My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (28 page)

The Year of the Transsexual

“I don’t deny my male side,” she says, “I cherish it. This turns out

to have a huge impact on every aspect of my life.”

It’s December. Ellen and I discuss Christmas presents. I suggest a ten-

nis warm- up suit. She likes the idea, so while on the phone, we go on-

line to window- shop. We’re discussing her size, the difference between bottom and top, broad shoulders and narrow hips, so I suggest a man’s

outfit and point out a few. Nothing doing. They’re all too drab and

neutral; she chooses a bright blue woman’s suit with feminine details.

Later in the month, she arrives with Eleanor as planned, and I

meet them for lunch at the Boathouse.

Afterward, the three of us come back to the apartment to see An-

drew. Only one gaffe on my part. Andrew’s teaching assistant Jona-

than happens to be on the same elevator coming up. I have to introduce

them and it comes out, “This is my sister and her ex- wife.” There

would have been better ways to do it, but they’re always either euphe-

mistic or incomplete. Not the least hurdle in the journey of transsexu-

als and their families is the awkwardness of introductions and the

problem of pronouns. Language simply hasn’t evolved to keep pace

with such complex relationships.

Andrew’s delighted to see them, and Eleanor is surprised at how

much his old self Andrew is. As we laugh I mourn the good times we

all had together, the trips the four of us will never take again.

After their visit, I call Eleanor. She knows I’m writing the book and as much as she dreads the exposure, she understands how and why I

must do it, and perhaps even welcomes the chance to give her perspec-

tive. We go back over the past few years, and the day Chevey as Ellen

appeared on her doorstep.

“I remember it so well. I was sitting at the desk and she came in

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My Sister

and sat in an armchair. I can see the humor in it now. She was like a

little girl in an Easter outfit. She tucked her feet under her, placed her hands close together on her lap, as if asking, ‘Mommy, don’t I look

pretty?’ As I told you I broke down. I don’t think it was the reaction

she was expecting.

“She had a very vivid fantasy life,” Eleanor continues, “imagining

dressing as a woman. I think sometimes she bought things for me, told

me how becoming they were, but wasn’t thinking about me at all, just

about how they might look on her if she were a woman.

“Now I think: I was really duped. I was living a lie, but didn’t

know it. Once I started looking back, my life came crumbling down

like a house of cards. He was living vicariously through me.

“One of the hardest things of all is when I see Ellen now doing

things John wouldn’t do. Now I see her making friends, being popu-

lar. I think of all the things I gave up, and her life is taking off with all those things we didn’t get to do.

“She wants things to be as they were, but they can never be the

way they were. That’s all gone. I still have the memory and the history, but I don’t feel about her as I did. It’s hard to be around her for extended periods of time. And it’s easier to be together in private than

in public.”

There is in this story of transformation no such thing as an un-

qualified triumph.

Most of the beginning of 2011 I seem to spend on Andrew, manag-

ing his retirement and worrying over a constantly proliferating string

of details, financial, legal, and medical, looking into caretaking possibilities.

It is now the end of May and I’m finally going to have my three-

week stint at VCCA, the writers and artists colony in the mountains of

Virginia. I hold my breath, praying that some emergency doesn’t inter-

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vene, that Andrew won’t fall or deteriorate radically. At present, he is mentally and physically unsteady, and has someone with him four or

five hours a day, preparing his meals, getting him ready for bed. But he can still go by himself on his walker to the rehab clinic a block away.

I’ll go down by train and Ellen, who lives not far away, will come for

the day after I’m settled and into my work. The very air is filled with ghosts and demons since the retreat happens to be just across the high-way from the women’s college I attended. When I wake up in the morn-

ing, it’s madeleine time in Virginia. The intense, hot hum of the balmy air plunges me back into the summers of my childhood, and various

versions of myself bump and collide. Surrounded by like- minded fel-

lows, the working writer hits the ground running, but, suddenly, I can’t sleep. Night after night. I talk to Andrew often, but I’m torn between

the liberation of work and a mind uneasy for my beloved.

I knew if I was ever going to write this book, I had to get away. He

knew it, too, and completely supported the venture. But now that I am

“free,” I’m not. My life has revolved around Andrew for so long, and,

stressful as that has been, the Jane Eyre role of caretaker, mainstay of beloved, dependent husband, has the satisfaction of removing “selfish-ness” from the table. The demons of guilt, ever on the alert for a pre-

text to pounce, have lain dormant. No longer. I have been sprung from

the obligations that had filled my days and it has opened the floodgates to the unconscious.

Nightmare follows nightmare. My husband and I talk several times

a day, and despite his support, he keeps asking, pleading, When are

you coming home? He loses track of time, and I try to reassure him.

That night I dream that I arrive at our apartment on Eighty- Eighth

Street to find some sort of saturnalia underway. Andrew is standing on

the landing of a staircase (it isn’t quite our apartment, rather an eerie combination of loft and grand salon), while all around him strange

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My Sister

revelers are drinking, laughing, merrymaking. And Andrew, thin and

taller than he is now, is wearing a
dress
, a glittery sheath affair. I am devastated. Et tu, Andrew! He is
also
becoming a woman. Both my men becoming women. And he has no idea who these people are, or

why they are there. They are taking advantage of him, probably steal-

ing (my fears of the trustworthiness of the various caretakers I’ve

hired), so I immediately take charge: “Thank you all for coming,” I say in a commanding voice, “and now please leave.” I wake up shaking,

nauseated. In the telling it sounds amusingly ironic, but it didn’t play that way. The feeling of abandonment and betrayal is unendurable,

worse than if he’d died. I lie there in a cold sweat, the dream still

clinging to me, feeling I’ve lost Andrew as I knew him. It’s like that

falling- into- the- abyss moment that comes, probably must come, in all long relationships, when you look at the person you love and for a terrifying instant you don’t love him anymore. The terror that envelops

you arises from the fact that if
he
is a stranger— as he is at this moment— so are
you
. A stranger to yourself, instead of the familiar being that fits into this other familiar being like a hand in a glove. The ground shifts beneath you; as Othello says, “Could I not love you,

chaos is come.”

