From over our heads the carillon began to peal. I thought about climbing up into the bell tower at Wesleyan and playing “How Can I Keep from Singing” on the college bells. It seemed like a long time ago, but it wasn’t.
My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
My sister’s horse galloped toward the top of a hill. Matthew raised his leg and peed on the wall of my parents’ house. I brought a diaper home from the hospital. Lucy lowered her head to give it a sniff.
It occurred to me that on that New Year’s Eve many years ago, when Alex had raised one paw and pointed toward the ocean, it was to this moment he had been pointing.
* * *
We waited for Zai and Emily to come home, our new daughter en femme. Sean was also expected to arrive from Penn Station, after the long journey down from Rochester. One child would have to tell the other the news. Then, we got the news from Zai and Em that they wouldn’t be home until ten. Deedie suggested that it wasn’t fair for us to have to sit with the news for the three or four hours between the time of Sean’s arrival and their own. I also noted that if you were going to come out as trans, it was best to do it while still presenting in the old gender. It makes it easier for everyone, I suggested.
My daughter was not impressed with this suggestion.
Instead, she simply called Sean on the phone. He was still on the train. She told him her news.
Later, when Sean finally came through the door of the apartment, the young scientist greeted us with a smile. “Hey,” he said. “Is there anything to eat? I’m starving!”
“Did you talk to—your brother?” asked Deedie. “Did you two—have a conversation?”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “I talked to Zai. She sounded good.” He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was now full of turkey and mashed potatoes and bowls of stuffing. “Do we have any lasagna?” he asked.
Was it possible, I wondered, that in a single generation we’d gone from trans issues being a scandal and an embarrassment—as my mother and I had described the terrain—to something so routine and normalized that a sibling’s transition was of less urgency than the need for lasagna? Could it be that this was another difference between my reaction to Zai’s coming out and Sean’s—that at least among a certain demographic, being trans is something you get to celebrate, rather than something you have to apologize for and provide explanations without end? I’d spent many hours—both before and after transition—trying to justify my identity, bending over backward to make it plain that I’d really had no other choice, that in the end I had done the only thing possible short of taking my own life. Now, for my children and their generation, being trans was—what was the phrase?—just one more way of being human. Was it possible that what was once something to be ashamed of could now become a source of joy? That, just as Robert Hunter had written so long ago, we had reached a day when things we’d never seen had seemed familiar?
If so, why was I so committed to the old ways of thinking, having done as much as anyone, I hoped, to try to shatter them completely?
I thought, fleetingly, of the words of Frodo as he takes his leave of the Shire. I have been too deeply hurt, Sam.
I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.
* * *
The following summer, on the Fourth of July, Sean and I set out on a little boat. On Independence Day my little town in Maine shoots off fireworks above the north half of Long Pond, and the lake fills with hundreds of boats, floating on the peaceful waters, while overhead the heavens turn crimson and gold and twinkling fire arcs toward earth.
Earlier that morning the house had been filled with eight people, but now it was down to just Sean and me. In the run-up to this date, Zai had invited a bunch of her friends from Vassar to join her at our house, and we’d spent the long weekend eating