way I could not begin to fathom, we would spend our eternities together someplace else. Somewhere else. If we hadn't met at college, then we would have met at the radio station or a restaurant or ... a car wash. But we were fated to find each other.

  Then, when it wasn't Allie, I was sure it was Patricia. Allie had been a mere detour. Patricia was my actual soul mate.

  I think it would take a lot of grit to get through this life and not believe such a thing--to believe instead that we are, in essence, completely alone, and there is no one person out there whose fate is inextricably linked with our own.

  Or, what might be an even worse interpretation of the same revelation, to believe that there are in fact uncountable legions of people out there who could offer us all exactly the same quotient of happiness (or unhappiness), and it just doesn't matter with whom we finally tell ourselves we are in love. Which might be why, arguably, the only people who are more romantic than the very young are often the very old.

  At almost all the funerals I have attended for parents and grandparents--mine and others'--and for elderly friends who have died, invariably someone has remarked on the depth of the love that linked the deceased and his wife.

  Or the deceased and her husband.

  "They were meant for each other."

  "They were perfect together."

  "I've never seen a love quite like theirs ..."

  It really may only be when we are in our forties and fifties, when we're old enough to know better but still young enough not to need pretense and fancy and sham, that we can be so determinedly unromantic.

  And yet ... and yet ... a part of me never did let go of the hope that there really was one very specific woman out there for me. People--including, unfortunately, Patricia--assumed that the problem was that I had never let go of Allie.

  I think that's incorrect, and I think I understood that with some clarity after Patricia's and my marriage had unraveled. I was having dinner with Allie and Dana once or twice a week, it seemed, and Allie and I were chatting with some frequency on the phone. Was there still a small part of me that fantasized about waking up one morning--morning after morning, really--and finding Allie beside me in bed? Perhaps. But did I actually believe that such a thing might happen, given my experience with her over the past decade? No.

  Allie and I were meant to be friends, not lovers. That's what I had concluded. We'd be like cousins who were close. Perhaps we were meant to be together long enough to bring Carly into this world, and then we were meant to do our best to raise her from our small, separate perches.

  But there was no invisible tie linking us, since there was no place in Allie's psyche upon which that tie could be fastened. There just wasn't, and I think I knew that.

  The problem, if that's even the right word, is that I was still clinging to the fallacy of the one perfect woman--perfect, that is, for me. There was an animus out there enclosed in sinew and flesh that was an exact fit with whatever intangible abided within me.

  Moreover, the more time I spent with Allie and Dana together, usually on the pretext of the radio series or in the context of their story, the more I realized that a small part of me was hoping their relationship would survive into their old age. Things were hard for the pair right now, but in time, perhaps, they might become nothing more than the village's eccentric elderly. That odd pair of old ladies you saw shuffling together behind a wire grocery cart in the supermarket down aisle six. Waiting for their prescriptions at the pharmacy. Asking too many questions about the scones or the bread at the bakery.

  It was the animus that mattered, not the shape of the shell that housed it. If Dana wanted a reconfigured husk, so be it. The husk doesn't last.

  When I would have these visions--in the car or my office or as I'd wander about my empty house--I would wonder if I was a romantic after all. Or whether, maybe, I was trying to focus upon anything but the fact that I was beginning to fear I was going to grow old all alone. I was never going to find that kindred spirit who would make everything right.

  I never sat in on the recordings, and I didn't listen to any of the tapes until the final product was brought to me for review. But I had lunch with Allie and Dana the day they both came to the station, and I had breakfast with Dana the next morning, when she alone was needed in the studio. I also went with Kevin Gaines to Bartlett when he wanted to spend some time with Allie and Dana at the house in which they were living, and I stayed for coffee with them when Kevin left to begin interviewing the folks who thought Allie shouldn't have allowed or encouraged a transsexual to move in.

  This meant, in all fairness, that I had a sense of how the programming was coming together. I knew how Kevin was structuring the short series in his mind.

  Once, Kevin came into my office and shook his head. "He really can pass for a woman," he said.

  "I know," I said, and I could tell that Kevin was experiencing for the first time something I had been feeling with increasing frequency--and if not yet with increasing discomfort, then certainly with increasing bemusement.

  "He's almost pretty," Kevin went on.

