Trans-Sister Radio
Chris Bohjalian
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"If the body and soul are comely, who am I to quarrel about the color of wings or the speed of flight?"
THOMAS BURNETT SWANN
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"Should one deal with our sister as with a harlot?"
GENESIS 34:31
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PART I
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT:
All Things Considered
Monday, September 24
LINDA WERTHEIMER: Periodically this year we have explored what we've called the Nature of Love: those strange and wondrous ways we find our soul sparked by somebody else. This afternoon we continue that series with the first in a five-part story that begins with gender dysphoria--the clinical term for individuals who believe their sex at birth is in error--and ends with--
NOAH ADAMS: Well, we won't tell you that, at least not today. You'll have to wait until Friday.
LINDA WERTHEIMER: Carly Banks is nineteen, three weeks now into her sophomore year at Bennington College in Vermont. Her father, we will tell you, is the manager of one of our affiliate public radio stations.
NOAH ADAMS: But this is her mother's story as well as her father's--though her mother and father have been divorced for eleven years now. This week you will meet Will and Allison Banks, Carly's parents, as well as the fellow Allison met who she was sure, at first, would be the man of her dreams.
LINDA WERTHEIMER: This part of the series was written by Carly--with the guidance of NPR's own Nicole Wells--while Carly was with us this summer in Washington. The engineer was Sam Coleman, and the producer was Kirsten Seidler.
Chapter 1.
carly
I WAS EIGHT WHEN MY PARENTS SEPARATED, AND nine when they actually divorced. That means that for a little more than a decade, I've watched my mom get ready for dates. Sometimes, until I started ninth grade, I'd even keep her company on Saturday afternoons, while she'd take these long, luxurious bubble baths. I'd put the lid down on the toilet and sit there, and we'd talk about school or boys or the guy she was dating.
I stopped joining her in the bathroom in ninth grade for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it had started to seem a little weird to me to be hanging out with her when I was fourteen and she was naked.
But she has always been pretty cool about bodies and sex, and for all I know, she wouldn't mind my joining her in the bathroom even now when I'm home from college. For better or worse--and usually for better--my mom has always been very comfortable with subjects that give most parents the shivers. A couple of days before my fifteenth birthday, she took me to the gynecologist to get me fitted for a diaphragm, and told me where in her bedroom she kept the spermicidally lubricated condoms. (Of course, I already knew: God, by then I even knew where she'd hidden a vibrator.)
I hadn't had sex yet, and my mom made it clear that she didn't want me to in the foreseeable future. But she had a pretty good memory of the hormonal chaos that hits a person in high school, and she wanted to do all that she could for my sake to ensure that she wouldn't become a grandmother any sooner than necessary.
When I think back on it, my parents' divorce was very civilized. At least it has always seemed that way to me, though it's clear there are things I don't know.
The way my mom tells it, I was in second or third grade when they realized they just didn't love each other anymore the way they had when they were first married. They'd worked together at the radio station then, and they'd shared everything. My mom insists they both came to the realization at about the same time that they should separate: My mom was thirty-two and my dad was thirty-three, and they figured they were still young enough to hook up with someone who, in the long years ahead, could keep their motors humming the way they were meant to.
Sometimes my dad hints that it wasn't quite so mutual. Most of the time he toes their party line, but every so often I'll get the impression that when he moved out, he was figuring they'd both change their minds and reconcile in a couple of weeks. I think he might have thought he was just being cool.
Once when he was visiting my mom, I overheard him telling her that he knew her heart had never been into the counseling they went through when I was eight.
Still, he was the one who got remarried.
Sometimes, when I was little, I'd help my mom pick out her jewelry or clothing for a date.
"Wear the pearls," I might suggest.
"It's a clambake," she'd remind me.
"Too formal?"
"And they might scare the oysters."
One time she especially indulged me. I was eleven years old and convinced there was no fashion statement more powerful than a kilt. And so she wore a red-and-green Christmas kilt to a backyard cook-out, even though it was the middle of August and the air was just plain sticky. That night my baby-sitter spent most of the time standing in front of a fan, with her T-shirt rolled up like a halter.
If I were to count, I'd guess my mom probably had five serious boyfriends in the decade between my parents' divorce and the day she met Dana. Dana had been in pre-surgical therapy for two years by then and had probably endured close to fifty hours of electrolysis. He'd been on hormone therapy for a good four or five months.
Unlike a lot of pre-op M2Fs, he wasn't trying to pass as a woman yet, he hadn't begun his transition.
Of course, he didn't tell my mom any of this--not that he should have. When they met, he was simply the professor for a film course at the university that she was taking that summer as a lark, and she was one of his students.
