Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (40 page)

I realized I was angry at the transsexual for the chimera she had created, and for the unfullfillable fantasies that she offered.

Dating other women--dating real women, including, possibly, my first wife--with that mind-set would actually be rather easy, I decided. Especially now that I was over my youthful romanticism and reconciled to the belief that there wasn't one consummate woman out there who was meant for me. It was all random.

And though it wasn't exactly meaningless, it was all merely adequate.

Chapter 35.

dana

WE DIDN'T MAKE LOVE AFTER THE SECOND NIGHT of the radio story either. I had thought that we might, and when we didn't, I asked Allison what she was thinking. The bedroom smelled faintly of hand cream, and I could feel the shape of the vibrator through the pillow where--ever the optimist--I had placed it.

"I'm thinking that I want to go to sleep," she answered, her face toward the wall.

"You're thinking more than that."

"Not by choice."

"Then what?"

She sighed, and I stroked her shoulder and the back of her neck through the quilt.

"Are you tired of all this?" I asked, careful to keep my question vague. I wasn't sure myself what I meant.

"Here's what I'm thinking," she murmured. "I'm thinking we shouldn't have this conversation at eleven o'clock at night."

"You never want to talk in bed."

"No, I don't. I don't like that kind of stress here."

"Will this be a stressful conversation--when we have it?"

"Dana: Stop. Please."

"Stop touching you?"

"Stop asking me questions. I want to sleep."

I took my hand off her and fell back on my pillow. "Can I say one more thing?"

"I doubt I can stop you. I've never stopped you from doing anything, now have I?"

An allusion to my surgery? Probably. But I ignored it. "I just want to make sure you know that I appreciate everything you said on the radio. About personal choices. About teaching. About me. All of it." And then I turned off the light and assumed that would be the end of it for the night. Who knew what the morning would bring? Half the time when we said we'd talk about something the next day, we never did, and so a part of me was quite sure this conversation was over for the foreseeable future. Allison was just tired. Tomorrow, once more, everything would be fine.

Oh, but not that night.

I'd placed the vibrator on the nightstand on the far side of a pile of books and rolled over onto my side, and I'd begun to try to clear my head so I could sleep. Exorcise those demons that dog us every day, banish those moments--the good ones as well as the bad--that keep one awake. I thought only of the fact that I was warm in the bed and the pillow felt good, and tomorrow I might bake some walnut-and-beer bread. I'd bake bread and read the manuscript for a new biography of George Sand a friend of mine at another university was writing. I'd wait for people to call with the news that they'd heard Allison and me on the radio, and to declare that the town was indeed behaving badly. It would be a glorious day.

"I'm done with radio," Allison said suddenly, and in an instant I was wide awake.

"Go on."

"No, that's all there is. I'm glad I spoke my piece and said what had to be said. And now I'm done. No more interviews. No more discussion."

"Good," I said simply, but I wondered if it would really be that simple. Tomorrow that would be all anyone would want to talk to her about.

"No more," she continued, and her voice broke abruptly. A crack on the
m
that drew the syllable out into a long stutter, a little cry punctuating the final exhalation. And then she was crying soundlessly, her face buried deep in her pillow, her shoulders twitching away from my touch as if I had leprosy.

"Allison, my Allison," I said softly, "what is this?"

"No!" she hissed, and she turned toward me and then sat up in bed. "I'm not
your
Allison!"

"I didn't mean anything, I'm sorry. Just tell me--"

"I'm not your Allison, I'm not Will's Allison! I'm nobody's Allison but mine!"

I sat up, too, but she wouldn't look at me. She had pulled her legs up toward her chest and buried her face in the covers on her knees. "I understand," I said. "I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry." I tried to touch her, but she wouldn't let me. She didn't exactly swat at my hand, but she brushed aside my fingers like so much dandruff or dust.

"Just tell me why you're crying," I murmured, and then--because I couldn't find the words to pacify her, and I was feeling useless and ineffectual and utterly (the word here is chosen with care) impotent--I added, "I've never seen you cry!"

I realized that I needed her help: I needed her to tell me how to help her--to tell me exactly what to do--because I was hoping, even then, to be her Savior Male. Imagine: Almost three months after surgery, and I was still having postmortem penile reflexes.

Unfortunately, as I would understand in a moment, those few words were the single worst thing I could have said, because of all that they revealed about me. About who, in so many ways, I still was.

But for a time Allison ignored me and continued to cry, her body shuddering with her sniffles. Finally she allowed me to drape my arm over her like a tent, but I was engulfing her more than touching her, and--though the thought crossed my mind--I didn't dare try to kiss the back of her hair.

How long did she cry? I can't say. Time is pure torture when you're that sad, just ask any transsexual. It's excruciating and it's endless. A sailboat on a lake with no wind. Was it a mere ten or fifteen minutes, or was it considerably longer? Could she have cried without stopping for fully half an hour? Perhaps. Those tears, I know now, had been welling inside her since Trinidad.

No, they'd begun gathering even earlier than that. They'd begun congregating on a ledge up in Lincoln that autumn afternoon when I first told her my plans.

Finally she said in a voice barely above a whisper, "Never seen me cry?" It was a question, but it was asked in astonishment.

