She's Not There (22 page)

Part 4

June 2001. Okay, I thought. Enough.

The Yankee-Doodle Girl

In 1987, while I was living in Washington, my mother came down for a visit. We went over to the Lincoln Memorial. As we drove, she reminisced about coming to America as a child, her memories of Ellis Island and Depression-era New Jersey. It wasn't a topic she visited often.

“No matter what else you say,” she said, “you have to love America.”

“I have to?” I said. “I don't have a choice about this?”

“No, Jim,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you don't.”

I parked the car near the Mall. Together we walked through the rain up the steps. There was Abe, sitting on his marble throne. It was quiet.

Visiting the Lincoln Memorial is sort of like being sent to the principal. You feel ashamed of yourself for being such a shithead. You want to tell him,
I'm sorry about being a woman, Mr. President. Honest I
am.
Lincoln looked at me, his melancholy face ravaged and discouraged:
I'm not angry. I'm just terribly, terribly disappointed.

“Boy,” my mother said. “He's ugly.”

Fifteen years later, Grace and Russo and I walked by the train tracks in a Wisconsin town we'll call Egypt. Behind me, my suitcase on wheels went clackety-clack across the sidewalk. To our right was the small river that flowed through Egypt, paper factories built upon its banks.

A gritty diesel groaned past us, hauling boxcars:
Georgia Pacific,
Chessie System, Southern Serves the South.

We'd arrived the night before, checked into a hotel that was decorated with the work of an artist named Remington, the “Cowboy Sculptor.” I'd never heard of him before, but Grace and Rick had. There were broncos bucking dudes with big hats, bison staring down guys in chaps.

Grace and Russo and I walked into a brightly lit office. On the door were the words
Dr. Eugene Schrang, Cosmetic Surgery.
For all that, it was a place like many others. The waiting room included stacks of old magazines, a television tuned to CNN.

The three of us went into Dr. Schrang's chambers.

“Jennifer,” he said, standing up to shake my hand. He wore a three-piece suit and a white lab coat over that. Schrang exuded a kind of imperious dignity, as well as a not displeasing measure of eccentricity.

“This is my partner, Grace,” I said, “and my friend Rick Russo.”

We all shook hands, sat down. For a moment it was silent.

“I've read your novel,” Schrang said. He meant Russo's. “It's good.”

“Thank you,” said Rick.

It was quiet in the office for a moment. I was waiting for Dr. Schrang to examine me further, to brief my partner and my friend on the surgery that would be performed the next day.

Schrang got up, went over to the bookcase. He pulled out a copy of
Empire Falls
and gave it to Rick. On the cover were the words
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Empire Falls
had done all right.

“You wouldn't mind . . . signing this for me, would you?”

“Sure,” Rick said with a forced smile. He opened the novel to the title page. For a moment I thought I heard the gears turning around in his head as he tried to find words appropriate to the occasion.

“How'd you become a novelist, anyway?” Schrang asked Rick. “Is it something that just came naturally to you?”

“Oh no,” Rick said. “It took a long time to figure out how to do it right.”

“Well,” said Schrang, “figuring out how to do sexual reassignment surgery was like that, too.”

Rick rubbed his chin, having never realized how much his work and Dr. Schrang's had in common.

Schrang got up, removed three more books from a shelf, and handed one to each of us. The title was
The Great Communicators.
It appeared to be the work of a vanity press, a collection of essays about personal communications. A much younger Eugene Schrang was on the cover. He beckoned toward the reader with one hand, like a magician about to produce a rabbit.

I opened the book, and on the first page was a huge photograph of Ronald Reagan. “This book is dedicated to President Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator,” read the inscription.

“Yikes,” I said.

“You don't think you're the only one who wrote a book, do you?” said Schrang with a dignified smile. He was talking to Russo.

“Listen, I don't know if I should tell you this before the surgery, but I'm a Democrat,” I said. The doctor looked at me, not sure if I was kidding.

