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.

“Now that’s going to come in handy,” Russo noted.

“Listen, Jenny, we should let you get settled,” said Grace.

“Okay,” I said. “I know.” I was in no mood for them to leave me there, though. Grace and Rick each gave me a hug.

“We’ll be back after dinner, all right?”

“Okay,” I said.

Grace hugged me again.

“Okay.”

They walked off down the hall, and for a moment I lay on the bed, holding my moose in one hand. The nurse said, “You ring if there’s anything you need.”

Then I took off my skirt and hose, peeled off my blouse, and slipped into the hospital gown. I hung up my things in the locker, then lay back on the bed. I realized I wouldn’t be wearing my own clothes again for a long time, over a week. All sorts of things would have happened once I got my own clothes back.

“So, Melanie,” I said. “You had the operation when? A couple days ago?”

“Last Friday,” she said.

“How are you feeling?”

She nodded. “Okay,” she said tremulously.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?”

Melanie nodded gravely. “But if I can get through it, you can get through it.”

I wasn’t sure this was true, but for now I left it at that. It was better, maybe, not to know just how hard the coming week would be.

By nightfall, Melanie’s spirits had fallen considerably. “Why did I do this?” she said softly. “I wish I were dead.”

I went with Zero to an Alice Cooper concert in 1974, just a few months before Nixon resigned. Frank Zappa was supposed to make a surprise appearance, but he didn’t. That left us stuck with Alice. There was this big toothbrush that chased him around. Later he cut off his own head with a guillotine—Alice, I mean. Turned out later he was okay.

Zero looked over at me about halfway through the concert. We’d been smoking pot. “Are you okay?” he said. I was holding one cupped hand next to my thigh, then slapping it on the top. “Seriously. Are you all right?”

“I’m dissolving,” I explained sadly.

I was painted with iodine, filled with magnesium. A nurse shaved me with an electric razor. I drank a gallon of an electrolyte solution that emptied me of my contents. Blood was drawn, and drawn again. The night came on, and I was sedated and I slept.

The day before we’d come to Egypt, I’d taken a long walk up a mountain in our hometown. I walked the ridge above Great Pond, watching the boats dotting the lake below me. I saw eagles circling the sky above Long Pond. A gentle summer breeze shook the sugar maples and white pines.

I reached the top of the mountain and sat there for a long time. I had wanted, I suppose, to engage in some sort of final farewell to manhood, to create an appropriate ritual that would mark my final passing into the world of women. Yet every rite I could think of seemed arbitrary or foolish. Anyway, there was very little about being a man that I had not already surrendered.

All I could think about was Grace, and how I loved her still, and the terrible grief and guilt I felt for all the losses in her life. I realized I would never regret being female. But I would probably always regret not being Grace’s husband.

Then I stood up and, for the last time, peed against a tree.

Okay, I thought. Enough.

In the morning, Melanie was watching the World Cup on television, England versus Argentina. We talked about ham for a while, the way certain Virginians will if you get them going. I didn’t mind. The way I figured, if she wanted to talk about ham, I might as well listen. It was better than having to hear about Second Manassas all over again. She allowed as how a Smithfield ham was best, but it had to be soaked before cooking. When Grace and Rick arrived, we were still discussing ham.

“You like ham?” Melanie asked Grace.

Grace nodded. “I’m partial to it,” she said.

A man in green arrived at my door with a gurney. “Jennifer,” he said, “I’m here for you.”

I said okay and got out of my bed, which had no wheels, and got into this other one, which did.

Russo squeezed my hand. Grace hugged me. “Are you ready?” she asked me. I nodded.

We went out into the hallway, and the man in green pushed the down button. The elevator kept opening, but it was always filled with people. “I’m going to wait until we can get one of our own,” he said.

I began to sing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”

“You’ll be swell!” I said. “You’ll be great! / Gonna have the whole world on a plate! . . .”

“Is that Ethel Merman she’s doing?” said Russo.

“I think so,” Grace said, shaking her head.

