My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (22 page)

years. Ellen will come down from time to time to pick up papers she’s

stored in the office. She’ll arrive at a scheduled time, locate her files and documents, read Eleanor’s list of computer and household problems, and check them off. Then, at the appointed time, Ellen will de-

part, and Eleanor will return fifteen minutes later.

When they finally start seeing each other again, it will be at the urg-

ing of Barbara and Adam, who make Eleanor understand there will be

important moments in their lives and they’ll want Ellen to be there.

And Eleanor realizes that it would be better to have some sort of reconciliation before those events, so she won’t be caught off guard.

I understand. Even as I become accustomed to Ellen, in conversa-

tion, I’ll reflexively say “he,” and when she resumes her old voice on

the telephone, I happily picture her as male. I can’t let go of my brother, and apparently I’m not alone. Esmey has never been able to call her

“she.” Ellen’s friends from the old days, she tells me, all prefer to hear the Chevey voice (or that voice in an only slightly higher register).

There seem to be several registers now, the baseline (that she uses with me) is slightly higher than her old voice, while the new one, higher and of a different timbre, she must work to maintain. It’s fatiguing, like

speaking a foreign language, and she lapses. Beth’s sister says that Ellen’s so totally changed outwardly, the “Chevey” voice is the one link

to the man she knew.

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. . . . . . .

My summer and fall of 2007 are consumed by work, and there’s very

little about Ellen in my journal. I complete a manuscript, turn it in,

and prepare to endure the yearlong, multiphased agony that is book-

birth, one to which other anxieties are temporarily subsumed.

For Ellen, the spring and summer of 2008, after the terrible and

trying previous year, are a resounding success.

Back at Pine Mountain after the follow- up genital surgery, she’s

become part of a hiking group and tells me that she recently went

swimming with some twenty people, men and women, in a cold lake.

Whoa there! Swimming? In a bathing suit? Yes, she answers. For

some reason, this stops me cold, more than any of the surgeries, which

remain slightly abstract as all surgeries do. My brother, now dickless, in a woman’s bathing suit.

And then another startling revelation: she now wants me to write

the book. To help others in her condition, she says, and their families.

I believe her. If she were another kind of person, or a writer, the claim would be suspect. This altruistic impulse to “help others” is normally

a rationalization advanced by memoir writers to give themselves a no-

ble alibi as they wreak havoc on family and friends.

Another rather astounding piece of news is her happiness at Pine

Mountain, where she has formed friendships with many of the “Moun-

tain Women,” and there are invitations back and forth for parties and

outings. She’s “making her place,” as Mother would say. Because her

apartment has a perfect view of the fireworks, she’s having people over for the Fourth of July. Everyone will bring food; she doesn’t want it too

“planned.” She even takes up tennis. I tell friends that although

Mother would have had a heart attack at the news of Chevey’s trans-

sexualism, Ellen has become the kind of person Mother always wanted

Chevey to be: social, a tennis player. She’s “come out” in all senses of

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the word: become more gregarious. It always struck me that Chevey

and Eleanor had very little social life. Did this stem from his own

sense of inauthenticity, and the effort of “playacting” the conventional male? I wondered.

It wasn’t that he was antisocial, or even shy. He was good with

people, friendly, at ease, a good teacher— the various caretakers who

helped Mother in her last years all adored him. But there was some-

thing withheld, not exactly a barrier, but a polite reserve that discouraged intimacy

Andrew liked Chevey immensely but always thought him guarded.

He interpreted it as the protective strategy my brother had adopted

after our father’s death; a defense against being caught off guard by

tragedy again. I’d thought so, too. As we grew up, putting years be-

tween ourselves and the trauma, I always felt a sadness or sorrow, a

special vulnerability, where Chevey was concerned. Perhaps it was my

own unexpressed grief projected onto him, but it came with guilt at-

tached.

A memory: I am taking the train back to New York after a visit to

Richmond, possibly following the Christmas of 1962 or ’63, when I’ve

only recently become a New Yorker. Chevey and Mother have driven

me to Broad Street Station, the glorious vaulting neoclassical structure of so many childhood memories (now converted into a science museum), one of the Union Stations that connected the modern, indus-

trial United States at the turn of the last century. In that cavernous

echoing space, with its marble floors and walls, giant wood benches,

we came and went, departed as a family on trips to Florida or North

Carolina, or I alone to camp. Its grandeur lay not only in its architecture, but in the links it forged with other parts of the country and

those other Union Stations, some given local names, in Philadelphia,

Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York (Penn Station),

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My Sister

Toronto, beckoning, haunting like the whistle of a train in the night,

the conductor’s cry.

But the excitement is always threaded through with an aura of sad-

ness and melancholy, the little deaths of good- byes. This one I remem-

ber especially for the heavy- heartedness I felt (and still feel, thinking of it) as I pulled out of the station, waving, watching Mother and

Chevey dwindle in size, an aching reminder of our forlornness without

husband and father.

Before his death we were four, we were strong. Now we are a vul-

nerable three, not just one number less, but exponentially diminished.

We haven’t found a way to arrange ourselves around the void. And

with my leaving, there are only two, standing on the platform, growing

smaller and smaller and sadder and sadder as the steam curls upward

and the wheels gather speed. And I am feeling guiltier and guiltier for abandoning them. Possibly I can’t bear my own sense of aloneness, of

not belonging to one place or the other. But somehow all of this sad-

ness concentrates on Chevey, who is seventeen but seems like a lost

little boy who can’t be reached. I realize I have always felt he was fragile in some unaccountable way.

