Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "That's a beautiful headband," he added, and I was flattered. "Blue and yellow look nice in your hair."

  Granted, Allison got a much bigger and longer hug than I did, but the two of them had a lot more history together. I think it was in fact that evening that for the first time I really saw the friendship that had developed over the years between Will Banks and Allison, and finally understood it. After all, that first evening he joined us for dinner was the weekend Patricia had left, and he was just a basket case. The second time, too. Mostly, Allison was offering him emotional triage.

  When he had dinner with us that third time, however, he was already pulling himself together and preparing to get on with a new phase in his life. There was a big cutout in the wall between the kitchen and the den, and I watched them chatting while I finished preparing dinner. They looked almost like siblings.

  At least that's what I told myself then. God forbid they should look like lovers. The last thing I wanted was to somehow effect a reconciliation between my girlfriend and her ex-husband. I know well how distress can breed romance--I don't especially like support groups, but I know what can happen--and those two people were certainly in the midst of periods in their lives that could only be called blue. And so when I saw the two of them reminiscing about their years in college together or pondering the self-possessed young woman who was in actuality their daughter, I had a few pangs of apprehension: As I peeled the pears for the fruit salad. As I set the table. As I opened a second bottle of wine.

  The two of them seemed to laugh so easily together that I actually felt guilty about the way my presence had strained their relationship throughout the fall.

  Dinner, however, reassured me. Allison sat at the head of the table, surrounded on either side by her current and her former lover, and she sat just a hair closer to me. Twice she stroked the back of my hand when she spoke, and she squeezed it lovingly during dessert, after she tasted the white chocolate mousse.

  Will was charming, and downright chivalrous when he talked about Patricia. Penitent, too. He understood what mistakes he had made, and his self-deprecation was utterly endearing.

  But he hadn't come to see us to discuss the wreck of his marriage. He'd come to our house to talk about radio. Midway through dinner he brought up his idea for a program about us, and I was fascinated by the way his hands and face were transformed when the subject changed from the turmoil in his personal world to his professional passion. Suddenly his hands came to life. I realized that prior to that moment he hadn't once used his hands or his fingers when he'd spoken: It was as if he was conditioned from two decades in radio to understand that hands weren't helpful in conversation.

  But clearly I was wrong. He was simply more restrained--his hands, too--when he was talking about himself. When the subject was radio or radio programming, however, he was like an orchestra conductor: His eyes grew animated and his head practically swayed with enthusiasm. He put his knife and his fork down and leaned into the table when he first began outlining his concept, and his fingers practically danced with excitement. All ten of them. It was like he was playing the dining room air.

  When he was done, I was sold. I don't court publicity, but I saw the short series as a wonderful way to defend my ladylove. I know, that sounds butch. But it's exactly how I felt. I was looking for the chance--any chance--to do something to help.

  Allison, on the other hand, was somewhat less enthusiastic. "Absolutely not," she said.

  "Think about it. Just think about it for a few days," Will said.

  "No. Absolutely not," she said again.

  "Okay," Will said, and he leaned back in his chair, and his hands and his face wilted. He picked up his fork and returned to the curried carrots.

  "These really are delicious," he told me.

  I wasn't surprised by Allison's aversion to the notion of a radio story, but I was shocked by how quickly Will had backed down.

  "Allison," I said, "this is a great opportunity. This is a chance to make the world see how horribly you've been treated!"

  "Why do I want to advertise that?"

  "Because people shouldn't be allowed to treat you that way."

  "Our lives are private."

  "People shouldn't be allowed to treat anyone that way," I said.

  "I would think you'd be used to all this," she said.

  "Dear heart, I didn't mean me. I meant your students. That Lindsey Lessard child you care so much about. That Audrey LaFontaine. They've lost a great teacher."

  "Your opinion. There are parents who'd disagree with you."

  "Oh, Allison, all I'm saying is that there's a human cost here, and we're not the only humans involved. But we are the only ones who can present a certain perspective. People need to know what you're feeling. What I'm feeling."

  "I really don't want to be a poster child."

  "And I don't think Dana is saying you should be," Will said. "But she's right. There are people behaving very badly in this town, and if the rest of the state knew you--and I mean both of you--I think it would shame some of our neighbors into decency."

  Allison and I didn't look at each other as he spoke; I don't think either of us wanted to call attention to what had just transpired. But we'd both heard it, we'd both caught it. She's. Will had used a feminine pronoun. He had referred to me as a woman.

  It was that moment, I believe, that changed Allison's mind about being interviewed. Not the horrid piece of paper someone slipped into her in-box, not the frustrating meetings she seemed to have to endure almost weekly. Not the vicious graffito that would appear a few days later on the front door. It was the realization that she was no longer alone when she looked at me and saw a woman.

