Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (41 page)

I found it interesting that when I was most angry with Dana that spring, I would inadvertently revert to male pronouns and a male image--to Dana Stevens before her reassignment. He used me, I'd think, and the image in my mind would be the man I'd once known who wore his hair in a ponytail.

But then I would think to myself, How? How had he used me? Yes, I'd wound up as his model woman--
her
model woman--but I was the one who had called Dana back in September after she revealed to me her intentions on a cliff high in Lincoln. I was the one who had proposed that she move into my house. I was the one who had suggested she would need company in Colorado, and offered to go with her.

And, in return, I had received a very great deal. I'm not sure other people would see it that way, I'm not even sure Dana would. But I did, and I don't mean simply the company or the conversation or the way my house seemed to smell of freshly baked bread all the time. Nor am I referring to the sex, which, though it often confused me, always left me deeply satisfied. More than any of that, first he--and then she--had given me the faith, however brief, that I might not wander unescorted through the rest of my life. We had been in love, and for months and months I had had hope--one of the greatest gifts you can give someone on the far side of forty.

When I would realize that, my anger would dissipate. I would no longer be mad. I would even feel a twinge of what might have been guilt. Or, at least, disappointment in myself. What did it say about me, I would wonder, that I could only love Dana as a man? Was I really that intractable, that emotionally obstinate? Or was sexual preference so profoundly ingrained in my gray matter and soul that even the desperate attraction I had felt for Dana the preceding September--a desire that in the days before our hike to the cliff may have bordered on rapture--couldn't budge it?

The irony there was inescapable. It was the man who had made me angry, but it was also the man whom I seemed to love.

Still, I refused to see Dana that spring. Maybe in the summer when school was out, we would meet for coffee in Burlington. Maybe in a few years we would actually be friends--not unlike the way Will and I, over time, had built a friendship that transcended the fact that we shared a daughter.

In April and May, however, I simply wanted to reclaim a semblance of normalcy. And that meant only seeing people who had no plans to challenge what had once been a biological absolute.

Carly told me that she had listened to Dana's and my story on VPR in her dorm room. Listening with her were her roommate and a few of her friends--including Neil Shorter, a boy I could tell she was growing interested in, either because of or in spite of the pleasure he derived from coloring hair. Apparently, that spring it was a traffic-tape orange. Carly and I spoke on the phone both nights the programming aired, but she called me again on Thursday from the station with the news that we--her mother and her transsexual girlfriend--were all over the wires in two-and three-hundred-word increments. I wasn't surprised. The newspapers in northwestern Vermont had called my house and the school throughout Wednesday, though I continued to refuse to speak to reporters.

I told Carly then what was the real news in my life: There would be no more stories about Dana and me, because we'd decided Tuesday night to separate. Dana had already moved back to Burlington. She asked whether there had been any specific trigger, and I told her there hadn't.

"Just a chemistry thing, huh?" she said, using the expression she had heard me use perhaps a half dozen times when I would break off a relationship that had had some duration, or when I would report that a first date had been a bore.

"Yeah, a chemistry thing," I said.

"Were yesterday and today really strange?"

I admitted that there had been awkward moments both days, but word travels fast in a village like Bartlett. People had seen Dana loading up her car in the morning. And so by the time I had started to walk home from school Wednesday afternoon, by the time I had stopped at the supermarket and the bank, I had the sense that everyone in town knew Dana had left. I could see it in their faces: In some cases they were masks of sympathy, in others there was relief they couldn't hide. The trannie was gone, and the sixth-grade teacher had regained her senses.

Of course, it was nowhere near that simple. Regained my senses? Maybe, but with reason came despair. Before I knew it, I was in mourning, and the mourning grew deeper through April and May.

Nevertheless, somehow I was able to stave off the full brunt of the depression until after Carly had left Bartlett for Washington on Memorial Day. But then it hit me like a train, and I was a mess through a good part of the summer. I'm not sure how I endured the last two weeks of school, how I managed to get dressed the final nine or ten mornings: I know there was one period when I went four nights without washing my hair. There was one day when my eyes were so red from crying, I wore a pair of old eyeglasses to school that were supposed to change from dark to light when you wandered inside, but they hadn't functioned properly in years. But that was exactly the point: I knew even indoors they would remain a dull gray and hide my eyes.

Once school ended in the middle of June, I rarely left my house. At some point I planted my vegetable garden, but I have only the vaguest memory of kneeling in the dirt with a spade and a claw. And one day I must have planted the annuals that would fill in the gaps between the perennials that line the front walk, but I have no recollection of visiting the nursery where Carly had worked the summer before.

I know Molly Cochran and Nancy Keenan brought me cold soups and salads, and Will came by for visits. I know Dana wanted to come by, though I wasn't ready to see her. Was there anyone else? Probably. But visits from other people were rare--and always unsolicited.

I don't remember the Fourth of July, though every year there is an impressive fireworks celebration at the high-school athletic fields, and usually I sit on my terrace with friends and we watch the pyrotechnics in the sky. Not that summer. I don't even recall hearing the explosions high in the air above Bartlett.

