Trans-Sister Radio Page 14

  But my grandmother hadn't seemed bothered at all.

  "Did it use batteries?" she'd asked Nancy.

  "Nope. Plugged right into the cigarette lighter."

  "See?" my grandmother had said. "No good has ever, ever come from smoking."

  Nevertheless, I was still amazed by how comfortable she was discussing Dana's plans Christmas Eve, and offering her opinions. She was, after all, somewhere in her early seventies.

  "This isn't a nose job, Dana," she went on. "This has to be a major operation."

  "Oh, it is."

  "What would you do if the procedure didn't exist? If it wasn't possible?"

  "Suffer."

  "Is that what--and I want to use the right word--transsexual people did until someone figured out how to do it? They just suffered?"

  Dana took a piece of bread from the basket and delicately broke it in half. "Essentially, yes. They lived very unhappy lives."

  "So there was a ... demand for the procedure? Some doctor somewhere thought it was something we needed to figure out how to do?"

  "Market forces at work," Dana said.

  My grandmother sat back in her chair. "When it's done, will you tell the next man you meet how you came to be who you are?"

  "I don't think I understand what you mean," Dana said, and then motioned for my mother to pass the butter.

  "The next time you fall in love with a man, and things proceed to the bedroom: What will you tell him? Or will you have told him already? I guess this is a question about sexual etiquette. Obviously it wasn't an issue for my generation."

  I glanced at my mother, and she was already looking at Dana. Dana looked crestfallen: doe-eyed and sad and surprised. Clearly my mom hadn't told her mother that she and Dana were lovers, and somehow my grandmother had missed the fact that they'd slept in the same bedroom the night before--or, if she had noticed, she had simply viewed it as two middle-aged gals bunking together.

  Dana sat up very straight, turned back to my grandmother, and said in a tone that was as controlled as it was polite, "I'm having this operation so I won't have to hide who I am. I like to believe that I'd only fall in love with a person who's completely comfortable with that. With me."

  I don't know if my mom was planning to tell my grandmother about Dana and her and just hadn't yet found the right moment, or whether she was hoping she'd never have to mention it. But I could see how hurt Dana was, and certainly my mom could, too. And so she rallied. She took Dana's hand in hers and said, "And I'm that person, Mother. Dana and I have been dating since the middle of the summer."

  My grandmother pulled off her eyeglasses, folded the ear pieces flat, and placed them on the dining room table. "I didn't realize," she said.

  "It's true," my mom said. Dana, I saw, was actually blushing.

  "And you're having the surgery next week?" my grandmother asked.

  "A week from today, as a matter of fact."

  My grandmother nodded, and I thought that for one of the few times in her life she was actually embarrassed. But I was wrong. She was displeased, but she wasn't flustered. "Well, dear," she said to Mom, "we all need to try new things now and then. Let's face it: The first person to eat a lobster must have been a very brave man."

  "Or," Dana said, smiling, "very, very hungry."

  I stayed up watching television well past midnight Christmas Eve, and so I was the last one to go upstairs. For a long moment I stood in the dark at the top of the steps, and then I tiptoed down the hall to my mom's bedroom. There was a string of light under the shut door, but I didn't want to disturb them and so I didn't knock. But I stood there for a long moment, entranced, wondering what was going on at that exact moment on the other side. Were they reading? Had one or both of them fallen asleep with the light on? Were they, at that very moment, making love?

  I tried not to think about Dana naked, but I did. I tried not to think of either the breasts that were starting to blossom, or the penis that would soon be gone. But I did. I thought of both.

  I imagined Dana and my mother were having a variant on makeup sex: Dana, in my mind, was filled with gratitude because my mom had announced at the dinner table that the two of them were lovers, while my mom was, finally, liberated from the guilt she must have been feeling for days at having hidden that very fact.

  Nevertheless, I found it interesting that my mom was still so uncomfortable with her relationship with Dana that there remained people from whom she hid the gory details.

  It may have been the apparent fixation of everybody around me on genitals, and it may have been the odd tensions and euphorias that filled the house; it may even have been the simple fact that I'd finally gotten some much-needed sleep after my first semester of college; but I realized, suddenly, how powerfully horny I had become, and I retreated as fast as I could to my bedroom. If it hadn't been Christmas Eve and if I hadn't known it would have sent my ex-boyfriend, Michael, exactly the wrong message, I would have called him up that very moment and told him to come over to my house and fuck me silly.

  The women in my family have always seemed to do okay without a man permanently under the roof. My mom hadn't lived with one since I was in elementary school, and her mom hadn't lived with one since my grandfather died when I was a toddler.

  Nevertheless, I knew my grandmother was very disappointed when her daughter and Will Banks had divorced. She liked my dad a lot.