Russo looked at the orderly. “This isn’t the . . . usual reaction, is it?”

“We get all kinds of reactions,” said the man in green.

It was silent for a moment, then I started in on “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”

“Man,” said Russo. “You know who I pity, is her anesthesiologist.” The doors opened on an empty elevator.

“Okay,” I said to my wife and my best friend. “I’ll see you later.”

“We’ll be here,” said Grace. Rick nodded. I was rolled in. The elevator doors closed.

It was quiet in there. I didn’t sing.

“Your friends are nice,” said the man in the green scrubs. We descended.

“They are,” I said. “They’re about the two most amazing people in the world.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.

The doors opened, and I was rolled to a kind of holding area just outside the OR. “Okay,” said the orderly. “They’ll be taking you in to surgery in just a few minutes.”

And then he left me there.

It was silent in this place. There were half a dozen other gurneys all around me, but they didn’t have people on them. Across the hall from me was a supply cabinet. Nurses and doctors walked down the hall now and again, glancing over at me as if I were a work forged by the Cowboy Sculptor.

The anesthesiologist came over to me, introduced himself. He told me to call him by his first name, which was Jeff. He connected a tube to the IV line on the back of my hand. We talked for a while. “I’ve got you on a mild sedative right now; we’ll increase it later, once we get you into the OR.”

“Am I going to sleep?”

“Chances are, you’re not going to remember anything, Jenny. You’ll be lying here one moment and the next thing you know it will be this afternoon.”

“That’s so weird,” I said. “It’s as if the way we medicate pain now is not by removing the pain, but by removing the memory of it.”

Jeff smiled. “That’s so wrong?” he said. He had a nice face. “I’m going to see if everything’s ready in the OR. Is it all right if I just leave you here for a couple minutes?”

“It’s fine.”

I didn’t mind. I just lay there in my little bed. I looked at the clock. It was 8:40 A. M., June 6, 2002.

I felt like an airplane sitting at the end of a runway, waiting for clearance from the tower.

Jeff was gone for more than a couple of minutes. I felt very peaceful. Quietly I sang “In the Still of the Night.”

Shoo-doop, dooby doo. Shoo-doop, dooby doo . . .

I lay there singing, thinking about everything.

’Tis a good life, the life at sea.

“Okay,” said Jeff, returning at ten after nine. “Sorry you had to wait. You’re the second surgery this morning, and the first one went long.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve been fine.”

“You’ve been singing?” he said, wheeling me into the operating room.

“Yeah.”

The OR had green tiles on the wall. There were a lot of machines in it. It was brightly lit. A woman in the corner with a face mask was washing her hands. I didn’t recognize her. I hadn’t seen her before.

One night in 1987 the phone rang. It was a friend from college, who’d heard I’d died. I thought about Aunt Nora. Maybe what I needed was to drink some milk.

I explained to my friend that I was not dead. Someone had seen a notice in The New York Times, he said, and my entire peer group up in Boston was now in mourning for me. They couldn’t believe it. I’d been so young.

“Oh,” I said. “That was my father who died.”

That cleared things up.

That night I attended a performance of a play I’d written called Big Baby. It was about a baby that gets big. After the performance, the playwrights had to get up on stage and talk about their work. Edward Albee was in the audience, and he raised his hand and said, Listen, Mr. Boylan, about this baby in your play. Why is it so large? He seemed annoyed with me, although I do note that fifteen years later he also wrote a play about a baby. His was better than mine, though.

I explained that the size of the baby was intended to create a comedic effect.

At that moment, a tile fell out of the ceiling and hit me on the head, and I fell down klunk on the floor. This, incidentally, was much more effective at producing a comedic effect than my play had been.

People offered to take me to the hospital, but I fended them off. I was all right. I had a big bump, though.

Later, the series of events had me worried. I thought about the possibility that there was some sort of curse on me now, the result of people mourning for me under false pretenses. It’s because there’s this rumor I’m dead, I thought. It’s going to kill me.