There's an expression that a bulb will burn brightest just before it burns out. Certainly that was true in my father's case. I was twenty-six years old when he passed away, and Carly was just about twenty months. He died of pancreatic cancer, and two days before he died--though he had opened his eyes no more than a slit in twenty-four hours, and his body probably had more morphine in it than blood--he sat up in his bed and told my mother and me and the hospice worker who was visiting that he wanted to be hoisted into his wheelchair and taken to see the lights on the boathouses that line a small stretch of the Schuylkill River near the Philadelphia Art Museum. The houses are outlined in white Christmas lights year-round, so you can just see their silhouettes against the night sky, and they look like giant gingerbread cookies held vertically against a black backdrop. Sometimes you can see their reflection in the river as well.

My father had been a rower, and when he was younger, he would participate every year in the local regattas: the Dad-Vail and the Head of the Schuylkill. When I was very young, he would take me with him for more leisurely rides.

And so we took my father to see the boathouses, and he smiled and was not unhappy. Somehow he had rallied, and briefly he resembled the man who had raised me. And then we came home and he slipped into a coma, and less then forty-eight hours later he died.

My last months with Dana were something like that: I got sicker and sicker in January and February, but the night of the talent show--and the morning after, when our front door was vandalized and one last time I had to be there for her--I burned bright. I was strong and spirited and yet oddly serene. I was, briefly, at peace.

And then I burned out.

People believe that I have only a small role in the version of our story that aired nationally in the fall on
All Things Considered
because I refused to be interviewed through most of the summer. But that's only partly true. Yes, I had reclaimed my personal life, and the fact is, I probably wouldn't have talked to Carly about Dana and me with a producer and a tape recorder present in July. But both Carly and Will also understood how uncharacteristically fragile I had become, and they both made it clear to everyone in Washington that I would--that I could--have nothing to do with the programming until at least August. And even then there was no guarantee.

That's the real reason why you hear my name often but only rarely my voice in those stories. It wasn't simply that I didn't want to make a longer statement (though that, too, is true): Pure and simple, I couldn't.

Honestly, I just couldn't.

Chapter 37.

carly

AT FIRST I FELT A LITTLE DISLOYAL AGREEING TO have a drink with Dana when I came home from college in May. But she said she simply wanted to see how I was doing, and it was okay to tell Mom.

Still, I didn't. I just didn't think Mom wanted to know.

My dad kept telling me that my mom would be okay, and I tried not to worry. But I'd never seen her like this. One night she brought home a big stack of tests to grade, and she plopped herself down on the couch in the den with the pile in her lap. She began about eight-thirty, and she was still at it at ten o'clock. Finally, a little before midnight, I asked how she was doing, and she told me she hadn't started. She'd finished her tea, but otherwise she hadn't done a thing but sit there and daydream with the tests in her lap.

"Do you miss Dana?" I asked. I promised myself that I wouldn't share a thing that she told me with Dana.

She shook her head. "I miss the Dana I met last summer."

"The man."

"Yup. I like the woman she's become very much. But I'm not sure I'm prepared to be her friend."

"I can see that," I said. Then, without thinking, I asked, "Is it really okay for me to go to Washington this summer?"

"Okay? Why wouldn't it be? I'm very proud of you."

"I know. But a part of me thinks it would be really fun to do something brain-dead this summer in town. Maybe work at the nursery again. And hang out with you."

"I'm not an invalid," she said. "I'm a little shell-shocked, but I'll be fine. Don't even think of turning down that internship for me. I'd be furious with you if you did. Furious."

"I'd be turning it down for me. I'm sure I could do it next summer. And I worked really hard this year at school. Maybe I've earned a rest."

"You're talking nonsense," she said. "This is a great honor, and you'll love it. You'll love every minute of it."

I went upstairs to bed a few minutes later, and when I fell asleep, she was still in the den. When I woke up, I heard her in the shower getting ready for school, and I made a decision. I would check the book bag that would, inevitably, be hanging off the top of a ladder-back chair in the kitchen. If she had finished grading her kids' tests, I would go to Washington that summer. If not, I would stay.

I tiptoed down the stairs, though I couldn't imagine she could hear me in the shower--and, if she did, why it would matter. Sure enough, her canvas bag was in its usual morning spot on a kitchen chair. And then, for the only time in my life, I snuck a peek at its contents.

The papers were all done. They were corrected and graded, and my mom had written little notes on the ones that were particularly good or bad. And so a few days later I went to Washington. I left convinced that my mom was mending and very soon would be her old self.

It was perhaps a month later that I would learn I'd been wrong, and that my mother would in fact have to get worse before she'd get better.

"My dad says she's grieving," I told Dana. We met in Burlington, at one of the tables in the bar of an elegant restaurant on Church Street. The awnings were up and the windows were open, and the spring air felt terrific. We could watch people as they wandered up and down the pedestrian mall smack in the center of the city.

"He says it's like her lover has died," I continued. "You, that is, when you were a male."

"Your father is a very smart man."

"Yeah, he is. But he said he was only repeating what Mom had told him."

"Oh."

"It doesn't matter who said it. It makes sense."

I was having an iced coffee, and she was sipping a glass of wine half filled with club soda.

"She hasn't answered any of the E-mails I've sent her. Or any of the letters," Dana said.

"Have you called her?"

"I have. In early April. She begged me not to."

"My mom doesn't beg for anything."

"Forgive me: She
insisted
that I not call her again. She told me she'd call me when she was ready," Dana said, and she looked down at the slender goblet on the table.