before hanging a name on him.
We’d had the dog for a full two minutes before the four of us looked at each other and said, more or less simultaneously, “Ranger.”
The next morning was the Fourth of July, and at 5:00 A.M. there was this strange howling in the bedroom. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.
Then I picked up the puppy and carried him outside and sat down on the banks of Long Pond. At my side was the small black dog, pink tongue hanging out of his mouth, tail wagging.
“Good morning, Ranger-dog,” I said. I was not blind, but as we watched the sunrise together, I tried to imagine all the places this dog might guide me, in the days that lay ahead.
The day after that, the four of us were in the kitchen when the puppy squatted down, as if to pee upon the floor. I scooped him up and ran with him outside—but somehow in my hurry I tripped upon the stairs that led from the deck to the lawn—and suddenly found myself hurtling horizontally toward the ground. The three-month-old puppy fell out of my grasp, and he traveled through space, rotating gently, until he landed. I crashed into the earth a second later, right on my rib cage.
A moment later the members of my family rushed outside. There, at the bottom of the stairs, I lay on my side on the ground. Ten feet beyond my corpse was the puppy, whimpering softly.
Deedie, Zach, and Sean rushed past me to the puppy.
“Is he okay?” Deedie shouted.
“Ranger, are you all right?” the boys asked.
I lay there like a dead thing. “I think I’m okay,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry, Maddy!” said Zach, perplexed. “Ranger’s fine!”
Maddy was the name my children had come up with for me—their combination of Mommy and Daddy. Zach had a classmate named Maddy as well, and he’d noted that “she was very nice.” And so I became Maddy. They still call me that.
Sean, at the moment of this coinage, had noted, “Or we could call you Dommy.”
But Dommy didn’t stick.
Years later, when I asked my children about their memories of the time when Ranger joined my family, the very first thing that came to mind was “that time Maddy threw him like a football.”
I lay there on the ground, wondering if I’d broken anything. “Deedie?” I said. “Sean? Zach?”
Someday, when I meet my family in heaven, I’ll call them and they’ll come.
* * *
Our family survived my transition, but there were times when I worried about whether the love we had for each other was enough to protect us from the traumas of the world, traumas that seemed to creep closer to us now that we seemed so different from everyone else in our little Maine village. The author Chris Bohjalian wrote a novel, Trans-Sister Radio, about a couple in a rural New England town like ours, in which one of the women is trans, and the community reacts with violence and cruelty. My friend Richard Russo says that he was certain for a long time that local cretins were going to blow up our mailbox or that we would—as happens to the characters in Bohjalian’s novel—come home one day to find profanities spray-painted on the side of our house.
None of that happened, although I continued to worry. What would hold us together, if the world tried to pry us apart? Would love be enough to glue us, one to the other, if something other than love—like bigotry, or hatred, or violence—prevailed instead?
At least two things managed to bind us during the most uncertain of those days. One of them was pizza. Post-transition I’d discovered a fondness for making my own pies, and on Friday nights I tore the kitchen apart with my sourdough crusts, my homemade sauces, and the various toppings that I devised. I had one I called Downeast: a whole shelled lobster served on a sourdough crust with lobster-infused tomato sauce. Then there was Maddy’s Meatsapalooza: pepperoni, sausage, prosciutto, and ham, tossed with fresh basil. There was Spongebob: sautéed shrimp served with pesto sauce and a slash of sriracha. There was something called Gabagool, in which I placed an olive in a blob of mascarpone, covered each one with capicola, tossed sautéed fennel over the whole pie, and then streaked it with hot sauce. And once I even made something I called Quackup: shredded duck breast, feta cheese, blueberries, and radicchio.
It was one big crazy pizza party,