Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (22 page)

"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.

"Do you need some help?" he asked gently.

"No, thank you," I murmured, and I tried to smile. "I guess I was spacing out a bit."

"Are you okay? Would you like to sit down? A glass of water, maybe?"

I shook my head. "I'm fine," I lied. "I was just lost in thought for a second."

"Try ten minutes."

"Ten minutes?"

"Uh-huh."

The aisle was narrow, and I allowed myself to lean back against the pegboard rack of dusty brushes and combs and hair clips. I kept seeing that seventy-seven-year-old's surgical certificate in my head, and I realized that in the next week Meehan would issue a new one for Dana, too. The male Dana would really and truly be gone, the original Dana would no longer exist. Instead there would be a Meehan Maiden, a born-again woman with a legal piece of paper from the doctor who'd made her to commemorate her birth.

"It's been a really long day," I told him.

"It's almost over," he said, trying to comfort me. The pharmacist was Native American, with a magnificent aquiline face: long and narrow, and the color of a mesa at dusk.

"It is, isn't it?"

"The sun probably fell behind the mountains while you were shopping."

Supposedly, you can't prevent a person from killing himself, if that's what he's determined to do. If someone is resolute in his decision, there's no way in the world to stop him. The same, apparently, was true of the transsexual. Of Dana.

"I should get back," I said.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

"No."

"Visiting someone at the hospital?"

I nodded, and I could tell instantly that he understood.

"You on any medication?"

"No."

"Okay, then," he murmured, and he led me to a corner of the store filled with vials of tiny pills and little bottles of brown tinctures. "I don't normally do this," he added.

"Do what?"

"Offer unsolicited counsel," he said, and he handed me a bottle labeled St. John's Wort. "Each capsule's four hundred and fifty milligrams. Take two a day."

"What will it do?"

"Maybe nothing. Maybe something. It's a natural antidepressant."

"Okay," I said, and I was grateful. There in the store I peeled off the plastic that was pasted around the lid, and I swallowed the first pill that fell into the palm of my hand.

Tuesday morning before Dana was wheeled from the room, we kissed. I could tell I had the orderly's sympathy.

In Trinidad, it seemed, I had everyone's sympathy. Regardless of whether they imagined that Dana and I were siblings, or whether they assumed we had once been married, they felt sorry for me. They felt for my loss, and they viewed me as some wondrous angel of a person for staying with Dana.

"If anybody comes along with the trannie," Maura had said when we'd had a cup of coffee Monday evening, echoing Dr. Meehan's receptionist, "it's Mom. Sometimes Mom will stick around for a few days, but that's about it. And she's usually numb. It's like she's the one who's been given the anesthetic."

Back in Vermont, of course, I didn't have anyone's sympathy. There, I knew, I was merely viewed as a lunatic--or, in some people's minds, as a pervert. Someone who shouldn't be allowed in a classroom with children.

When I could no longer hear the gurney as it squeaked its way down the corridor to the operating room, I sat down in the chair in the corner by Dana's bed and stared out the window at the mountains. I realized it had been almost exactly thirty-six hours since Dana and I had made love for the last time. Quickly I corrected myself: made love for the last time in a way that most people did. Or, at least, could.

We'd had sex before going out to dinner. Despite the hormones and the testosterone blockers--despite the surgery that was imminent--Dana had left one last erection.

"Isn't hotel sex hot?" Dana had asked when we were through, and I'd simply purred my concurrence. I didn't dare open my mouth and say a word, because I knew my voice would break and I would cry if I did. And so neither of us said anything about the fact that this was the last time Dana would ever be inside me.

We might be together as a couple for months or years or even decades; it was possible we'd be making love again by Valentine's Day. ("I tend to heal very quickly," Dana had told me. "Physically, anyway.") But never again would Dana sink into me, or would I reach down and open myself up to--and the pronouns are everything here--him. Never again would we move our hips together the way we once had, never again would I sit upon him and ride him and be, literally, filled. Never again would we be together as a woman and a man.

Dana had reassured me constantly throughout the fall and then as winter arrived that nothing would change between us, except for that act. With the exception of one of the ways we made love, nothing at all would be different.

