I, of course, was merely considered insane.
There was one horrible moment at the grocery store when a woman complained to the manager that Dana was touching the fruits and the vegetables. Her concern? Clearly a person like Dana was leaving some horrible disease on the grapes. Another time, at the post office, a customer whose hands were completely empty refused to open the door for Dana, even though Dana had a half dozen boxes to mail in his arms. Finally, he had to put them down in the salt and sludge on the cement steps.
And he was given two speeding tickets in the village in the course of a week. Certainly our town--like many rural villages--is a bit of a speed trap, but in all the years I'd lived there, I hadn't received a single citation. Dana, however, was pulled over once for going thirty-six in a thirty-mile zone, and then for going forty-one on a stretch where the speed limit increased to thirty-five. Both times, he insisted, he was going the limit.
But what was especially awful was the way the officer tried to intimidate Dana because his appearance no longer matched the photograph on his driver's license. His license showed a well-groomed man in his early thirties. It also had a big M beside gender.
The policeman, under most circumstances a nice enough young guy named Culberson, saw in Dana the sort of deviance that some people find disgusting and menacing at once.
"There seems to be a problem, sir. This doesn't appear to be you," Culberson said, knowing of course that it was. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave your vehicle and stand away from it with your arms at your sides."
After Dana patiently explained the situation, the officer politely but firmly continued to insist that he stand outside of his car while Culberson wrote out the ticket. He also continued to call Dana mister and sir, even after Dana asked him not to.
"So long as you have an M on your license, sir, I am going to have to call you mister. Okay, Mr. Stevens?"
Two days later, Culberson pulled him over again, and once more the officer made him wait by the side of the road.
When Dana and I were alone inside our castle, however, it was a grand month. Certainly it was for me. I was spoiled. Didn't vacuum once. Didn't clean the bathtub. Didn't pull a single seed from the spaghetti squash, or chop a single scallion.
And while the female hormones had begun to decrease the frequency of Dana's erections--as well as his ability to sustain them--they hadn't diminished his desire to love me. I would get a massage almost every night before bed, and at least half the time I would wind up on my back while he explored with his fingers and tongue the pudendum of his dreams. Moreover, I gather Dana had always had a much more powerful libido than most transsexuals, and so even when his body was filled with testosterone blockers and his sexual reassignment was barely a month away, more times than not he would still get hard when I would rub his nascent breasts, or lick my way from his wondrously hairless ankles to his thighs.
In return, all Dana wanted from me was to be a woman. To be womanly. He would watch me shave my legs and my underarms, he would stare as I pulled on panty hose or a bra. He would want to see how I sat when I talked on the phone with Carly, and to listen in when I chatted at night with Nancy or Molly or my mother in Philadelphia.
"How do you butter your toast?" he would ask, and he would be completely sincere. The fact is, women do butter their bread very differently from men.
"Let me watch you climb into your car," he would say, and I would show him.
"Brush your hair again, please."
"Would you flip through a newspaper?"
"How do you pick up a pen?"
It was never annoying: I felt, simultaneously, like a cherished possession and a goddess. A woman loved on a variety of levels. A woman loved for all the right reasons, and for ones too small to matter in any other relationship I could have. The way I held a book when I read on the couch. The fact that I would sleep on my side five or six days before my period, because my breasts would be tender. The things I carried in my purse.
And so although I adore teaching--and although I had a particularly sweet and smart group of kids that year--there were some mornings when I could barely bring myself to put on my overcoat and leave the remarkable world I had in my house.
Christmas was on a Wednesday that year, and so the public schools were open on Monday, the twenty-third, but then closed for a luxurious thirteen-day break. The students weren't due back until January sixth. Dana was able to reschedule his final pre-operative consultation with the Trinidad surgeon for Monday, the thirtieth, and the sexual reassignment itself for the thirty-first: New Year's Eve morning.
"I guess it's sort of like completing my New Year's resolution a full three hundred and sixty-five days ahead of schedule," Dana observed while finalizing the details. "This year I'm going to be organized. This year I'm going to take off ten ugly pounds. This year I'm going to lose that needless appendage between my legs."
The real reason the timing mattered, however, was that by having the surgery performed on that Tuesday, I could remain with Dana in Trinidad for four full days after the operation, and--in total--we'd have nine days together out west. Our plan was that we'd spend Christmas in Vermont with Carly and my mother (she came north from Philadelphia every year), and then Dana and I would fly to Colorado on Friday, the twenty-seventh. I would return home alone on Sunday, January fifth, in time to teach the following day.
Dana, then, would still be unable to leave the hospital bed. Sexual reassignment is not minor surgery, and Dana wouldn't be allowed to even stand up until Monday, the sixth. Discharge--just another new woman emerging from Mount San Rafael, a hospital operated by the Catholic Sisters of Charity until 1968--wouldn't occur until the middle of that week.
