Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (30 page)

I knew Ethan LaPree thought he looked fat in the turtleneck shirts his parents made him wear, the sleeves often damp from his nose. For a week in December I'd placed a Kleenex box by his desk--he sat in a row against the wall with a counter--but he clearly preferred the cotton on his cuffs.

"It isn't a cold," his mother insisted. "He's allergic to airborne indoor pollutants."

Oh, but Mike Deering did have a cold. He had had a cold throughout the fall and into the winter, and the fact that his boots had holes didn't help. I pretended I was his Secret Santa and bought him a new pair, but he wore them only one time that I know of.

I knew Sally Warwick was reading and understanding the same sorts of novels that sat on my nightstand and was capable of polishing off the "young adult" books she was expected to read in a day. I recommended at least a dozen books to her that autumn and winter, and took her to the public library in the village three times to show her my favorite authors.

I knew Sam Reynolds was beginning to grasp algebra and starting to solve binomial equations.

I knew no one was able to concoct more rules for Capture the Flag and permutations for Red Rover, Red Rover than Lindsey Lessard. I knew that, in spite of her father, she was a delightful little person with a smile that was infectious. She had, even then, movie-star eyebrows.

I knew Dan Hedderigg didn't like me, in part because his parents didn't like me, but also because I insisted he learn how to spell.

I feared Roberta Beaudet would be pregnant before she could drive: I knew she was in desperate need of affection, and no teacher alone could fill the giant maw in her heart.

Brian McCurdy, too. I don't mean, of course, that I feared someday soon he'd be pregnant. Rather, I worried that his need for human kindness would simply drive him to extremes. He was one of too many children in a trailer in a five-acre floodplain of decrepit mobile homes some people called the Tin City. There wasn't a father to be found in the bunch. Brian's dad, too, was long gone.

But Brian was what we have come to call a "good kid." He worked hard. He played well with his friends. And when he wasn't paying attention to me, he was at least drawing harmlessly in his salt-and-pepper notebook in the back of the class.

I knew my students well, and I cared about all of them. Some, in a teacher's way, I probably loved.

Not long after Carly had left for Bennington, two days after I found the picture of the transsexual in my in-box, I met with Glenn Frazier and Evelyn Newman over lunch. Evelyn was chairperson of the school board, a group of five adults from the community who worked with school administrators and teachers on a variety of issues: Staffing. Extracurriculars. The budget that would be presented for approval each year at the town meeting in March. The group was paid a modest stipend for their work, but not nearly enough, in my mind, to justify the aggravation that came with the job, or the amount of time it demanded. They were elected officials, which meant they actually ran for their jobs every other year.

We met in Glenn's office, eating egg salad sandwiches that came from the cafeteria. I had taught Evelyn's son, Tim, now a freshman in high school, and there was an even chance that I would teach her daughter, Casey, the following year. I'd liked Tim a lot, despite his mistaken belief that sixth-grade boys looked good with the back of their hair shaped into a rattail, but I could always count on him to stroll to the chalkboard and tackle even the most complex open-ended math problems, and I had always assumed that he'd liked me. I had every reason to believe that his mother was fond of me, too. Consequently, I'd been looking forward to the meeting, because I thought it was possible that Evelyn might be able to rein in board member Al Duncan and convince the rest of the group to take my side in what had the potential to become a particularly nasty clash with disgruntled parents.

I was wrong.

"Isn't my job already thankless enough, Allison?" Evelyn asked early in the meeting, and I heard annoyance in her voice. Evelyn was a Realtor, and usually her people skills were pretty good. She had to be deeply irked to try not to hide it.

"No one ever likes the budgets we present," she went on, "no one's ever pleased with what we spend on special ed. It's either too much or too little. The classroom computers are too expensive for some people, they're too old for others. Every year it's something. Every year."

She paused to nibble her sandwich and took a small, inconsequential mouthful that demanded she barely part her lips--what Carly and I had called a rabbit bite when she was a little girl. She was holding the triangle of half-sandwich with both hands.

"Well, the good news, then, is that this issue doesn't have anything to do with budgets or computers or special ed," I suggested. I hoped I sounded helpful.

"Really, I thought I'd seen everything," she said, ignoring me. "I must admit, I was leaning against running again this spring, but now my mind is made up. Firmly made up. There is no way on God's green earth I want to deal with this lunacy for another term."

"Am I the problem, in your opinion? Or is it Al and the parents who've been calling you?"

"Oh, please," she said.

"Really, I don't know."

"My answering machine wouldn't be filled every single night with irate moms and dads if it weren't for you! It's not just Al--come on. I have a petition with over seven hundred names on it in my hands. Seven hundred."

"So you think I'm the problem. Not their intolerance."

"Tolerance is an awfully squishy notion, Allison," Glenn said. "It's meaningless, completely meaningless." He'd finished his sandwich and was wiping his fingers on a brown paper napkin. "I'd wager you couldn't find two people on this planet who are tolerant of the same things. God, my wife thinks I'm way too tolerant of our new puppy. A really delightful black Lab, but dumb as a doorstop. He chewed her slippers to rags yesterday, and I just wasn't that upset. After all, the dog's only three months old."

"This isn't about dog tolerance," I said.

"Of course it isn't. But people tolerate different things. You'd probably be much more tolerant of your daughter if she came home from college with a nose ring than I'd be if mine pulled the same stunt."

