Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (2 page)

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 you 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.

"I'm not
that
much younger than your mom," he said, grinning, as if he'd sensed what I was thinking.

"No, not at all," I said. Mom had just turned forty-two.

He reached for a cocktail napkin from the table beside him and surprised me by dabbing it against the edge of my lips. "You had a little drop of strawberry there," he murmured. "Can't have that, now. Do you have a date tonight?"

"Nope. I mean, I am going out. But it's just with a group of friends I hang out with."

"Boyfriend?"

"Not since May."

He took a sip from the bottle in his hand, and for a moment I thought I'd seen him extend his pinkie as if he were holding a cup of tea.

"You know," he said, "most kids your age who are about to start college are scared right now, too."

"I guess."

"Except for the drama jocks. Nothing scares a drama jock."

"I don't act."

"And there will be a lot of drama jocks at Bennington, won't there?"

"Mom told you where I'm going?"

"It did come up. What are you scared of, may I ask? Is it making friends or doing the work? Or is it, I don't know, just being away from home?"

I thought for a moment. "I'm not sure."

"I can tell by the way you just introduced yourself to me that you're a real shrinking violet," he said, rolling his eyes. "Clearly you'll
never
meet anybody."

"Kids are different."

"Yeah, they're younger. And here's the big secret about colleges: They only try and accept people who can do the work--especially a place like Bennington. Those incredible dullards in admissions? Well, one of the few things they're actually very good at is figuring out who's going to make it and who isn't. The last thing they want is for someone to fail. Besides," he went on, "I can't imagine you have any problems in the classroom."

"My mom's biased."

"Your mom and I have never talked about your academic strengths or weaknesses. I just have a good feeling about you," he said, and then he did something that in hindsight seems pretty minor, but at the time was one of the more astonishing things an adult male had ever done to me. He touched my hair.

"You wear your hair a bit like your mother, don't you?" he murmured, and with the fingers of only one hand he fixed the barrette, which had fallen askew. "So many young girls insist on a Barbie do. But short hair becomes you. You have such a lovely face--just like your mother."

Had any man in the world other than Dana touched me that way, I would have felt it was a come-on. I would have felt threatened. And given the fact that this man was my mom's friend--perhaps even a man she was interested in--it's likely I would have been pissed.

But none of those thoughts passed through my mind at that moment. I was simply flattered that this attractive older man thought my face was lovely. And I was glad that a person who apparently thought about hair felt I'd made a good decision with mine.

It was, in some way, as if one of my mother's close female friends--one of the women she'd known since Middlebury, and whom I'd known my whole life--had complimented me. The small remark was meaningful. Powerful. Reassuring.

"Thank you," I said.

He shrugged. "No problem. Girl can't have a barrette with a mind of its own."

I was home that night in time to help my mom load the dishwasher.

"You didn't mention you were inviting your teacher," I said as I emptied wineglasses into the sink. I tried to sound casual.

"I didn't know I was until yesterday. It was very spontaneous."

"Did you invite anyone else from the class?"

"Most of the other students are nineteen and twenty. They're closer to your age than mine."

"Not that doctor you told me about. Not the woman who works for the phone company."

She placed a sheet of Saran Wrap over a glass bowl filled with couscous. "I guess I could have invited them. But I didn't."

"You like him?"

"Who?"

"Dana!"

"Sure, I like him just fine. That's probably why I invited him."

"Do you like him as a friend? Or as something more?"

She placed the couscous in the refrigerator and closed the door with her hip. "Too early to tell."

"I like him."

"I'll sleep easier."

"He likes you."

If I'd said something like that to a girl my age, she would have been unable to resist asking me how I knew such a thing. But my mom had a generation on me, and merely nodded unconcernedly as she reached over my shoulders for the sponge at the edge of the sink.

"He grew up in Miami. Did you know that?" I asked.

"I think I did."

"He went to school in Massachusetts--Hampshire College, he said--because he wanted to be as far away from home as possible."

She wiped the crumbs off the counter she'd cleared, and turned to me. I was pleased that I'd finally said something that had gotten her attention. "How in the world did that come up? How long were you two chatting?"

"Not too long. But we talked about college."

"Personally, I've never been wild about Florida. I can't blame him for going to school in New England."

"I think it was more about his parents. He didn't say anything about Miami one way or the other."

"Your father once had a job offer from a station in Gainesville. I guess you were five or six," my mom said, clearly hoping to steer the conversation away from Dana. She never liked talking about the men in her life until she'd made a decision about them one way or the other.

I considered letting her off the hook, but it was a Friday night--almost Saturday morning--and I was having fun watching her sweat. And so I plowed ahead.

"Want to know why he picked a place in the Berkshires?"

She rinsed the sponge. "Sure. Tell me."

"Because his nearest relatives would be a thousand miles away in Atlanta, and his mom and dad would have to change planes at least once if they ever wanted to visit. Getting there would be a major ordeal."

"Well, then," she said, "I guess I should be flattered that you're only going to be two or three hours away."

"Want to know something else about him?"

"You're dying to tell me, aren't you?"

"He thinks you're pretty. And he likes your hair."

She smiled and gave me a small hug. "I'm happy you like him," she said, her voice serenely maternal. "Really, I am. But right now we're just friends. That's all. If it ever becomes anything more, you'll be the first to know. Okay?"

Her hands were wet from the sponge, and the back of my shirt grew damp.

"Okay," I said.

As we pulled apart, I found myself looking carefully at her mouth, and I wondered if I'd ever be brazen enough to dab someone else's lips with a napkin.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Monday, September 24

BACKGROUND AUDIO:
The sound of teacups on china saucers, the clinking of spoons. Small murmurs of conversation.

CARLY BANKS:
Montreal's majestic Hotel Pierre sits across from an entrance to Mount Royal, the elegant park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead in the midst of Quebec's largest city. Here the International Association for Gender Diversity is holding its annual conference, this year themed "Trans-Am: In Praise of Gender Expression Across the Americas."

Raymond and Vanessa Packard are two of the nearly eleven hundred conference attendees who have arrived in Montreal. They've been married for five years--a demographic detail of little distinctiveness.