Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "I was praying for you to be happy. For this to be the right decision," she answered evenly.

  "That's very sweet."

  She clicked her tongue in her mouth. "I'm one hell of a sweet girl."

  There was a slight edge to her voice that I'd come to recognize: Frustration. Incredulity. A hint of despair. Instantly I convinced myself that in reality Allison had been praying that I would yet change my mind. Maybe have a last-second submission to the chromosomes and plumbing I'd been given at birth. Perhaps accept the shell I'd endured for three and a half decades.

  "You're so good to be here," I said. "I will always be more grateful than I can tell you. You know that, don't you?"

  "I do."

  "And if there was any way in the world I could change my mind ... well, for you, Allison, I would. I surely would. But I can't."

  She took back her hand and placed it inside her coat pocket. It was just cold enough that we could see our breath when we spoke--little curls of steam that rose up in the air and disappeared amidst the white latticework that surrounded us.

  "Don't worry," she said, "I wasn't praying for that. I don't pray for things that specific."

  "No?"

  She shook her head. "I see no reason to court disappointment in this life. It seems to come often enough on its own."

  There's a story that one night in 1908, when Trinidad physician John Epsey was leaving the hospital, he saw a flickering light on the hill before him--despite the snow and the wind and the fact that at the time there was nothing but scrub pine and rock on that bank. And so he wandered toward it, perplexed, and discovered there the 250-pound statue of the Virgin Mary that is still a part of the chapel today. No one knew where it came from, no one understood how it got there.

  Inspired, that very year the townsfolk built the grotto in which Allison and I sat for a few minutes our first Saturday in Trinidad.

  Today, some of the locals insist, if you come at the perfect time of the day or if the moonlight is right after dark, it looks as if the statue of the Virgin is crying--sobbing, in theory, because of the surgery that occurs right in front of her. Literally, right under her nose.

  Allison and I were told these stories when we were having a cup of coffee after visiting the shrine. The waitress at the diner regaled us with stories about Trinidad, especially the tales she'd heard about the trannies who'd come before me. Initially, I was a little perturbed that she saw so quickly what I was; I was a little frustrated by the fact that I had so clearly failed to pass.

  "Is it really that obvious?" I asked.

  "Oh, don't be upset," she reassured me, and she smiled at Allison. "It's your friend's nails that gave you away. They're just bitten to shreds."

  When my sister, Isabel, was four and five years old, we'd act out fairy tales together. She was always the princess--Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty--and I was the appropriate heavy. The Hag. The Stepmother. The Witch.

  We'd find a shady spot by the palms in our yard, or we'd play inside in the den. For some reason, we never played in Isabel's room, and I have memories of lugging the trunk in which she kept her stash of dress-up clothes all over the house. I was only nine and ten myself, of course, and so half the time I had to drag the chest like a body through the hallways, or along the cement that bordered the pool.

  I was already too tall for any of the dresses, but I would wear the big, loopy clip-on earrings and the scarves and the shoes my mother no longer wore. Isabel would get to wear the shiny polyester gowns with the pouf ballroom sleeves, and the diminutive wedding dresses with scooped necks.

  Then, depending upon the role, I would stamp my feet and whine, or I would snarl and hiss and shout. I spent a lot of time seething, and Isabel spent a lot of time collapsing and pretending to cry. It was a good arrangement.

  To most of the world, I probably looked like a patient and imaginative and exceptionally loving older brother. How many ten-year-old boys, after all, are willing to drape a nylon scarf over their heads and pretend they're the evil fairy Maleficent? How many male fifth-graders are content to spend time casting spells on poor little Aurora, a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty/Briar Rose/Kid Sister Izzy?

  Sometimes Isabel would grow bored of the games before I would, and I would have to return to a world in which I was supposed to care about Little League baseball, books about tank battles, and loud, smelly go-carts.

  Over dinner those nights, my mother might mention how I had spent my day, and my father would mumble distractedly, "You're a good brother."

  "Yup."

  "Want to go see the Dolphins this Sunday? The Jets are in town."

  "No, thank you. I have a ton of homework to do."

  "Okay. I'll take Jack," he would say, referring to one of my cousins who lived in West Palm Beach. Jack was in high school by then, and played tight end on the football team.

  And so a few days later, while my father would be watching a football game with a boy who understood and appreciated the rites that accompany an NFL Sunday, I would be alone in my room, probably waiting for my sister to return from a play date so I, too, would have someone to play with.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Tuesday, September 25

  CARLY BANKS: The costs mount quickly in Trinidad, especially if the transsexual is having more than genital surgery: a tracheal shave, for example, or a nose job. Dr. Meehan's fee begins at a flat $7,500 and starts climbing from there: $2,900 for breast implants, $2,250 for a rhinoplasty, $1,800 to reduce the appearance of the Adam's apple.

  In addition, the anesthesiologist will charge between $1,300 and $1,800.

  And then there are the hospital costs, which begin at $6,200 and often reach $10,000--even when there are no serious complications.

  Moreover, it is unlikely that any part of the operation will be covered by insurance, and neither Dr. Meehan nor the hospital accept personal checks. The business runs almost entirely on cashier checks and cash.

