Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  After all, a day didn't go by that month when I wouldn't pick up two or three of the CDs in the stack on the credenza I never used--the credenza on which I would toss the CDs after Kate had shared them with me--and stare at the people on the covers. I'd stare at their trans-gender lips or their transsexual mouths, I'd look closely at the shape of their cheeks and their noses and their jaws. I'd try and see beyond their smiles and their pouts--beyond the oddly flirtatious gaze in their eyes--to figure out whether they were indeed happy.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Tuesday, September 25

  DR. JEN FULLER: In my opinion, clothing is infinitely more important to a transsexual than to a transvestite. A transvestite is merely using clothing to play a role. A transsexual is using it to define himself--or herself--as a human being.

  Chapter 13.

  allison

  I RATHER DOUBT I'D HAVE SEEN DANA AGAIN IF I'd thought seriously about the consequences. I know I didn't have any expectations or goals when I called him two days after he told me his plans; I don't think I had thought as far as tomorrow.

  Maybe I thought I would see him once more and hurt him. Maybe I thought I could talk him out of it. Maybe I just never stopped loving him. I don't know.

  But I certainly hadn't expected the two of us would be living together as the snow would start falling in earnest in early December, or that on the very first Monday of the month I'd be called into the principal's office after school.

  "You must hate this sort of thing," Glenn said, using his metal wastepaper basket like an ottoman for his big heavy loafers.

  "What sort of thing?" I asked. I figured I'd play naive, though I knew exactly why I was there. Glenn Frazier had only come to the school that September, and in little more than a season had shown himself to be an administrative automaton and a middle-aged martinet. We'd already had a series of run-ins that fall. We'd bickered the very first week of school when a mother complained that I was giving my sixth-graders too much free rein when we visited the World Wide Web on the classroom computer, and then we'd quarreled during the second week over my decision to allow some of the students to go swimming out at the maritime museum when the bus wouldn't start. Two parents had called him, and he wasn't simply concerned that I had endangered my students' welfare: A rumor had spread that I had actually allowed the girls to go swimming topless. Two weeks after that, Glenn prohibited me from taking my class on a picnic near the cliffs behind Will's house. I'd gone there with eighteen to twenty eleven-year-olds every single year for almost a decade and a half, and the only accident I'd ever witnessed had been an adult chaperone's twisted ankle. Still, Glenn was convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of the kids ventured to the ledge and did a cannonball over the side.

  He shrugged. "Talking about your life. You must hate it. After all, it is your life. I know how hard it is to live in a fishbowl."

  "I live in a Victorian village house."

  He rolled his eyes and smiled. "You know what I mean."

  "Honestly, I don't."

  He pulled his feet back from the trash can and sat up straight in his desk chair. His office overlooked the playground, and I saw that it had started to snow once again, and the snow was beginning to stick to the seats on the swings and the metal bars of the jungle gym.

  "Your new live-in," he said.

  I nodded. "Ah."

  "I had a parent call me about him today. That makes three in a week--actually, three since last Thursday--so I figured we should connect."

  "A parent of one of my students?"

  "Yup."

  "May I ask who?"

  "Well, today it was Lindsey's dad. Lindsey Lessard."

  "I don't know him."

  "Richard Lessard?"

  "Nope. We've never met. I know Lindsey's mom."

  "Well, he's concerned."

  "Why?"

  "Why do you think? Because his daughter's sixth-grade teacher is living with a transvestite."

  "Not true."

  He rolled his chair closer to his desk and folded his hands on the blotter. "We've all seen him."

  "Dana's not a transvestite."

  "We're about to play a game of semantics, aren't we?"

  "No. But Dana's a transsexual. There's a big difference."

  "Point noted. Bottom line? He's still a guy in a dress. He's still wandering around Grand Union in lipstick and mascara."

  "I don't see why Richard Lessard should care."

  "I don't think he would if Dana didn't take his groceries and go back to your house."

  "What does he want?"

  "Richard? I'm not sure. But he's not happy. Mostly he just wanted to vent--like the others."

  "And you were happy to listen."

  "It's my job."

  "Did you defend me?" The question seemed to catch him off guard, and for a long moment he stared at the row of Thanksgiving pictures the first-graders had drawn the month before.

  "I said you've been here a long time. And most of the time you seem to have pretty good judgment."

  "Most of the time?"

  "I was honest. We've really only known each other since August."

  "Well. Thank you for the ringing testimonial."

  "You know you have my support."

  "Hardly!"

  "You do. But I am concerned about this relationship of yours."

  "I have many relationships. Do you mean the one with my daughter? My ex-husband? My friend Molly?"

  "That attitude doesn't make this any easier."

  "Who lives with me is none of Richard Lessard's business."

  "That's not true. You teach his daughter. He pays your salary."

  "It's not like I'm shacked up with a convicted child abuser. It's not like I'm having some fifteen-year-old's baby."

  "No. You're living with a man in a dress."