  We went for a walk through the village early Christmas night, just the two of us, savoring the lights and the decorations on the houses that ringed the green. Mom and Dana had prepared another monster dinner and refused to let my grandmother or me do a thing--even help clear the table when we were done.

  "We don't get snow like this in Philadelphia," she said, and she waved at the white quilt on the commons, and the drifts piled up against the gazebo. "I wish we did."

  "Trust me: It loses its luster in February. Sometimes you're pretty sick of it by March."

  "Do you know what kind of weather they'll have in Colorado?"

  I was careful to walk pretty slowly, because there were little patches of ice on the sidewalk and I didn't want my grandmother to fall and break her hip. Aside from the damper it would put on the holiday, it would have complicated my mom's travel plans in a big way.

  "Cold, but not too cold. Twenties and thirties at night. Forties during the day. And there's no snow where they're going right now. They might get some, but supposedly it wouldn't last."

  "Like Philadelphia."

  "Maybe."

  "I still can't believe what doctors can do today. And believe me, I've seen a lot of changes over the years."

  "Me too. It's pretty amazing."

  "What do you think of him?"

  "Dana?"

  "Excuse me. Her."

  "It's okay. None of us can keep up with the pronouns. Except for Mom."

  "Well, she is a teacher."

  "I like Dana," I said.

  "Oh, I do, too. But do you think she's normal?"

  "Nope."

  "Me either. I think she's as crazy as a loon."

  "Still, you'd be surprised how quickly you can get used to the weirdness of it all."

  "Have you?"

  "Gotten used to it? Not always. But most of the time. And the important thing is that she makes Mom happy."

  "For the moment, anyway," my grandmother said. "No one, it seems, has been able to keep your mother happy forever. I guess your father still holds the longevity record."

  "I guess."

  "What do people in town think of Dana? Not much, I'd wager."

  "I was gone most of the fall, so I'm probably not a good person to ask."

  "That was a very tactful answer, dear. Forgive me. I didn't mean to try and make you rat on your mother."

  We passed by a massive yellow and blue Victorian house that had been a bed-and-breakfast for as long as I could remember. There were electric candles in every single window, and small wreaths on the shutters.

  "I really haven't had to talk
to anyone about Dana," I said, and then thought to myself, yet. I knew it was only a matter of time.

  "Not even your father?"

  "Well, Dad and I have talked."

  "What does he think?"

  I shrugged, though my grandmother was so focused on the sidewalk she probably didn't notice. "You know, my sense is he isn't going to like anyone my mom likes," I said.

  "You're probably right. Your father enjoys his torch. He'll carry it to his grave."

  "Oh, I think he loves Patricia."

  "In a way, maybe. How is she?"

  "She and Dad seem to be at odds a bit lately."

  "What a surprise."

  "But I guess she's okay. Busy."

  "So, your father's met Dana?"

  "Uh-huh. But Dana wasn't wearing women's clothes yet."

  My favorite high-school English teacher and her family drove by, and she gave me a little wave. Somehow she recognized me under my wool hat and my scarf.

  "I'm glad I didn't know about them last night," my grandmother said. "I thought they were just friends."

  "You mean when we were at church?"

  "Exactly. I think if I'd known the truth, I would have convinced myself that every single human being in the sanctuary was staring at us."

  I nodded, and kicked a little piece of ice off the sidewalk. I didn't have the heart to tell her they were.

  Chapter 16.

  will

  THINK ABOUT IT, AND JUST IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES:

  You think you're a Caucasian trapped in an Oriental's body. You know for a fact that your hair is supposed to be blond, you know your chest is supposed to be a forest of tawny curling hair. A mass as thick as steel wool. And so you're miserable. Wretched. Perhaps even bitter. What do you do? You have cosmetic surgery so you look like a WASP. You dye the ebony mass on your head the color of straw, you have hair plugs implanted into your chest. You have your eyes rounded.

  But are you no longer Taiwanese? Chinese? Japanese?

  Of course not.

  Better still: You're convinced you're a black man imprisoned inside a white guy's skin; you're absolutely sure that a gigantic error's been made. Really, that's what you believe. And so you go to a dermatologist to find out what can be done to make you look black.

  Or walk with me a few generations into the future. You're a short man. You're barely five feet. And you are sick to death of being treated as ... small. Especially since you are so big inside. So tall. You know it. You sense it. You feel it. Perhaps when you were a teenager and no one was home, you once went so far as to sneak into your father's armoire, and you pranced around the bedroom in his suits. Forty-two longs. Trousers with an inseam of thirty-six.

