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  Chapter 26.

  carly

  THE MOON IN THE SKY LOOKED LIKE IT WAS underwater; it bobbed beneath a gauzy haze like a Caribbean jellyfish in the shallows by a beach. It was a sickle moon. There was still some daylight left, but the sky was moving quickly from purple to dusk. It was a little past five in the afternoon.

  I climbed into my roommate's sporty little Camry and started back up the hill toward the college. I knew I couldn't make a habit of borrowing June's car, because I just didn't like her enough to incur that kind of debt. Come March, I figured, I could bicycle back and forth between my dormitory and the radio station in town, but I wasn't sure what I would do until then. A full third of January still remained.

  The station where I was going to work that spring was on the top floor of a brick building about three blocks from the battery factory in Bennington. It used lots of syndicated material, and it seemed like we ran almost every PSA we received. Especially overnight. Mostly the station was known for classic rock, the sort of stuff my mom would play at her parties and listen to when she was cleaning the house--there were album covers all over the walls, and the waiting room looked like a head shop from an era way before my time--but throughout the day it offered a five-minute local news roundup on the half hour. Then, at twelve-thirty and five-thirty, it actually had a fifteen-minute news program, which was what drew me to the station in the first place.

  Jim Blosser did both of those broadcasts. He was the station owner as well as the station manager, and he was, I am sure, a much better salesperson than the person whom he actually expected to sell time. He paid me a dollar above minimum wage and gave me plenty to do.

  At first I simply typed up ad contracts and called local retailers to get merchandise we could give away on the air. But once Jim saw I could write and put together a story, I started drafting news for the deejays and Jim to read: Direct-mail clothing merchant to open outlet in Manchester. Three cows die in sudden snowstorm. Diner to offer discounts for seniors.

  Moreover, after I got my FCC license later that spring, Jim allowed me to go on the air with Jamie Sloan whenever she wanted the company and I had the time. Jamie was somewhere in her mid-thirties, and her real job was as a shift supervisor for some valve factory in Hoosick Falls. But she loved rock and roll music and she loved being a radio "personality," and so she did the station's afternoon program during the week. Jamie was great fun to be around because she understood that we were a ten-thousand-watt station with, at any given point in the day, somewhere between eleven and nine hundred listeners. Jamie also generated a fair amount of ad revenue herself because of her spontaneous and bizarre on-air additions to the commercials she was handed to read:

  "I'm telling you, the rhubarb pie at the Blue Benn is out of this world. The best. If 60 Minutes ever does an expose on the valve factory in Hoosick, I'm serving Mike Wallace that pie. Truly. Mike Wallace? He gets the pie. It's one of a kind. Top it with the Blue Benn's homemade ice cream, and you won't mind the angioplasty that'll come with dessert. You just won't care."

  My first day there--the day I saw the sickle moon in the sky--was a Monday. My mom had been home two weeks and a day by then, and Dana had been back for a week and a half. To be honest, I was somewhat relieved that I had had an excuse to leave Bartlett. Certainly a part of me wanted to be home to cheer up my mom and to continue to help Dana with her recovery. I had insisted on making dinner every night for two weeks, and I'd brought Dana breakfast in bed her first Friday and Saturday home so she wouldn't have to struggle down the stairs as soon as she woke up in the morning.

  But I couldn't bear to hear my mom insist that she didn't care about what people were saying and doing, when it was so clear that she was devastated. And Dana, who wanted nothing more than to be treated like a woman, was acting, it seemed, more and more like a man.

  "We need to respond," she kept saying, "we need to do something!"

  "Oh?"

  "Yes! We can't just let them pillory you. We can't just let them put you in the stocks."

  "They're not pillorying me."

  "That petition is heinous. Its implications are appalling."

  "It's meaningless. It's names on paper."

  "Do you want to talk to my lawyer? Let's do that. Let's talk to my lawyer. That thing Al Duncan said in the paper? It's libel, I know it is."

  That particular day there had been a short article in the Middlebury newspaper because Al Duncan had said publicly that he thought my mom should be fired. His comments were news because he was a member of the school board, and because it was obvious that he wasn't alone in his opinion. But the article also had a quote from Judd Prescott, the school superintendent, that made it clear that as a member of the Vermont NEA--the Vermont National Education Association, the group that acted, in essence, as the teachers union--my mom couldn't possibly be let go because she was living with Dana.

  "I have a lawyer," my mom said. "Thank you."

  "Then let's call him. Let's schedule a time to see him right now."

  "Her. My lawyer happens to be female."

  This conversation was repeated, more or less, over and over during the first few days Dana was back. Finally, over dinner one night, I snapped at the two of them: "You're like an old married couple!" I said. "You're having the same fight every day. If I want to watch two people argue all the time, I can just hang out at Dad's."

