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  "I don't know the family," I said.

  "You probably wouldn't. They live out in New Haven. And you can bet that if your mom and Dana stay together, your mom won't get to know them real well either: They'll either begin to home-school their little Chrystal, or they'll demand that she's transferred into Carolyn Chapel's class," she said, referring to the school's other sixth-grade teacher. When I was eleven, Mrs. Chapel had been my teacher.

  "It must be really hard to home-school a kid," I said.

  "It is. As a parent, you have to feel awfully strongly about something to do it."

  Upstairs we heard a thump and then laughter. I must have looked up toward the ceiling reflexively, because Molly was quick to reassure me that it was only her husband, Clayton, and the two boys. They were supposed to be reading, but it was clear they were wrestling.

  "Let's see, Audrey LaFontaine: Her family won't be happy about this either."

  "No?"

  "Nope. Fundamentalists. They're also in that church in East Medford. Same with the McCurdys. Of course, there could be worse things to happen to your mother than to lose Brian McCurdy."

  "A difficult child?"

  "Actually, just the opposite. But needy beyond belief, and guaranteed to fail. Your mom always cares way too much for kids like that. She lets them bring her down."

  I didn't know Brian McCurdy, but I did know his older sister. Terry. Terry was the sort of girl who was never invited to the really good parties, and tended to accessorize badly. She was also from a house where it was clear bathing was optional, and so she wasn't very popular. Nevertheless, I'd always felt bad for her, and in eleventh grade I'd made it a personal self-improvement goal to eat lunch with her at least once a week in the cafeteria. I'd even suggested we take driver's ed together, though it had meant sitting in the backseat of a Dodge Dynasty with her for an hour a day in the spring, a formidable task given her family's evident indifference to laundry and soap.

  Of course, self-improvement has its limits when you're sixteen: I never had her over to my house.

  "What's Terry doing now?" I asked.

  "Haven't a clue. But working somewhere, I imagine. She was, in her own way, very industrious. Unlike her brother, who's merely exasperating."

  I knew that Brian and Terry were part of a pretty large brood, and so it crossed my mind that poor Terry was simply spending her life baby-sitting.

  "Let's see," Molly murmured as she flipped open another folder with another class picture. "The Duncans will be trouble. And so will the Hedderiggs."

  "Are you worried?" The question had come out abruptly. I'd meant to ease into my concerns more gracefully, though I'm sure Molly knew I was anxious. That was, after all, why I'd come by.

  Without looking up from the picture she answered, "A little. But it's like your stepmother said: They can't do anything. Really, they can't."

  "They can just, what ... circulate a petition?"

  "Actually, they can do something much worse than that," she said, and she looked straight at me and her face became serious. "Much worse."

  "What?"

  "Meetings, Carly Banks. They can make us have meetings."

  Chapter 21.

  allison

  IN THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY AFTER HER SURGERY, I grew accustomed to talking to Dana while her feet were higher than her head. Three times a day her bed was tilted this way, while warm pads soaked in saline were applied to her new vagina. She'd fold her arms across her chest and I'd sit in the chair with the view of the Huajatolla, and we'd chat about nothing. The weather in Trinidad. The weather in Bartlett. Whether her painkillers were better or worse than a daiquiri.

  Sometimes she'd reach over for my hand, and she'd kiss the tips of my fingers.

  Outwardly, she didn't look any more feminine than she had a week or two earlier, and in some ways she may have looked less: She wore little makeup in the hospital, and her hair had fallen flat because she couldn't wash it. But she seemed more womanly to me, and sometimes she seemed downright maternal.

  "You are taking care of yourself, aren't you?" she asked me Wednesday night--New Year's Day--barely thirty-six hours after her surgery.

  "Of course I am," I said. That night when I returned to my hotel room, waiting for me were chocolates and flowers and a half dozen paperback books she'd ordered for me before we'd even left Vermont.

  The surgery had gone well, and there seemed to be no postoperative complications on the horizon, and so on Friday morning Dana suggested that I take our rental car and go for a drive. She thought it would do me good to get out--out of the hospital, and out of Trinidad--and she reassured me she would be fine. She said she had plenty to read.

  I considered driving northwest toward the Huajatolla themselves, but I was warned that there was a chance of snow in the forecast, and decided I probably shouldn't go sight-seeing at twelve and thirteen thousand feet.

  And so I drove south through the Raton Pass--a mere seventy-eight hundred feet--and into New Mexico. Suddenly I was in the desert and it was warm. Amarillo, the green sign said, was only 214 miles distant, and I estimated that the westernmost edge of the Texas panhandle was barely two hours away. I decided I would go there. I would go east. I had no expectations that I would ever see Amarillo--nor even the promising red dot on the map called Dalhart--but I thought I could reach a little black speck called Texline by early afternoon.