  You looked ridiculous, and certainly all that fabric bunched up around your ankles and shins didn't do a whole lot to facilitate the illusion. But there was something there if you half closed your eyes and you gave your imagination free rein. It was a bit like visiting the fun house at the county fair and standing in front of the mirror that stretched you like a rubber band.

  Now, however, the science is there to build you a body that would get you a tryout with the Knicks. Make you the tall man on the outside that you know you are on the inside. And so you have the surgery. Or you take the drugs.

  Are any of these ideas stranger than the notion that with hormones and a knife we can change a person's gender? When I first met Dana, I didn't think so. To be honest, I'm not completely sure I do now.

  The fact is, no hormone was going to turn Dana Stevens's Y chromosome into an X. No surgery in the world was going to offer him the particular history that went along with growing up female. No procedure was going to give him the joys or the terrors that must accompany pregnancy--that must, for teen girls, make sex a walk over Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

  In my opinion, learning to mince through a mall didn't make him female, rouge didn't make him female, a barrette in his hair didn't make him female.

  You simply couldn't, it seemed to me, change a biological imperative.

  When I realized what Dana was going to do, I saw at best a parody of femininity. I saw the sort of man who could set the women's movement back decades. Look at me, the transsexual screams, I'm a girl! I'm wearing a dress!

  The problem? The male transsexual wants only to be as womanly as possible. He wants to be ultra-feminine. Half the transsexuals in this world would probably have looked right at home at a Junior League luncheon in 1961. The only giveaway? Their bigger hands would have been holding those teeny-tiny watercress sandwiches. Their bigger mouths would have been eating them.

  Dana, no matter what, was never going to know what it was like to grow up female. He was never going to be molded by the sorts of challenges that confronted Allie twenty and thirty years ago, or that face Carly right now. Dana was never going to be formed, at least in part, by the fears and frustrations a woman inevitably endures throughout her life. Nor, for that matter, was he ever going to know her real joys.

  I did my homework, and it struck me that Dana's problem was as much on the outside as it was on the inside. A big part of his predicament was his world. Instead of living in a place where it was perfectly fine to be a man who feels like a woman (or, for that matter, a woman who feels like a man), he was part of a civilization that would rather castrate certain men and remove the ovaries from certain women. We're just not very comfortable with people who, for example, lack that second X chromosome and therefore sport facial hair and a penis, but would rather wear stockings and a skirt than a pair of pants.

  And yet it wouldn't be that difficult to learn to be comfortable. What would it take? A generation? Maybe two?

  Look at me. I've changed.

  And even if we never, ever grew to approve of them, you have to admit: Tolerating them is far better than mutilating them. Chopping apart their genitals. Disfiguring their bodies.

  Here's an irony too good to pass up: The last name of the surgeon who in 1952 turned George Jorgensen into Christine?

  Hamburger. The guy with the knife was named Hamburger.

  The logistics of Allie's and my friendship are only complex when other people are involved. I don't think Patricia ever minded too terribly when I dropped in on Allie--or, at least, I was always able to convince myself that she didn't. For some reason, however, I was very uncomfortable the one time that Patricia and Dell, Allie's mother, were together in the same room. Some years earlier, when Mrs. Cronin had come north for a long Fourth of July weekend, she and Allie and Carly had all dropped by our house on a Sunday afternoon. I think Patricia felt outnumbered--she saw an ambush, three generations of women descending upon her from my ex-wife's family--and so it had been a very tense forty-five minutes.

  Consequently, the day after Christmas I went to Allie's house to say hello to Mrs. Cronin. I went late-morning, because Allie had told me that Dana would be in Burlington then, doing his last-minute shopping before they left for his big event in Colorado.

  The four of us had a very nice visit together, and I said nothing uncivil when Carly mentioned her mother's and Dana's trip. I simply nodded politely and reminded Allie to bring along Dramamine. Once, when we'd been married, she'd forgotten.

  Mostly we talked about Carly's growing interest in broadcast media, and the video she had completed about the battery factory in Bennington. That morning may also have been the first time that I heard the full details of the part-time job Carly would have in the spring at a little radio station in southwest Vermont. I was, of course, thrilled.

  And then I left. I went straight from Allie's to the Grand Union to replenish the pantry that Patricia's nieces and nephews had pillaged Christmas Day. It was there that I ran into the principal of our local elementary school.

  I did not, as some people probably believed at the time, call Glenn Frazier on the telephone. I did not make a special effort to see him, I did not tattle on my ex-wife.

  I simply bumped into him in the cereal aisle, our carts almost clanking together as we met. And at
some point in our conversation--when we were beyond the holiday pleasantries, when we were done praising the original Shredded Wheat biscuit--the topic invariably turned to my ex-wife. How could it not? People were aware that we were still friends, and people knew who she was living with now. People knew what she was doing with her life.