Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (14 page)

"That's exactly what I'm talking about!"

"We're still friends. It's only natural to care about what she does with her life."

"There are degrees, Will. There are degrees."

"And she's Carly's mom. I have to think about her, too."

"Carly's in college, for God's sake. She's not some impressionable preschooler."

By the time I got up Tuesday morning, Patricia had already left for her office, but my dad was still home. He was finishing the first section of the newspaper while listening to Bob Edwards interview a Peruvian soccer star on
Morning Edition
.

"Did you hear us last night?" he asked.

"Hear what?"

He folded the newspaper into a small rectangle and smiled: "Yeah, right."

I shrugged.

"You know, I didn't tell you about Dana this fall because I figured your mother would have ended the relationship long before you came home from college. I'm sorry. I should have told you."

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down with him. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why should you have told me?"

"So it wouldn't have been such a shock."

"I can deal."

He stretched his legs under the kitchen table and rested his hands in his lap. "All right, then: What do you think of Dana?"

It was eight in the morning, a pretty early hour in the day for me that semester. I considered taking the easy way out and being completely noncommittal and vague. And my dad seemed so pathetic that fall that I seriously considered the uncommunicative-teenager route out of sympathy. A grunt would probably have sufficed.

But that didn't seem fair to Dana, and so I answered with what I thought was a compromise. "Well, she's a little weird and I have my doubts. But I like her. I like her a lot."

"She? Her?"

I realized instantly that I'd chosen exactly the wrong pronouns for my dad. "I guess I could call Dana a him. But I know that's not what she wants."

My dad nodded. "You're very diplomatic. But I think there's a biological imperative here that transcends preference."

"You don't think Dana could be a woman in a man's body?"

"I think Dana could believe such a thing. I think he could believe it with all his heart. But Dana is no more a woman than I'm an NFL linebacker. I could go around all day long in a New England Patriots jersey, but I still wouldn't be six and a half feet tall, I still wouldn't be two hundred and eighty pounds of rock-hard muscle. I still couldn't tackle an NFL running back if my life depended upon it."

"It's not exactly the same thing."

"Maybe not. But Dana's delusions will still affect your mom's life. That's my concern. I don't care what Dana does. Really, I don't. I only care if his actions take a toll on your mother."

"I wouldn't worry so much about Mom. She'll be okay."

"You sound like your stepmother."

"Well, she's right."

"I don't think either of you realize what people will say. What people already
are
saying."

"About Mom and Dana?"

"She's a schoolteacher, honey. She's a schoolteacher in a little village in rural Vermont. This isn't West Hollywood. It isn't even Bennington College."

"They'd do fine there," I agreed.

"People lose their jobs over this sort of thing. They lose their friends. Their families. They lose everything," he said, shaking his head as he spoke.

That night, my dad and Patricia took up exactly where they had left off on Monday, but they were more conscious of my presence down the hall this time, and so they spoke much more softly. Nevertheless, I still heard select words and phrases, and sometimes I'd overhear a whole sentence.

"You're in love with her, admit it," Patricia said at one point, and it sounded as if she was on the verge of tears. Then, a little while later, she said, "I won't quiet down. It's not fair, and you know it. It's not fair and I shouldn't have to take it."

The next morning, my dad and Patricia had both left for work by the time I awoke, and I wouldn't see them again until Friday night. I knew they were seeing their couples counselor during lunch that day, and my hope was that the therapist would find a way to reestablish peace in our time. I wasn't confident, but even a nineteen-year-old hates to see parents fight.

Chapter 12.

will

PATRICIA AND I WENT SKIING EVERY SATURDAY AT the Snow Bowl that December, and not simply because Patricia had purchased a new pair of skis. We donned our goggles and parkas because our therapist had encouraged us to do more things together.

Ironically, at the Snow Bowl I found myself focused even more on Allie and Dana, despite the fact that Allie had never once slipped either of her little feet into the cavernous plastic shell of a ski boot, or looked down from a chair lift and watched her skis bounce like airplane wings in a bumpy sky.

But, I learned, I was always going to associate the Snow Bowl with Allie. It was simple transitivity: I was on the ski team at Middlebury and we practiced at the Snow Bowl, and so the Snow Bowl would always remind me of college. College, in turn, would connect me with Allie.

There were other reasons, too, of course. We all have moments when we think we're at our best, and when we like ourselves just a little too much. Many of my moments like that occurred those winters when I was a very young man, and I'd squeeze in a dozen runs--a dozen runs minimum--a day, and then I'd return to Allie's dorm room, as attentive as a prodigal lover. I'd feel badly that I'd deserted her, and I'd be unfailingly attentive and present.

At least I think I was present.

Present
is one of those words that came up a lot when Patricia and I were in counseling. Apparently, I'm not always as
present
as I think I am. I'm not exactly
absent
--even those months when Dana and Allie were becoming an item, I wasn't
always
alone in my car at the edge of the airport--but it seems I don't always listen.

"What I think Patricia is saying," our therapist constantly said, "is that you hear her. But you're not listening to her. Do you see the difference?"

