Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (17 page)

Olivia kept looking up at me as we walked, as if she wanted to ask me something. As if something about me confused her. I had thought I'd looked pretty good that morning when I'd gotten dressed, or at least pretty female. And so her gaze was shaking my confidence a tiny bit.

Finally, as we were emerging from the air-conditioning into the tropical heat--I could literally feel the waves rising up from the asphalt--she took my free hand and said, "Aunt Dana, your earring is awfully dangly. I think it's gonna fall off."

I touched my lobe, and she was absolutely right. It was about to fall off. And so there in Section B of the parking lot I stopped and knelt and planted a big, lipstick-laced kiss on her cheek.

I slept in the room that had been my room as a child, though it looked nothing like it had two decades earlier. Once I started graduate school and it was clear to my mother that I'd never be living there again, she converted it into a bedroom for guests--of which they've always had scads. That meant that everything was now an equatorial white, like every other room in the house, as if we didn't have air-conditioning squalls roaring through the place twenty-four hours a day.

My mother grew orchids and had placed two of her more spectacular plants in the room to cheer me.

I hadn't been back in two Christmases, and I'd seen my parents only once that whole time. The autumn before I'd met Allison, they'd flown to Vermont for a week of leaf peeping, and we'd had breakfast and dinner together two days in a row when they were in Burlington. It wasn't a disaster, but they complained constantly about how much colder Vermont was than Coconut Grove, and it didn't help at all when, the first night we went out to eat, our frolicsome waiter overheard that my parents were from Florida and welcomed them with great histrionics to the "Queen City." My father was convinced that I knew the fellow and had put him up to it.

"No, Dad," I'd said, "that really is Burlington's nickname."

"Queen City?"

"Yup."

"Is that why you settled here?"

And my mother kept hugging herself, as if she were freezing to death on an ice floe. "Polar tundra," she kept saying. "You must have absolutely no growing season here!"

She also couldn't believe that there wasn't a man in my life I was hiding.

"You get checked for AIDS, don't you?" she asked before they continued on their way to Stowe. "It's very controllable now, you know," she said, and she gave me the sort of perfunctory squeeze that she conferred upon her women friends when they'd run into one another at charity events at Viscaya or the Playhouse.

Early that afternoon when Isabel and I arrived at the family hacienda--a faux adobe that mixed white stucco walls with black wrought-iron railing--both our mother and father were home. I wasn't surprised Mother was there, since her tennis games were Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she rarely did lunch on a Friday. Her women's group met Wednesday mornings.

But I was shocked to find Father there, too. Isabel was also. We had both assumed that I would take a runway walk first for my mother and then, once whichever tranquilizer she was on that day had had a chance to mellow her out, unveil the new me for dear Dad. One parent at a time, that was my plan, in each case with lovely, supportive, maternal Isabel as my emotional brace.

Well, it didn't happen that way. Apparently Dad had run out of things to develop, at least for the afternoon. It looked as though the Everglades, so long as I was in town, would be safe.

"Well, Dana," he said as we walked in the front door, "you really are one very brave ..."

"Yes?" I asked when he couldn't bring himself to finish his sentence.

"Let me look at you," my mother said, and I put down the bag I was carrying and offered a demure little spin in their entryway.

"I saved Aunt Dana's earring," Olivia cooed in the brief silence, and my father picked her up and kissed her. He was wearing tennis shorts, and I realized he probably hadn't gone into the office for even a few hours that morning. I was very flattered.

"Oh, good for you! I'm sure your Unc--I'm sure Dana was very grateful," he said.

"Have you had lunch?" my mother asked.

"Lunch?"

"It's the meal we eat between breakfast and dinner," my father said.

"Though
meal
isn't exactly the right word for Mom's midday fare these days," Isabel added. "I'd say it's more of a drink: eleven fruits and vegetables in a juicer."

"Sometimes I add yogurt, sweetheart."

"You asked to look at me, and you haven't rendered any opinion!" I said. I tried to make it sound as if my indignation was a joke, but I was still hurt that my mother hadn't told me what she thought.

"You've lost a lot of weight," my father said. "Too much, I think. You're as bad as your--"

"Mother?" I said, wondering whether I was trying to be helpful or throw a bomb.

"Yes."

"You're a big man, Father," I said. "I don't want to be either."

"Either?"

"Big. Man."

"I get it."

Olivia climbed down from his arms and started petting Coconut, one of the two springer spaniels my mother had brought home from the animal shelter a few years earlier. As usual, Coconut--like her sister--had a buzz cut. Springers are hairy little pups, and my mother hated pulling tufts of fur from the rattan, or finding matted hair on her white upholstery.

"You don't want to get sick," my mother said.

"I won't get sick!"

"Are you getting exercise?"

Isabel--a woman who, clearly, should be raising her sweet child in some embassy overseas because she is indeed a born diplomat--took my hand and squeezed it. "I'll tell you what I think," she said to me. "I think you'll have to tell me where you got those leggings. And you'll have to tell me what you do to make your skin look so damn healthy!"

Before I could answer, my father said it was officially Friday afternoon and he was going to go get a beer. Clearly, however, it wasn't that he wanted that beer or he needed a drink. It was the
going
part that mattered, it was his need to leave the hallway where we were standing. I looked at my watch: His urge to flee around me had kicked in barely two minutes after my arrival--conceivably a record, I thought.