  I could see this conversation was going nowhere good, and that remaining and arguing with him would only make things more difficult. And so I asked him what he wanted me to do.

  He was quiet for a long moment, and then he shook his head. "At this point," he said finally, "I just wanted you to know that parents were calling me. That's it." And then he scrunched up his eyebrows and tried to look thoughtful. "I guess that's really all," he said, and then added, "at least at this point."

  That December, Dana and I went to Montreal for the weekend with Molly Cochran and her husband, a lawyer named Clayton. We went to the theater on Saturday night, and we spent the weekend afternoons shopping for Christmas presents and clothes at the elegant department stores along Saint Catherine.

  On Saturday afternoon, the four of us wandered from Eaton's to Frommer and Bristol. Clayton was in the men's department on the first floor browsing through neckties, while Molly, Dana, and I were upstairs trying on business suits and skirts. The dressing room in that section is a rarity, especially for a store as refined as F&B's: Although the individual changing rooms are private, separated from one another by long, cabana-like doors, the three-sided mirrors are in a large chamber between the changing rooms and the store floor. The result? You have to emerge into a vaguely communal anteroom to see whether the dress you're thinking about is indeed flattering.

  At one point, Dana and Molly had disappeared into the dressing room, while I was looking at pleated skirts along a side wall.

  When they returned, Molly was giggling and Dana was oddly self-satisfied. Almost smug.

  Molly squeezed my wrist and said, "You really are a dyke." Then she kissed my cheek.

  I assumed I knew exactly what had occurred and was unimpressed. "What did you think Dana would do in there? Try and find a urinal? Hide in a changing room?"

  "You had to be there, Allison. This had nothing to do with peeing like a woman or simply trying to act female."

  "Much more affirming," Dana added, and he pointed discreetly toward a man and a woman chatting beside a rack of blazers. As I looked more closely at the pair, I real
ized that the woman was actually a man in drag.

  "Was he in there when you two were?" I asked, referring to the transvestite.

  Molly nodded and then told us what she had witnessed. Apparently, Dana had been standing at one of the three-sided mirrors beside a woman, fixing his headband and adjusting the shoulders of the dress he was considering. The transvestite had emerged from a changing room, seen the two females before the mirrors, and abruptly grown anxious and fled back onto the store floor. The woman at the mirror beside Dana had shaken her head, clearly appalled.

  "Isn't it just amazing? That guy was trying to look like a girl," she had said to Dana. "What kind of man thinks he can do that?"

  When Molly had finished her story, Dana offered a small smile and murmured contentedly, "And that, dear hearts, is the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual."

  Sometimes, in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I felt a bit like Beauty in the story of Beauty and the Beast. Like many little girls, Carly had loved the tale as a child, and so I knew the basics of the plot pretty well.

  I don't mean to suggest that I was as lovely as Beauty, or that Dana, by comparison, was as frightening as the Beast. Not at all. But I had begun to see my home as a castle, and the only spot in the world where I could feel absolutely safe. Moreover, because Dana was focused almost entirely on staying healthy for his upcoming surgery, he spent huge chunks of his day doing nothing more than taking care of the house and preparing the magnificent breakfasts and dinners we shared. And so, just as it was for Beauty once she was inside the Beast's walls, there was absolutely no work for me to do. None. Everything, suddenly, was provided for me, and I was cared for and loved with a fervor I'd never before felt in my life.

  Nevertheless, while Dana may not have looked like a Beast, I did understand that he was viewed as one whenever he ventured beyond the front door of our little citadel. While he could pass as a woman among strangers, everyone in town knew exactly who he was, and all too often he was seen as a freak--a freak who was insane.

  I, of course, was merely considered insane.

  There was one horrible moment at the grocery store when a woman complained to the manager that Dana was touching the fruits and the vegetables. Her concern? Clearly a person like Dana was leaving some horrible disease on the grapes. Another time, at the post office, a customer whose hands were completely empty refused to open the door for Dana, even though Dana had a half dozen boxes to mail in his arms. Finally, he had to put them down in the salt and sludge on the cement steps.

  And he was given two speeding tickets in the village in the course of a week. Certainly our town--like many rural villages--is a bit of a speed trap, but in all the years I'd lived there, I hadn't received a single citation. Dana, however, was pulled over once for going thirty-six in a thirty-mile zone, and then for going forty-one on a stretch where the speed limit increased to thirty-five. Both times, he insisted, he was going the limit.

  But what was especially awful was the way the officer tried to intimidate Dana because his appearance no longer matched the photograph on his driver's license. His license showed a well-groomed man in his early thirties. It also had a big M beside gender.

  The policeman, under most circumstances a nice enough young guy named Culberson, saw in Dana the sort of deviance that some people find disgusting and menacing at once.

  "There seems to be a problem, sir. This doesn't appear to be you," Culberson said, knowing of course that it was. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave your vehicle and stand away from it with your arms at your sides."