Certainly I did. Our counselor was a woman about a decade our senior, who was still very attractive. Unfortunately, she took great pride in what she called "active listening," which meant two things. First of all, it meant she was always nodding her head when either Patricia or I spoke, as if she were one of those wooden mascot dolls with a bobbing noggin you buy at the ballpark. You couldn't stare back at her without getting seasick.

Second, it meant that any problems Patricia and I had could be reduced, in her opinion, to my inability to pay attention to what my wife really was saying. Patricia could have had an affair with the seventeen-year-old son of a client--which she most assuredly did not--and in the eyes of our therapist it would have been because I wasn't listening.

Of course, it's easy to be catty about the counselor now. Even then, however, I think I understood she was onto something, if only because of those Saturdays Patricia and I spent together on the ski slopes. I'd recall college and my first years with Allie, and I'd remember how, once, I probably
had
been a better listener.

One Saturday that winter, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I was waiting for Patricia at the bottom of the mountain and watching the other skiers motor downhill. I found myself ogling a slim young woman in navy blue ski pants. I noticed her midway down her final descent toward the base lodge, and I could see that she had terrific form. Then she abruptly cut her skis into the powder and came to a stop about twenty yards distant. She was chatting with another woman, facing away from me as she pulled off her goggles and her headband. Her parka was yellow and only fell to her waist, which meant I stared for a long moment at her rear.

Forgive me: Any man would have.

Then she turned toward me and I realized she wasn't a woman at all. She was a young man. A young racer. Me, perhaps, two decades earlier.

My hair, too, had been long.

Patricia suddenly pulled up beside me, jabbing her poles into the snow and leaning upon them.

"See someone you know?" she asked, catching her breath.

"I thought I did," I said. "But I was wrong."

I have a friend who insists that every man who marries multiple times essentially marries the same woman. This guy went to college with Allie and me, and now he's a professor and psychological researcher in the Northwest. In the study for which he's probably known best, he surveyed literally thousands of men who married two and three times, and then "profiled" their spouses. He determined that these men's wives had much more in common than might have been apparent if you had just glanced at the women as they strolled toward wedlock in churches and synagogues and city halls. Even those men who handled midlife particularly badly and convinced young things half their age to witness their physical declines up close and personal were usually marrying much younger versions of their first wives.

There were exceptions, of course. There always are. But, he insisted, the idiosyncrasies of what we love as we age don't really change.

Either I'm one of those exceptions or my friend's research is hokum. I think I first fell in love with Patricia because she was in so many ways so very different from Allie. We met at a car wash in the waning days of yet another northern New England mud season. I don't think Allie took any of our vehicles to a car wash in all the years we were together or married. It just never crossed her mind that she might want a car that was cleaner than it could get from a night out in the rain, or that a backseat wasn't in reality a massive knapsack in which one tossed all the small necessities a person might need on the road: A box of tissues, an extra lipstick, an aerosol can of an "instant tire repair." The old cassettes you no longer listened to, and that book on tape you haven't quite finished. A pair of winter weather wiper blades, and all those books you've been meaning to donate to the library. Dozens of Magic Markers, small (and large) slabs of oak tag. Maps of Vermont and maps of New England and maps of New York. A map of, of all things, Arkansas that AAA sends you by mistake. ("Where else would you keep a road map?" Allie had asked me when I inquired why in the world she had a map of Arkansas in her automobile.)

The day Patricia and I met, one of the water jets at the car wash needed to be unclogged, and while an attendant took a few minutes to repair it, the two of us climbed from our seats and stared up at the surprisingly warm March sun. And then, still beside our cars, we started to chat. After a moment I wandered over to her--it would have been rude not to, I decided--and I stood beside her.

Resting upon the backseat of her car was a burgundy leather briefcase, clasped shut. Nothing more. Nothing else on the seat, and nothing on the floor. The passenger seat was empty, too.

And in the cup holder just off the dashboard was an official Vermont Public Radio plastic auto-mug with safety lid.

"New car?" I asked, and I motioned through the glass windows.

She knew instantly why I was asking, and she smiled and offered a self-deprecating shrug. "I've had it a little over a year," she said. "Isn't it awful to be so compulsive?"

We had the chance to speak for a good ten minutes before the water jet was fixed, and I learned then that she was a lawyer and that her office and her town house were as tidy as her car. I learned that she swam and she skied, and she wasn't dating anyone seriously.

The following Saturday we went skiing together on the heavy spring slush that exists at the tops of the mountains, and it was so warm that we were able to ski in only windbreakers and turtlenecks. Already the sun felt higher at noon than it had earlier that week over the car wash, and the snow was dazzlingly bright.

That car wash, incidentally, is very near the Burlington airport. It is on the opposite side of the runway edge where some years later I would find myself stopping to watch the planes come and go. But when the wind is right, the planes climb and descend just above that car wash, too, their wheels stiff-legged below their bellies, and the wind was right on the day Patricia and I met. Twice when we were speaking turbo props zoomed over us--one coming to Vermont, and one leaving.

If, somehow, I could watch a film of the two of us standing together at that moment, I wonder if even then my gaze was straying up toward the planes as they passed overhead. I tend to doubt it. But one can never be sure.