Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (25 page)

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.

And so I decided to call Allie, even though it was ten o'clock on a Saturday night. I told myself I was merely phoning because I was going to report on how Carly's first few days back at Bennington seemed to be going.

But Allie was out for a brief walk around the green when I called, getting some fresh air before going to bed.

"She'll be sorry she missed you," Dana said. "Should she call you?"

"Yeah. If she doesn't mind."

"No, she wouldn't mind at all. You'll still be up?"

"I think so," I said, and offered the number of the motel. Then, perhaps triggered by remorse for having mentioned Dana's plans to Glenn Frazier, I surprised myself by asking, "So, how are you feeling?"

"Pretty good, actually. Thank you."

"Do they have you on painkillers?"

"Don't need them. I haven't needed them for a couple of weeks now."

"That's good."

"It is."

For a long moment we both were quiet, and I was about to thank Dana for passing along my message and hang up, but Dana said, "Your station did a nice job with that farm story this week."

"We did, didn't we?" I said. "Moira's a good reporter." Three days that week we'd examined how a once-rural village had lost every single one of its dairy farms since the Second World War and become a distant but tony suburb of Burlington. I was very proud of that package. Still am.

"She is. But it was beautifully produced, all of it. The music. The timing."

"I'll tell the producer. And Moira."

"How's Carly doing?"

"God, Carly's fine. We should all be so together."

"You and Allison have done an absolutely stunning job with her."

I agreed, and we continued to chat about my daughter and radio. I learned a little more about the two books Dana had written, and why I should consider reading George Sand. I don't think either of us consciously avoided discussing the Bartlett Elementary School, but the fact is, classrooms and school boards and disgruntled parents never came up. Transsexuality never came up. It was such a pleasant conversation that we were still on the phone when Allie got home, and I had largely forgotten that I was speaking with a person who'd been born a man.

That night when I was falling asleep in the motel bed, it seemed instead that I'd been talking to some female friend of Allie's. A woman, perhaps, who'd come into her life after we had divorced and who--like most of Allie's friends--was intelligent and interesting and ... attractive.

Quickly I disabused myself of this notion.

Some men in this world would fornicate with anything, I reminded myself. But I wasn't among them.

Chapter 24.

allison

IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR ME TO GO TO SLEEP THE Sunday night that I returned home from Trinidad and convince myself that there was at least a chance the petition was merely a nasty rumor. Ugly but--happily--untrue. After all, no one I spoke with had actually seen it: not Carly, not Molly, not Will. Not even Glenn, our school principal, who told me that he thought it was possible the last straw had been my decision to go with Dana to Colorado.

"People were not happy when they heard," he said.

"Well, how did they hear?" I asked.

"How would I know?" he answered, but I could tell by the sudden churlishness in his voice that he was lying. I had a feeling they knew because he had told them.

Nevertheless, I did believe him when he insisted that he hadn't yet seen the petition. He--like Carly and Molly and Will--had simply heard that one existed: It was just outside the Grand Union. It was being passed around in a church. Someone had seen someone holding one while standing in line at the post office.

Sometimes there was the added conjecture of a name behind it. It had to be the Hedderiggs, it was likely the LaFontaines. The Duncans? Good chance--though it was possible that because Al Duncan was a member of the school board, he might have felt it was inappropriate to initiate a little grassroots activism against one of the teachers. Regardless, no one had in fact seen anyone soliciting signatures in a parking lot.

Nothing had really changed in the thirty-six hours since I'd called Glenn from Colorado, and I doubt the petition would have even come up when we spoke Sunday night if I hadn't mentioned it. Mostly Glenn phoned because he wanted to discuss the meeting we were going to have with some parents Monday morning, and to chastise me once more for not, as he put it, "keeping him in the loop." He thought I should have warned him early that fall that I was in the midst of what had the potential to become a controversial relationship.

"I just wish you'd told me back in September or October," he said again. "I just wish you'd warned me. That way I wouldn't have been blindsided."

"I understand," I said.

"I should know about these things before the PTA. I should hear about them before the school board."

"You're right," I agreed. Because he was. Without fail I would have sat down with his predecessor, Sue Dixon, and explained to her that I was seeing someone who might raise some eyebrows in the town. But Glenn and I had barely known each other; we'd worked together less than three months when Dana moved into my house. Moreover, the little contact we'd had had been unpleasant: fights about field trips, squabbles about the Internet.

And, of course, Glenn was male, and I'm sure that had entered into it, too. In some way, it would have seemed oddly deferential of me to have gone to him. It would have seemed like he was my father, and I needed his approval or his permission to see my new heartthrob.

The fact is, at my age, there are few people in this world whose approval I court or whose permission I need. Perhaps, on some level, I still look to my mother for approval. But I certainly can't imagine looking to the likes of Glenn Frazier for permission. Especially that winter, when we barely knew each other.

"I haven't talked to Judd," Glenn continued on the phone, referring to our school superintendent--the fellow who supervised all of the public schools in our half of the county. "And I haven't asked any lawyers to be there. I don't think we're at that stage yet, and I think it would be inflammatory to have someone there. So, please, don't even bring that sort of thing up."

"Why would I bring up a lawyer?"

"Defensiveness, maybe. Self-preservation."

"I'm not defensive. And I don't see what good a lawyer would do."

"Fight or flight, Allison. You go with fight, you might bring up a lawyer. I can see it. I would."

"I won't do anything of the sort. The idea hadn't even crossed my mind."

"With any luck, it won't even come to that. With any luck, they'll talk, we'll listen, and we'll all go home friends."

"That's all you want me to do tomorrow morning? Listen?"

"That's all I want
us
to do. My hope is that once they've had a chance to vent, they'll get on with their lives."