Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (36 page)

"Really?"

"Uh-huh. But I think that's natural. All children think their parents are nuts. I assume my mother's nuts. Don't you think I am?"

"Gee, Mom, why would I think that? Just because you invited a transsexual to move in with you?"

"See what I mean?"

"But you believe it's biological--being a transsexual?"

"Yup," she answered, and she shrugged. "There are those theories about the size of some part of the brain. And there are people who say it's a chemical thing. Or a chromosome thing. Who knows? Maybe someday when they finish that human genome project, they'll have found the 'transsexual gene.' Or genes. But my sense is, whatever it is that makes someone gender dysphoric--I have no idea if that's a real word, but you get my drift--it probably begins with nature. Not nurture."

"Hemingway's mom always put dresses on him when he was a little boy. Really frilly dresses. Made him look like a little girl."

"Your point?"

"There's a lot of transgender role-playing in
The Garden of Eden."

"Really?"

"At least in bed. And at the barbershop. We read the novel last month." It dawned on me that transsexual literature was peppering my classes at college. First Plato, now Hemingway. It was like discovering a new rock group: Suddenly everybody seems to be listening to them, too, and wherever you go, you see their faces.

"I don't think Hemingway had transsexual leanings," my mom said. "I suspect he had his gender demons, but I don't think he'll ever appear in the transsexual pantheon."

"Probably not," I agreed, yet then I surprised myself by suggesting, "but I do think we all want to cross over a lot more than we realize. We all want to be ... other."

My mom nodded and then asked abruptly, "Am I wrong about parenting? Did I make my little Carly a transsexual?" Though her voice was light, I could tell she was uneasy.

"No," I reassured her, "you don't need to add that to your worries. But I'm lucky. It's so much easier to do guy things as a woman than it is to do woman things as a guy."

"I like being a woman. I like being feminine."

"I do, too. Sometimes. But not always."

She sighed and put her arm around my shoulder as we walked. "I like being a woman a lot. Really, a lot. And you know what? I like being with a man. It pains me so much to say that. But it's true. It is, for better or worse, just who I am. A gal who likes a man's lap once in a while."

"Are you going to break up with Dana?"

"I should, I really should. But I can't. I wouldn't know what to say, I wouldn't know where to begin. Because I do love her. It's just that ..."

She didn't finish her sentence and I didn't finish it for her. I didn't know how. And so we continued to stroll around the commons, listening to the birds that were coming back, and savoring the warm midday sun on our faces.

I returned to Bennington on a bus late that Sunday afternoon, aware that in eight days my mom and Dana's story would air on VPR. My dad told me that the program would be two segments broadcast on consecutive nights, beginning a week from Monday. Each segment would be about eleven minutes long and would begin at five thirty-one.

The first part, he said, would be mostly about Dana and gender dysphoria, wrapping up with her romance with my mom. That was the word he used:
romance
. He said it without any sarcasm at all, like he viewed their relationship now as one of the world's great love stories.

The second part would be about my mom's confrontation with the school, and there would be interviews with parents on both sides of the conflict.

"Given my friendship with your mom, I've scrupulously avoided listening to any of the tapes that will be used in that segment, or making any suggestions about content," he said, smiling. "Call it journalistic recusal."

On the bus, I wondered if the show was yet another reason why my mom didn't want to break up with Dana. The program had grown to mean a lot to both Dana and my dad, and maybe she figured that breaking up with Dana now would ruin their effort.

But I also understood that it was a lot more complicated than that.

The next day, I decided to wear makeup and a skirt to my classes, and then to the radio station in the afternoon. The skirt was short and my tights were black, and so no one said anything about that. But some people noticed the lipstick and eye shadow, and tried to figure out what kind of statement I was trying to make. Neil Shorter, my new friend with the nuclear lid, thought it looked very sexy and said I should let him henna my hair that night, and I almost said yes because he made it sound just like foreplay.

The only person who I think sensed what I was doing was Jamie Sloan. She wasn't usually at the radio station on Monday, but she stopped in after work to get some new CDs to listen to at home so she could decide whether they were worthy of airtime.

"Aren't you the little Barbie," she said when she saw me.

"Overkill?"

"No, not at all," she said. "Very, very feminine."

That night Neil and I had sex for the third time, and it was incredibly hot. Dressing up, I decided, was fun. It made every day seem kind of like Halloween.

Chapter 32.

will

PERHAPS BECAUSE I HAD A FIRSTHAND FAMILIARITY with divorce, I didn't view myself as particularly romantic at midlife. Maybe, I decided some moments, I never had been.

Yet my sense was we were all pretty romantic when we were young, and I didn't suppose I had been an exception. There had certainly been a time, after all, when I had convinced myself that we were all destined to meet that one special person, and I had my Allie. As a young man, I had imagined that Allie and I would spend our entire lives with each other on this planet, and then, in some way I could not begin to fathom, we would spend our eternities together someplace else. Somewhere else. If we hadn't met at college, then we would have met at the radio station or a restaurant or ... a car wash. But we were fated to find each other.

Then, when it wasn't Allie, I was sure it was Patricia. Allie had been a mere detour. Patricia was my actual soul mate.