"No," I said.

"There have been whole days--weekends--when I cried all the time!"

I nodded to myself, the words echoing in my head as if she had shouted them in a cave, and I realized something as disturbing as the fact that I had missed so much of her misery: I wasn't crying. And I should have been. I should have been crying, too. Sympathy sobs. An empathy wail. Some wholly justifiable weeping.

But I would have had to will those tears from the reservoir; they weren't going to come on their own.

And that meant something, too.

I didn't dare speak, because I knew if I did, I would acknowledge what we both understood: It was time for me to leave. I knew it, and so did she. And this time, I was quite sure, she wouldn't stop me. Because she'd made her point. She'd refused to be bullied. She had, with the help of her ex-husband of all people, stood by her woman.

And now she needed to get on with her life. And I with mine.

At some point I did speak. And, unlike when I broached the subject in the past, she didn't offer even token resistance to the notion that I should return to my home in Burlington.

Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if she had. I would have left regardless of what she said, because it was time. The experiment was over, and it had failed. That sounds harsh, but it reflects the reality of how I felt my last night in her bed. Not only was I the wrong person for Allison--gay, straight, I wasn't even focused that moment on monikers--the two of us together had replicated one of the most onerous male/female paradigms in the history of gender.

A nurturing woman had given way too much to an insensitive creep of a man. She had been my teacher and my nurse and the one person in the world who had been there for me--no matter what. She had endured all manner of derision on my behalf, she had risked her place in her community. She had jeopardized her career, her future, her sense of herself.

So much for transcending a few millennia of sex-role socialization, I thought to myself.

Well, bully for us! Bully for me!

Oh, I could tell myself that I had vacuumed for her and I had cooked for her. I could remind myself that I had even done windows.

But in reality Allison hadn't gotten anything from me that she couldn't have gotten from a first-rate domestic.

For a long moment she was quiet when I told her what I was going to do, and then I saw her nod. It was small, almost invisible. But it was real. Soon after that I believe she fell asleep--exhausted, I imagine, by all those tears and by the emotional toll that living with me had taken--but I would be awake through the night. At four in the morning I finally climbed from the bed that was already feeling foreign to me, and I tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. There I put a kettle on the stove for hot tea and baked that walnut-and-beer bread, and then I wandered through the rooms on the first floor of the house. I touched things as if I would never touch them again--the candlesticks on the dining room table, the couch in the den, the kitchen ladles and whisks and tureens that had become my unduly gynecic line in the sand--because I understood that I would never be back here again.

*

PART V

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Friday, September 28

DR. JEN FULLER:
I've heard some transsexuals liken their transformation to a butterfly's. They wake one day and they have wings. They're beautiful and they can fly.

But it's not usually like that. You're too awkward, too insecure. You're still experimenting with your new identity.

Usually it's much more like ... adolescence.

Chapter 36.

allison

IT WAS AS IF DANA HAD NEVER LIVED WITH ME. I would wander through town or I would walk to the school, and nobody seemed to view me anymore as the local sex renegade or pariah. I was, once again, merely a schoolteacher. One of the dozen-plus who lived in the town. I was a neighbor. I was Allison Banks--Allie (still and always) to one of the village's more prominent citizens.

When Rich Lessard and I would run into each other at the post office, we would make small talk. We were courteous to each other, we were polite. When Al Duncan and I would pass each other on the street by the bank or the bookstore, we would chat. We would laugh about the weather. Or his family's new minivan. He would ask me how Carly was doing at college.

Once more, Glenn Frazier and I bickered only about my curriculum and field trips--though I no longer had the cloud of the maritime museum excursion hanging over my head. But Glenn and I stopped discussing my life, because, after all, my life no longer mattered to him. Or to anyone. I wasn't exactly invisible--one can never do what I did and not become a part of a little town's mythos--but I believe I was no longer actively discussed. The corkboards and counters at the stores that had once held petitions debating the importance of a schoolteacher's morality now had flyers for piano teachers and typists and young people looking for roommates. The petitions themselves were buried deep in someone's gray metal filing cabinet.

My house seemed, suddenly, way too big for one person, and in late April I considered putting it on the market. But Carly came home from school two and a half weeks later, and though she only stayed with me until Memorial Day--that Monday she left for her internship in Washington--I was glad we had so much room. Neither of us is a big person, but somehow we manage to take up a lot of space. And so I decided I wouldn't even consider selling the house again until Carly had finished college.

And then? And then who knew.

The fact was, in less than a year I had met and lived with a transsexual, I had had sex with a woman for the first time in my life. I'd been excommunicated by a good measure of my community and then taken back into the fold without anyone saying a word. Without anyone even acknowledging what had transpired.

I had been, for better or worse, on the radio two nights in a row.

I had seen my daughter go off to college.

Consequently, I wouldn't even conjecture about where I might be in three years, or who I might have become. Especially with that wild card called midlife looming large.

For a while I was angry with Dana, and I felt I'd been used. She'd needed someone to take care of her during transition, she'd needed a woman to tutor her in the finer points of my gender. She'd seen the way I'd fallen in love with her when she was my male professor, and taken advantage of me.