  Dana apologized, and my mom gave me a hug. I felt bad comparing them to Dad and Patricia, and I regretted my inference that their squabbling was going to drive me away. The fact was, my dad was taking me back to school in a couple of days in any event, because my job at the radio station began on the twentieth.

  Nevertheless, I can remember climbing into Dad's car on a Sunday afternoon and--despite the snow that was swirling in little gusts and the measureless gray in the sky--feeling downright happy. As soon as I got to Bennington, I realized, I would no longer be the daughter of the teacher who lived with the transsexual.

  The words in the petition that most rankled Dana were perversion and prurience.

  "Of course I'm deviant," she said, shaking her head as she scanned the petition her first weekend home. "Every transsexual is. But perverted? I think not. And I'm certainly not prurient."

  The copy we had hadn't been circulated, so we couldn't see the names of the people who had signed it. Apparently, however, the school board had been presented with three petitions and a total of 725 signatures--or, roughly, almost one out of six people in the town, and a much higher percentage of the adults. Moreover, 210 of the signatures were from parents of children who attended the school, including seventeen parents of the kids my mom taught. Since my mom had nineteen kids in her class, and since it was likely that sometimes a child's mother and father had both signed the petition, I calculated that the parents of somewhere between a half and two-thirds of her students had offered their signatures.

  The petition was only two paragraphs long, and it was the kind of thing any sane person would sign if he didn't know the politics behind it:

  We, the undersigned, believe that teachers are role models. Their behavior in the classroom and their behavior in their community influences the children in their care.

  We therefore believe that teachers must act morally, honorably, and decently in their private as well as their public lives. They must not court obscenity, prurience, or deviance. They must not advocate perversion.

  Let's face it, no one wants a teacher who advocates perversion. No one wants a pervert teaching their kid how to read or write or find the Solomon Islands on a map.

  But everyone in Bartlett knew that the petition was all about Dana and my mom, and that meant there was a lot of not-in-my-backyard hypocrisy fueling it, too. And while I know teenagers are supposed to see adult hypocrisy everywhere, in this case it was pretty evident. A lot of people who would support gay rights in the abstract were very uncomfortable with a little in-your-face gender bending. Everybody who signed the petition was saying publicly that t
hey believed my mom was courting obscenity and advocating perversion. They were saying they didn't want my mom in the classroom so long as she was living in Bartlett with Dana.

  When I left for Bennington, however, there really didn't seem to be a whole lot that anyone could do other than sign the petition and make some noise. My mom said she thought some parents might see if they could have their kids transferred into the other sixth-grade class, and some might even withdraw their children and home-school them for the remainder of the year. But the storm would pass, and eventually everyone would get used to Dana. After all, hadn't the school superintendent himself said that her job wasn't in any jeopardy?

  I think, on most levels, I believed that. Yet I continued to worry. And I was glad to get away.

  Chapter 27.

  allison

  A ROGUE SENTENCE: "I WISH THINGS COULD BE the way they had been in the summer."

  A rogue thought: This whole business is freakish.

  I kept the thought to myself, but not the sentence. I was lying in bed with Dana the night Carly had returned to college, watching her flip distractedly through a magazine. I'd closed my own book at least a half hour earlier and placed it on the nightstand on my side of the bed. I wasn't sure at first if I'd actually verbalized the words that had formed in my mind, or whether I'd kept them inside me.

  "That's a loaded idea," Dana said, without looking up from her magazine. She was sitting up. I was lying on my tummy.

  "I didn't mean anything by it," I said, beating a hasty retreat.

  "Certainly you did. What?"

  "Nothing. Really, nothing."

  "Do you simply wish it was warm again? Is that it? Are you sick of the snow and the ice and the cold?"

  "Yes."

  "You're lying," she said, her voice considerably lighter than her words.

  "No. I do want it to be warm."

  "But that's not what you meant."

  "I guess not."

  She rested her magazine on top of her knees. Her nightgown had teacups a delft-blue, and her hair hung loose like the drapes.

  "Do you know what you meant?" she asked.

  "Probably not," I said, though when I pressed the side of my face deep into my pillow, I realized I knew exactly what I meant. We both did. And then I had another rogue thought, one that had been floating just beyond my consciousness since Trinidad but had never landed with such explicitness in my sentient mind: I will never be fucked again.

  At least as long as I was with Dana.

  She read for another few minutes and then turned out the light and lay down beside me, pulling the quilt over us both. She rubbed my back and massaged my shoulders until, finally, I fell asleep.

  "You're a beautiful woman," I told Dana at breakfast Monday morning.

  "I wish," she said, delicately spreading raspberry jam on an English muffin.

  "No, you are," I insisted. She was healing quickly, getting better fast. She was walking with the same sure, long-legged gait she had had before surgery. She was going to start making dinner for me again soon.

  "My hands are too big. My nose is a man's."

  She was wearing a sea-green cardigan with glistening pearl buttons. Her leggings were sleek and crisp, and they matched her sweater: They were a beautiful shade of turquoise. She made me look shabby in my loose thermal dress.