  Sometimes I'd listen to country music, something I never did in Vermont, and for an hour mid-morning I listened to a radio shrink I picked up on a talk station out of Denver. Usually the people who called into those shows struck me as pathetic and predictable at once: They were men who had extramarital affairs and now had gonorrhea, women who had fought with their husbands and then slept with their brothers-in-law, aunts (never uncles) who were annoyed that their nieces and nephews never sent thank-you notes.

  Often there were men who wore women's clothing in secret and were wondering if they should tell their wives ... but none that day. Frequently there were women who were toying with the idea of a lesbian dalliance ... but not that morning. Regularly, it seemed, there were women and men who were involved in a relationship that no one around them seemed to understand ... but no one that Friday seemed to have such a dilemma. For the first time in my life, my problems actually seemed bigger than theirs.

  Though, of course, every bit as self-created.

  "You got yourself into this mess, and it's up to you to get yourself out of it," the doctor told most of the callers. "It's your life."

  Yet the sun seemed higher in New Mexico than in Colorado, and I realized I was warmer outside than I'd been any moment since early October. It was seventy degrees in the town of Clayton, and I bought a sandwich at a diner and sat alone at the picnic table in the parking lot. I convinced myself that I really didn't have any problems at all.

  In the days immediately after Carly was born, I couldn't imagine Will would ever want to have sex with me again. He'd been in the delivery room with me, and I feared he'd been present for too much bloody show to view me as something sexual. To find me arousing.

  "Not true," he insisted, and he was comforting and sweet. "The mind compartmentalizes that sort of thing. Besides, I'm a guy. I spend my life in heat."

  Sure enough, six or seven weeks after Carly had joined us, we were making love while she slept in the nearby bassinet. Though at first we were both nervous and tentative, we got the hang of it again soon enough. Will, it was clear, was able to separate the vulva from which his daughter had emerged from the vulva he would make love to as a husband.

  I wondered if I could do the same thing with Dana. I worried. I couldn't stop thinking about the gauze and the fluids and the blood. I couldn't stop thinking about the surgery.

  On the steps of the library in Texline, I ate some of the chocolates that Dana had given me. They melted fast in the sun, and within moments the chocolate had the consistency of mayonnaise.

  There I fantasized that I would climb back into my rental and drive
on to Dalhart. Hartley. Dumas. I would reach Amarillo by dinner, I imagined, spend the night there, and then continue east along old Route 66. I would lose myself in a Texas town with the magical name of Shamrock.

  Shamrock, on old Route 66.

  Or, perhaps, I would veer south of the highway and sleep in Goodnight. Maybe, instead, I'd decide to spend the rest of my life in Groom, an interstate diamond almost exactly equidistant between Shamrock and Amarillo.

  Groom, Goodnight, and Shamrock. Was there a patch on the planet with three towns with more promising names? Not likely.

  Of course, I went to none of those places. I turned around and headed back into Colorado. I went west and northwest, for a time driving straight into the low winter sun.

  But in Capulin I did stop and visit the crater from a ten-thousand-year-old volcano, and there I wished that I'd worn sandals as I walked through the chokecherries and brown field grass that surrounded it. And in Raton I watched children in short pants climb upon a cluster of playground dinosaurs, each of the sculptures painted a cheerful pastel.

  I watched the children, I realized after the fact, for close to forty-five minutes.

  Though I hadn't run away into Texas, I had managed to spend the day sleepwalking.

  I was back at Mount San Rafael barely in time to watch Dana eat the apple cobbler that had come with her supper, and have a cup of coffee with her while she finished her dessert. She was disappointed that I hadn't had dinner with her, but she said she was happy that I'd had the chance to spend the day in the southwestern sun.

  "And you made Texas? Okra, fried food, and trucks with big tires. Lord, Allison, I wish I'd been with you," she said, joking, but I couldn't find it in me to laugh. I'd liked my few minutes in Texas.

  We watched an hour and a half of television together in her hospital room, and I was back at my hotel by quarter to nine. I saw immediately that the little red light on my phone was blinking, and I learned from the generic voice that hails from computer message centers everywhere that I had received a call. My daughter had phoned only moments before, calling from her father's house around ten-thirty at night her time.

  Though I knew she'd be awake, I wasn't sure about Patricia and Will, and so I almost didn't return the call that evening. But I did, and I'm glad. Looking back, I don't regret that decision at all. I simply wish the news of the petition hadn't made me so testy with Dana during our last day together in Colorado.

  Testier, actually.

  Let's be honest. I hadn't been very pleasant around her on Thursday or on Friday night when I returned from my drive. Then, when I looked into the face of my girlfriend and I saw what I feared was my future, I experienced what I can only describe as buyer's remorse.

  Chapter 22.

  dana

  I AM NOT A SENSATION. I AM NOT SENSATIONAL. I have never appeared on a TV talk show.

