Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (33 page)

The second petition didn't get nearly as many signatures as the first, but that was due at least in part to Allison's reluctance to allow anyone to go house to house with it, or to solicit signatures in the grocery store parking lot. The petition simply sat on clipboards at the front register of the health-food store and the little bookstore in town, shops with clienteles somewhat more sympathetic to Allison's situation. No one ever actually asked anyone to sign it. Still, close to two hundred people eventually penciled their names and addresses on the little black lines under the second paragraph.

The pastor at Allison's church also stood by her. He was an elderly gentleman who was considered somewhat conservative among Baptist ministers in northern New England, but he thought the world of Allison and Carly. And so he and his wife came to her house for brunch after church on the last Sunday in January, walking there directly from the sanctuary so everyone in the center of town could see them. Then, a week later, he devoted his sermon to that beautiful moment in Acts when Philip baptizes the eunuch.

And the newspapers in Burlington and Middlebury both ran editorials that were sharply critical of Glenn Frazier, Judd Prescott, and the school board for allowing students to transfer from Allison's class into Carolyn's. The Burlington paper even chastised those parents who withdrew their children--though, of course, they didn't actually rebuke anybody by name.

My sense is that Allison and I would have been a very big local news story those first months after we returned from Colorado if either of us had been willing to speak to reporters. But we refused. We refused the
Burlington Free Press
and we refused the
Addison Independent
. We passed when a writer from an alternative weekly in Chittenden County phoned us, and when a reporter from the Montpelier daily paper showed up at our door. We said no to the NBC television affiliate, and we said no to the two radio talk-show hosts who called. We both wanted our privacy, and we both expected that eventually the tempest around us would pass. Maybe I just had to lie low a little while. Maybe if we could reach the end of the school year without a major explosion, people's interest would dissipate over the summer. Maybe, just maybe, people would grow to like me.

People, after all, had seemed to like me just fine in the years before my sexual reassignment.

Were we kidding ourselves? Perhaps. But I just wanted to get on with my life as a female--I certainly didn't want to remind people that I'd been born with male genitalia--and Allison simply wanted her old life back. She wanted nothing more than to teach, and visit with friends, and (I like to believe) relax in the evenings with the woman she loved.

And while people who listened to Vermont Public Radio that March might have assumed it was the obscenity someone had spray-painted on our front door that changed all that--that made us both willing to talk to the media--the truth is, we had changed our minds five days before we discovered what some horrible person had done. The front door had been vandalized on February 21, and we had found it on the twenty-second. But we had already agreed to go public on the seventeenth, one of the nights Will Banks had come to our house for dinner that month, and the very evening he had proposed his idea for a story.

"You
are
beautiful," Allison whispered to me in our bed on Valentine's Day, just after she pulled away from my mouth. I opened my eyes and looked up at her, and despite what I'd seen of myself in the mirror, I knew I wasn't nearly as lovely as she. Wasn't possible. She was smiling, the light from the candle dancing across her cheeks, but there was something going on in her eyes I couldn't quite decipher, a mystery in the tiny lines emerging along the sides of her face.

She rested her weight on her elbows and combed my hair with her fingers and then closed her eyes and kissed me again. I tasted blueberry brandy. I allowed myself a small purr. And then through the silk of my chemise I felt her running her fingers gently over my nipples, and down my ribs and my abdomen until she reached the hem at the end of the material. The hem at the end of the world, I thought. There's no place else to go but ... there.

I was wrong, and she dallied along the insides of my thighs a long while, sliding her body down mine so she could rub my legs and caress my ass with both of her hands and with her tongue. I spread my legs for her, telling her it was okay, signaling her that I was ready if she was.

She put one of her lovely slender fingers into my mouth, and I sucked it for a long while. She gave me a second, and I sucked them together, coating them both with all the saliva I could muster.

That night she made love to me with fingers steeped in spit, and with a little pink vibrator coated with orange-scented lube. I didn't come, but it didn't matter. It all felt heavenly, especially the notion that I was spreading my legs and there was a vagina--moistened and open and just oozing with nerves--telling my lover I loved her.

"God, I adore you," I murmured later when we were lying in each other's arms. My thigh was snuggling against her vulva, and her thigh was nestling beside mine.

"I know," she said softly. "I know you do."

She smiled at me again, and without any design revealed the otherwise inexpressible secret that was lurking in her eyes: She was sad. She was pitifully, earnestly, seriously sad.

Misery had softened Will Banks. Made him a whole lot nicer. Who knows? Maybe every arrogant man simply needs a good woman to humble him once in a while by walking out--though in Will's case, I guess, it took two.

But when he came to our house for dinner for the third time in two weeks, he actually extended his hand to me and gave it an appropriately gentle squeeze. And then he hugged me. He sure as hell wouldn't have done that when he'd joined us for lasagna two weeks earlier.

"That's a beautiful headband," he added, and I was flattered. "Blue and yellow look nice in your hair."

Granted, Allison got a much bigger and longer hug than I did, but the two of them had a lot more history together. I think it was in fact that evening that for the first time I really saw the friendship that had developed over the years between Will Banks and Allison, and finally understood it. After all, that first evening he joined us for dinner was the weekend Patricia had left, and he was just a basket case. The second time, too. Mostly, Allison was offering him emotional triage.

