Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (29 page)

"You're a beautiful woman," I told Dana at breakfast Monday morning.

"I wish," she said, delicately spreading raspberry jam on an English muffin.

"No, you are," I insisted. She was healing quickly, getting better fast. She was walking with the same sure, long-legged gait she had had before surgery. She was going to start making dinner for me again soon.

"My hands are too big. My nose is a man's."

She was wearing a sea-green cardigan with glistening pearl buttons. Her leggings were sleek and crisp, and they matched her sweater: They were a beautiful shade of turquoise. She made me look shabby in my loose thermal dress.

"I should go," I said. "My eleven-year-olds await."

"Tonight we really must talk," she said.

I nodded. I smiled. I kissed her on her cheek.

I wished, I realized, that I, too, were gay. With confidence. With assurance. Without reservation. I wished that I could be the lesbian of her dreams.

Or, if I wasn't, that I could decide whether such things really mattered.

But we didn't talk that night, and later in the week she licked me and I came, and she entered me with a dildo and I came again. Some evenings she would rub an oil made with neroli and black pepper into the backs of my legs; one time she painted my toenails a shade called cerise. In bed we would sip fruit shakes made from the strawberries I'd picked half a year earlier, thawing the red brick from my freezer in the microwave before dropping the fruit with bananas and ice into a blender.

I did nothing for her in return, and still we did not discuss our relationship.

Yet I would lie awake at three in the morning and I would think to myself, I'm not a lesbian, repeating the words like a mantra. But I knew I couldn't tell her such a thing in the middle of the night, and--more important--that was the only time that I felt completely sure. As long as we were savoring fruit shakes in bed, or the sheets were still wet from my orgasm, a part of me would remain open to the possibility.

When I was alone that week, walking to and from school or preparing for class, I would wonder at how things had changed since Christmas. Outwardly, Dana's final sexual reassignment had changed nothing: She was wearing the same clothes, the same shades of lipstick and nail polish, the same boots when she ventured outside. She read the same magazines and books, she liked the same foods. She held my hand the same way when we walked upstairs together in the evening.

I had not yet seen her vagina, and I wouldn't until there were absolutely no traces of the surgery--until her vagina would look, more or less, like mine. Dana was adamant about this, and I was content with her decision.

But the surgery had changed everything. It had to, it was inescapable. You can't say to yourself, much as you might want to,
It's just a penis, it was just one small part of our relationship
. It didn't matter whether we actually used the penis for sex twice a week or once a month, it didn't matter if I saw it or felt it a dozen times a year or over a hundred. The fact remained that it was there, and I knew it was there.

Moreover, it was also true that had Dana been male--no gender dysphoria, no need to wear a dress, no woman in the soul under the flesh--and lost his penis because of an accident or a disease, I wouldn't have felt as acutely its loss. Because then, I imagine, Dana would have continued to live as a man. It isn't the penis solely that makes someone male: Just ask a female transsexual, a woman with gender dysphoria. Just ask a self-proclaimed trans-man.

As recently as late December, however, Dana had still had a penis, and on some level I must have been continuing to cling to the fantasy that the sexual reassignment surgery would never actually happen. I may have been living with a person who wore makeup and skirts, but the person beside me in bed had a penis.

I could play all the mind games I wanted, I could intellectualize and rationalize forever, but, pure and simple, Dana's castration changed something. It no longer made sense to me to rest my head on her shoulder the way I had as recently as Christmas, or to lay my head in her lap when we watched a movie in the den. I did that sort of thing with men. I'd sat in her lap any number of times the summer we met--the summer before I'd known her plans--and I couldn't imagine doing such a thing now. It just didn't seem like the kind of thing a woman did with another woman.

But then I'd remind myself how happy I'd been sometimes in the fall--how remarkably, blissfully happy--and I'd try and convince myself that little in reality was different. We had the same breakfasts, the same dinners, the same long talks about movies and books. There was the specter of the people in the town who disapproved of Dana, but inside our home--that little fantasy palace--once more I was Beauty. I was fed. I was pampered. I was stroked.

I was--with wands, batons, and vibrating scepters--fucked.

And I came. Some cold nights in late January I'd tell Dana, No, I don't want that, and I'd turn away, but then I'd feel something oiled and new sliding between my cheeks or I'd hear an unfamiliar hum, and almost instantly I'd grow wet.

One night she would blindfold me. One night she would keep the room black. One night she would light the bedroom only with candles.

One night, when she'd been home almost a month, she climbed on top of me and entered me with a vibrator she had somehow attached to her groin, and she fucked me the way she once had. I was able to move my hips against someone the way I had for--oh, God--a quarter century. I was able to reach my hands up and over my lover, squeezing and stroking her neck, her shoulder, her back.

Nevertheless, something seemed wrong--off, to be precise--and I couldn't find that place I'd known well in the fall and the early part of the winter, that place where I had been ... happy.

I think, ironically, that if people like Rich Lessard and Glenn Frazier hadn't tried to drive Dana away, I might have given up on the relationship within weeks of our return from Colorado. Had I not felt that I was being bullied and Dana was being harassed, at some point in January I might very well have confessed to Dana that I wasn't as happy as I thought I should be--certainly I wasn't as happy as I had been in August or November. And then, perhaps, I might have asked her to leave.

Or, until she was absolutely and completely well, to move into the guest bedroom. And then leave.