  "I should go," I said. "My eleven-year-olds await."

  "Tonight we really must talk," she said.

  I nodded. I smiled. I kissed her on her cheek.

  I wished, I realized, that I, too, were gay. With confidence. With assurance. Without reservation. I wished that I could be the lesbian of her dreams.

  Or, if I wasn't, that I could decide whether such things really mattered.

  But we didn't talk that night, and later in the week she licked me and I came, and she entered me with a dildo and I came again. Some evenings she would rub an oil made with neroli and black pepper into the backs of my legs; one time she painted my toenails a shade called cerise. In bed we would sip fruit shakes made from the strawberries I'd picked half a year earlier, thawing the red brick from my freezer in the microwave before dropping the fruit with bananas and ice into a blender.

  I did nothing for her in return, and still we did not discuss our relationship.

  Yet I would lie awake at three in the morning and I would think to myself, I'm not a lesbian, repeating the words like a mantra. But I knew I couldn't tell her such a thing in the middle of the night, and--more important--that was the only time that I felt completely sure. As long as we were savoring fruit shakes in bed, or the sheets were still wet from my orgasm, a part of me would remain open to the possibility.

  When I was alone that week, walking to and from school or preparing for class, I would wonder at how things had changed since Christmas. Outwardly, Dana's final sexual reassignment had changed nothing: She was wearing the same clothes, the same shades of lipstick and nail polish, the same boots when she ventured outside. She read the same magazines and books, she liked the same foods. She held my hand the same way when we walked upstairs together in the evening.

  I had not yet seen her vagina, and I wouldn't until there were absolutely no traces of the surgery--until her vagina would look, more or less, like mine. Dana was adamant about this, and I was content with her decision.

  But the surgery had changed everything. It had to, it was inescapable. You can't say to yourself, much as you might want to, It's just a penis, it was just one small part of our relationship. It didn't matter whether we actually used the penis for sex twice a week or once a month, it didn't matter if I saw it or felt it a dozen times a year or over a hundred. The fact remained that it was there, and I knew it was there.

  Moreover, it was also true that had Dana been male--no gender dysphoria, no need to wear a dress, no woman in the soul under the flesh--and lost his penis because of an accident or a disease, I wouldn't have felt as acutely its loss. Because then, I imagine, Dana would have continued to live as a man. It isn't the penis solely that makes someone male: Just ask a female transsexual, a woman with gender dysphoria. Just ask a self-proclaimed trans-man.

  As recently as late December, however, Dana had still had a penis, and on some level I must have been continuing to cling to the fantasy that the sexual reassignment surgery would never actually happen. I may have been living with a person who wore makeup and skirts, but the person beside me in bed had a penis.

  I could play all the mind games I wanted, I could intellectualize and rationalize forever, but, pure and simple, Dana's castration changed something. It no longer made sense to me to rest my head on her shoulder the way I had as recently as Christmas, or to lay my head in her lap when we watched a movie in the den. I did that sort of thing with men. I'd sat in her lap any number of times the summer we met--the summer before I'd known her plans--and I couldn't imagine doing such a thing now. It just didn't seem like the kind of thing a woman did with another woman.

  But then I'd remind myself how happy I'd been sometimes in the fall--how remarkably, blissfully happy--and I'd try and convince myself that little in reality was different. We had the same breakfasts, the same dinners, the same long talks about movies and books. There was the specter of the people in the town who disapproved of Dana, but inside our home--that little fantasy palace--once more I was Beauty. I was fed. I was pampered. I was stroked.

  I was--with wands, batons, and vibrating scepters--fucked.

  And I came. Some cold nights in late January I'd tell Dana, No, I don't want that, and I'd turn away, but then I'd feel something oiled and new sliding between my cheeks or I'd hear an unfamiliar hum, and almost instantly I'd grow wet.

  One night she would blindfold me. One night she would keep the room black. One night she would light the bedroom only with candles.

  One night, when she'd been home almost a month, she climbed on top of me and entered me with a vibrator she had somehow attached to her groin, and she fucked me the way she once had. I was able to move my hips
against someone the way I had for--oh, God--a quarter century. I was able to reach my hands up and over my lover, squeezing and stroking her neck, her shoulder, her back.

  Nevertheless, something seemed wrong--off, to be precise--and I couldn't find that place I'd known well in the fall and the early part of the winter, that place where I had been ... happy.

  I think, ironically, that if people like Rich Lessard and Glenn Frazier hadn't tried to drive Dana away, I might have given up on the relationship within weeks of our return from Colorado. Had I not felt that I was being bullied and Dana was being harassed, at some point in January I might very well have confessed to Dana that I wasn't as happy as I thought I should be--certainly I wasn't as happy as I had been in August or November. And then, perhaps, I might have asked her to leave.

  Or, until she was absolutely and completely well, to move into the guest bedroom. And then leave.