My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (25 page)

eyes on me, looking over my shoulder, and feel the burden of having to

justify her trust as I collect, file away, take notes, hesitate, and procras-tinate. The resistance comes partly from inhibitions about exposing

my treasured sibling, even if she is now actively encouraging me, even

participating in the project. Will I be able to write freely, even satiri-cally about my brother/sister, treat with some degree of humor a mat-

ter so touchy, so sensitive, so possibly injurious to the him that was

becoming her? Not to mention the inevitable exposure of two very

private people, my sisters- in- law. In sum, would love constrain me?

Would conscientiousness weigh so heavily that it became a burden?

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c h a p t e r t w e lv e

Andrew Falls and Ellen Comes Up and

Shows Off Her Body

I
n May (2010) I go to Sweden, to the university at Norrköping, about two hours from Stockholm, where I’ve been invited to speak about

film criticism and my book on
Gone with the Wind
. Norrköping is a charming surprise, a nineteenth- century manufacturing town which

has been renovated and preserved, factories turned into museums,

winding along a canal.

I fall in love with the place and my hosts, and it’s a great relief to

spend a whole week not having to talk about what I’m doing now, or

my brother becoming my sister. I speak before an audience of faculty

and students, and am surprised to find that more of them have read or

seen
Gone with the Wind
than have read or seen
The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo.
Stieg Larsson seems to be more popular as an export, but I remark on the odd similarity between two “gender nonconformist” heroines. Scarlett O’Hara and Lisbeth Salander, though separated

by a century and a half and radically different cultures, are sisters under the skin by virtue of their “masculine” qualities: narrowly focused brilliance, ruthless ambition, and a deafness to the usual social cues.

I’ve been home five days, and my world collapses once again. On a

beautiful Saturday, Andrew and I are walking across Madison Avenue,

on our way to the West Side to see a film and have brunch, when An-

drew falls in the street and hits his head. He’s fallen before but has

usually made a soft landing, crumpling like a parachute. This time he

crash- lands on his head. Bleeding in the street, bleeding in the brain.

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My Sister

The ambulance takes us to Lenox Hill Hospital, where, after the

usual scans and MRIs, he’s diagnosed as having a traumatic subarach-

noid hemorrhage. This is the third brain injury, the first being the terrifying cytomegalovirus encephalitis in 1984, and the second a

subdural hematoma after we were rear- ended in 2000. That one re-

quired surgery, this one fortunately doesn’t.

While he’s in Lenox Hill, Ellen arrives with her friend Sue for a

long- planned, three- day theater trip. They’ll be staying at her recently acquired time- share in the Fifties near Seventh Avenue and close to

the entrance of Central Park, a place Ellen loves to visit the way I love Paris. I’ve met none of her new friends, and am immensely curious to

meet Sue, her favorite. After a prearranged tour with a park expert

and historian, they come for brunch, Ellen abuzz with descriptions of

outlying areas of the park that I’ve never seen— and probably never

will. Sue is remarkable, very attractive— sixtyish but looks fifty, was once a model but now has a comfortable middle- aged beauty. An avid

reader and world traveler, she’s divorced with grandchildren, now has

a boyfriend, but refuses to remarry. Ellen’s lucky to have her, but then she, I realize, is lucky to have Ellen.

Ellen’s only here for a quick visit, but takes time out to worry about

Andrew, and about me and my health. In 1984, Chevey and Mother

came alternately to stay at the apartment and help me during Andrew’s

illness, and I surely wouldn’t have gotten through the ordeal without

them. Ellen now advises me, as Mother used to, “Don’t overdo it.” (I

always do, swinging from driven mode, to collapse.) She tells me I

need to save myself, and should just go to the hospital once a day. Al-

though this is clearly meant for my own good, it irritates me, just as it did in 1984. Why didn’t he, why can’t she, understand that I
have
to go twice a day?

In a Venus and Mars squaring off, reason was Chevey’s way as

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emotion was mine. It wasn’t that he was unfeeling, but his rationality

has always made him appear that way. I took it to be a carapace he’d

developed when our father was dying, to defend against further

trauma. But now I wonder: could it be the sort of coping mechanism

therapists Mildred Brown and Chloe Ann Rounsley, authors of
True

Selves: Understanding Transsexualism,
describe, whereby transsexuals relieve stress by visualizing, in their disturbing words, an “impenetra-ble shell or container, not unlike a steel vault, into which they deposit and lock away all of their cross- gender feelings, yearnings, dreams,

behaviors and mannerisms.” That’s a lot to lock away, requiring a

pretty thick wall. It might explain the isolation, the moat he dug

around himself. The near- obsessive rationality.

After they were married, he and Beth moved to the country, to

distance themselves from Richmond. Chevey seemed to be trying to

carve out a space for himself with inviolable boundaries.

