Trans-Sister Radio Page 23

  "As a matter of honor," I heard Glenn saying, "I like people to look one another in the eye. Settle their differences like grown-ups. I think the fact that it was anonymous is as troubling as the subject matter itself. It's downright menacing."

  "Have any laws been broken?" Evelyn asked.

  "Probably not," Glenn said. "It's not illegal to take a naked picture of an adult off the Web."

  "But what if it was a student who found it? Wouldn't the Web site be responsible for ... something?"

  He rocked back in his chair and waved his hands at his side. "Oh, maybe. I don't know. But it doesn't matter, that's not the issue in my mind. What do you want me to do, Allison?"

  "About the picture?"

  "Right."

  "Nothing," I said. "That's not why I told you. I'd like you to keep this among us."

  He shook his head. "That's understandable. But that's the one thing we can't do. We have our newsletter going out to parents next week, and I think we should mention it. Tell the folks what happened, and ask the person who did it to come forward and apologize."

  "No, I'd really rather we didn't--"

  He held up one hand like a police officer commanding me to stop, and continued, "We simply can't have your authority any more undermined than it already is. Even now we know that some parents are undoing a good deal of what you do on any given day in the classroom. Nitpicking. Carping. Criticizing. Surely you've noticed. It seems to me, if parents think someone can get away with leaving a piece of smut in your in-box, you're finished."

  I honestly wasn't aware of any unusual nitpicking, but I didn't contradict him. I was too busy marveling at how deluded I'd been just a moment before, and digesting the fact that my own principal was actually going to use the picture to cripple me further in the eyes of the town.

  That night Judd Prescott called me at my house just after dinner. Dana answered, with the result that the school superintendent was mildly flustered by the time Dana handed me the phone. I have to assume that Dana was the first transsexual he had ever spoken to.

  "I have what I hope is good news," he said, trying to get back on track. Judd was a huge man, not so much fat as massively boned. He was probably in his late fifties, but I knew he held his own in a twice-weekly basketball game with much younger teachers at the Middlebury College gym. He was well-liked, and I'd found him perfectly nice the few times our paths had crossed. He had a statewide reputation as a first-rate administrator.

  "I could use some," I said.

  "I've talked to our lawyer, and he says we can offer you a paid leave of absence. Full salary, full benefits. The works."

  I was in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator. Dana and I had been cleaning the dinner dishes when he called.

  "Is that so?" I said, trying to think. I could feel a little lurch in my stomach. I took the cordless phone with me and went into the hallway, both to escape the sound of the pots as they clanged together in the sink and so Dana wouldn't see me turning pale.

  "Yes."

  "Why would I want such a thing?"

  "Glenn told me about the unseemly picture someone left you--which, not incidentally, you should turn over to us as soon as you can. I'm sorry for you, Allison, really I am. It must have been very frightening."

  "The picture?"

  "A part of me can't believe someone would threaten you like that. But then, another part of me is never surprised by how low people can fall."

  "No one threatened me."

  "Not in so many words. But that picture was clearly--"

  "It was most clearly not a threat."

  "But there was a knife in it, correct?"

  "It was obscene and degrading and childish. But it wasn't threatening."

  "Well, we can let the experts decide that. In the meantime, while we investigate this, you don't have to be in the classroom--you don't have to put up with such nonsense, or be treated with such shabby disregard."

  In the kitchen I heard the low rumble from the dishwasher as Dana switched on the machine.

  "You're blowing this way out of proportion, Judd. I don't need a leave of absence, and I don't want one."

  He paused. "There are other reasons, of course."

  "Such as?"

  "Do I really need to elaborate?"

  He didn't; I knew exactly what he meant. Still, I considered making him say what he was thinking; I almost made him express his distaste for my lover. But I decided I'd be better off in the long run if I kept quiet.

  "No, probably not," I said simply.

  "Seriously, Allison, don't you think you might be doing everyone around you a colossal favor if you accepted this offer? Your students, for example. This whole controversy can't be good for them."

  "My students are fine."

  For a long moment he was silent, and I imagined him looking at a note card in his hand. I wondered if he had written out his remarks ahead of time.

  "In that case, may I offer you one more enticement to consider the proposal?"

  "An enticement? To stop teaching? I love teaching, I love what I do. And the kids really don't care who I'm living with. It's their parents who are so bent out of shape! I think the world of my students, and I would never do anything to jeopardize their education, or hurt them, or put them at risk. I would never--"

  "Let them swim in Lake Champlain without lifeguards?" he said, finishing my sentence for me. "That was clearly putting them at risk."

  "Are you talking about that field trip to the maritime museum back in September?"