Surely the effects of enough people believing something, even if that something is untrue, are not without consequence.

The next day I arrived at the airport to fly to Boston, to visit my friend Moynihan. There, on the tarmac, was my plane—a single-engine puddle jumper. As I looked at this questionable aircraft, I understood clearly what all the premonitions had been about. It was in this plane, surely, that I would make my final journey.

I got on board.

The propellers began to whirl. The tiny plane took off and flew up the East Coast of the United States.

I looked out the window at all the places I had lived before my unfortunate demise. There was Philadelphia to the west, where I had grown up. Then there was New York, where I lived after college. I thought I could even pick out my old apartment building on 108th Street. To the east was Long Island, and now I could see, in the sparkling sun, the coast of Fire Island, where an old girlfriend’s family had a summer house. We traveled north and crossed Connecticut, and I could see the bend in the Connecticut River and Wesleyan University on the hills of Middletown.

There was every place I’d ever lived. I said farewell. I felt all right about everything, even about dying. Okay, so you never got to be a woman, I thought. But you did all right.

We landed safely in Boston. Again I had failed to die. It was something I wasn’t very good at, as it turned out. I got my bags and jumped into a cab, sailing off to Moynihan’s house.

In Somerville, Moynihan’s door opened wide and a girl stood there. It was Grace Finney.

I hadn’t seen her since the memorial service for Tim Alcock at Wesleyan, the one where I’d been too sad to sing “Beautiful Dreamer.”

“Hey, James Boylan,” Grace said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were coming.” She looked embarrassed. “I heard you were dead.”

We were in the hallway, rolling. “Jenny,” said Grace.

It was Grace, and we were rolling. We were in the hallway. I was Jenny.

“You’re all right,” she said. “It all went perfectly.”

“It’s? It’s?” It was Jenny, and she was rolling. Grace was in the hallway.

“It’s over,” said Russo. “The doctor came out and talked to us. He said he couldn’t be happier.”

“You’ll be swell! You’ll be . . .”

“You’re going back to the room now. We’re here with you. You’re all right.”

“You’ll be swell! You’ll be . . . great . . .”

The phone rang, and I talked to someone. It was Zero, it was my mother, it was Grace’s sister Bonnie, who had died of ovarian cancer two months earlier. I’d read a Galway Kinnell poem at her funeral. My hospital room was filled with flowers, from Grace, from my mother, from my friends. A card read “It’s a girl!”

“Grace,” I said, “can you sing me a song?”

Grace looked over at Russo, who shrugged and looked back at her as if to say You’re on your own here.

“Okay,” said Grace. “What do you want to hear?”

“One of those . . . falling asleep songs you sing the children.”

Grace looked out the window, thinking about the songs she knew.

“Do you think I could leave you crying?” she then sang, taking my hand.

When there’s room on my horse for two?
Climb up here, Jack, quit your crying,
We’ll mend up your horse with glue.
When we grow up we’ll both be soldiers
And our horses will not be toys.
Maybe then we’ll remember
When we were two little boys.

I was awake, then I was asleep again, then I was awake. Grace was on the phone, talking to someone. “Whatever else you say about my husband,” she said, “she’s a remarkable woman.”

Then it was late at night, and Russo was sitting by my bed and Grace was gone. “Where did she go?” I asked. My voice was slightly hoarse. I’d had a tube down my throat, but it wasn’t there now.

“Grace went back to the hotel,” Russo said. “We went out to dinner. I told her to go get some rest.”

“Were you drinking? I hope you were . . . drinking. . . .”

Russo smiled. “We might have had a couple.”

“Is she all right?” I said. “Is she really okay?”

“She’s doing great,” said Russo. “She’s very proud of you. Apparently you sailed through. Schrang says you were amazing.”

“Do you think . . . he’s nuts?” I said.

Russo smiled. “Well, all we know is that he’s very, very good at one thing. And fortunately for you, it’s the thing you needed him to be good at.”

“Russo . . . it’s done. It’s over. I did it.”