When he had dinner with us that third time, however, he was already pulling himself together and preparing to get on with a new phase in his life. There was a big cutout in the wall between the kitchen and the den, and I watched them chatting while I finished preparing dinner. They looked almost like siblings.

At least that's what I told myself then. God forbid they should look like lovers. The last thing I wanted was to somehow effect a reconciliation between my girlfriend and her ex-husband. I know well how distress can breed romance--I don't especially like support groups, but I know what can happen--and those two people were certainly in the midst of periods in their lives that could only be called blue. And so when I saw the two of them reminiscing about their years in college together or pondering the self-possessed young woman who was in actuality their daughter, I had a few pangs of apprehension: As I peeled the pears for the fruit salad. As I set the table. As I opened a second bottle of wine.

The two of them seemed to laugh so easily together that I actually felt guilty about the way my presence had strained their relationship throughout the fall.

Dinner, however, reassured me. Allison sat at the head of the table, surrounded on either side by her current and her former lover, and she sat just a hair closer to me. Twice she stroked the back of my hand when she spoke, and she squeezed it lovingly during dessert, after she tasted the white chocolate mousse.

Will was charming, and downright chivalrous when he talked about Patricia. Penitent, too. He understood what mistakes he had made, and his self-deprecation was utterly endearing.

But he hadn't come to see us to discuss the wreck of his marriage. He'd come to our house to talk about radio. Midway through dinner he brought up his idea for a program about us, and I was fascinated by the way his hands and face were transformed when the subject changed from the turmoil in his personal world to his professional passion. Suddenly his hands came to life. I realized that prior to that moment he hadn't once used his hands or his fingers when he'd spoken: It was as if he was conditioned from two decades in radio to understand that hands weren't helpful in conversation.

But clearly I was wrong. He was simply more restrained--his hands, too--when he was talking about himself. When the subject was radio or radio programming, however, he was like an orchestra conductor: His eyes grew animated and his head practically swayed with enthusiasm. He put his knife and his fork down and leaned into the table when he first began outlining his concept, and his fingers practically danced with excitement. All ten of them. It was like he was playing the dining room air.

When he was done, I was sold. I don't court publicity, but I saw the short series as a wonderful way to defend my ladylove. I know, that sounds butch. But it's exactly how I felt. I was looking for the chance--any chance--to do something to help.

Allison, on the other hand, was somewhat less enthusiastic. "Absolutely not," she said.

"Think about it. Just think about it for a few days," Will said.

"No. Absolutely not," she said again.

"Okay," Will said, and he leaned back in his chair, and his hands and his face wilted. He picked up his fork and returned to the curried carrots.

"These really are delicious," he told me.

I wasn't surprised by Allison's aversion to the notion of a radio story, but I was shocked by how quickly Will had backed down.

"Allison," I said, "this is a great opportunity. This is a chance to make the world see how horribly you've been treated!"

"Why do I want to advertise that?"

"Because people shouldn't be allowed to treat you that way."

"Our lives are private."

"People shouldn't be allowed to treat
anyone
that way," I said.

"I would think you'd be used to all this," she said.

"Dear heart, I didn't mean me. I meant your students. That Lindsey Lessard child you care so much about. That Audrey LaFontaine. They've lost a great teacher."

"Your opinion. There are parents who'd disagree with you."

"Oh, Allison, all I'm saying is that there's a human cost here, and we're not the only humans involved. But we are the only ones who can present a certain perspective. People need to know what you're feeling. What I'm feeling."

"I really don't want to be a poster child."

"And I don't think Dana is saying you should be," Will said. "But she's right. There are people behaving very badly in this town, and if the rest of the state knew you--and I mean both of you--I think it would shame some of our neighbors into decency."

Allison and I didn't look at each other as he spoke; I don't think either of us wanted to call attention to what had just transpired. But we'd both heard it, we'd both caught it.
She's
. Will had used a feminine pronoun. He had referred to me as a woman.

It was that moment, I believe, that changed Allison's mind about being interviewed. Not the horrid piece of paper someone slipped into her in-box, not the frustrating meetings she seemed to have to endure almost weekly. Not the vicious graffito that would appear a few days later on the front door. It was the realization that she was no longer alone when she looked at me and saw a woman.

Chapter 30.

allison

WE HELD A TALENT SHOW THAT YEAR TOWARD the end of February to break up the monotony of winter. We'd never had one before, but one of the teachers and I--for wholly different reasons, of course--were feeling that the season had conspired with the town to make winter seem particularly claustrophobic, and we needed to do something to take our minds off the cold and the snow and the ubiquitous road salt.

Glenn Frazier was comfortable with the idea, but when we were alone he told me that he had heard rumblings about some skit one group of my sixth-graders had performed some time ago during the annual end-of-the-year production for parents.

"It wasn't some skit," I said. "It was the finale. And it wasn't a small group. It was my entire class."

"They were in bathing suits?"

"And grass skirts. We were doing African dancing."

"Well, just remember. We live in rural Vermont."

I restrained myself from reminding him that I'd lived in Bartlett far longer than he. Instead I reassured him: "It'll be fine. Everyone will have a wonderful evening."