Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (24 page)

Then, once I knew what Molly knew, I'd call my mom in Colorado.

We sat on the couch by the woodstove, and Molly showed me class pictures.

"Lord, Chrystal's in sixth grade now," she said, shaking her head. "I adored Chrystal. Still do. She would bring me a drawing every day when she was in my class, including these absolute horrors she made with something called Blush Art."

"Blush Art?"

"It's just like it sounds. Little pads of cosmetic blush you pat on your paper. It comes with stencils, so the pictures are pretty generic. Unicorns. Cakes. Women with very big hair. The problem is that the stuff stains, and so the year I taught Chrystal, I had a dry-cleaning bill that rivaled the national debt. Humongous. Just humongous. But I love that girl, she is incredibly sweet."

"And her parents are behind the petition?"

"I don't know if they're behind it. But I promise you they've signed it."

Molly lived in a house that had once been a barn, on land that had once been a cornfield. She lived about a mile and a half outside of the village, so I had borrowed my dad's car and driven there. And though I had called first, Molly and her husband had two boys in elementary school--one in the second grade and one in the fourth--and so their house was completely trashed, despite the warning they'd had that I was coming. Every time either of us moved, we were gored by one of the plastic aliens her kids had left in the cushions of the couch.

"I don't know the family," I said.

"You probably wouldn't. They live out in New Haven. And you can bet that if your mom and Dana stay together, your mom won't get to know them real well either: They'll either begin to home-school their little Chrystal, or they'll demand that she's transferred into Carolyn Chapel's class," she said, referring to the school's other sixth-grade teacher. When I was eleven, Mrs. Chapel had been my teacher.

"It must be really hard to home-school a kid," I said.

"It is. As a parent, you have to feel awfully strongly about something to do it."

Upstairs we heard a thump and then laughter. I must have looked up toward the ceiling reflexively, because Molly was quick to reassure me that it was only her husband, Clayton, and the two boys. They were supposed to be reading, but it was clear they were wrestling.

"Let's see, Audrey LaFontaine: Her family won't be happy about this either."

"No?"

"Nope. Fundamentalists. They're also in that church in East Medford. Same with the McCurdys. Of course, there could be worse things to happen to your mother than to lose Brian McCurdy."

"A difficult child?"

"Actually, just the opposite. But needy beyond belief, and guaranteed to fail. Your mom always cares way too much for kids like that. She lets them bring her down."

I didn't know Brian McCurdy, but I did know his older sister. Terry. Terry was the sort of girl who was never invited to the really good parties, and tended to accessorize badly. She was also from a house where it was clear bathing was optional, and so she wasn't very popular. Nevertheless, I'd always felt bad for her, and in eleventh grade I'd made it a personal self-improvement goal to eat lunch with her at least once a week in the cafeteria. I'd even suggested we take driver's ed together, though it had meant sitting in the backseat of a Dodge Dynasty with her for an hour a day in the spring, a formidable task given her family's evident indifference to laundry and soap.

Of course, self-improvement has its limits when you're sixteen: I never had her over to my house.

"What's Terry doing now?" I asked.

"Haven't a clue. But working somewhere, I imagine. She was, in her own way, very industrious. Unlike her brother, who's merely exasperating."

I knew that Brian and Terry were part of a pretty large brood, and so it crossed my mind that poor Terry was simply spending her life baby-sitting.

"Let's see," Molly murmured as she flipped open another folder with another class picture. "The Duncans will be trouble. And so will the Hedderiggs."

"Are you worried?" The question had come out abruptly. I'd meant to ease into my concerns more gracefully, though I'm sure Molly knew I was anxious. That was, after all, why I'd come by.

Without looking up from the picture she answered, "A little. But it's like your stepmother said: They can't do anything. Really, they can't."

"They can just, what ... circulate a petition?"

"Actually, they can do something much worse than that," she said, and she looked straight at me and her face became serious. "Much worse."

"What?"

"Meetings, Carly Banks. They can make us have meetings."

Chapter 21.

allison

IN THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY AFTER HER SURGERY, I grew accustomed to talking to Dana while her feet were higher than her head. Three times a day her bed was tilted this way, while warm pads soaked in saline were applied to her new vagina. She'd fold her arms across her chest and I'd sit in the chair with the view of the Huajatolla, and we'd chat about nothing. The weather in Trinidad. The weather in Bartlett. Whether her painkillers were better or worse than a daiquiri.

Sometimes she'd reach over for my hand, and she'd kiss the tips of my fingers.

Outwardly, she didn't look any more feminine than she had a week or two earlier, and in some ways she may have looked less: She wore little makeup in the hospital, and her hair had fallen flat because she couldn't wash it. But she seemed more womanly to me, and sometimes she seemed downright maternal.

"You are taking care of yourself, aren't you?" she asked me Wednesday night--New Year's Day--barely thirty-six hours after her surgery.

"Of course I am," I said. That night when I returned to my hotel room, waiting for me were chocolates and flowers and a half dozen paperback books she'd ordered for me before we'd even left Vermont.

The surgery had gone well, and there seemed to be no postoperative complications on the horizon, and so on Friday morning Dana suggested that I take our rental car and go for a drive. She thought it would do me good to get out--out of the hospital, and out of Trinidad--and she reassured me she would be fine. She said she had plenty to read.

I considered driving northwest toward the Huajatolla themselves, but I was warned that there was a chance of snow in the forecast, and decided I probably shouldn't go sight-seeing at twelve and thirteen thousand feet.