“You sure as hell did. You did it, Boylan.” He smiled. “I’m proud of you, too, Jenny.”

“I can’t believe,” I said. “It’s over.”

He smiled. “Are you okay? Do you feel okay?”

I beamed. “I think so. I keep dozing off, though. I think I’m on . . .” I felt a wave of pain. I picked up my Demerol drip and hit the magic button that released the drug. It dinged, as if I were at a gas station and I’d driven over the hose. “I keep, you know . . . Waking up and . . .”

“You look like you’re doing incredibly well.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah. Quite frankly, it’s a little eerie. You seem so happy. To tell you the truth, it’s a pretty powerful thing to see, how happy you are.”

“It’s just that I’m so relieved, Rick,” I said. “I was afraid . . . I was going to wake up . . . and have a sense of regret. Instead, I just feel glad. I feel so . . . grateful.”

“Is there anything I can do for you right now?”

“Would you read me something?” I had Empire Falls lying on the nightstand. “Read me some of this, would you?”

He looked about as glad to read his own work at my bedside as he’d been to sign a copy of it for Dr. Schrang. But he did it.

My friend read me the beginning of chapter 14 of his great novel, a scene in which Miles Roby and his father are driving in their car.

On general principle his father was dead set against swerving to avoid obstacles. . . . Once, the year before . . . , they’d encountered a cardboard box sitting square in the middle of their lane on a narrow country road. Since no one was coming toward them and no one was following, and since there was plenty of time to slow down and maneuver around the box, Miles was surprised when his father actually accelerated into it. He braced for something like an explosion, but the box, thankfully empty, was sucked under the car, where it got caught in the driveshaft and made a hell of a racket for a hundred yards or so before it flapped away, mangled and reduced to two dimensions, into a ditch.

“What if that box had been full of rocks?” Miles asked.

“What would a box full of rocks be doing sitting in the middle of the road?” Max wondered back, pushing in the cigarette lighter on the dash and patting his shirt pocket for his pack of Luckies.

Miles was tempted to reply,“Waiting for an idiot to hit it doing sixty miles an hour,” but he said instead, “If it had been full of rocks, we might both be dead.”

Max considered this. “What would you have done?”

Miles sensed a trap in this innocent question, but at sixteen he continued to play the hand he’d been dealt, confident he had enough to trump with. “I might’ve stopped to see what was in the box before I hit it.”

Max nodded. “What if it was full of rattlesnakes? Then when you opened it, you’d be dead.”

Miles had not grown up in his father’s intermittent company for nothing. “What would a box full of rattlesnakes be doing sitting in the middle of the road?”

“Waiting for some dumbbell like you to stop and look inside,” Max said.

Grace and Rick returned to Maine on Sunday, June 9th, leaving me to recover a few days longer in an Egyptian hotel. One day, I decided to kill a few hours by taking a taxi several miles north to the Houdini Museum, in Appleton.

The Houdini Museum consisted, for the most part, of a collection of shackles, handcuffs, and straitjackets that the great magician had eluded over eighty years previously. There weren’t a lot of other people there that day, and as I rolled in my wheelchair around the museum’s environs, it was hard not to be struck with a sense of infinite loneliness. This feeling was amplified by the juxtaposition of the Houdini material with a very large exhibit in the main hall, a retrospective on Wisconsin’s own junior senator entitled “Joe McCarthy: An American Tragedy.” There were entries in a guest book such as this one:“Joe McCarthy was right—his only fault lay in not going far enough!”

On the wall by the handcuffs was a tattered poster: “HOUDINI: ORIGINAL INTRODUCER OF THE METAMORPHOSIS! Changing places with his wife in 3 seconds! The Greatest Mystery the World Has Ever Seen!”

From the next room came the recorded voice of Senator McCarthy harassing a witness, attacking his patriotism: “Will you tell us the names of these sympathizers, or will you not? By five o’clock today?” Before me, in a wooden box, were half a dozen loose handcuffs and a straitjacket on a hanger. “Slip on these shackles! Try the straitjacket on for size!” read the sign. “And see if you can escape.”