  I smiled and shook my head. "Not almost," I told him, stating the obvious.

  "It's true. You expect the ugly duckling, and you get this swan."

  Kevin was about a decade younger than I was, and he had two small daughters at home. He was, I assumed, happily married. "We'll have to make that clear on the radio," he continued. "Normally what someone looks like doesn't matter. But it
does here. We need to make it clear he isn't a drag queen and he isn't a--"

  "Use a feminine pronoun," I suggested.

  "Do you mean on-air?"

  "Yes."

  "We'll confuse our listeners."

  "Just think about it. As you work on the narrative, see how it sounds."

  "It'll sound weird."

  "So? Their whole story is weird."

  He was sipping coffee from one of our fund-raising mugs, and he ran a finger around the swirl that comprised the radio station's logo. "This must be very, very strange for you," he said, his eyes on the porcelain.

  I'd known Kevin for perhaps half a decade, since he'd come to public radio from the CBC in Montreal, and he had probably become one of my closer friends. At some point, I had imagined, I was going to move on to another station or to NPR in Washington--whenever Patricia and I had discussed it, we always assumed it would be once Carly had left for college--and Kevin would become the station G.M. Already he was doing as much managerial and programming work as he was reporting. Maybe more.

  "Which part?" I asked him. "The part about my ex-wife, the lesbian? Or that part where my ex-wife sleeps with a man and a woman who turn out to be the same person? Of course, there's also the part where my daughter comes home from college and finds out her mom has invited a transsexual to move in. That's a little strange, too."

  He shook his head, and I could see that I had depressed him a tiny bit. I hadn't meant to. "It all comes back to Allison, doesn't it? Even now," he observed.

  I knew what he was driving at, and I ignored it. "In this radio series, it shouldn't. At least in the first half--on day one--Allie is completely irrelevant. Completely. On day two, she should certainly come into focus. So should a lot of people. But, in my mind, she's only a part of the program."

  "I wasn't talking about the program."

  "I was aware of that."

  "Okay, fine. Has Patricia found a new home yet?"

  "She has. She has a glorious apartment. In Brandon, of all places."

  "Lousy spot to meet people."

  "Ah, but it isn't Bartlett, and I think that's all that mattered. She wanted out of our little town, and I really can't say I blame her."

  "Have you seen it?"

  "Her place? No. But I know the building. It's gorgeous. She has the top two floors of some monster Victorian near the library. Right now she's planning to stay there for a couple of months and regain her bearings. Through the summer, probably."

  "And then?"

  "I don't know. But this isn't a trial separation. I wish it were. Sometimes. But it's not."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Me too," I said, and I tried to recall the last time we had made love. I couldn't, and for some reason that scared me. I knew it had been in December, but our last few intimate moments had blurred together like so many leaves on the collages Carly would make in the autumn when she was a little girl. Quickly I returned to the subject of the radio series. "Explain that she can pass for a natural woman. Dana, of course."

  "And leave it at that?"

  "Tell people she's attractive."

  He sipped his coffee and then nodded. "Yeah, I think that's important."

  "It is for the radio," I said. "But not in reality."

  Oh, but it was. Whenever I saw Dana, and I saw her quite a lot in February and March, I would have to remind myself that she was a transsexual. I would have to focus upon the phonetics of the word, murmur it to myself in my mind, and conjure the genitalia that once had been there. Otherwise ... and sometimes I would cut the thought off right there:

  Otherwise ... otherwise, nothing.

  And I would allow myself to hug her as a friend. I would touch her the way I might have touched any of Allie's or Patricia's female pals, or the various women I knew who were married to my male friends. I would give her an embrace that was warm but not overtly sexual. I would shake her hand gently. I would not touch her legs or her hair, which for male friends are off-limits, but I would graze her arm with my fingers when it was appropriate.

  But aren't even those touches sexual?

