My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (13 page)

possibly no less monstrous than flying snakes.

It was in the country, too, that Chevey began to be enamored of

guns after our father taught us to shoot. We would go down in the

front yard, put beer cans on the fence, and fire away with a .22 rifle. Or compete in skeet- shooting competitions on the lawns of friends in

Goochland County. At this we both became fairly expert, thanks to

our father’s instruction, and it was a sport for which Chevey needed

only one good eye. He had his own BB gun, and later became a gun

collector. As adults, he and his “gun buddy” Karl would drive to shows

all over Virginia and farther, where they would set up a table, buy and sell guns that fitted their own area of interest.

I try to square the idea of this little marksman, who seemed “all

boy,” with the kid harboring secret desires to be a girl and giving my

wardrobe the occasional whirl.

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Well, after all, while he was dolling himself up and admiring him-

self in the mirror, turning himself into a female artifact, so was I!

While he was confused about himself and his desires, my identity

was forming around several conflicting stereotypes, male and female.

One minute I was a tomboy, vowing to my carpool that I would never

wear lipstick. And my favorite song was the country dirge “I Never

Will Marry.” I went through what I take to be the usual adolescent

girl’s crushes on camp counselors and gym teachers, but we possessed

only the dimmest sense of same- sex love and it was confined to the

context of our all- female institution. We had the Modern Library vol-

ume of Lillian Hellman plays and immediately read the one that wasn’t

assigned,
The Children’s Hour.
And the novel
The
Well of Loneliness
made the rounds, samizdat- style, and was discussed in snickering

tones. We had a word— “pansy” (incorrect, of course)— for creepy

teachers who left their hand on your shoulder for too long. Another

girl and I practiced kissing, an episode she remembers with some em-

barrassment, but to me it was always in preparation for the “real thing.”

I felt no electric charge, nothing like the shock, six months or a year later, when a boy I liked was pursuing me in the quarry, and his leg

brushed against mine. Or when we played spin the bottle at parties.

Then, and it seemed like just minutes after declaring my aversion to

makeup and all things feminine, I was wearing an outlandish amount

of lipstick, even for the fifties. I’d upgraded my wardrobe— a boon for Chevey, no doubt— to pretty, girly clothes. What did he go for? The

white net dress with the blue trim (my favorite) or the blue- gray taffeta that was Mother’s favorite? (It had no ruffles, something I as a “big”

girl was not supposed to wear; the other did.). Otherwise it was skirts and Shetland sweaters and circle pins, the uniform. We were having

that ritual of families everywhere, little sister borrows big sister’s

clothes, but who knew?

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. . . . . . .

I ask him how he felt about his “cross- dressing.”

He says it’s hard to know
what
you felt
when
.

“Again, people constantly ask, When did you first realize you were

transsexual? And the answer to that is fairly recently, simply because

there was no such thing as a transsexual. It’s very difficult to erase what you’ve learned now that we have all this knowledge, or at least awareness. All I knew was I didn’t want to get caught trying on your clothes.”

Did he ever have “guy” ambitions like being a fireman or even a

farmer?

“One of the things about me, there was no particular thing I wanted

to do. I didn’t know what to do with my life. Or even what to major in

at college. So I took one subject in every department, an extremely

varied college curriculum, hoping something would light a fire.”

I think about our old dispute over “Who has it better, the man or

the woman?” Chevey saw from what now seems to me a precociously

young age that he didn’t want a life dominated by work. So what

seemed like a “lack” of ambition was a more considered “antiambi-

tion,” a refusal.

But if Chevey had no single ambition, I, on the contrary, was a re-

volving door of them— or rather “hobbies,” since ladies didn’t have

ambition
.
Mine took various forms, consonant with my multiplying and consolidating selves. I knew I wanted to become “something”

when I grew up, not just a wife and mother. Mother always encour-

aged my independence while at the same time pushing me toward an

advantageous marriage. Were the two compatible?

“My problem,” she once confessed to me, “is I’ve always been

drawn in too many different directions.” This moved me deeply, pos-

sibly because I shared her dividedness. Suppose she had passed up

marriage for painting, she said to me at a later time, and then didn’t

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make a success of it. Then, as she saw it, she’d have nothing. She had

had a long and varied and, in her own words at the end, “wonderful”

life, but there was also a well of regret, of something missed. How else could her life have been otherwise, given the conventional, even Victorian, upbringing in which she’d been raised, and whose values still

shaped my childhood world?

My sense of myself formed around the concept of tomboy. What

that meant to me was not that I was a transsexual who wanted to be

male, certainly not a “man,” but more a Peter Pan– like creature, an-

drogynous, with all of the advantages of boyhood, none of the re-

straints of girlhood. I no more wanted a penis than I wanted any other

sign of sexual development (breasts definitely included).

So my dreams took the form of whichever “hobby” I was currently

mad about: dancer, rider, preacher, actress.