After all, I have always been very capable when it comes to ending a relationship, or asking someone who loves me to go. Just ask my ex-husband. There are at least three--maybe more--men in this world who believe that I am at once among the crueler women who walk on this planet and the quickest to throw what they deemed as happiness aside.

The Rich Lessards and Glenn Fraziers of the community did challenge me, however, and I have never been good at acquiescence. I have never, ever done something simply because somebody wanted me to, or because it was the easy way out. And because they couldn't tolerate Dana's presence in my life, I decided that she was more than welcome to be a part of it. No matter what.

Despite the reality that she lacked a penis.

Despite my belief that I wasn't gay, and that somehow that mattered.

Despite the fact that I was coming in the night with an apparently endless assortment of sex toys.

The paper was a single sheet in the midst of a stack of stapled exams, the conclusion of our small unit about the Canadian maritime provinces, and on it was a four-color image printed from the Internet and a pair of words scribbled in red crayon:
Fucking perverts
. The image was a photograph of a naked transsexual--pre-operative, in that the person had a penis and breasts--standing before a dated couch and the sort of home entertainment center you buy at a big discount department store. It looked like a photo from an Internet personals ad. Or, perhaps, from the transsexual's home page.

The words had been scrawled over the picture, in letters that were thick and bold. It wouldn't have taken a handwriting expert to conclude that they had been written in anger--each letter looked like an obscenity--but I know I couldn't decide whether they had been written by one of my eleven-year-olds or by someone considerably older. Someone who was trying to disguise his age.

The fact that the final word was plural made it seem particularly odious and hurtful, acknowledging, as it did, the notion of Dana's and my consensual involvement. The missing words?
You're. Both
.

The full insinuation?
You're both fucking perverts
.

Yet the worst part wasn't the accusation. It was the primitive, childlike drawings that had been added to the photograph with that very same crayon: A dagger poised at the transsexual's penis, with the sort of dashes and chit marks surrounding the blade that a child might use to convey sharpness. A second knife aimed at the transsexual's breasts--or, perhaps, at her heart. I couldn't decide.

I stared at the words and the pictures for a long time, numbed, sometimes only dimly aware of the photograph that shared the page with them. When I heard the sounds of people in the hall, I slipped the paper under my desk blotter and sat back in my chair and tried to think.

I remembered my students had placed their tests in a small in-box at the front of my desk as they filed past it on their way to my classroom door just before noon. Together, we had then filed down the long corridor to the cafeteria for lunch. That meant the exams had been in the tray for close to three and a half hours before I picked them up and thumbed through them at the end of the day. Moreover, they'd been alone in my classroom for almost an hour during lunch.

And so I decided it was possible that the paper hadn't even been left there by one of my students. Clearly it hadn't been placed in my in-box by either the student whose exam was below the slur or above it. That would have been much too obvious. And when I thought about the two students whose work surrounded the paper, I concluded that neither could have been responsible in any event. Neither was the type to surf the Internet in search of this sort of smut, or the kind of person who would--who could--call someone a pervert. Neither was the type to use the
word fucking
.

Certainly there were other students in my class who had that capability. But not those two.

Nevertheless, I thought back to the moment the kids had filed past my desk with their tests: I'd been standing by my door at the time, I'd been a good fifteen feet away. I certainly hadn't been watching them carefully as they shuffled past it, dropping their tests in the tray that I kept at the front for this purpose. And so while I was sure it hadn't been either of the students whose exams were nearest the image, it was clear that virtually any other student could have slipped the paper in the pile at almost any point. I wasn't paying close attention. I really wasn't paying any attention at all.

But then once more I would convince myself that it couldn't possibly have been one of my kids in the first place. It just couldn't. Someone else had to have wandered into my classroom during lunch and placed the paper there. A teenager, maybe. Perhaps even a grown-up. It was, in fact, probably left there by someone who barely knew me. Maybe someone who'd never even met me: The parent of a student in another grade or the other sixth-grade class, perhaps. Someone who had just seen me in the hallways. Or in the auditorium. Or walking to and from school.

I wanted to throw the paper away, simply excise it from my life, but I didn't dare. It seemed important to keep it. If I thought I would have had any support at all from Glenn Frazier, I would have shown it to him that very moment. He was, after all, my administrator. My principal. But I didn't have his support, and I had a sense that sharing it with him that afternoon would only make things worse.

Of course, I also didn't want to defile my house by bringing the picture home. And so once the people in the hallway had long passed--once the world had grown so quiet that I heard only a distant ringing somewhere in my ears--I pulled the image from beneath my desk blotter and placed it in one of my lower desk drawers. Then, for the first time in my entire career, I locked my desk.

I knew eleven-year-old Jeremy Roscoe had a crush on eleven-year-old Renee Wood, and I knew Renee and her friends would talk about nothing but kissing when they had lunch in the cafeteria.

I knew Audrey LaFontaine wished she were one of Renee's friends, but Renee's family had money and Audrey's did not, and so a friendship between the two had been unlikely since the pair left preschool. But I knew also that Audrey was smart and Audrey was loved, and Audrey would do fine without Renee's friendship, assuming she ever learned not to care.

A tall order, that. But, I hoped, one that was possible.

I knew Schuyler Brown wrote surprisingly lovely poems in the writing journals I had the kids keep, even if they were often about his in-line skates and his snowboard. I knew he wrote one about his grandmother after she'd died that was particularly sweet: She was buried in a plot beside a hydrangea tree, and he likened the blossoms to lawn darts and pink cotton candy.