Once, after Andrew and I were married, the two came to New

York but made a point of
not
making a date to see us. I kept waiting and waiting, and no word from Chevey. He’d spent a year in Manhattan after college, working for the New York branch of his firm, so he

knew his way around. I could see how his mind works. He wanted to

establish a precedent; he could come to New York without necessarily

“touching base” with us. Yet my understanding of his motives didn’t

make it hurt any less. When Andrew and I came back to the apart-

ment (it was their last day in New York), there were Chevey and Beth

sitting on a bench in the lobby, looking sheepish. It was a very cool,

very brief encounter. “Dropping in” instead of making a date was part

of his defense against being hamstrung by what he thought of as
arbi-trary, socially imposed duties to family. It wasn’t an aversion to us per se (or so I prefer to think); moreover, other kinds of duties he willingly took upon himself. He simply detested what he saw as “social” obliga-

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My Sister

tions, the tyranny of blood ties, doing things for appearances, the im-

posed rules and expectations. He stirred up a furor in the family when

he persuaded Mother to stop giving Christmas presents to all the

cousins, who were by now in their thirties and had children of their

own. We were too old for it, he insisted, and it was a too much of a

burden for her, now a widow with little time on her hands. The other

family members were furious, but he was right, Mother was relieved,

reason had triumphed.

As Mother aged, long before she was ill with emphysema, he took

over all of her financial work, paid the bills, kept track, made who

knows how many calls, did it all uncomplainingly. They had fun,

too— he went out with her on her landscape- painting expeditions, car-

ried her canvases and paints; helped her hang the pictures when she

had shows; took slides of all of them. When she was dying— she lived

now in the Tuckahoe Apartments, with round- the- clock aides— he be-

haved with his usual common- sense practicality, a tower of strength to the rest of us. It was this calm that led casual observers to think he

might be indifferent. But I knew more was going on underneath, and I

had a glimmer of it after Mother died, when he confessed that when

he left after a visit, he would take the stairs instead of the elevator . . .

and cry all the way down.

After eleven days in the hospital, Andrew is sent to rehab for what

will lengthen into six weeks. I choose the nearest one that takes our

health insurance, a place that turns out to be ghastly bordering on the Dickensian. It is, like so many others, a nursing home, gussied up with

“rehab” to bring in additional revenue from those who won’t go gently

into the good night. Patients are assigned to floors that, like Dantean circles of hell, announce their status: the degree of difficulty (dementia or just disagreeable), the nature of their insurance (if any). Indignities and neglect vary according to floor, but ubiquitous are the ghastly

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food, the overworked staff, the viruses and bacteria that leap from

floor to floor and room to room, and the communal lunch hour when

the patients, in a hapless display of wheelchair- bound togetherness,

are assembled in the television room.

He finally comes home, now on a walker though delirious with joy,

but he doesn’t know where his pajamas are, doesn’t remember to brush

his teeth, or how to operate the remote or microwave, has to be told

how to dial a number (put
a one in front). Some of these are familiar symptoms of the Absentminded Professor syndrome, the technod-ummy, but intensified and magnified. Will some or all of this routine

stuff come back? Can he go back to teaching at Columbia in a matter

of weeks? Will I be able to live without him, or the him I knew? Will I be able to live with (and love) the new him?

In all of this, harrowing as it is, there’s nothing special. Unlike the earlier out- of- the- blue crisis, this one is accompanied by the silent stalker: Old Age as the slow precursor to Death. What I’m going

through is just what women married to older or infirm husbands do.

That’s what makes it so awful. It’s what we
do
. I think we must come to despise our own strength, the role that’s simply expected of us.

“You do what you have to do,” or “You find out how strong you

are,” somebody will say, or think. But how often do we need to make

that discovery?

By this time we’re in late July and I want someone to take care of

me. Friends are wonderful, but what can they do? It’s a full- time job, and neither the emotional cross (the heaviness of heart, the constant

dread and apprehension), nor the logistical minutiae are the sorts of

burdens anyone else can assume.

I want my brother, the rock of reliability, the quietly take- charge

person. But my brother is now my sister. Lucky for me, my newly

minted sister is still the magnificent human being my brother was. But

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My Sister

sexist as it sounds, I miss that male shoulder to lean on. Nine weeks

into the ordeal, I call her and she instantly makes plans to come up. I cry with relief when I get off the phone, realizing only at that moment the extent of longing for her calming presence. I still haven’t gotten

completely past the self- conscious stage, twinges of anxiety about how she will look and sound— to me, to others. But it’s 2010 now, and it’s

gotten a lot easier in five years.

She comes up and stays at a nearby hotel. The first morning, I go to

meet her at a café on Madison Avenue. I see her coming a block away

and I cringe. She’s wearing short shorts and a sleeveless top, her

smooth legs and buff arms gleaming in the sun. She’s definitely more

Marilyn Monroe than Marilyn Manson, but is that a good thing?

When I express horror, she contradicts me: they’re not
short
shorts, they’re exercise shorts, for walking in the park. I tell her she can wear them in the park but
not
on the street. Well then, she wonders, how does she get from the hotel to the park?

This is the first chance I’ve had to look at this new body, and it has

an eerie, ageless, almost sexless quality in its perfection. The skin is golden, smooth and consistent, no blotches, no blemishes, no spots. It

might be a digitalized body in a movie, or a classical sculpture. She

harks back to ancient Greek culture where the body was an idealized

conception of beauty made visible. I imagine that if she had something

covering her head and breasts, her hair and makeup, I wouldn’t be

able to tell if she was male or female. She would be just body, with a

bird mask over the head like one of those Alexander McQueen man-

nequins in the Metropolitan that metamorphose into animals. In

truth, she is on exhibit, the way she’s outfitted herself, the casual exposure. Fortunately, her face, radiantly pretty, redeems the rest, or at

least deflects from it.

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