I flew home on Father’s Day. My children met me at the door with a big sign that read “WELCOME HOME, MADDY” as well as a box containing the Milton Bradley game Battleship, tied up with a bow. Grace had a bottle of champagne on ice, a lobster dinner on the stove.

A few weeks later, we got a package in the mail from Melanie, my roommate in Egypt. What did she send us? A ham.

On the Fourth of July, Grace and I were in Boothbay Harbor, attending the wedding of our friend Frank’s daughter. The ceremony was performed down by the water, as yachts and lobster boats sailed by.

There we were, two women in our early forties, wearing our summer dresses, watching our friends and their children walk down the aisle as a man in a white tuxedo played Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Wind blew across a microphone. The sound of the ocean was picked up by the PA system. Gulls flew in circles over our heads.

The groom, a sweet-faced young man, came down the aisle in his white jacket and bow tie. The bride followed, on her father’s arm. In one hand she held a bouquet of white tulips.

The ceremony combined the two families’ Jewish and Christian traditions; a minister officiated, but the vows were exchanged beneath a chupa, and a glass was broken. “We do this,” explained a rabbi by the minister’s side, “to remind us of the destruction of the Temple, to remind us that even in the midst of joy there is sorrow.” As if this were something we could ever, possibly, forget.

Those two young people looked in each other’s eyes and shyly, softly, promised to love each other “as you are, and as you shall be.” They promised to make each other’s needs their own.

After the ceremony, we sat inside a rustic lodge that overlooked the harbor, eating salmon and drinking champagne. Our friend Frank, a tall, burly, elegant man, stood before the gathered crowd at the side of the woman he had divorced twenty years earlier and toasted his daughter and his new son-in-law. His eyes filled with tears as he raised his glass, and as the big man cried, so did everyone else.

Between the two of us, Grace and I had only one napkin, and we kept snatching it back from each other in order to dab at our eyes. After a few minutes we got up, still crying, and went outside. Salt air was blowing in across the harbor, and the moon was rising above the sea.

Throughout that evening, I had felt the eyes of strangers upon us, silently asking the question for which we ourselves still had no answer: What are you two? Clearly we were not husband and wife; on just that much we could all agree. But neither, by any stretch of the imagination, were we a lesbian couple. We were parents, yes, of two remarkable and resilient children, both of whom had apparently inherited the unsinkable optimism and faith of their grandmother, the woman whose motto was “Love will prevail.” Were Grace and I “sisters,” then, two siblings somehow born to different parents? Was that what we had become?

We were still legally married and could remain so even though I was now female. Although we could not legally have gotten married now, if we were to meet and fall in love for the first time, we were allowed under the law to remain married, for as long as that suited us both. If we chose to divorce and remarry, however, I could legally marry only a man. If I then divorced that man and Grace married him, then Grace’s ex-husband and her husband’s ex-wife would both be the same person. I smiled as I tried to make sense of all this and thought of the song I used to sing my children, “I’m My Own Grampa.”

What were we? For her part, Grace was still a beautiful woman, still able to whistle with two fingers in her mouth as her eyes crinkled with devilish laughter. Even now, men still looked at her as she passed through a crowd and thought, just as I had twenty-five years earlier, Whoa. Who was that?

As for myself, I had begun, to my own shock, to see men through different eyes. Dr. Schrang’s hope that I would be orgasmic postsurgery had been fulfilled. The sensation—which I’d cautiously, curiously, produced all on my own—was like nothing I’d experienced, and yet, sure, it was familiar. The Greek prophet Tiresias, who was said to have lived as both a man and a woman, claimed that “the pleasure for a woman is ten times that of the man.”To this, all I can add is that what it reminds me of, more than anything else, is the difference between Spanish and Italian.

