drive off with the dog. Mrs. Flood was standing behind him, raking the rank, damp earth.
* * *
That night, I sat in my living room with the puppy, whom I decided to name Ruby. I’d purchased a small crate, which I imagined the dog would welcome as a soothing, den-like home, as well as a goodly portion of bagged-up puppy chow. Ruby had walked around sniffing everything and whimpering softly. “It’s okay,” I told the dog. “I just moved here, too.”
Alex, deep into his dotage by now, was far from certain about having a puppy in his life. I suppose it was sort of like meeting the person they’ve hired to replace you just before you retire. Or, like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, facing the fresh-faced version of his former nerd-like self: “Gotta dance!” He sat down in the middle of the kitchen with his tennis ball in his mouth, making it clear to the puppy that in spite of his generous character there were some things he would not be sharing and that his tennis ball was one of them.
I called Deedie on the phone and reached her in her dormitory at Smith College, a building called Martha Washington that, in the summers, was filled with hundreds of social-workers-to-be. “You’ll never guess what I did today,” I said to my bride. I was so excited to tell her about the Floods and their hog farm.
“What?” said Deedie.
“I got a puppy!” I blurted out. “A little golden retriever! Her name is Ruby!”
There was silence on the line. It wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Hello?” I said.
* * *
Several days later, I locked Ruby up in the crate, then rode my bicycle to a bar. It was one of the delights of our new house, that the Sunset Grill was just a mile away and that when the mood took me, I could head down to the bar and have a pint in about as long as it took to open a can of dog food.
It would be at this very same bar, ten years later, that I would sit on a stool reviewing the instructions from my doctor.
Let us pause at this moment to consider the future that awaited me.
There I am in 2001, sitting on my stool, holding a rather graphic sketch of the area that in Ireland is referred to as “down below” and that addresses details of a particular dilemma presented by the forthcoming surgery. The specific complication in this instance was that after all was said and done, some of what was currently on the outside of this area would take up new residence on the inside, and in order to ensure that one’s interior regions were—in the words of my surgeon—“pink and mucosal,” it would be necessary to make sure that they were hairless before the doctor embarked upon the dipsy-doodle. The instructions in my hand at the bar included a hand-drawn sketch that it was impossible to gaze upon without equal measures of horror and wonder.
I would take these instructions to heart, although finding an electrologist who was willing to work in such an intimate way was far from easy, especially in a place as remote as northern New England. My regular electrologist, in Waterville, had been helpful enough when it was my face that was being smoothed, but when I raised the prospect of down below she just shook her head. “I don’t think so,” said she.
As with so many aspects of this process back then, I finally got wind of a woman up for the challenge through some of the other trans women I knew, through a series of whispers and secret signals reminiscent of the French underground or the ancient order of Freemasons. This woman worked out of a trailer in a town called Livermore Falls, a hard-bitten mill town where my band had once played in a bar called Ma Duck’s. There really was a Ma Duck, too, a tough woman who walked around with a baseball bat making sure that nobody got any ideas. The electrologist’s trailer was just a few miles out of town. It was to her practice I would make my way that dark, cold winter and present myself for electrocution. In preparation for this, I had been prescribed something called Emla cream, which essentially numbed the skin that was being smelted. Then, in order to keep it all from rubbing off upon my underpants during the hour-long drive between our house in Belgrade