Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (34 page)

The kids were always given a fair amount of rope to do whatever they desired in those June performances, though we adults always worked with them to make sure that their dancing or their skit had at least a semblance of choreography and cohesion. But it was still a pretty casual affair, and that was pretty much what happened that February.

A group of the youngest girls in the school who took ballet together in Middlebury did a few twirls and pirouettes, while their male classmates jumped around the stage like movie ninjas. A few children played the piano, and one little girl played the flute with her mother. Twin boys played the violin.

A fifth-grade class that was in the midst of a unit on global climate change performed a truly disarming skit about the frightening numbers of three-legged frogs that were being discovered throughout the Lake Champlain Basin. A fourth-grade class built a sugar house onstage out of cardboard, and wrote two surprisingly clever songs about maple syrup and mud--without question, Vermont's two most salient features in March.

"Busby Berkeley Visits the Ozarks," Dana dubbed that part of the production later that night, but she did admit that the kids looked pretty cute when they danced around in their mud boots and checked flannel shirts. She watched the show from the back corner of the auditorium, standing in the dark about six feet from a lit exit sign. She wanted to come, but she didn't want to be seen. And so she arrived a few minutes late and left a few minutes early, which meant, unfortunately, that she missed the curtain call.

My own students had wanted to do something to support me, but I had refused to allow them. I didn't want them any more involved in my situation than they already were by the nature of the fact that they'd wound up in my class six months earlier. Instead the group fixated upon aliens (Was there a connection in their opinion between my situation and a Martian's? They denied that they thought so) and asked me to help them develop a series of hip-hop moves that would, they hoped, look slightly robotic. I did, and the skit went off without a hitch.

But then there was the curtain call. I was working backstage, and after the final sketch I went to help Molly Cochran round up her six-year-olds. My eleven-year-olds, I knew, were capable of marching back onto the stage in a line, holding hands, and bowing once or twice during their parents' applause. We'd gone over it during the dress rehearsal, and it was clear that they understood the drill.

Besides, most of them were veterans of the June theatricals.

Consequently, I was as surprised as the audience when my entire class--granted, it was a small class by then--reappeared on the polyurethaned wood floor in drag. All of the girls had changed into pants and were wearing their fathers' neckties and blazers, and Sally Warwick and Renee Wood had gone so far as to paint black mustaches just above their lips with eyeliner. And the boys? There was Jeremy Roscoe in his big sister's field hockey kilt, and Schuyler Brown in what must have been one of his mother's summer skirts. Ethan LaPree had climbed inside a dress that was covered with sunflowers, and Sam Reynolds--my gifted young mathematician--had found a blond wig somewhere and was wearing a hoop in each ear the size of a bracelet.

They paraded onto the stage with the rest of the kids as if there was nothing unusual about their costumes, and for the first time in my life I understood that expression about a lump in one's throat. Somehow, swallowing and weeping were connected.

"You did okay with those kids, Allison," Molly whispered beside me, and she patted my back.

In the audience, small groups of parents stood up for them, and others whistled and hooted. The boys in the dresses loved it, and Schuyler and Ethan and Jeremy did a few kicks together as if they were cancan dancers or Rockettes.

"I'm going to assume you had nothing to do with this," Glenn Frazier said to me. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he looked more bemused than disgusted.

"Of course not," I managed to murmur, though I was still unsure what would happen when I opened my mouth.

"Didn't think so," he said.

I realized I was very lucky that moment to be a sixth-grade teacher. The girls, of course, would wear masculine shirts and pants at least some days for the rest of their lives. But the boys? If they had been a single year older and started junior high school, they wouldn't have been caught dead in women's clothes. Likewise, if they'd been a year or two younger, they wouldn't have had the confidence and the wherewithal to pull off this sort of statement.

At eleven, however, for both the boys and the girls the absurdity of dress was still clear. It was all costume. It was still fun to dress up. It just didn't matter if the person with whom I lived happened to outfit herself in what we called a blouse or a shirt, pants or a skirt. It was, most of the time, all just denim and cotton and wool.

When we finally pulled the curtain shut in front of the kids, my students ran to me, giggling and giving one another high fives as they approached.

"How do I look?" Ethan LaPree asked.

I bent over slightly so we were at eye level. "I think yellow's your color," I said as earnestly as I could. "And sunflowers in February are a very cheery statement. Thank you."

He shrugged, and before I could say another word to Ethan, I had to compliment all of the boys in their dresses and all of the girls in their pants, and then--at their insistence--take a group picture for the class photo album.

"Were you surprised?" Sally Warwick asked me.

"Absolutely," I said.

She grinned, and she was still blinking from the flash. For a moment the image was strobelike, surreal--a scene from a film from the Weimar Republic.
Cabaret
done by dwarfs. But the moment passed, and suddenly Sally was once again just a smart little girl with a drawn-on mustache. I hugged her and she hugged me, and then I embraced every single one of my students.

The next morning, we found the words on the door. Dana discovered them just before breakfast, when she was getting the daily paper out of the newspaper box.

I'll never know if it was a response to my students' show of support the night before--a message, perhaps, to remind me that though a dozen eleven-year-olds were on my side, a large part of the town was still very angry--or simple coincidence.