And so I drove south through the Raton Pass--a mere seventy-eight hundred feet--and into New Mexico. Suddenly I was in the desert and it was warm. Amarillo, the green sign said, was only 214 miles distant, and I estimated that the westernmost edge of the Texas panhandle was barely two hours away. I decided I would go there. I would go east. I had no expectations that I would ever see Amarillo--nor even the promising red dot on the map called Dalhart--but I thought I could reach a little black speck called Texline by early afternoon.

Sometimes I'd listen to country music, something I never did in Vermont, and for an hour mid-morning I listened to a radio shrink I picked up on a talk station out of Denver. Usually the people who called into those shows struck me as pathetic and predictable at once: They were men who had extramarital affairs and now had gonorrhea, women who had fought with their husbands and then slept with their brothers-in-law, aunts (never uncles) who were annoyed that their nieces and nephews never sent thank-you notes.

Often there were men who wore women's clothing in secret and were wondering if they should tell their wives ... but none that day. Frequently there were women who were toying with the idea of a lesbian dalliance ... but not that morning. Regularly, it seemed, there were women and men who were involved in a relationship that no one around them seemed to understand ... but no one that Friday seemed to have such a dilemma. For the first time in my life, my problems actually seemed bigger than theirs.

Though, of course, every bit as self-created.

"You got yourself into this mess, and it's up to you to get yourself out of it," the doctor told most of the callers. "It's your life."

Yet the sun seemed higher in New Mexico than in Colorado, and I realized I was warmer outside than I'd been any moment since early October. It was seventy degrees in the town of Clayton, and I bought a sandwich at a diner and sat alone at the picnic table in the parking lot. I convinced myself that I really didn't have any problems at all.

In the days immediately after Carly was born, I couldn't imagine Will would ever want to have sex with me again. He'd been in the delivery room with me, and I feared he'd been present for too much bloody show to view me as something sexual. To find me arousing.

"Not true," he insisted, and he was comforting and sweet. "The mind compartmentalizes that sort of thing. Besides, I'm a guy. I spend my life in heat."

Sure enough, six or seven weeks after Carly had joined us, we were making love while she slept in the nearby bassinet. Though at first we were both nervous and tentative, we got the hang of it again soon enough. Will, it was clear, was able to separate the vulva from which his daughter had emerged from the vulva he would make love to as a husband.

I wondered if I could do the same thing with Dana. I worried. I couldn't stop thinking about the gauze and the fluids and the blood. I couldn't stop thinking about the surgery.

On the steps of the library in Texline, I ate some of the chocolates that Dana had given me. They melted fast in the sun, and within moments the chocolate had the consistency of mayonnaise.

There I fantasized that I would climb back into my rental and drive on to Dalhart. Hartley. Dumas. I would reach Amarillo by dinner, I imagined, spend the night there, and then continue east along old Route 66. I would lose myself in a Texas town with the magical name of Shamrock.

Shamrock, on old Route 66.

Or, perhaps, I would veer south of the highway and sleep in Goodnight. Maybe, instead, I'd decide to spend the rest of my life in Groom, an interstate diamond almost exactly equidistant between Shamrock and Amarillo.

Groom, Goodnight, and Shamrock. Was there a patch on the planet with three towns with more promising names? Not likely.

Of course, I went to none of those places. I turned around and headed back into Colorado. I went west and northwest, for a time driving straight into the low winter sun.

But in Capulin I did stop and visit the crater from a ten-thousand-year-old volcano, and there I wished that I'd worn sandals as I walked through the chokecherries and brown field grass that surrounded it. And in Raton I watched children in short pants climb upon a cluster of playground dinosaurs, each of the sculptures painted a cheerful pastel.

I watched the children, I realized after the fact, for close to forty-five minutes.

Though I hadn't run away into Texas, I had managed to spend the day sleepwalking.

I was back at Mount San Rafael barely in time to watch Dana eat the apple cobbler that had come with her supper, and have a cup of coffee with her while she finished her dessert. She was disappointed that I hadn't had dinner with her, but she said she was happy that I'd had the chance to spend the day in the southwestern sun.

"And you made Texas? Okra, fried food, and trucks with big tires. Lord, Allison, I wish I'd been with you," she said, joking, but I couldn't find it in me to laugh. I'd liked my few minutes in Texas.

We watched an hour and a half of television together in her hospital room, and I was back at my hotel by quarter to nine. I saw immediately that the little red light on my phone was blinking, and I learned from the generic voice that hails from computer message centers everywhere that I had received a call. My daughter had phoned only moments before, calling from her father's house around ten-thirty at night her time.

Though I knew she'd be awake, I wasn't sure about Patricia and Will, and so I almost didn't return the call that evening. But I did, and I'm glad. Looking back, I don't regret that decision at all. I simply wish the news of the petition hadn't made me so testy with Dana during our last day together in Colorado.

Testier, actually.

Let's be honest. I hadn't been very pleasant around her on Thursday or on Friday night when I returned from my drive. Then, when I looked into the face of my girlfriend and I saw what I feared was my future, I experienced what I can only describe as buyer's remorse.

Chapter 22.

dana

I AM NOT A SENSATION. I AM NOT SENSATIONAL. I have never appeared on a TV talk show.

The last thing I want to do is draw attention to myself as a transsexual. As a woman in a doctor-built body.