  That was the otherwise: For men, on some level it's all sexual. It might be that way for women, too, but I can't speak for women. For men, however, it's always about sex. We are what we are. Whenever I thought about touching Dana, I realized that I hadn't ever touched a woman without understanding on some plane that we were different genders, and succumbing to the sexual charge--sometimes awkward, sometimes teasing, sometimes downright thrilling--that was as involuntary as it was inevitable. It was, in its own way, pro forma. Men don't hug women without thinking of sex. It may be for the merest second, the flutter of a hummingbird's wing. But it's there and it's real. After all, that's a woman's shoulder blade you are touching or patting or caressing for the briefest twinkling. Those are a woman's breasts that are pressed against your chest when you squeeze her to you after a dinner party. That human being in your arms for an instant? Your bodies fit together, and the genome that limned you and the memes that control you ... they understand this and crave her.

  And so when I'd hug Dana or touch the inside of her palm with the inside of mine (a handshake, yet so suggestive) or my fingers would find their way to one of her arms, I would experience a sexual ripple and wonder why I had felt such a thing--why I had courted such a thing. And the answer would be because she was pretty and she was smart and she was feminine. The otherwise that was the euphemism in my mind for penis and balls and a chest with a rug would be subsumed by the scent of her perfume and the softness of her skin. The small of her back. The feel of her body forming itself next to mine for the split second that it takes to embrace as ... friends.

  Even the word transsexual had grown less disconcerting. Less foreign. It began to seem less like a scientific abomination--man into woman with the aid of hormones and scalpel--and more like medicine. A woman healed.

  One time when Dana was with Kevin, and Allie and I were alone, I asked her if she thought she was gay because she was attracted to Dana.

  "No," she said, and then she asked the question of me that only my Allie would ask. "Do you think you are?"

  I wasn't sure what I expected when I went to see Glenn Frazier. Probably I shouldn't have called first. I should have surprised him. But he knew I was coming and he knew why I was coming, and so he was ready.

  I stopped by his house after dinner. He'd said his family was usually done eating by seven or seven-fifteen, and so we agreed upon seven-thirty.

  His house was part of a small, relatively elegant development that had been built on what was once a modest dairy farm just outside of town. Ten or eleven houses, all one-and two-and three-acre lots. They'd been built in the early 1990s, and they were vaguely Colonial: inappropriate for northern Vermont, but they were well landscaped and they were not unattractive.

  The Fraziers had lived there just about eight months. They were the second family to live in the house. I knew Glenn because Bartlett is a small town and we were men about the same age, and because he worked with my ex-wife at the school. We knew each other well enough to make small talk when our paths would cross at the bakery in the morning or--obviously--when we ran into each other at the supermarket. But we weren't friends, and I had never before been to his house.

  When I arrived, Glenn's teenage son--a boy a few years younger than Carly--was doing some sort of math homework in the den off the front hall. He left me standing in the entryway when he went upstairs to tell his father I was there. And then, a moment later, he came back downstairs and informed me that his father was on the phone and would be with me in a minute. Then he returned to his homework, stopping once to pet the side of a puppy that was asleep on the floor by the woodstove.

  He seemed like a nice enough kid. Awkward. Not particularly well socialized for a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old. But the fact that he was doing schoolwork at seven-thirty at night was encouraging to me. I read nothing into the fact that he didn't invite me in to sit down, or offer me something to drink.
I read nothing into the fact that his mother didn't appear to say hello while Glenn wrapped up his conversation on the telephone.

  At least I didn't at first.

  I leaned my back against the front door with my coat in my arms and wondered if I should take off my shoes. Then I decided not to: The boy had his sneakers on. And my loafers were reasonably clean. I glanced around the hallway, noting the way the brass fixtures still had a bright shine to them, and the wallpaper on the stairs had not yet begun to separate at the seams. There was a copy of the day's newspaper, unread, on a small table by a mirror.

  At twenty to eight, I asked the boy in the den if his mother was home.

  "Yup. You want me to get her?" he asked.

  I shook my head no. "Just curious."

  He nodded, donned a pair of small headphones, and continued to work.

  At a quarter to eight, I decided to read the newspaper. I had already read the paper once that day, and so the articles I read at the Fraziers' were the stories that hadn't interested me at first. In most cases, they still didn't. But the waiting was less awkward when I had something to do with my hands, when I had something to look at other than the wallpaper and the fixtures and a boy with his homework.

  At ten of eight I sat down on one of the bottom steps on the stairs, still holding the newspaper and my coat. I resolved not to give Glenn the satisfaction of sending his son up for him again, and I resolved not to leave. I resolved I would not be stood up.