Into it feeds an earlier incident from several years before, when I

arrive from college for the holiday. We’ve come down in the world,

having sold our handsome French Provincial house on Paxton Road

and rented a tiny frame box from St. Stephen’s Church. The holiday—

the three of us, without Daddy, and in “straitened circumstances”—

promises to be sad enough, but while Mother and I are decorating the

Christmas tree, Chevey announces that he’s volunteered for holiday

duty at the filling station where he is working temporarily. So what

little cheer we might have mustered is dispelled: Christmas becomes

not a day of togetherness but of rejection. As Chevey made clear in

that conversation with Mother and me, we didn’t
know
him— didn’t

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know who he was outside the family, didn’t know he had a sense of

humor. This sense of alienation, even the shortage of humor, might

track back to those long years of Daddy dying, when we were locked

in our private hells, unable to comfort one another, or not knowing

how. It stemmed no doubt from some crazy WASP mixture of stiff-

upper- lip stoicism and not wanting to burden each other. But that

sense of love mixed with helplessness, of mutual abandonment, seems

to circulate among us like a fog in which we’re unable to see and feel

one another clearly. It’s no wonder we are relieved— and guilty— to

get away.

We talk about not only the surgery but the other factors in her transi-

tion, the electrolysis (painful, continuing) and her comportment guide, both on the West Coast. In the summer of 2008, I’m very anxious

about Andrew. He’s so wobbly on his feet, he will need a walker soon,

and, as I write in my journal, “He’s so diminished in different ways,

conversationally withdrawn, not ‘getting’ who people are, even actors

in movies and on television.” Is this just old age? He had the most

phenomenal memory and even with this deficit retains more than most

people. Yet the lapses are strange. And he doesn’t seem perturbed the

way most of us are. By anything. My journal is filled with cries of exasperation and anger. Some of this could be from terrible hearing and

deteriorating vision, but his memory, his responsiveness to cinema, is

who he is. Was?

In the fall of 2008 I’m planning his eightieth birthday party, on

October 31. I don’t invite Ellen, as I’m not quite up to the task of introducing her to so many friends at once. But in November the time

seems right, and she comes for a visit and finally gets to meet some

friends.

Ellen will arrive on a Wednesday and stay three nights. Before she

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comes I mention (as tactfully as I can) the jeans with the appliqué

flowers, and wonder if she has another pair. She says yes, she already

knew my feelings about them (oops!), but “a lot of people love them.”

First, it’s Betty and Jeanne, the two she already knows, who come

for lunch (during which time Andrew is walking the halls and lifting

barbells with Megan). Jeanne looks agreeably surprised, smiles with

pleasure at seeing her. Betty, the one- time actress (and television reporter), stops dead in her tracks. “I’m speechless,” she says, which she actually is for about forty- five seconds. “I expected a nice, middle-aged woman. Instead I got a looker!” Where once she might have

begged off, Ellen now likes meeting people, both known and un-

known, and seems to regard these encounters as a kind of test she al-

most relishes. She wants to know people’s reactions (the
truth
, she says), and whether she’s “read” or not, she likes and is proud of her

new body, her new self.

She’s more than willing to reveal the gaffes and absurdities. She

tells Betty and Jeanne the story of going to a boutique to try on clothes.

She’s decked out in a very nice jacket, and thinks she looks pretty

good, but then something gets twisted or caught. “Shit,” she explodes

in a clearly male voice.

But when we’re alone, she tells me, “I think a lot about how incred-

ible it is being Ellen, especially in those early months. It’s probably the most terrifying thing I could imagine happening, short of certain life-threatening situations. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same

time. Even when you have been in therapy and the people closest to

you know about it, when the time comes and you actually have to put

on women’s clothing and go out in public . . . you’ve practiced, you’ve been coached, you’ve done all kinds of things, you’ve had two or three

people teach you about clothes and makeup, but then you go out and

do it.”

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I’m reminded of the “twenty cues for femininity” and the terror of

being “read.”

Next morning, the Witches. I’m worried it might seem as if I were

introducing her like the freak come to town. She says no, they’re your

good friends and if I were your brother you’d want me to meet them.

This is true. I’ve gradually met most of Lily’s vast brood of children and stepchildren, grandchildren and in- laws and an ex- husband, though

I’ve never met Patty’s sister who lives in Florida (I will, eventually) or Frannie’s brothers. Fran is away, so it’s only Patty and Lily. Ellen’s a fervent walker but hasn’t brought sneakers so doesn’t accompany us

around the reservoir. We pick her up, she looks fine in plain pants and a white parka with faux- fur trim, and at Le Pain Quotidien everyone

seems to get along well. She is utterly at ease, and more to the point, she puts them at ease. I ask her to tell us about the ways men and women

do things differently, and she demonstrates: women hold their hands

open, a sign of submission, while men’s closed hands signify aggression.

(Like two dogs squaring off, the smaller bowing to the larger.) Women

are more closed, there’s no space between the arms and the body when

they walk, whereas a man walks more openly, moving his shoulders.

She swaggers in exaggerated Neanderthal style to demonstrate. She has