  He sighed so loudly I could hear his breath on the phone. "Look, if you take this leave of absence--paid, I should remind you--I can assure you that you will be in no trouble for violating the contract over that fiasco at the lake."

  "Violating my teacher's contract?"

  "You endangered children by letting them swim, you--"

  "I did nothing of the sort!"

  "And you let them swim topless."

  "That's not true!"

  "Individually, either of those episodes might merit disciplinary action. Together ..."

  "Together ... what? Are you suggesting my job is in danger?"

  "All I'm suggesting is that you should consider a leave of absence right now--over this picture. Nothing more."

  Dana appeared in the hallway, drying her hands in a dish towel. Without speaking she mouthed the words Is everything okay? and her eyes were small rifts of concern.

  "It's not an option, Judd, I'm sorry to disappoint you. If you investigate that field trip, you'll see it's a nonissue. A complete nonissue. And so while I appreciate your concern for my welfare, I am not taking a leave of absence, and I am not going to leave my classroom. Do you understand?"

  A moment later, after we had both hung up, I allowed myself to fall into Dana's warm and sheltering arms. She told me later I was so mad I was shaking.

  Chapter 28.

  will

  PATRICIA WAS GONE WHEN I GOT HOME SUNDAY morning from Stratton, and I really wasn't surprised. Her note said that she was with the Brighams, a family who lived in a restored farmhouse out in Waltham. Marshall Brigham worked in her law firm, and she was friends with both Marshall and his wife. She said she'd prefer that I didn't call her, and that she'd be back after work Monday night. I noticed that she hadn't written she'd be home after work Monday night. She had used the word back, which I concluded could mean everything or nothing. Was her decision to not use the word home a conscious signal that she no longer considered the house in which we lived her home? Or was back the signal, and the word meant that she planned on coming back to our marriage?

  I decided I was probably reading way too much into the word either way. For all I knew, she'd simply scribbled the note in half a minute and hadn't been thinking about anything but the fact that she was miserable and sad and she had to get out of the house that very moment.

  And so I unpacked my small bag and read the mail that had arrived on Friday and Saturday. And then, because Allie will always be my best
friend no matter who I am married to (or separating from), I called her to tell her that Patricia was gone until Monday, and I had a sick feeling that I was about to see my second marriage collapse.

  "You probably don't want to rattle around your house all alone this evening. Would you like to come over here for dinner?" she asked.

  I hesitated for a moment, wondering why I would want to have dinner at a table that would also include Allie's strange paramour. Had I really fallen so far so fast that I was about to turn for comfort to a support group of two that included our esteemed town's ultimate outcast? Maybe, I thought, I would be lucky and Dana would spend the whole time in the kitchen. Wasn't he the cook and cabana boy in their little arrangement? But then I recalled my conversation with Dana the night before on the telephone and remembered how, after the first minute or so, it really hadn't been all that awkward. Moreover, it was clear that there were people--including my own daughter--who could deal just fine with my Allie's new friend.

  Consequently, I agreed, though not without healthy measures of both trepidation and self-loathing.

  "Sure," I said. "Why not?" My voice sounded odd to me: simultaneously embarrassed and apprehensive.

  "No reason. Dana's making a vegetarian lasagna."

  "Okay," I said.

  "It's a school night, so how's six o'clock?"

  "Fine."

  "Good. We'll see you then."

  "You will," I said, and I hung up the phone. And then I turned on the radio and decided to change the sheets on the bed and vacuum the house. If Patricia decided, after all, to come home--to come back--and I wasn't there, I wanted to be sure that the house was inviting and clean.

  My radio instincts aren't brilliant, but I've been in the business for so many years that longevity alone has given me a reasonable sense of what will work and what won't. And Dana Stevens, I'd begun to think, would work well. Gender dysphoria, I'd decided, interested people--even if it repulsed them. Even if it angered them.

  And, certainly, it angered Rebecca Barnard, my Wednesday-morning commentator.

  "You can't be serious," she said when I told her my idea.

  She'd finished taping her commentaries for the next two weeks, and we were sitting in my office having coffee, and watching small soft-balls of snow fall from the blue spruce trees outside my window. It was a week and a day since the Punxsutawney groundhog had retreated from the sight of his shadow, and the temperature was climbing into the high thirties for the first time in a month. It was glorious.

  "I am."

  "You're going to give him radio time?"

  "Not just Dana. Dana and Allie. Maybe Dana and this Burlington support group. The Green Mountain Gender Benders, I think they're called. Maybe Dana and some doctor in Montreal who specializes in sexual reassignment."

  "There's a doctor in Montreal who does that?"

