Rowan took Susan’s hand in his. He turned to Dr. Weinberg and said, “What are we supposed to do?”
First, Dr. Weinberg insisted they move Charlotte out of their room and install a lock on their bedroom door to keep the twins at bay. This was almost more than Susan could handle, losing Charlotte, locking the boys out; it felt cruel and dangerous. (“What if there’s a fire? What if there’s a fire and we’re asleep and they can’t get in?”) But Dr. Weinberg wouldn’t bend—getting the eighteen-month-old out of the marital bed and making sure the door would lock was nonnegotiable. “It might be enough,” Dr. Weinberg said at the end of that first session. “Quite often, that’s enough.”
It wasn’t, though. It wasn’t enough.
And thus was ushered in a particularly grim phase of their marriage, the Working on Sex phase. They saw Dr. Weinberg every Thursday night, and at the end of each session he sent them off with homework to complete by the following week. They bought scented massage oils, they slept naked, they forced themselves to cuddle and kiss and give each other long-drawn-out nonsexual massages. Susan was encouraged to masturbate. Rowan was told in no uncertain terms not to. They wrote down their fantasies and then read them to each other while Dr. Weinberg looked on from the comfort of his Eames chair. They held hands when they didn’t want to, they made out in a movie theater, groping each other like teenagers. Only that was the thing—the groping didn’t feel teenager-ish, the groping felt forced, staged, awkward, and distinctly unsexy. Working on sex, it turned out, was worse than not having sex.
Through it all, Susan could feel how difficult, how truly unpleasant, this was for Rowan. It always came down to one thing: The pressure! He couldn’t take it! And the more Rowan couldn’t take the pressure, the angrier Susan got. He’s really fucked up, Susan thought. That’s all there was to it. And if Susan had been a different woman, a woman with a baseline of instinctual health, she probably would have cut her losses right then. But—the kids. The life. The friends. Beekman.
It started as an innocent experiment in reverse psychology. Susan sat Rowan down after the kids were in bed one night and told him that she wanted to stop Working on Sex. She wanted to stop seeing Dr. Weinberg and maybe use the money they saved for a date night every few weeks if that sounded good to him, but no pressure. She’d decided that she was okay, she was happy, and things were good the way things were. They were both tired, the twins were still a handful, Charlotte was still in diapers, and his job put him under a lot of pressure. They loved each other, they had a life together, and the sex would eventually sort itself out.
Two more years passed.
*
Ten days after the meeting in the school auditorium, Colleen Lowell was relieved of her position as the kindergarten teacher of the Beekman elementary school and placed on paid leave.
The administration pulled Mrs. Gibson away from one of the first-grade classes and placed her in the kindergarten spot and then blended half of the first-graders with the second-graders, going from four classrooms down to three. Of course, this had the effect of angering even more parents, the parents of the first-and second-graders who were now in classes with higher pupil counts, the second-graders sitting side by side with the first-graders, with all the parents comparing notes, trying to figure out if they’d put the smartest first-graders in with the second-graders or if it was truly random, as Mrs. G. insisted over and over again.
The school board had finally settled on the excuse of gross insubordination, based on the fact that Mrs. Lowell hadn’t informed the principal or the superintendent of her plans before commencing her transition. She was tenured, though, and continued to receive full pay while on leave, and since there was only one elementary school in the Beekman Unified School District, there was no other school in which to place her.
The local Catholic school was oversubscribed by ten o’clock the morning after the initial public hearing as a small but significant group of Beekman parents rushed to pull their kids out of the public school. The Archdiocese of New York trucked in mobile classrooms and placed them in rows on the big, flat lawn in front of Beekman’s beautiful two-hundred-year-old Catholic church, creating an eyesore and sparking a new round of contentious municipal-zoning hearings. Before long, parents who had never set foot in a church were listening to their children saying Hail Marys at the dinner table and then again while they knelt beside their beds each night. A little religion never hurt anybody, these parents would say to themselves and then try not to think about whether or not that statement was actually technically true.
It was Susan Howard who came up with the idea for Colleen Lowell’s silent protest. She didn’t want Colleen, in particular, and the subject of transgenderism, in general, to disappear from the “Beekman dialogue,” and so she persuaded Colleen to take up residence during school hours on the bench in front of the Country Crock, so no one in town would be able to ignore this colossal injustice! Colleen was dressed to the nines every day, looking like she was either on her way to a cocktail party (all black, wearing statement necklaces) or doing duty as mother of the bride (pastels, with the pearls she’d bought herself as a present for coming out). Her wife, Arlen, joined her whenever she wasn’t working at the shelter or visiting her mother at the retirement home, and the two would hold hands, scratch dog bellies, and chat with friendly passersby.
*
For the first time in my life, I’m glad my parents are dead, Lucy thought.
Lucy was on Metro-North, heading south, heading toward Ben, and for some reason she found herself thinking about her parents.
Her mother had died when Lucy was three years old. She’d pulled over to help a stranded motorist along the small stretch of highway she used as a shortcut to and from Lucy’s ballet class, from exit 18 to exit 19. Lucy was in the back of the car and her mother had gotten out to talk to the stranger, who had run out of gas, when she was clipped by a drunk driver and then flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. Lucy had overheard one of the EMTs use those exact words, clipped and flattened, and they were not words her three-year-old mind could forget.