I had always imagined that post-transition my sexuality would remain constant, that I would remain fascinated by women no matter what form my own body took. Yet somehow, without any conscious thought, the object of my desire was gently shifting. Now, looking around at the world, I would occasionally think, Jeez. Look at all these men. Surely they haven’t been here all this time? Where did they all come from?

Occasionally a man would give me a hug, and the sensation of his stubbly face against my soft neck and cheek made the hairs on my arm stand on end. Women no longer struck me as creatures of such wonder. Their world seemed like the one I knew, like the one into which I woke each morning. Men, on the other hand—to me they now seemed like a mystery.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that one or the other of us, at some point, would take a first tentative step in a new direction. Yet that time was not upon us, and it was impossible to know whether it would come months from now, or years, or never. In some sense, I think we both dreaded that moment as much as we hoped for it. Where on earth would either of us find men that we adored as much as we had adored each other? How could we want, even after all these losses, to ever wake up beneath a roof that did not cover the other as well?

We knew what we were not—we were not husband and wife; we were not lesbians; we were not merely friends. We knew that we were not all these things. But what were we?

“Are you all right?” I said to Grace.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “What about you?”

I nodded. “I’m okay.”

Grace turned to me.

“Jenny,” she said softly.

“Grace.”

I had no idea what it was she was going to say next. It could have been anything—I want you to move out. . . . I want a divorce. . . . I want you to climb a mountain in Nova Scotia and allow yourself to be blown off a cliff by the wind. Nothing would have surprised me, I thought, with the exception, perhaps, of the one thing Grace did say to me then, the thing she said after all these years together.

“So, Jenny,” she said. “Do you want to dance?”

For a moment I didn’t know how to respond; she had caught me completely off guard. Then I said something I had said to her a long time ago, in the National Cathedral, in Washington. I said, “I do.”

We went back inside and walked up to the dance floor, where scores of other couples were rocking out. The band was playing a Paul Simon song, “Late in the Evening.”

And we danced.

A conga line formed, and we snaked through the inn. Everyone was laughing and dancing, clapping their hands. We all formed a big circle, and at its center Frank danced with his daughter, and the groom danced with Sandra.

A moment later, a man I did not know put his hand around my waist and spun me into the middle of the dance floor. He wanted to dance close, and all I could think of was, He’s got the wrong hand out and the wrong hand on my waist—until I realized that as a woman I had to do everything I had done before, only in reverse.

I thought hurriedly, Am I leading?

Well, I guess I’d been in love before, and once or twice I been on the floor. But I never loved no one the way that I loved you.

The man spun me with one hand, and I saw faces I recognized whirling around me in a blur. There was Grace and Russo, Dr. Schrang and Hilda Watson and my sister, Donna Fierenza, Dr. Wheeler, even Seamus O’Twotimes. He just walked right out into space. Into space.

A moment later I was by Grace’s side, back in the outer circle again.

“Well, I’m back,” I said.

Exactly twenty-six years earlier, on the evening of the American bicentennial, I was once more in Surf City, New Jersey, sitting on the beach with my friend Tad Pennypacker and his girlfriend, Lois. Before me was the very jetty on whose tip I had stood as a child, watching the hurricane blow up, the waves crashing against the rocks. Where would you get, I asked myself, if you went directly east from Surf City, New Jersey?

SPAIN, said my grandmother to the medical student who was examining her. SPAIN.

Whoop?

Fireworks were exploding above the sea. Tad and Lois and I sat there on the beach, drinking a bottle of Mateus rosé. Through a series of incidents we could hardly have explained, Gerald Ford was president. People kept trying to assassinate him, but he was having none of it. I admired that.

I was sitting in the middle, halfway between Tad and Lois. Drunkenly we sang “In the Still of the Night.”

A few miles north of us was New York Harbor, filled with the masts of tall ships. As I lay there watching the fireworks light up the sky, I thought, What a beautiful night it was, what a beautiful country.

Tad and Lois and I all had our arms around one another. I hadn’t been cured by love yet, but at that moment I felt as if I might be, if only I sat there long enough.