Saturday morning we had woken up together, happier than we'd been in a very long time. Dana was disappointed that she'd gone home before the curtain call, but she was nevertheless touched. I think she even thought we might have begun winning over some of the more reactionary personalities in town. Certainly that hope had crossed my mind.

But then we wandered downstairs, and I shuffled into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and warm up the banana muffins Dana had baked the day before, and she went outside to retrieve our newspaper. When she joined me in the kitchen, I could see instantly that she was seething: Her eyes were slits and she was red in the face.

"What?" I asked. "What happened?"

She rolled the newspaper into a tube--a baton as thick as a baseball bat--and swatted the top slat of a ladder-back chair.

"People are pigs," she said. "They disgust me. This provincial piece-of-shit town disgusts me. You know what? We really should move. Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of Bartlett. Out of Vermont. Go where nobody has the slightest idea who we are," she raged, and then she sat down in the chair and put her head on the table.

"Outside?" I asked, and I motioned toward the street. I understood that whatever had happened had happened outdoors--someone had said something to her, perhaps, or shouted something at her--but she'd revealed little else.

"God, I'd clean it off before you could see it," she continued. "But I can't. It's dry. It's paint, and it's dry. We'll probably need a new door."

I put down the butter dish and left her in the kitchen. I tried to look calm, which meant walking down the hallway, though I wanted to run. When I swung open the front door, I saw there were two words spray-painted upon it in massive red letters, and for a second I assumed I was reading a pair of nouns--oddly, it seemed, a singular and a plural--but then I realized the first word was meant to be an adjective.

A part of me wanted to curl up in the cold on the stoop; a part of me wanted to roll into a little ball and close my eyes, hoping--like a child--that when I opened them it would be gone. I'd never seen such a thing written so big. But it was a small part of me, and mostly I was fine. Really. Maybe if Dana hadn't been so angry that she was close to tears, I might have lost my composure. But I doubt it. Instead I simply closed the door and took a deep breath and then returned to the kitchen.

"It's completely inarticulate," I said. "We'll just paint over it."

"It's February! It's too cold to paint over it!"

"We'll put a heater on the porch. We'll--"

"We can't make it go away! Not till the spring! Don't you see? You can spray something like that on a door in this weather, but you can't really ... paint."

Perhaps I would have been as enraged as Dana if I hadn't already been called a pervert in my own classroom. If I hadn't already found myself referred to as a kind of obscenity. Perhaps the Internet picture someone had left in my in-box had helped to prepare me for the affront on my house.

But I think there's also a chance I would have been fine even without that warm-up, or without the need to be strong for Dana. The night before, I'd been given a gift by my students that made the slur on the door seem particularly small-minded and stupid. Juvenile. The night before, my students had shown me they cared for me, regardless of what the adults around them may have thought, or what their peers may have been saying.

Moreover, I realized with an almost intellectual detachment that the two words on the wood had far more power when they were used separately. Individually, each was offensive--one was probably the word most universally and thoroughly despised by women. God knows it had always made me bristle. And the other, though less potent, certainly had the potential to generate a good amount of hostility in heterosexual men.

But together? They were by no means laughable. But they were also oxymoronic. Implausible. And, in a way, as silly as they were grim:

.FAGGOT CUNTS

.

"We will cover it up," I said to Dana, and I pulled a chair beside her and sat down. "I'm sure the hardware store will have something."

"God, it's horrid. Horrid!"

"Seriously, it won't be that difficult to cover up. Trust me, I'm sure."

"It's just so mean. Why would someone do such a thing?"

"You know the answer to that."

"Really, I don't."

"Well, trust me: The hardware store will have a solution. It will."

She sighed. "I hope so. God, I hope so."

"It will."

She put her head on my shoulder and I stroked her hair. "Why do you put up with me?" she asked.

"You bake," I said. "I don't."

"Seriously. Look what I've--"

I put two fingers on her lips to shush her. And then I resumed petting the back of her head, and I tried to focus on nothing but the extraordinary softness of her hair and the smell of the freshly brewed coffee that was filling my kitchen.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Thursday, September 27

DANA STEVENS:
The thing is, I never was one of those Times Square transsexuals. It's not like I was hanging around street corners in Bartlett or Burlington, dressed like a slut and trying to seduce mixed-up teenage boys.

Or, I imagine, mixed-up grown men. The sexually ... confused. I never was the sort of transsexual--the sort of
person
--who abused people, or tried to take advantage of them.

Of course I knew transsexuals like that. I knew--I know--prostitutes. I know transsexuals who will do whatever it takes to get the money they need for their reassignment, and I know transsexuals who are simply so ... bewildered by their own sexuality that they're content to fill their bodies with female hormones, and keep their penises intact. They'll seduce anything that moves.

But there are people who aren't transsexuals who are like that. Not straight, not gay, not bi. Omnisexual, I guess. Megasexual.

Either way, that's not me. I've always been as domestic as a balloon shade or a perennial garden. And just as harmless.

Chapter 31.

carly

MY VIDEO ABOUT THE BATTERY FACTORY WON A college journalism award that spring, and the local PBS station wanted to air it until I told them I hadn't gotten release forms from the people I interviewed. To this day, my dad says it's that prize that got me the NPR internship, but I think he could have gotten me the gig no matter what. He's very well-connected, and I really did have honest-to-God radio experience. Besides--and maybe this isn't beside the fact at all--I was willing to work for peanuts.