  The last thing I want to do is draw attention to myself as a transsexual. As a woman in a doctor-built body.

  But I would have risen from my bed--ripping my stitching to shreds--and returned to Vermont with Allison to defend her if I had thought such a thing would have made her life one tiny bit easier.

  I would have.

  But we all knew that my going there then would only have made her life worse.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Wednesday, September 26

  MOLLY COCHRAN: Once we joked about it. Maybe twice. She knew there were people in the community who wouldn't be happy about her decision to stay with Dana.

  But she was in love. And true love's supposed to conquer everything, isn't it? I mean, really, isn't it?

  Chapter 23.

  will

  IT'S NOT ALWAYS EXPLICABLE WHAT ATTRACTS US, and what doesn't. There are the basics, of course, certain universal tenets of beauty. The doctrine of symmetry. The dogma of slim.

  At the time that my second marriage was starting to crumble, I had slept with only three women. Allie. Patricia. And exactly one lover between my two marriages, a woman whose face I can now barely remember. That had been it.

  And Allie and Patricia really look nothing alike. Patricia is shorter, smaller, more petite. She is darker. Less serene. I won't say she is less beautiful than my Allie.

  My Allie.

  It is probably owing to the fact that out of habit I occasionally use that construction that I now discuss my second marriage in the past tense. Not literally, of course. Patricia didn't leave me because I used the words my Allie once in a session with our therapist toward the very end of January. But it didn't help. It made the remainder of that meeting needlessly hostile.

  That afternoon--it was a Thursday--Patricia informed me that she needed a few days apart from me, and one of us needed to leave the house for the weekend. She said she'd be happy to go, but I insisted it should be me. After all, I had a conference that night with our listeners' advisory board anyway, and the meeting was going to be in Woodstock. And so I spent that night at the Woodstock Inn, and then on Friday I drove south to Bennington. Carly and I had dinner together on Friday night and then went to a movie, and we had breakfast together the next day. She took me to the radio station where she'd begun working earlier that week, and introduced me to the Saturday-morning deejay.

  I wasn't sure what to do with myself once I had taken Carly back to her dorm, and so I decided to go skiing. I went to Stratton, rented a pair of skis, and spent the afternoon on the mountain. After my last run I called Patricia to see how she felt about the notion of my returning home. I got our answering machine. I went to a restaurant down the road from the resort, ordered dinner from the bar, and--when I was finished--tried Patricia again. Once more I got the answering machine.

  That's when I checked into the motel across the street from the restaurant. But I wasn't ready for bed, and I certainly wasn't sleepy. And so I walked back across the road, planning to get potted in the saloon while people a generation younger than me flirted and danced and went back to their own motel rooms to have sex.

  I didn't succeed in getting smashed, however, because one of those young women close to Carly's age started coming on to me at the bar. She was not beautiful but she was cute, and she had very short hair and a stud in the side of her nose. She was studying to become a paralegal.

  When she put her hand on my thigh while telling me about how much she liked to dance alone--meaning, I realized, perform for a lover as foreplay--I asked her why in the name of God she was coming on to what had to look like a middle-aged, burnout drunk in a bar.

  "I've always liked older people," she said.

  "Ah, a daddy complex."

  "And a mommy one."

  "I have a daughter who's roughly your age."

  "So? I have a father who's roughly yours."

  I took her hand off my blue jeans and held it for a long moment. It was small and soft, and there was a thin gloss of moisture on her palm. I studied her face carefully, since I was about to reject her and I wanted to say the right thing. Suddenly she seemed to me more than cute. She seemed sexy and wanton and I imagined that whatever I was about to give up in a motel bedroom would have given me all manner of memory for years to come. She had grown more attractive in the few minutes we'd been together for the simple reason that she'd wanted me. Physically.

  No other woman on the planet seemed to. Certainly not Patricia. Not Allie.

  "Look," I said. "I think--"

  She pulled her hand from mine and put her finger on my lips.

  "I think you need to relax," she murmured.

  "I do. And as much as I loved having your hand on my thigh, it wasn't relaxing me."

  "Know what would relax you?"

  I nodded and stood up. "I do," I said. "You're a very attractive young woman, and I am very attracted to you. I have every confidence you could relax me. But I'm married and I'm a father, and--"

  " 'Nuff said." She surprised me by kissing me lightly on the cheek, and then took her beer and disappeared into
a group of people near the band.

  People will have intercourse with anything. Especially men. Take Chinese foot-binding: Men would literally fornicate with the deformed cleft of an adult woman's size-three or -three-and-a-half foot.

  When I went back to my motel room, Patricia still wasn't home. I realized then she'd gone somewhere, too. I wondered if she simply couldn't bear to be around even my things anymore. The reminders of me.