I would have liked to stay to help Dana, but I didn't dare miss a day of school--especially if my reason was my transsexual lover.
When Dana and I were first working out the details of the trip--the timing, the flights, finding a motel--I would try and tell myself that he wouldn't, in the end, go through with it. But as Christmas neared, I began to realize he would. He left for Florida to see his parents and his sister the weekend before the holiday, and once he was gone, the notion that he was going to spend two and a half days in a dress with his dreaded family signaled for me the irrevocability of his decision.
And so the Friday before Christmas, almost the moment Dana got into his car to drive to the airport, my magic little paradise evaporated. Poof. Beauty without her Beast. Dana had left, and everything seemed to disappear at once. And I began to cry. I cried off and on that whole weekend, even though Carly was home from college and might be watching TV in the den, or reading, or simply trying to sleep on the couch after her first semester as a college freshman.
"Mom, he'll--I mean she'll--still be Dana. You said so yourself," Carly reminded me any number of times that weekend, sometimes rubbing my back or patting my arm.
I was still weeping as the weekend came to an end.
"Why are you crying?" little Missy Thompson asked me when she saw my eyes tearing Monday morning as we wandered up the front steps of the school together at the start of the day. The building was long and low, and the bricks were a patchwork of rust and red. There were white pines surrounding the parking lot, and apple trees lining the front walk. The school was shady and cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and always very, very comforting.
"Because everything's so beautiful this morning," I lied, and I motioned toward the snow that had silenced the world the day before, and for a time had made all of the sidewalks in town look like church runners.
I don't think I was crying because I cared so much about Dana's penis, or because I gave a damn about the idea that some people would think I was gay. It was the notion that once the surgery was done, it could never be undone. Sure, some people went back, but the surgically built penis wasn't the same. It was a little bell cord, a third of a suitcase grip.
Limp, it looked fine. The rebuilt man could use it to pee standing up. But it didn't grow hard on
its own, it didn't really get any bigger.
Here was yet another unalterable fact of transsexuality: Surgeons could do an astonishing job transforming a man into a woman, but the techniques weren't nearly as good when a woman--either genetic or surgically wrought--wanted to become a man. At least not yet.
Especially when the genital nerves had already been rearranged and transplanted once.
And so what if Dana was making a mistake? What if he really was, merely, a transvestite? Or an effeminate, heterosexual male? Or, perhaps, a gay male who, for some reason, was incapable of admitting the truth to himself?
And what if I was repulsed by Dana after the reassignment? I might be. No matter how many pictures he showed me of OR-sculpted vulvas, no matter how many Polaroids we received in the mail of the surgeon's fine work ... the truth was, I had never in my life been sexually attracted to a woman. At least not seriously.
"Do you love me?" Dana asked on the phone that weekend from his parents' house in Florida.
"I do," I said.
"Do you have fun with me?"
"Of course."
"I make you happy?"
"So happy," I whispered, determined not to cry on the phone.
"Then we'll be fine," Dana said.
But once we'd said good night and the line had gone dead, my eyes welled with tears and I started to sniffle. Once again I was crying, and I don't think I stopped for more than a few minutes at a time until he returned Monday night, and made me laugh with his tales of his parents, his adventures in the ladies' rooms in airports and shopping malls, and his brief time on the beach in a sundress.
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT
All Things Considered
Tuesday, September 25
DR. THOMAS MEEHAN: You really want to know? Let's see, there must be at least half a dozen different "-ectomies" alone. There's the penectomy and the vaginectomy. The orchidectomy and the oophorectomy. F2Ms, of course, all have a salpingectomy, a hysterectomy, and a mastectomy.
Actually, that's an exaggeration: Not all have the mastectomy. Some will just have reduction mammoplasty--and now we're getting into the "-plasties." Reduction mammoplasty. Augmentation mammoplasty. Phalloplasty. Vaginoplasty. Labiaplasty.
And then there's the procedure that I guess you'd have to call the phonetic wild card. But it's a biggie. Certainly it's something that mattered to Dana Stevens.
CARLY BANKS: And that is?
MEEHAN: Castration, of course.
Chapter 14.
dana
IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE: NEITHER OF MY parents had a stroke and died. When I was on the airplane, I thought there was a distinct possibility that at least one of them would.
My mother had wanted to pick me up at the airport, but I had insisted she couldn't. I'd said I'd rent a car. My parents thought that was ridiculous. And so we had compromised: My sister, Isabel, would take the day off from the television station where she was a producer and get me. She was even going to bring along her little daughter--my niece--and the two of them would spend the morning bonding at some big public pool with a series of water slides before picking me up.