  "Yup. Dana said he's very good. Even considered using him. But the guy in Colorado had a lot more experience."

  "God, experience. Gross. He'd hacked off more penises, you mean."

  "Call it what you will."

  "Do you know how many listeners you'll piss off?"

  "Listeners like controversy, especially in the context of news. Listeners like conflict. And most of our listeners are pretty darn nice. Statistically, the vast majority of them disagree with every word you say, but still they tolerate you. Some, I'd wager, even enjoy you."

  "I'm your voice of reason."

  "Perhaps if you like Ethan Allen."

  "Have you asked him about this? Have you talked to Allison?"

  "Nope."

  "What makes you think they'll do it? It sounds like they're already getting a lot more attention than they want. I understand there are a lot of angry parents in your peaceful little hamlet."

  "I think that's exactly why they will do it. They can tell their side. They're both smart, charismatic people, and they'll sound great on the radio. And those nitwits I call neighbors will look like a lynch mob."

  "Those nitwits are reasonable adults and concerned parents. And since when is there anything charismatic about a man in a dress?"

  "Even if they're right," I said, referring to my neighbors, "they're still acting like nitwits."

  "Someday I should do a commentary about him. Or, better still, about Allison. About the vital role of an elementary-school teacher in a small community."

  My antennae had gone up the moment she said my ex-wife's name, but I was still confident she was merely trying to annoy me. "You do what you want," I said. "Just don't slander anybody."

  "I wouldn't. You know that."

  "Thank you."

  "Though that would take all the fun out of it now, wouldn't it?"

  "Probably."

  She smiled. "Have you spoken to the illustrious Professor Stevens since he returned from Colorado?"

  "Yup."

  "I assume the surgery was successful?"

  "Apparently."

  "Appalling," she mumbled, shaking her head.

  "In some ways. But you know what? We had dinner--"

  "You had dinner?"

  "Yes, we had dinner. A week ago Sunday."

  "God, I wish I'd been a fly on the wall for that little outing. Was this in public?"

  "No," I said, and then added, "Not that it would matter."

  "Let me guess: at your ex-wife's?"

  "Yes."

  "I see. You weren't interested in seeing Professor Sex Change. He just happened to be at the table."

  "I guess that's true," I said. I started to fold my arms across my chest, but stopped myself when I realized how defensive I'd look. From her years in the classroom, Rebecca Barnard was an expert on body language.

  "And it was at that dinner that you concluded he'd be good on the radio?"

  "It was," I said, nodding. I didn't volunteer the information that we'd spoken three times since then on the telephone, including once in the middle of the day when Allie wasn't even home.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Thursday, September 27

  DANA STEVENS: What was I feeling? Guilt, mostly. But not completely. I was angry, too.

  I think I was angry that I was being made to feel guilty.

  Chapter 29.

  dana

  WHEN LINDSEY LESSARD AND DAN HEDDERIGG were transferred into Carolyn Chapel's class, and when Audrey LaFontaine's parents withdrew their daughter from the public school, I offered to move out.

  I volunteered again when Allison lost a little girl she liked very much named Chrystal. But Allison dug in her heels and insisted I stay. It became, in her mind, an act of principle.

  "I really don't care about principles," I told her. "I care about you being happy. And you're not. You're miserable, and it's entirely my fault!"

  "It's not," she said. "I don't want you to go anywhere. I'd be even more miserable if you left."

  But the attrition in her classroom made her heartsick, and she was shattered by the mean-spirited way that Glenn Frazier and the school superintendent and even Carolyn Chapel were refusing to defend her. I think the idea that Carolyn didn't stand by her was particularly dispiriting. Carolyn had been at the school for six years, and she had sufficient tenure there that she could have stubbornly refused to take in any more kids. The fact is, that's what the teachers association wanted her to do, and I think that's what they assumed she would do. Show a little solidarity. A little support. A little spine.

  "I'm only trying to do what's best for the kids," she said to Allison. "I don't want to see Lindsey or Dan home-schooled. I don't think it's in their best interest."

  I wanted to pick up the phone and tell her that it wasn't in the kids' best interest to grow up in a community of small-minded bigots either, but I held my tongue.

  And so Carolyn got two more students, and the teacher's aide she had Tuesdays and Thursdays started coming five days a week. Somewhere the school board found the extra money in the budget. Imagine. And when the McCurd
ys and the Duncans heard that Carolyn Chapel now had a full-time aide, they had their children transferred into her class, too. It was appalling. I hate to even speculate about what the kids who were left with Allison must have been thinking. They'd seen a third of their class vanish into their homes or the room across the hall.