  Chapter 30.

  allison

  WE HELD A TALENT SHOW THAT YEAR TOWARD the end of February to break up the monotony of winter. We'd never had one before, but one of the teachers and I--for wholly different reasons, of course--were feeling that the season had conspired with the town to make winter seem particularly claustrophobic, and we needed to do something to take our minds off the cold and the snow and the ubiquitous road salt.

  Glenn Frazier was comfortable with the idea, but when we were alone he told me that he had heard rumblings about some skit one group of my sixth-graders had performed some time ago during the annual end-of-the-year production for parents.

  "It wasn't some skit," I said. "It was the finale. And it wasn't a small group. It was my entire class."

  "They were in bathing suits?"

  "And grass skirts. We were doing African dancing."

  "Well, just remember. We live in rural Vermont."

  I restrained myself from reminding him that I'd lived in Bartlett far longer than he. Instead I reassured him: "It'll be fine. Everyone will have a wonderful evening."

  The kids were always given a fair amount of rope to do whatever they desired in those June performances, though we adults always worked with them to make sure that their dancing or their skit had at least a semblance of choreography and cohesion. But it was still a pretty casual affair, and that was pretty much what happened that February.

  A group of the youngest girls in the school who took ballet together in Middlebury did a few twirls and pirouettes, while their male classmates jumped around the stage like movie ninjas. A few children played the piano, and one little girl played the flute with her mother. Twin boys played the violin.

  A fifth-grade class that was in the midst of a unit on global climate change performed a truly disarming skit about the frightening numbers of three-legged frogs that were being discovered throughout the Lake Champlain Basin. A fourth-grade class built a sugar house onstage out of cardboard, and wrote two surprisingly clever songs about maple syrup and mud--without question, Vermont's two most salient features in March.

  "Busby Berkeley Visits the Ozarks," Dana dubbed that part of the production later that night, but she did admit that the kids looked pretty cute when they danced around in their mud boots and checked flannel shirts. S
he watched the show from the back corner of the auditorium, standing in the dark about six feet from a lit exit sign. She wanted to come, but she didn't want to be seen. And so she arrived a few minutes late and left a few minutes early, which meant, unfortunately, that she missed the curtain call.

  My own students had wanted to do something to support me, but I had refused to allow them. I didn't want them any more involved in my situation than they already were by the nature of the fact that they'd wound up in my class six months earlier. Instead the group fixated upon aliens (Was there a connection in their opinion between my situation and a Martian's? They denied that they thought so) and asked me to help them develop a series of hip-hop moves that would, they hoped, look slightly robotic. I did, and the skit went off without a hitch.

  But then there was the curtain call. I was working backstage, and after the final sketch I went to help Molly Cochran round up her six-year-olds. My eleven-year-olds, I knew, were capable of marching back onto the stage in a line, holding hands, and bowing once or twice during their parents' applause. We'd gone over it during the dress rehearsal, and it was clear that they understood the drill.

  Besides, most of them were veterans of the June theatricals.

  Consequently, I was as surprised as the audience when my entire class--granted, it was a small class by then--reappeared on the polyurethaned wood floor in drag. All of the girls had changed into pants and were wearing their fathers' neckties and blazers, and Sally Warwick and Renee Wood had gone so far as to paint black mustaches just above their lips with eyeliner. And the boys? There was Jeremy Roscoe in his big sister's field hockey kilt, and Schuyler Brown in what must have been one of his mother's summer skirts. Ethan LaPree had climbed inside a dress that was covered with sunflowers, and Sam Reynolds--my gifted young mathematician--had found a blond wig somewhere and was wearing a hoop in each ear the size of a bracelet.

  They paraded onto the stage with the rest of the kids as if there was nothing unusual about their costumes, and for the first time in my life I understood that expression about a lump in one's throat. Somehow, swallowing and weeping were connected.

  "You did okay with those kids, Allison," Molly whispered beside me, and she patted my back.

  In the audience, small groups of parents stood up for them, and others whistled and hooted. The boys in the dresses loved it, and Schuyler and Ethan and Jeremy did a few kicks together as if they were cancan dancers or Rockettes.

  "I'm going to assume you had nothing to do with this," Glenn Frazier said to me. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he looked more bemused than disgusted.

  "Of course not," I managed to murmur, though I was still unsure what would happen when I opened my mouth.

  "Didn't think so," he said.

  I realized I was very lucky that moment to be a sixth-grade teacher. The girls, of course, would wear masculine shirts and pants at least some days for the rest of their lives. But the boys? If they had been a single year older and started junior high school, they wouldn't have been caught dead in women's clothes. Likewise, if they'd been a year or two younger, they wouldn't have had the confidence and the wherewithal to pull off this sort of statement.

  At eleven, however, for both the boys and the girls the absurdity of dress was still clear. It was all costume. It was still fun to dress up. It just didn't matter if the person with whom I lived happened to outfit herself in what we called a blouse or a shirt, pants or a skirt. It was, most of the time, all just denim and cotton and wool.

  When we finally pulled the curtain shut in front of the kids, my students ran to me, giggling and giving one another high fives as they approached.