I'd told my parents beforehand exactly why I was coming and what I would be wearing, but it's one thing to be told that your son--who you believe is merely a disgusting pansy, though he continues to claim he is something else entirely--will be traveling in a pair of almost indecently comfortable floral leggings and a pink cardigan sweater, and it's quite another to see it.
"I'd ask to borrow that," Isabel said, fingering one of the sweater's small wooden buttons as we walked through the airport in Miami, "but I think I'm a tad too small in the shoulders and a tad too big in the chest. Too busty."
Her daughter, Olivia, was about to turn five, and she hadn't seen me in close to two years. She had no real memory of me as a man. Both her hair and her mother's hair were still damp from the pool.
"With any luck, someday I will be too--too busty, that is."
Since I was only going to be in Florida for three nights, I'd brought along only two carry-on bags. Nevertheless, it had shocked me how many more things a woman needed to pack than a man. My cosmetics and blow dryer and curling iron alone took up half a satchel.
"Let me take one of those for you," Isabel said, motioning toward my little bags. At first that part of me that had grown up as a male refused. But then I realized that Isabel's sister would most certainly have allowed her to take one of the totes, and so I handed over the lighter of the two.
Olivia kept looking up at me as we walked, as if she wanted to ask me something. As if something about me confused her. I had thought I'd looked pretty good that morning when I'd gotten dressed, or at least pretty female. And so her gaze was shaking my confidence a tiny bit.
Finally, as we were emerging from the air-conditioning into the tropical heat--I could literally feel the waves rising up from the asphalt--she took my free hand and said, "Aunt Dana, your earring is awfully dangly. I think it's gonna fall off."
I touched my lobe, and she was absolutely right. It was about to fall off. And so there in Section B of the parking lot I stopped and knelt and planted a big, lipstick-laced kiss on her cheek.
I slept in the room that had been my room as a child, though it looked nothing like it had two decades earlier. Once I started graduate school and it was clear to my mother that I'd never be living there again, she converted it into a bedroom for guests--of which they've always had scads. That meant that everything was now an equatorial white, like every other room in the house, as if we didn't have air-conditioning squalls roaring through the place twenty-four hours a day.
My mother grew orchids and had placed two of her more spectacular plants in the room to cheer me.
I hadn't been back in two Christmases, and I'd seen my parents only once that whole time. The autumn before I'd met Allison, they'd flown to Vermont for a week of leaf peeping, and we'd had breakfast and dinner together two days in a row when they were in Burlington. It wasn't a disaster, but they complained constantly about how much colder Vermont was than Coconut Grove, and it didn't help at all when, the first night we went out to eat, our frolicsome waiter overheard that my parents were from Florida and welcomed them with great histrionics to the "Queen City." My father was convinced that I knew the fellow and had put him up to it.
"No, Dad," I'd said, "that really is Burlington's nickname."
"Queen City?"
"Yup."
"Is that why you settled here?"
And my mother kept hugging herself, as if she were freezing to death on an ice floe. "Polar tundra," she kept saying. "You must have absolutely no growing season here!"
She also couldn't believe that there wasn't a man in my life I was hiding.
"You get checked for AIDS, don't you?" she asked before they continued on their way to Stowe. "It's very controllable now, you know," she said, and she gave me the sort of perfunctory squeeze that she conferred upon her women friends when they'd run into one another at charity events at Viscaya or the Playhouse.
Early that afternoon when Isabel and I arrived at the family hacienda--a faux adobe that mixed white stucco walls with black wrought-iron railing--both our mother and father were home. I wasn't surprised Mother was there, since her tennis games were Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she rarely did lunch on a Friday. Her women's group met Wednesday mornings.
But I was shocked to find Father there, too. Isabel was also. We had both assumed that I would take a runway walk first for my mother and then, once whichever tranquilizer she was on that day had had a chance to mellow her out, unveil the new me for dear Dad. One parent at a time, that was my plan, in each case with lovely, supportive, maternal Isabel as my emotional brace.
Well, it didn't happen that way. Apparently Dad had run out of things to develop, at least for the afternoon. It looked as though the Everglades, so long as I was in town, would be safe.
"Well, Dana," he said as we walked in the front door, "you really are one very brave ..." r />
"Yes?" I asked when he couldn't bring himself to finish his sentence.
"Let me look at you," my mother said, and I put down the bag I was carrying and offered a demure little spin in their entryway.
"I saved Aunt Dana's earring," Olivia cooed in the brief silence, and my father picked her up and kissed her. He was wearing tennis shorts, and I realized he probably hadn't gone into the office for even a few hours that morning. I was very flattered.
"Oh, good for you! I'm sure your Unc--I'm sure Dana was very grateful," he said.
"Have you had lunch?" my mother asked.