  Chapter 18.

  allison

  WHEN I AWOKE IN THE HOTEL SATURDAY MORNING, without thinking I reached under Dana's nightgown and cupped the penis and balls I found there in my hand. I did the same thing on Sunday, though this time I was very conscious of what I was doing. I wanted reassurance. I wanted to know they hadn't disappeared in the night.

  We lay there like spoons, Dana inside my arms, the palm of my hand and my fingers protecting testicles and spongiosum and glans.

  On Monday we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and then we drove into the town we'd gotten to know well over the weekend. We were able to get a parking space right in front of the building in which Dr. Meehan had his offices, and then we rode the antique elevator to the fifth floor.

  Dana's surgeon had the weathered skin I'd expect on a cowboy, but his hair was thick and full and the color of sepia ink. I guessed he was in his mid to late fifties.

  He told us he'd been an army surgeon in Vietnam in the early 1970s and wound up in southeastern Colorado after he was discharged because he'd fallen in love with a nurse in his unit whose father had run one of the last remaining Trinidad mines.

  "I didn't study this at medical school," he said, smiling. "But I learned from the best," and he motioned toward a photograph on the wall behind his desk of the founder of the Waterman Gender Clinic.

  "How'd he wind up here?" Dana asked, just a hint of unease in the question. It wasn't Meehan himself who was making us uncomfortable, it was the place where he worked--his clinic. The walls of the waiting room were decorated with bullfighting posters and the yellowed covers of half-century-old Wild West Weeklies. The Venetian blinds on the windows were brown with dust, the tile on the floor was cracked with age, and the Naugahyde chairs that lined three of the walls had seen their best days before my daughter was born.

  There were magazines from an earlier presidential administration.

  "Same way, more or less. The mines. They drew most of us here. Only difference was, Cordell Water
man was a mining company recruit. Brought here a good twenty years before me by the mining company itself, because there wasn't a surgeon in the whole city at the time. He started doing the reassignment work about a decade and a half after he arrived when a chef in town who everyone thought was a woman dropped the bombshell that he was a man. At least anatomically. And the fellow had heard that Johns Hopkins was doing sex change operations, and he wanted his penis transformed into a vagina."

  "Why didn't he just go to Johns Hopkins?"

  Meehan shrugged. "Money, I guess. And he trusted Cordy."

  "And so Dr. Waterman did it?" I asked.

  "That's right. The surgeon in Baltimore sent him the diagrams, the instructions. Told Cordy exactly how to do it on the phone. And throughout the 1970s, the word just spread that here was the place to come if you'd been dealt the wrong cards at birth--especially once Johns Hopkins stopped doing the procedure."

  He rose from behind his desk and poured a stack of Polaroid pictures from a greeting card envelope into his hand, and then fanned them together as if he were about to perform a magic trick. They were not unlike ones Dana had been sent earlier that fall.

  "We really do very good work here," he said as he glanced at the pictures himself. "Mostly these are M2Fs, but there are some recent F2Ms as well. Really, really nice jobs--if I say so myself."

  I expected him to offer the pictures to Dana, but instead he gave them to me. "Dana and I are going to spend some time talking with my nurse now, Allison, so would you mind waiting in the reception room?"

  I stood, smiled at Dana, and--though I had no interest in them at all--took the Polaroids with me. I didn't want Dana's doctor to think I was a difficult partner.

  Meehan's receptionist was closer to my mother's age than to mine.

  "How long have you been with Dr. Meehan?" I asked. Her desk was across from the elevator, instead of a part of the tiled waiting room with the posters of bullfighters and cowboys. I didn't want to be alone, and so I decided to wait in the hallway with her.

  "A very long time," she said, without looking away from the computer terminal before her. She had pinned a plastic iris to the lapel of her blazer like a corsage. "I mean, I started with Dr. Waterman. I was here before he even began doing his work with the trannies."

  "Are you from Trinidad?"

  "I was born and raised here. Brought up my four kids here. I still have a daughter and two grandchildren living about a mile from my house."

  "I'm sure it's a lovely place to raise a family," I said.

  "Trinidad's coming back, you know."

  "I'm sure."

  "Now, as I recall from our correspondence with Ms. Stevens, you two aren't related."

  "Nope." Just friends, I almost added, but I stopped myself. Still, I couldn't bring myself to say the word lovers.

  "She seems very nice," the receptionist said.

  "She is."

  For the first time she looked up from her keyboard and terminal. "And you are very nice to be here," she said. "Usually the trannies come alone. Completely alone. Not a soul with them. No mom or dad. No girlfriends or boyfriends. No friends of any kind."

  "That's sad."

  "Imagine. Eight or nine days in the hospital, and no one you know with you. Terrible, isn't it?"

  "It is."

  "My name is Rose."

  "Allison. Allison Banks."

  She smiled and then noticed the envelope of photographs in my hands. "Would you like me to take those for you?" she asked.

  "Thank you."