Later, with coffee and a full awakening, I get some distance from the

dream, and the aesthete in me can’t help but appreciate its mythic res-

onance. Odysseus returning to Penelope to find her surrounded by

swilling suitors. And the obvious and painful role reversal: I am now

the “man,” the protector, and Andrew, in his dependency, the woman.

And that feels bloody awful. This isn’t the role reversal I celebrate

as a film critic and lecturer. This isn’t the cute, caustic back and forth of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in
Adam’s Rib
, and the other charming cut- ups of screwball comedy, nor is it the deliciously sinister

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death struggle between masochistic men and spider- dames in film

noir. This is the role reversal of aging and it goes in only one direction.

And then I think, this dream, this nightmare, is a gift. In one of

those astonishing feats of integration and expansion that dreams per-

form, Andrew’s “feminization” brings Ellen’s epic migration from

male to female, seemingly so weird and exceptional, much closer to

home, hits me where I live in every sense of the word. The transsexual

plays out, in a more sensational form, humankind’s drama of transfor-

mation, the androgyny of aging, the overlapping and reconfiguring of

roles as we cope with an ever- changing array of new opportunities,

but also new disabilities. And suddenly I knew, on another, deeper

level, why I have to write this book. It isn’t just about Ellen, it’s about me. And Andrew. And everyone I know.

Ellen comes over for a day visit. I show her around and introduce her

to several fellows. We go out for lunch, after which she comes back

and solves whatever computer problems I’m having. Then she catches

me up with her latest “T” adventures.

“I was taking the train from New York to Philadelphia; it was very

crowded and a woman sat next to me. We read, chatted, read some

more. When a seat became available by a window, the woman moved

over. She was having a very hard time getting her suitcase up on the

rack. She struggled and struggled. I thought maybe it wouldn’t fit.

‘Want me to try it?’ I asked. The woman nodded.”

“Did you put on a show of making it difficult?” I ask.

“Not quite enough apparently. She thanked me, and said, ‘Wow,

I’ve got to go to the gym more often.’ ”

But the kicker came when they got to Philadelphia.

“Do you want me to help you with your bag?” Ellen asked. “No,”

the woman replied, “I have a man to do that.”

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c h a p t e r f ou r t e e n

Ellen Is a Welfare Mudder

The wood that finds itself a violin . . .

— Rimbaud

I
t’s a mild Monday in October, and later in the day I’ll fly down for a much- anticipated visit with Ellen. For the moment I’m in the waiting

room of a doctor’s office, for follow- up surgery on a minor skin cancer.

In the waiting room I come across a woman I know, a composer, whose

husband is here, like me, for follow up. While he’s having his stitches removed, the two of us chat. I glance at my watch, telling her I have to catch a plane to visit my sister and we talk about the mountains where

she lives. Later in the conversation, she mentions taking the car- train to Florida. I tell her I used to go there when my mother had an apartment

in Delray, but she gave it to my brother as part of his inheritance, and he sold it. “I hope he got a good price for it,” she says, thinking of the dismal housing market in Florida. But all I can think of is: she thinks I

have a brother
and
a sister. Not that it matters to her, but still. Two siblings. Well, if we think of them as successive rather than simultaneous, I guess I do. You’re never quite free of these conversational conundrums.

I’ve planned this visit to Pine Mountain to see Ellen and enjoy the

splendor of autumn foliage, but also to meet and interview some of her

friends. We settled on Monday because the weekend was taken over

by an outdoor event called, appropriately and dauntingly, the “Tough

Mudder.” Ellen has told me about this hair- raising physical trial, not a

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My Sister

competition exactly (everyone cooperates), but a grueling obstacle

course that takes place in various rugged terrains around the United

States. This is the first time they’ve done it at Pine Mountain, and

thousands of participants, both men and women, will have come from

all over to submit to such athletic ordeals and indignities as wading

through freezing water, climbing up and down mountains, scaling

high walls, passing through electric cattle- jolt wires. Ellen and her

friends had planned to watch and supply water from the sidelines. Af-

ter she picks me up at the airport and we’re driving up the mountain,

I ask her how it went. She describes all the gory details— the trials are meant to be both mentally and physically punishing— and it sounds

like sheer masochism. “Who on earth would want to
do
that?” I ask.

A slight smile comes to Ellen’s face. “I did it,” she says.

I’m stunned but (unlike her friends on the mountain, as I’ll discover)

not completely surprised. The way she did it was pure Ellen, both reck-

less and cautious. It was, she tells me, no hasty decision. Although she’d applied early (even securing permission to have a t- shirt that read:

“Medicare Mudder”), she hadn’t decided to actually enter until the

night before. She adds that, as her hairdresser told her mud could ruin her hair color, she avoided those obstacles in which she might get im-mersed. And she refused to do one which entailed jumping straight