"So, Mother, tell me: Do you like my new look? Is it better or worse than you feared? I want to know. Honestly."

My mother looked down at her granddaughter and then back at me. She sighed, and then her eyes started to water: big drops meandering down a face that looked elderly but wrinkle-free. The face-lift visage.

"You look fine, honey," she whispered, her words partly lost in her throat. "So fine I don't think you need to do the rest."

"The rest?"

"You know," she mumbled, wiping her face with her fingers. "The operation. I don't think you need it. Please don't. Please. Don't."

Olivia looked up from Coconut and asked her mother, "Is Aunt Dana sick?"

And though my sister quickly smiled at her little girl and shook her head no; though my mother turned away from us, hiding her face in the painting of a spiky cockscomb shrub by the stairs; though my father was in the kitchen, taking as long as he could to pop the top of a can of beer; I knew that if any one of them had been asked the question alone--even my truly dear younger sister--they would have said, with varying degrees of sympathy and support, "Yes, Olivia. Your aunt Dana is sick."

Though my father would not have used the word
aunt
.

The closest thing my mother has to an office is the terrace by the cafe at Viscaya--the massive "villa" James Deering built on Biscayne Bay almost a century ago. It isn't quite as jaw-dropping opulent as Hearst Castle, but it isn't shabby: thirty-four rooms, tons of marble, and ten acres of formal gardens and fountains. It's now a museum, which is why my mother lunches there with some frequency: She's on the board.

That, I imagine, and the fact that she likes to watch the fashion photographers do their clothing shoots. It keeps her a season or two ahead.

When my parents took me there Saturday morning, a group of young things were preening in gauzy lingerie in a roped-off corner of one of the white marble balconies overlooking the ocean. It wasn't the sort of fashion shoot that was going to interest my mother, but I was happy for my dad. Though he had to have breakfast in public with me, he at least had the pleasure of watching young girls in tiny panties pretend they were harlots.

Truth be told, it wasn't bad for me either. As usual, I lusted. I learned. I coveted.

But my father was all business and may actually have paid less attention to the models than even my mother. He was hoping he could talk me out of my surgery, and he was going to play what he thought was his last card. Not necessarily what he believed was his best or even his second-best card--he'd played those the night before, asking me first if I understood the physical complications that were possible after the surgery, and then whether I'd really and truly digested its finality.

He ordered a ham and cheese croissant, asking--as only my father can--for extra ham and mustard. My mother and I had the tomatoes stuffed with tuna salad.

"I know you think you have to do this," my father began, "and I know you think your mother and I are opposed to it simply because we view you as our son."

"Uh-huh."

"There's more to it than that."

"Okay." A new model appeared in a white camisole and a very demure pair of white cotton panties. As the stylist, a man, was adjusting them, I realized that the woman was actually wearing two briefs so there wouldn't be any bulges or bumps from her pubic hair. It made for an almost preternaturally smooth presentation. I wondered if the transgendered had discovered that little trick. I knew I hadn't.

"You have to understand that there are some things you're going to experience that you can't possibly have endured. Things your mother and sister have had to go through. Things no person should have to tolerate."

I considered placing my hand on my father's and saying something flippant:
Father, don't worry. I won't start getting a period at thirty-five
.

Father, don't fret. I'll live if a construction worker pats me on the ass
.

But he was so sincere that I held my tongue. My father may not approve of me--he may think I'm completely insane--but I don't believe he has ever stopped loving me. And his delivery was so earnest that a part of me actually feared that something profoundly horrible had indeed happened to my sister and my mother. A mugging, perhaps. Maybe they'd been victimized by a pervert in a trench coat.

Perhaps it had been something much, much worse.

Based on my father's tone, it was certainly possible. Yet I assumed I would have heard if such a thing had occurred. One would have thought that someone would have gotten on the phone and told even me, the transsexual disappointment in northern Vermont.

"I'm a businessman," my father continued, "and I'm in a business where I see a lot of men and women. I see a lot of men and women working together. And I know a little bit about what goes on at the TV station where your sister works. I know people there."

My mother watched her tuna and her tomato, instead of looking at either my father or me. I realized we were all wearing sunglasses, and I wondered if we looked like a family of drug dealers to the tourists who were at Viscaya to see the house and the gardens and the scantily clad models. Mid-morning, we were the only people on the terrace who were actually eating.

"I hope you're not about to tell me something hideous has happened to Isabel," I said. "Or to you, Mother."

My father finished his orange juice and sat back in his deck chair. "I'm talking discrimination, Dana. In business. In life. I can tell you flat-out as a businessman that discrimination remains a fact of life in the workplace. In the world! There's a producer at Isabel's station who must earn seven or eight thousand dollars a year more than she does, even though he isn't half as good. Know why?"

"Let me guess: because he's male?"

"Damn straight. And while I try to make sure that the women in my firm are on the exact same pay scale as the men, I know how the companies we work with behave. I know how they treat their women."

"Most of the businesses you work with are construction companies--a group not exactly known for their forward-thinking personnel practices."

"They work with banks, too," my mother said softly.