“Oh, that's all right,” he said. I was glad he was being so nice about it. Of course, Dr. Schrang dealt with transsexuals every day. Democrats probably weren't that much worse.

“Hey, where are
my
books?” I said.

Dr. Schrang looked at me as if I had spoken a foreign language. It was clear, at that moment, that he had no idea I'd ever written anything.

“I'll send you one,” I said.

“I'd like that.”

It was silent again.

“Well, do you have, like, any . . . questions for us?” I said. “Or any more examinations you have to do before tomorrow?”

“Nah,” said the doctor. “Since you were out here in November, I know all that I need to know. You're going to do fine.”

“What are some of the things that could . . . go wrong?” said Grace.

“Well, the biggest danger is a fistula, you know, a fissure between the vagina and the rectum. That's the worst-case scenario. If that happens, I'll have to put in a colostomy. I see that all the time, in patients who've had their surgeries done somewhere else, a fistula. Oh, there's a lot of junk out there, you wouldn't believe some of the junk I've had to correct.” He looked at the three of us. “Do you want to see some slides, some pictures of some of the junk I've had to fix?”

“No,”
all three of us shouted.

“Is that going to happen to me?” I said. “A fistula?”

“I sure hope not,” said the doctor.

“Do you want to talk with the doctor privately?” Grace said.

“I think I ought to,” I said. “You know, just so we do it.”

“Okay,” said Grace and Russo. They stood, took their books, shook the doctor's hand. “See you tomorrow.”

The door to the office closed. I sat back down.

“What do you get for a Pulitzer Prize, anyway?” he asked after a moment. “Is it money? Or a medal, or what?”

“I think it's money,” I said. “I don't know how much, though.”

“You think it's a lot?”

“I bet it is,” I said. Dr. Schrang looked troubled. “But I don't know for sure. I know you get a certificate, like a diploma. I think Rick got a paperweight, too.”

“That's nice, a paperweight,” said Dr. Schrang. He smiled, all those years in medical school seeming worthwhile again.

“So, like,” I said. “Surgery's tomorrow and everything.”

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Schrang asked.

“I guess I'm excited. Kind of nervous. Afraid of the pain, of the unknown. I don't know, it's like you open a door, thinking you know what's on the other side. But you don't really know. I mean, I've done my research, I think I have a good idea of what to expect. But I won't really know for sure until it's all done, you know?”

Dr. Schrang nodded. “It's okay to be afraid. Most people are.”

“Okay,” I said. “So you're saying I'm normal?”

He nodded. “That's right, Jenny, you're normal.”

I had a strange affection for Eugene Schrang. He was an eccentric, perhaps, but he was also a genius. It must be hard, I thought, to be the pioneer of a field so arcane.

Gingerly, almost shyly, he showed me some slides of the operation, which initially struck me as being about as appealing as watching a car accident. Yet as I sat there in the dark, it was impossible not to find something beautiful about these slides as well. I recalled the words I had so often heard used to describe Schrang's work:
Even your
gynecologist can't tell the difference.
It was remarkable.

“And you say I'll be orgasmic?” I said quietly. “I mean,
really
?”

“Well, that's the goal,” Schrang said. “We want you to see stars and comets. The whole nine yards.”

I nodded. That would be nice, stars and comets. Dr. Schrang reviewed some more slides. I could sense his pride as he described the intricacies of his handiwork. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a slide with his pen. “Nobody else makes a urethra like that,
nobody
!”

Eventually the last slide clicked in its carousel, and the screen went blank. We were silent for a moment, Eugene Schrang and I.

“Jenny,” said Dr. Schrang, “you're going to be all right. You're going to sail through.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“You will.” He put his hand out to shake. I put my arms around him and hugged him. He wasn't a large man, and as I embraced my doctor I had to bend my knees. That way I could reach him.

On the Fourth of July 1968, our neighbors the Staines had a bicycle contest. They were from Tennessee. The father, Verge, chain-smoked L&Ms and had a deep voice and cracks in his face that looked as if they'd been cut by running water.