"It's not like the person is changed on the inside," Dana's friend Jordan said to me once. "When Dana's wheeled into post-op, it'll be the same old Dana. Oh, a fraction of a pound lighter, maybe. But trust me: It will be the same human being underneath all that surgical gauze."

On one level, I prayed that would be the case. But I also realized that my life would be easier in so many ways if Dana was changed and I didn't love the new person Meehan was about to start sculpting in the operating room down the hall. Perhaps the two of us would simply go our separate ways, and people would kid me when we met on the street in Bartlett:

"Was that a weird phase, or what?"

"Allison, we thought you had lost your mind."

"What were you thinking, girl? What
were
you thinking?"

If Dana turned out to be different and we were no longer in love, I could resume the life I had known before we had met, and I would no longer have to plumb those parts of my psyche that were probably best left unexplored.

A male nurse I'd never met before put his head into the room and asked me if I needed anything. I shook my head no. Suddenly I wanted to get away from the thin little bed in which Dana had slept, the sheets still stained with the rust-colored antiseptic that had been painted the night before upon groin and torso and thighs.

The hospital gift shop wasn't open yet but the cafeteria was, and I went there to read newspapers and sip coffee, and to wait for the doctor to finish with Dana.

Chapter 19.

dana

IT'S EASY TO REMOVE THE TESTICLES. YOU SIMPLY make a small midline incision across the scrotum, tie off the spermatic cords, and exhume the testicles from their little balloon of a purse. This is known as an orchidectomy.

It is considerably more difficult to transform a penis into a vagina.

Slice open the penis, beginning a scant two centimeters from the anus. Remember, the balls are no longer a buffer. By now they're in the container with the hazardous waste--though, interestingly, you will have preserved a good measure of scrotal skin, because this parchment will become both the new labia and a free graft to help lengthen the tunnel that will become the vagina.

The incision will run the length of the penis
(longitudinal
is the word the surgeons prefer), extending all the way up to the glans. It is at the perineum where the cut is the deepest.

You will then excavate all of the pulpy, erectile tissue beneath the skin, careful not to inadvertently hack the penile urethra. After the organ has been all but hollowed out, you may clip the tiny tube that links bladder with bathroom. Now, once and for all, sever the flap that is the cylindrical seat of one's life--axis, locus, hub, regardless of whether we are gay or straight, regardless of whether we are happy with the genitalia that accompanied us through our mother's vaginal canal or miserable with the little hermit crab who pokes out its head at the damnedest moments in time.

With the penile skin put aside for the moment--though carefully preserved--you will insert a urinary catheter, a guest who will reside in your patient's groin for almost a week.

At this point, you will shift from doctor to miner, though this may be, in fact, the most difficult part of the operation. It demands both patience and skill. You will bore a vagina, dissecting a crawl space between rectum and bladder. This is the part of the procedure where complications are most likely. There is bleeding. Tissue resistance. And it is easy here to nick the lower intestine, to pierce the fine and sensitive terminus of the hose line that weaves its way through so much of the torso. Fistulae are possible. Abscesses are not uncommon.

Neither, I imagine, are pleasant.

Once the cavity is complete, you will take the penile skin you have painstakingly conserved, and you will turn it inside out as if it were a sock. Bear in mind that though the penile and scrotal skin help line the tunnel, they alone do not determine the ultimate vaginal length. You may want to graft skin as well from buttock and thigh. Pare off a fingernail-size piece of the glans--sensitive, reactive, just bursting with nerves--and insert the rest inside the burrow before you.

Next, take that section of glans and affix it upon a little bulb of spongiosum just above the vagina, as if it were a piece from a little box of Colorforms. This will be the clitoris.

Now, remember that birch bark-like skin that once housed the testes? Pretend you're back in preschool and fashion from it a two-dimensional sugar doughnut. Make sure it's slightly more oval than round. Voila! Instant labia. Apply around the vagina like a life preserver, hooding the clitoris at the top.

Finally, pack the vagina with antibiotic gauze. Be generous; this is no time to cut corners or costs. Expect to load it with at least ten feet, and be prepared to fill it with twenty. The last thing you want is a spanking new vagina that becomes infected or (worse, arguably) begins to narrow before your patient can begin her regime of postoperative dilation--the routinized use of dildos to prevent the tissue inside her from closing.