  "How do I look?" Ethan LaPree asked.

  I bent over slightly so we were at eye level. "I think yellow's your color," I said as earnestly as I could. "And sunflowers in February are a very cheery statement. Thank you."

  He shrugged, and before I could say another word to Ethan, I had to compliment all of the boys in their dresses and all of the girls in their pants, and then--at their insistence--take a group picture for the class photo album.

  "Were you surprised?" Sally Warwick asked me.

  "Absolutely," I said.

  She grinned, and she was still blinking from the flash. For a moment the image was strobelike, surreal--a scene from a film from the Weimar Republic. Cabaret done by dwarfs. But the moment passed, and suddenly Sally was once again just a smart little girl with a drawn-on mustache. I hugged her and she hugged me, and then I embraced every single one of my students.

  The next morning, we found the words on the door. Dana discovered them just before breakfast, when she was getting the daily paper out of the newspaper box.

  I'll never know if it was a response to my students' show of support the night before--a message, perhaps, to remind me that though a dozen eleven-year-olds were on my side, a large part of the town was still very angry--or simple coincidence.

  Saturday morning we had woken up together, happier than we'd been in a very long time. Dana was disappointed that she'd gone home before the curtain call, but she was nevertheless touched. I think she even thought we might have begun winning over some of the more reactionary personalities in town. Certainly that hope had crossed my mind.

  But then we wandered downstairs, and I shuffled into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and warm up the banana muffins Dana had baked the day before, and she went outside to retrieve our newspaper. When she joined me in the kitchen, I could see instantly that she was seething: Her eyes were slits and she was red in the face.

  "What?" I asked. "What happened?"

  She rolled the newspaper into a tube--a baton as thick as a baseball bat--and swatted the top slat of a ladder-back chair.

  "People are pigs," she said. "They disgust me. This provincial piece-of-shit town disgusts me. You know what? We really should move. Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of Bartlett. Out of Vermont. Go where nobody has the slightest idea who we are," she raged, and then she sat down in the chair and put her head on the table.

  "Outside?" I asked, and I motioned toward the street. I understood that whatever had happened had happened outdoors--someone had said something to her, perhaps, or shouted something at her--but she'd revealed little else.

  "God, I'd clean it off before you could see it," she continued. "But I can't. It's dry. It's paint, and it's dry. We'll probably need a new door."

  I put down the butter dish and left her in the kitchen. I tried to look calm, which meant walking down the hallway, though I wanted to run. When I swung open the front door, I saw there were two words spray-painted upon it in massive red letters, and for a second I assumed I was reading a pair of nouns--oddly, it seemed, a singular and a plural--but then I realized the first word was meant to be an adjective.

  A part of me wanted to curl up in the cold on the stoop; a part of me wanted to roll into a little ball and close my eyes, hoping--like a child--that when I opened them it would be gone. I'd never seen such a thing written so big. But it was a small part of me, and mostly I was fine. Really. Maybe if Dana hadn't been so angry that she was close to tears, I might have lost my composure. But I doubt it. Instead I simply closed the door and took a deep breath and then returned to the kitchen.

  "It's completely inarticulate," I said. "We'll just paint over it."

  "It's February! It's too cold to paint over it!"

  "We'll put a heater on the porch. We'll--"

  "We can't make it go away! Not till the spring! Don't you see? You can spray something like that on a door in this weather, but you can't really ... paint."

  Perhaps I would have been as enraged as Dana if I hadn't already been called a pervert in my own classroom. If I hadn't already found myself referred to as a kind of obscenity. Perhaps the Internet picture someone had left in my in-box had helped to prepare me for the affront on my house.

  But I think there's also a chance I would have been fine even without that warm-up, or without the need to be strong for Dana. The
night before, I'd been given a gift by my students that made the slur on the door seem particularly small-minded and stupid. Juvenile. The night before, my students had shown me they cared for me, regardless of what the adults around them may have thought, or what their peers may have been saying.

  Moreover, I realized with an almost intellectual detachment that the two words on the wood had far more power when they were used separately. Individually, each was offensive--one was probably the word most universally and thoroughly despised by women. God knows it had always made me bristle. And the other, though less potent, certainly had the potential to generate a good amount of hostility in heterosexual men.

  But together? They were by no means laughable. But they were also oxymoronic. Implausible. And, in a way, as silly as they were grim:

  .FAGGOT CUNTS

  .

  "We will cover it up," I said to Dana, and I pulled a chair beside her and sat down. "I'm sure the hardware store will have something."

  "God, it's horrid. Horrid!"

  "Seriously, it won't be that difficult to cover up. Trust me, I'm sure."

  "It's just so mean. Why would someone do such a thing?"

  "You know the answer to that."

  "Really, I don't."

  "Well, trust me: The hardware store will have a solution. It will."

  She sighed. "I hope so. God, I hope so."

  "It will."