In 1954 or ’55, while I pass from tomboy- ballerina- preacher to girl-

with- dates (the swimming pool is accomplishing its mission), and

Chevey is beginning to experience odd and inexplicable urges, our fa-

ther is told he has MS. It is actually the far deadlier ALS, but either the doctors haven’t diagnosed it correctly, or they want to give him “positive” news. So, to cope with what we think is a long- term degenerative but nonfatal illness, we move back to the city, to a house better suited to accommodate his disability. In fact, he will die two years later, in 1957, having rarely set foot outside the bedroom. It is at this point that each of us has our breakdown/breakaway. Chevey “acts out” by mis-behaving, staying out all hours doing who knows what, becoming a

borderline delinquent. Mother finds out his nocturnal activities in-

clude shooting out streetlights with a BB gun and setting off time-

delayed cherry bombs all around West End Richmond. Feeling that

she can no longer control him, she sends him away to prep school, for

which he’s furious, vowing revenge.

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Chevey is so unhappy away from home that after three years

Mother finally allows him to return to Richmond, where he will finish

out at Thomas Jefferson, an excellent public high school.

At a later point, going through memorabilia, when Chevey has be-

come Ellen, we find among the family letters and photographs a 1963

copy of the Thomas Jefferson literary magazine. It contains a short

story called “One Brief Moment” written by John Haskell— who would

have been eighteen and in the graduating class— in compliance with

an assignment whose nature she can no longer remember. I’m aston-

ished when I read it. Little more than a vignette, it’s a delicately observed, play- by- play account of a spider building its web only to have it carelessly brushed into oblivion by a passing farmer. For three- fourths of the story the spider methodically builds the web, tests it, then walks to the outer edge of the leaf, and, still emitting “a continuous stream of webbing from his abdomen, he lowered himself over into nothing-ness.” He waits for a gust of wind to blow him onto a neighboring tree

and then, after several attempts and failures, gains a footing, then the Sisyphean struggle all over again until he has a scaffolding, then on to the second stage, weaving back and forth to complete the task. There’s

a description of the beauty of the sun glinting on the finished web,

which “the spider never noticed . . . for to him the web was his home, his entire existence since the web caught the very food which he ate.”

Then a break and the expletive “Damn it!” uttered by the hulking

man who crashes “murderously through the silken threads, his huge

frame ripping them into millions of pieces.” But ten seconds after the

domi- cide, when the wind has carried away the last fragments of his

home, the spider without hesitation resumes its work, hurrying “back

to the base of the leaf where he began emitting the soft, delicate, silken thread which would soon become his new home.”

The tale is remarkable for the quality of its writing (lyrical, precise,

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a tad overlush in the manner of a beginning writer), and for the sto-

icism implied in the sympathy dispassionately split between the heroic

travail of the spider and the no less inevitable and headlong march of

the farmer- intruder: nature and man, coexisting and colliding. But of

course the spider, allied with Nature as female, is the “hero,” the one who remains camouflaged, vulnerable, yet determined. In this parable

of persistence against mighty odds, we can see the pupate Ellen, living like the spider in an ephemeral dream home, always menaced by over-bearing masculinity. But the extraordinary care and meticulousness of

the story, of the spider, of Chevey, also suggest the perfectionism be-

hind his hatred of writing.

I’m almost embarrassed by how good the story is, compared to my

early scribblings. .It also suggests the different paths we were to take.

A “kind” friend sent me
The Inklings
, our own school publication, this particular issue of which I’d buried and forgotten for reasons that will become apparent. It contains a poem by yours truly, entitled “The

Man I Marry,” and it was produced, alas, not in compliance with an

assignment, but from my own inspiration. For twelve years, I attended

St. Catherine’s, an Episcopal girls’ school, named for the (possibly

mythical) scholar in fourth- century Alexandria who sacrificed herself

on the wheel. She was also, I found out years later, the patron saint of spinsters. (There are fetes every year to which “Catherinettes” come

and pray for husbands.) Our teachers were all unmarried ladies, so

perhaps their example can be held responsible for the desperation of

the poem, which ends with the mortifying quatrain:

But I’ll take any,

No matter how varied.

I’m not very choosy—

Just so I get married!

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In my further defense (you think I do protest too much!), I was

only fourteen, and embarrassing as is this testimony to teenage yearn-

ing, I daresay it struck closer to our hormone- addled hearts than the

odes to autumn and birds in flight that make up the rest of that issue

of
The Inklings
.

I was still in middle school, pondering the options of matrimony (or

not), acting in school plays, but with an eye to the future. From danc-

ing to preaching, my need to perform, to get attention, now turned to

acting, a pursuit that became more intense after my father had died,

since he had made clear his disapproval of such a career. At about the

same time— can it be coincidental?— Chevey was playing with guns

one day and impersonating the Virgin Mary the next.

He was attending St. Christopher’s, the brother school to St. Cath-

erine’s, and it was their annual nativity play. Chevey, about ten or

eleven, was chosen to play the Virgin Mary, and he looked beautiful,

covered in the white hood and blue robe so that only his face showed,

gentle and meditative. In essence, there was nothing particularly un-

usual about “cross- dressing” in parochial schools. At St. Catherine’s, I was tall and got to play the lead in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
and Jack/Ernest in
The Importance of Being Earnest
. But what had struck me at the time, and now made sense, was not just how beautiful he

looked as the Virgin Mary, but how unembarrassed, even proud, he

was, and the pleasure he took when we praised him for it.

When I ask Chevey now, he says, “It was exhilarating, one of the

high points of my life, getting to play a female, and legitimately!” And, looking at the pictures of him, I think it was more than the features,

the feminine apparel, that made the sight of him so convincing. There