"Please, Glenn--"

"Seriously, hear me out. All of those parents who you just called intolerant? If their sons and daughters decided to get married at nineteen, they'd be much more tolerant than you would if your daughter told you tomorrow she was going to get married in the spring. I'm quite sure of that. Tolerance has a tendency to drift, no matter how hard we try and anchor it with political correctness."

"There are some standards. Some basics."

"Gotcha!" he said, sitting forward in his chair and slam-dunking his napkin into his wastepaper basket.

"Gotcha?"

"Yes! There
are
some standards," he said, "there
are
some basics. And you've crossed a line! Maybe in a perfect world it wouldn't matter who you lived with. But in this world it does. In this world there are people who don't want their children's teachers living with people like Mr. Stevens. Are they intolerant? Maybe. Unreasonable? Perhaps. But I have to tell you: Most of the world wouldn't think so."

I looked at Evelyn to see how she was reacting to Glenn's little speech. She was nodding her head just the tiniest bit, while continuing to gnaw at the white bread around her egg-yellow mush.

"First of all, I don't live with a mister," I said, and then took a deep breath to try and calm myself. I was growing furious, but I was still just this side of rational behavior. "Secondly, I'm getting really tired of defending my lifestyle."

"This isn't about sexual preference," Evelyn said.

"I didn't say it was," I said.

"You used the word
lifestyle
. Isn't that one of those euphemisms for
gay
?"

"No! Since when does
gay
even need a euphemism?"

"Personally, I think
gay
itself is a euphemism--and my brother-in-law's gay," Glenn said.

"Look, Allison, I would defend you completely if this were just about being a lesbian. I don't care if you like women or men, really I don't. But it's not about that."

"Though I'm sure for some parents that, too, is a factor," Glenn added.

"What concerns me is that this Dana person is something else. A transvestite, a transsexual, I won't make that distinction--"

"How can you not? It's like not making the distinction between carrots and peas! They're both vegetables, yes, but otherwise they're completely different!"

"They're not
that
different!"

"But they are different!"

"Look, I really don't care, I simply--"

"You have to care!"

"Allison," Glenn said, and when he first said my name, I assumed he was about to try and calm me down. Looking back, however, it's clear that he saw I was on the edge and with a single thought he could send me over the side. "The man had his penis cut off. You're romantically involved with a human being who voluntarily had his penis cut off."

"That's enough!" I said, and I slammed my hand down hard on his desk--so hard that my palm started to sting and the bones in my fingers started to hurt. Some pencils rolled onto the floor. "How dare you?"

"How dare I what?"

"How dare you suggest that what I do with my life is wrong!"

"I didn't!"

"Right now, locked in a drawer in my desk, is one of the most childish, disgusting, and mean-spirited--really, mean-spirited--things I've ever seen! Someone printed a picture off the Internet, defaced it, and then left it for me in my in-box! And now I have to listen to this? How dare you?"

I was trembling, and both Evelyn and Glenn grew quiet. Finally Evelyn asked, her voice surprisingly wobbly, "What is it? The thing in your desk?" She ran her hands over her skirt, as if she were flattening the sheets on a bed.

"It's a picture of a naked person," I began, and I realized that my breathing had begun to sound like a whimper: an endless chain of short little pants and gasps, with an occasional, embarrassing wheeze. I sat back in my chair to compose myself, and then I described for them the photo and the drawings and the insult that had been scribbled upon it.

When I was through, Evelyn told me she was sorry that I had had to endure such a thing, and Glenn said no one should ever be treated that way. For an instant, I actually began to believe that the photograph might, in the end, turn out to be a godsend. For whole seconds I imagined the incident was going to rally the school board and my principal and the community behind me. Perhaps, I thought, I had turned some sort of corner. Maybe, I fantasized, by March Dana and I would be playing bridge with the Fraziers, or military whist with the Newmans. Hadn't stranger things happened? Didn't stranger things happen every day?

"As a matter of honor," I heard Glenn saying, "I like people to look one another in the eye. Settle their differences like grown-ups. I think the fact that it was anonymous is as troubling as the subject matter itself. It's downright menacing."

"Have any laws been broken?" Evelyn asked.

"Probably not," Glenn said. "It's not illegal to take a naked picture of an adult off the Web."

"But what if it was a student who found it? Wouldn't the Web site be responsible for ... something?"

He rocked back in his chair and waved his hands at his side. "Oh, maybe. I don't know. But it doesn't matter, that's not the issue in my mind. What do you want me to do, Allison?"

"About the picture?"

"Right."

"Nothing," I said. "That's not why I told you. I'd like you to keep this among us."

He shook his head. "That's understandable. But that's the one thing we can't do. We have our newsletter going out to parents next week, and I think we should mention it. Tell the folks what happened, and ask the person who did it to come forward and apologize."

"No, I'd really rather we didn't--"

He held up one hand like a police officer commanding me to stop, and continued, "We simply can't have your authority any more undermined than it already is. Even now we know that some parents are undoing a good deal of what you do on any given day in the classroom. Nitpicking. Carping. Criticizing. Surely you've noticed. It seems to me, if parents think someone can get away with leaving a piece of smut in your in-box, you're finished."

I honestly wasn't aware of any unusual nitpicking, but I didn't contradict him. I was too busy marveling at how deluded I'd been just a moment before, and digesting the fact that my own principal was actually going to use the picture to cripple me further in the eyes of the town.