What was he supposed to do, say to the class, "Hi, I'm Dana, and I've spent a good part of the last year with my upper lip deadened by Novacaine"?
Or, "Good evening, I'm your professor. I'm about to start developing breasts!"
Or, if he wanted, for some reason, to be completely candid, "You folks ever met a lesbian with a penis? Have now!"
He had no idea he was going to fall in love with my mom, even when they started to date, and she had no idea she was going to fall in love with him. It just happened.
My mom's a sixth-grade teacher at the elementary school two and a half blocks from our home. When she went back to work after I was born, she decided she didn't want to be in broadcast anymore, and she sure as heck didn't want to be commuting thirty miles--one way--to Colchester or Burlington every day. And so she decided to see if she was meant to teach, and clearly she was.
She's excellent, truly gifted in front of a blackboard, and her kids always adore her. There are some parents who think she's too lenient, and every year there will be one or two who will complain about something in the class play she organizes each spring: The girls' costumes are too revealing. The boys' dancing is too provocative. The subject matter in one of the skits is inappropriate.
Ironically, the one show that really sent the school board over the edge didn't bother the more conservative parents in town. It was actually a group of very liberal parents--the sort who usually stood by her--who complained. My mom had been taking African dancing one night a week in Middlebury for a couple of months and decided to incorporate some of what she had learned into her end-of-the-year show. The kids loved the dancing as much as she did and really got into it. And so in the finale she had all the boys drumming and all the girls dancing, and some of the more progressive parents in town thought she was encouraging some kind of reactionary and unfashionable sex-role stereotyping. Although the boys had no shirts on and the girls were wearing two-piece bathing suits and grass skirts they'd made from the tall reeds that grow out by the watershed, all anyone was concerned about that year was the notion that the girls weren't drumming and the boys weren't dancing.
Nevertheless, despite my mom's popularity with her stude
nts and her reputation as a teacher, before I turned eleven I was still scared to death that I'd wind up in her class. Bartlett's a pretty small town, and each grade in the elementary school has only two classes, so I figured there was a one-in-two chance that I would have my mom as my teacher.
I didn't understand then that there was no way the school would allow that to happen. I didn't realize they even thought about such things.
Sometimes I considered telling my mom that I didn't want to be in her class, and trying to explain to her why. But at nine and ten I didn't fully understand words like favoritism or preferential treatment, and I'd probably never even heard the term paranoia. Moreover, my mom and dad hadn't been divorced all that long, and I was afraid that voicing my desire to be in Mrs. Chapel's class instead of hers would feel to my mom like rejection. Desertion. Even though my parents still seemed to be friends, I didn't want her to get the idea that her daughter was taking sides, since that wasn't the case at all.
Not long after the divorce was final, when it was clear they weren't going to get back together and he was never going to move back in, my dad bought a house on the other side of the village. Why not? His friends still lived in the town, and so did I. His place was about a ten-minute walk from Mom's.
The custody arrangement was pretty loose. I was supposed to spend weeknights with Mom and weekends with Dad, but it never really worked out that way. I was as likely to be with Mom on a weekend as I was with Dad on a Tuesday or Wednesday night. On some level, I think, I was trying to rebel against the unnatural formalism that marks any custody agreement, and pretend, in some way, that we were still one happy family. But on another level, my reason for being one place or the other was mere pragmatism. My mom's house wasn't buffered by the cliffs to the north, and so she had much better TV reception: That meant I really wanted to be there on Saturday and Sunday nights, when I could pretty much watch all the TV I wanted.
Occasionally, I'd spend a night at Dad's simply because I could tell that Mom wanted to bring her current squeeze home for the night. No one ever moved in with us until Dana, but she certainly got serious often enough that some men would sleep over.
Likewise, until Dad married Patricia, there were those Saturdays when I figured he needed a quiet evening with a prospective girlfriend more than he did one with his daughter, and so I'd hang with Mom.
But the fact is, my main home base has always been my mom's house.
For virtually my entire life, my dad worked for Vermont Public Radio. Most of the time he was the president and general manager, which must be among the most thankless jobs in the world: It seems like you spend your life raising money, and trying to explain to a lot of elderly blue-hairs why VPR has so much news and commentary, and then to a lot of political junkies why the station has so much classical music.
And then there are the fund-drives three times a year. Those weeks, you just don't sleep.
Sometimes, if the light is right, my dad looks a little bit like Dana did two years ago. Same straw-colored hair. Same grayish-blue eyes. Same build.
Of course, they look nothing alike now. After all, you can still see my dad's Adam's apple.
I probably know as well as anyone what it's like to have a crush on a professor.
Unlike my mom, of course, I've never acted on one, I've never actually slept with a teacher. But I know what it's like to sit in a classroom and forget about the material or the text, and just sort of gaze at the guy at the front of the room.