  "Sometimes Dr. Meehan gets so carried away with his work that he forgets that some people don't need quite so much information. But he just loves his trannies. Meehan Maidens, he calls them. He just adores his Meehan Maidens. I don't think there's any work in the world he'd rather do."

  "Why?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Why?" I asked. Initially the question had been a reflex, but then I repeated the word with deliberation. "Why? Why does he love his ... work so much?"

  She tilted her head and seemed to grow thoughtful. It was as if she were about to try and explain to a preschooler why the sky's blue.

  "Well, I guess I could say, 'Wouldn't you?' but I suppose in this case that wouldn't be true. Would it?"

  I shook my head. "Nope."

  "You know, a lot of people in this town say terrible things about Dr. Meehan. And you can imagine the sorts of things they used to say about poor Dr. Waterman. Awful. Just awful! Some people would look at all of Dr. Waterman's horses or Dr. Meehan's house--it has an indoor pool and its own fitness center, which I'm sure you can understand are very rare in these parts--and they'd say they just did it for the money. But between you and me, there are a lot of people in this town who drive very nice cars, thanks to this clinic. Very nice cars. I think Dr. Meehan could probably be mayor of Trinidad if he wanted the job. He really could. It's just that all the people who love that man and the work he does keep their thoughts to themselves."

  There was a window on the wall beside the elevator, and I could see it was starting to spit snow.

  "So why does he love to work with transsexuals?" I asked again.

  She shrugged and gave me the smile that it shames me to admit I probably offer my sixth-graders a hundred times every year: Tolerant. Patient. Condescending. "He makes them happy," Rose told me. "In some cases, he makes them happy for the very first time in their lives. Imagine being able to give that gift to someone. It's a blessing, it seems to me. It's a blessing."

  The bed beside Dana was empty, and the patient advocate who brought us there told us it would probably remain empty, barring a bus accident or a natural disaster.

  The advocate was a tiny woman named Maura, whose hair was a massive waterfall of silver and blond wings and waves that fell to her waist. "You have no reason at all to be nervous," she told Dana. "Dr. Meehan does this all the time. It's like a tonsillectomy. Why, last week he took care of an airline pilot, and a seventy-seven-year-old girl who'd been living in a camper-trailer for twenty years while she saved her money for the procedure. They're both still here if you'd like to meet them."

  "If there's time, certainly," Dana said, pulling up the blinds on one of the windows. Despite the clouds, in the distance we could see the Huajatolla.

  "Now, you're here for bottom and top--well, partial top."

  "Excuse me?" Dana said.

  Maura looked at her clipboard. "We call it bottom and top. I was just confirming that you're having the genital reassignment tomorrow as well as a tracheal shave. But you're not having any breast augmentation."

  "That's right. My breasts seem to be coming along just fine, thank you very much."

  "All you?" she asked, glancing at Dana's chest.

  "All me. Well, all hormones, I guess."

  "How long?"

  "Not quite a year."

  She nodded, and I think she was impressed. "The main thing I want you to know is that I'm here for you," she said. "I'm your representative. You can't ask nurses to mail a letter for you and you can't ask Dr. Meehan to get you a magazine in the gift shop. But you can ask me. You're going to be in bed for a week or so after your bottom's been done, so you're going to need some help. Well, I'm that help." Maura turned to me. "How long will you be here?" she asked.

  "I leave Sunday."

  "Wow. It's really sweet of you to stay that long. You're a lucky girl, Dana."

  "Lately, it seems."

  "No, really. I almost never see out-of-towners stay in Trinidad a full week if they don't have stitches to hold them."

  The airline pilot was going to leave the next day, and hoped to be flying again by Easter. She had an ex-wife who no longer spoke to her, and twin boys whom she apparently scared. They were in the third grade. They were, she said, her only regret.

  The woman who'd lived in a camper had a little dog for company and didn't seem to mind that she wasn't healing as fast as Dr. Meehan would have liked.

  "Even if I die today, it won't be so bad," she said,
petting the little terrier who was allowed into her room for parts of each day. "After all, I'd be leaving the world the way I was supposed to come into it. That's not a bad exit."

  Then she showed us a beautifully embossed surgical record that Dr. Meehan had issued so she could have her birth certificate updated. At seventy-seven, she'd been reborn a girl.

  Dana was settled into his hospital room by quarter to three, and I offered to go back into town to get the sorts of provisions we realized would be necessary in the hospital. I think I was looking for an excuse to get away.

  The snow hadn't stuck to the ground, so the little city seemed particularly haggard and gray. Even the Christmas decorations in the shop windows looked tired to me. I wandered into the drugstore on Main Street, surprised at first that it was open: Some of the tubes of fluorescent light along the ceiling had burned out, and I'd thought for a moment that the store had closed early for some reason.

  I had the list of cosmetics and magazines Dana had requested, most of which I figured I could find at the pharmacy, but I knew I'd have to drive to the electronics store in the strip mall north of town if I had any hope at all of finding an AC adapter for a laptop computer.

  I had been staring at the mascara and eye cream a long time when I realized the pharmacist was talking to me. I saw a clock on the wall over his shoulder and was surprised to see it was almost three-thirty.