I think it would take a lot of grit to get through this life and not believe such a thing--to believe instead that we are, in essence, completely alone, and there is no one person out there whose fate is inextricably linked with our own.

Or, what might be an even worse interpretation of the same revelation, to believe that there are in fact uncountable legions of people out there who could offer us all exactly the same quotient of happiness (or unhappiness), and it just doesn't matter with whom we finally tell ourselves we are in love. Which might be why, arguably, the only people who are more romantic than the very young are often the very old.

At almost all the funerals I have attended for parents and grandparents--mine and others'--and for elderly friends who have died, invariably someone has remarked on the depth of the love that linked the deceased and his wife.

Or the deceased and her husband.

"They were meant for each other."

"They were perfect together."

"I've never seen a love quite like theirs ..."

It really may only be when we are in our forties and fifties, when we're old enough to know better but still young enough not to need pretense and fancy and sham, that we can be so determinedly unromantic.

And yet ... and yet ... a part of me never did let go of the hope that there really was one very specific woman out there for me. People--including, unfortunately, Patricia--assumed that the problem was that I had never let go of Allie.

I think that's incorrect, and I think I understood that with some clarity after Patricia's and my marriage had unraveled. I was having dinner with Allie and Dana once or twice a week, it seemed, and Allie and I were chatting with some frequency on the phone. Was there still a small part of me that fantasized about waking up one morning--morning after morning, really--and finding Allie beside me in bed? Perhaps. But did I actually believe that such a thing might happen, given my experience with her over the past decade? No.

Allie and I were meant to be friends, not lovers. That's what I had concluded. We'd be like cousins who were close. Perhaps we were meant to be together long enough to bring Carly into this world, and then we were meant to do our best to raise her from our small, separate perches.

But there was no invisible tie linking us, since there was no place in Allie's psyche upon which that tie could be fastened. There just wasn't, and I think I knew that.

The problem, if that's even the right word, is that I was still clinging to the fallacy of the one perfect woman--perfect, that is, for me. There was an animus out there enclosed in sinew and flesh that was an exact fit with whatever intangible abided within me.

Moreover, the more time I spent with Allie and Dana together, usually on the pretext of the radio series or in the context of their story, the more I realized that a small part of me was hoping their relationship would survive into their old age. Things were hard for the pair right now, but in time, perhaps, they might become nothing more than the village's eccentric elderly. That odd pair of old ladies you saw shuffling together behind a wire grocery cart in the supermarket down aisle six. Waiting for their prescriptions at the pharmacy. Asking too many questions about the scones or the bread at the bakery.

It was the animus that mattered, not the shape of the shell that housed it. If Dana wanted a reconfigured husk, so be it. The husk doesn't last.

When I would have these visions--in the car or my office or as I'd wander about my empty house--I would wonder if I was a romantic after all. Or whether, maybe, I was trying to focus upon anything but the fact that I was beginning to fear I was going to grow old all alone. I was never going to find that kindred spirit who would make everything right.

I never sat in on the recordings, and I didn't listen to any of the tapes until the final product was brought to me for review. But I had lunch with Allie and Dana the day they both came to the station, and I had breakfast with Dana the next morning, when she alone was needed in the studio. I also went with Kevin Gaines to Bartlett when he wanted to spend some time with Allie and Dana at the house in which they were living, and I stayed for coffee with them when Kevin left to begin interviewing the folks who thought Allie shouldn't have allowed or encouraged a transsexual to move in.

This meant, in all fairness, that I had a sense of how the programming was coming together. I knew how Kevin was structuring the short series in his mind.

Once, Kevin came into my office and shook his head. "He really can pass for a woman," he said.

"I know," I said, and I could tell that Kevin was experiencing for the first time something I had been feeling with increasing frequency--and if not yet with increasing discomfort, then certainly with increasing bemusement.

"He's almost pretty," Kevin went on.

I smiled and shook my head. "Not almost," I told him, stating the obvious.

"It's true. You expect the ugly duckling, and you get this swan."

Kevin was about a decade younger than I was, and he had two small daughters at home. He was, I assumed, happily married. "We'll have to make that clear on the radio," he continued. "Normally what someone looks like doesn't matter. But it does here. We need to make it clear he isn't a drag queen and he isn't a--"

"Use a feminine pronoun," I suggested.

"Do you mean on-air?"

"Yes."

"We'll confuse our listeners."

"Just think about it. As you work on the narrative, see how it sounds."

"It'll sound weird."

"So? Their whole story is weird."

He was sipping coffee from one of our fund-raising mugs, and he ran a finger around the swirl that comprised the radio station's logo. "This must be very, very strange for you," he said, his eyes on the porcelain.

I'd known Kevin for perhaps half a decade, since he'd come to public radio from the CBC in Montreal, and he had probably become one of my closer friends. At some point, I had imagined, I was going to move on to another station or to NPR in Washington--whenever Patricia and I had discussed it, we always assumed it would be once Carly had left for college--and Kevin would become the station G.M. Already he was doing as much managerial and programming work as he was reporting. Maybe more.

"Which part?" I asked him. "The part about my ex-wife, the lesbian? Or that part where my ex-wife sleeps with a man and a woman who turn out to be the same person? Of course, there's also the part where my daughter comes home from college and finds out her mom has invited a transsexual to move in. That's a little strange, too."