  After Dana patiently explained the situation, the officer politely but firmly continued to insist that he stand outside of his car while Culberson wrote out the ticket. He also continued to call Dana mister and sir, even after Dana asked him not to.

  "So long as you have an M on your license, sir, I am going to have to call you mister. Okay, Mr. Stevens?"

  Two days later, Culberson pulled him over again, and once more the officer made him wait by the side of the road.

  When Dana and I were alone inside our castle, however, it was a grand month. Certainly it was for me. I was spoiled. Didn't vacuum once. Didn't clean the bathtub. Didn't pull a single seed from the spaghetti squash, or chop a single scallion.

  And while the female hormones had begun to decrease the frequency of Dana's erections--as well as his ability to sustain them--they hadn't diminished his desire to love me. I would get a massage almost every night before bed, and at least half the time I would wind up on my back while he explored with his fingers and tongue the pudendum of his dreams. Moreover, I gather Dana had always had a much more powerful libido than most transsexuals, and so even when his body was filled with testosterone blockers and his sexual reassignment was barely a month away, more times than not he would still get hard when I would rub his nascent breasts, or lick my way from his wondrously hairless ankles to his thighs.

  In return, all Dana wanted from me was to be a woman. To be womanly. He would watch me shave my legs and my underarms, he would stare as I pulled on panty hose or a bra. He would want to see how I sat when I talked on the phone with Carly, and to listen in when I chatted at night with Nancy or Molly or my mother in Philadelphia.

  "How do you butter your toast?" he would ask, and he would be completely sincere. The fact is, women do butter their bread very differently from men.

  "Let me watch you climb into your car," he would say, and I would show him.

  "Brush your hair again, please."

  "Would you flip through a newspaper?"

  "How do you pick up a pen?"

  It was never annoying: I felt, simultaneously, like a cherished possession and a goddess. A woman loved on a variety of levels. A woman loved for all the right reasons, and for ones too small to matter in any other relationship I could have. The way I held a book when I read on the couch. The fact that I would sleep on my side five or six days before my period, because my breasts would be tender. The things I carried in my purse.

  And so although I adore teaching--and although I had a particularly sweet and smart group of kids that year--there were some mornings when I could barely bring myself to put on my overcoat and leave the remarkable world I had in my house.

  Christmas was on a Wednesday that year, and so the public schools were open on Monday, the twenty-third, but then closed for a luxurious thirteen-day break. The students weren't due back until January sixth. Dana was able to reschedule his final pre-operative consultation with the Trinidad surgeon for Monday, the thirtieth, and the sexual reassignment itself for the thirty-first: New Year's Eve morning.

  "I guess it's sort of like completing my New Year's resolution a full three hundred and sixty-five days ahead of schedule," Dana observed while finalizing the details. "This year I'm going to be organized. This year I'm going to take off ten ugly pounds. This year I'm going to lose that needless appendage between my legs."

  The real reason the timing mattered, however, was that by having the surgery performed on that Tuesday, I could remain with Dana in Trinidad for four full days after the operation, and--in total--we'd have nine days together out west. Our plan was that we'd spend Christmas in Vermont with Carly and my mother (she came north from Philadelphia every year), and then Dana and I would fly to Colorado on Friday, the twenty-seventh. I would return home alone on Sunday, January fifth, in time to teach the following day.

  Dana, then, would still be unable to leave the hospital bed. Sexual reassignment is not minor surgery, and Dana wouldn't be allowed to even stand up until Monday, the sixth. Discharge--just another new woman emerging from Mount San Rafael, a hospital operated by the Catholic Sisters of Charity until 1968--wouldn't occur until the middle of that week.

  I would have liked to stay to help Dana, but I didn't dare miss a day of school--especially if my reason was my transsexual lover.

  When Dana and I were first working out the details of the trip--the timing, the flights, finding a motel--I would try and tell
myself that he wouldn't, in the end, go through with it. But as Christmas neared, I began to realize he would. He left for Florida to see his parents and his sister the weekend before the holiday, and once he was gone, the notion that he was going to spend two and a half days in a dress with his dreaded family signaled for me the irrevocability of his decision.

  And so the Friday before Christmas, almost the moment Dana got into his car to drive to the airport, my magic little paradise evaporated. Poof. Beauty without her Beast. Dana had left, and everything seemed to disappear at once. And I began to cry. I cried off and on that whole weekend, even though Carly was home from college and might be watching TV in the den, or reading, or simply trying to sleep on the couch after her first semester as a college freshman.

  "Mom, he'll--I mean she'll--still be Dana. You said so yourself," Carly reminded me any number of times that weekend, sometimes rubbing my back or patting my arm.

  I was still weeping as the weekend came to an end.

  "Why are you crying?" little Missy Thompson asked me when she saw my eyes tearing Monday morning as we wandered up the front steps of the school together at the start of the day. The building was long and low, and the bricks were a patchwork of rust and red. There were white pines surrounding the parking lot, and apple trees lining the front walk. The school was shady and cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and always very, very comforting.