And Dana was a very handsome man. I wouldn't be surprised if my mom saw in him some of the same things that first attracted her to my dad. But Dana was more delicate looking, and smaller boned. The first time I met him, when he came to a party my mom gave at our house, I wouldn't have described him as effeminate, but I might have said he had fine--perhaps even beautiful--features. And when a guy has no hair or stubble on his face, you're bound to notice a pair of really nice cheekbones, or a chin that's shaped a bit like the smaller half of a pear--and just as smooth.
I'm sure some people picked up on the fact that he had begun judiciously plucking his eyebrows, but I didn't. I just thought they were shaped like the most remarkable sickle moons.
He wore his hair back in a ponytail then, held together with the sort of thin rubber band a supermarket is likely to wrap around scallions. And he was dressed pretty much like generic professor: jeans, a summer-weight navy blazer, and a work shirt made of softened blue denim. Loafers.
He was tall and thin like my dad, and still drinking his beer from a bottle--again, just like Dad.
The party was the third week in July, and my mom had been in his class for three or four weeks. I was working at the garden nursery that summer, hoisting juniper trees in buckets, and helping people choose between Saint Cloud and Jersey blueberry bushes. It was a great summer job for a kid, especially for a kid who has finished high school and is about to start college, because it meant I had my evenings completely free.
There were probably a dozen of my mom's friends at the house that Friday night. It wasn't exactly a sit-down dinner party, but there were massive amounts of food--salads and cheeses and bread--and plenty of beer and wine. There were a few folks hovering behind the screen door in the kitchen, pouring themselves glasses of wine or bringing out food from the refrigerator, but the majority were on the stone terrace in the backyard.
Most of the people there had known my mom for years, and a few had been her friends back in college. My mom was part of a whole crowd of people who went to Middlebury College together in the 1970s and ended up staying in the area.
Dana was, essentially, the odd man out at the party--which, in all fairness, was probably a role he was used to. I thought I'd scoop up a plate of the strawberry pasta before heading out for the evening, and he was beside the two long picnic tables with the food. He was sipping a beer, and near enough to Jody and Graham that from a distance it might have looked like he was part of their conversation, but when you got close, it was pretty clear that he wasn't.
I wasn't sure then where he fit into my mom's life, and I thought it was possible he was merely a friend of a friend, perhaps a person who had been dragged to the party because he was a houseguest of someone who had been invited. My mother often had strays like that at her parties. And so I said hello.
"I'm Carly," I said. "Allison's daughter."
"I'm Dana," he said. "Your mother's teacher."
"Film?"
He nodded and smiled. "I guess she fears I don't get out enough. So she invited me here tonight."
I knew my mom got a charge out of the course, but I'd had no idea she liked the teacher enough to invite him to our home. When I'd asked her Wednesday night who was coming, she hadn't mentioned her professor.
"She enjoys your course," I said, unsure what else I should say. Here I'd been viewing Dana as merely some stranger in our house in need of company, when actually he was my mom's latest candidate for a new boyfriend.
"Oh, she is just a delight. But I'm sure you know that."
The class was exactly the sort of interdisciplinary shambles I've come to love now that I'm in college. Basically, my mom was reading a couple of nineteenth-century New England novels and then watching the twentieth-century movies that were based upon them. It was supposed to offer a really cagey window onto how Puritan New England affects our culture, but it was clear the class spent most of the time dissecting the fact that Louisa May Alcott had written a novel about a boy named Laurie and a girl named Jo, or making fun of Demi Moore's Hester Prynne.
"Well, I know she's really good about her homework," I said. "She likes the reading."
He ran two fingers abstractedly along the rim at the top of the bottle. I'd never noticed an adult man's fingers before, unless he was a logger and was missing a few, but I certainly noticed Dana's. They were long and slender, and the short, square nails seemed to gleam.
The fact that his fingers were largely without hair didn't register with me then.
"She tells me yo
u start college in five or six weeks. Congratulations."
"Thanks."
"Scared?"
I paused. Most of the time that summer, adults merely babbled to me about how much fun I would have, or how smart I must be. No one had ever touched on the fact that I might be scared to death--which, of course, I was.
"A little."
"I was, too. I was a basket case just about this time, oh, seventeen years ago now."
I did the math instantly in my head, but figured I'd confirm his age just in case. Maybe, I hoped, he'd bummed around Europe for a couple of years before starting college.
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-five."
As far as I knew, Mom had never been involved with a younger man. Once, she'd been pretty serious about an older man. When I was in eighth grade, she saw a guy named Foster, who was in his mid-fifties, which at the time had made him seem downright primeval.