We all decorated our bikes, threading red, white, and blue crepe paper through the spokes. It was good that the Staines were doing this for the Fourth because it was becoming more and more self-evident, even to the children, that the country was down the drain. The loss of Martin Luther King that spring had torn something open that seemed unlikely to heal. My parents and I had sat around the radio in the kitchen, listening to Bobby Kennedy address the crowd in Indianapolis:
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we
need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States
is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward
one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer . . .”

They were still voting for Nelson Rockefeller, though.

The Staines lived at the bottom of a steep hill, and their driveway was long and treacherous. For some reason, they erected the judging stand at the bottom of the hill, so that all the children participating in the bicycle parade had to jam their brakes on the whole way down Mount Staines.

I was last in line. Alone, I stood at the top of the driveway, looking at the grown-ups far below, sitting behind a row of card tables covered with bunting. Verge Staines was playing John Philip Sousa marches on a small phonograph. His wife was pouring out glasses of lemonade.

Then I began my approach. I saw the reviewing stand rush toward me. I saw my fingers, loosely holding, but not applying, the hand brakes. I couldn't understand why I wasn't slowing myself down; it didn't make any sense.

With the force of an impending asteroid, I slammed into the reviewing stand. Card tables and bunting and glasses of lemonade went flying through the air, as did Verge Staines and our next-door neighbor, Mr. Wheeler (who came from Texas and once fired a shotgun over the heads of my sister and me when we decided, out of sheer cussedness, to defecate in his garden). Also airborne was our other neighbor, Dr. Wheeler, to whom, strangely, Mr. Wheeler was not related. Dr. Wheeler liked to walk alone in the vast woods of the Earle Estate, and now and again I would run into him when I was over there playing girl planet.
What are you doing?
he'd ask me.

Oh, nothing.

Years later, I wondered whether Dr. Wheeler was playing his own version of girl planet.

Tables, bunting, glasses of lemonade, phonographs, Staines, Wheelers,Wheelers, and I all fell to earth with a loud thump. No one was killed, apparently. I lay on my back, the wheels of my bike spinning around and around nearby, as adults gathered around me.

“Is he all right?” I just lay there listening to the voices of the grown-ups, a weird smile on my face. My father held me in his arms. “Are you all right, son?”

We arrived at the hospital. There was some trouble finding the entrance. No one seemed to know where the front door was.

At length, Grace and Russo and I got as far as the admissions desk on the second floor. They were expecting me. I filled out some papers, gave permission for an AIDS test, gave them a copy of my living will.

Then they took me down the hallway to my room. Grace and Russo walked behind me. There were two beds in the room, and in the bed by the window was another patient of Dr. Schrang's, a pale woman with black hair. A nurse sat on a chair by the window, reading a copy of
GQ.
The magazine contained an article I'd written about the woman business. There were some big Diane Arbus–type photos of me in the magazine, taken by
The New Yorker
's Martin Schoeller.

“Whoa,” said the patient. “It
is
you. It's me, Melanie Seymour, from Virginia. Remember we swapped a couple of e-mails?”

Actually, I didn't remember her particularly well. I got a
lot
of e-mail.

“Hi, Melanie,” I said.

“I can't believe it's you,” said the nurse, looking up from the magazine, comparing me with my photo. “A celebrity, right here on my ward.”

“I know, I'm sorry.”

“Where do you want this stuff?” said Rick. He was still carrying my suitcase. It was nice that this time
I
was the celebrity for a change, even if my constituency seemed to be limited to a pale, bedridden transsexual and her scrub nurse.

“Anywhere is fine,” I said.

“You can use that locker,” said the nurse. “That's for all your personal effects.” She got out a hospital johnny. “You'll want to put this on.”

I
didn't
want to put on the johnny, actually. We puttered around the room, moving in. I got a stuffed moose doll out of my suitcase and put him on the pillow.