My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (8 page)

identify with such self mutilation. They simply can’t understand it. (In all fairness, who can? Certainly not transsexuals.) Moreover, as political activists, gays have a hard enough time of it without incurring even more culturally dubious fellow travelers. To them, the transsexual is

the crazy aunt descending on a family whose social status is none too

secure to begin with. In fact, the four components of GLBT are all far

more disparate than such a rubric allows for. Gays and lesbians may

have less in common than either has with straight people of their re-

spective sexes; and there are subsets and branches of each.

I tried to imagine him, her, somewhere. What about a community

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with other transsexuals? “I don’t want to be one of them,” he said.

What did he even mean by this, a strangely callous remark from some-

one as generally empathetic as he? I assumed he meant a commune of

in- your- face queerish drag queens, mascaraed babes out of
La Cage
aux Folles
rather than sobersided members of society, but why, if they come from backgrounds as diverse as he makes clear they do? He was

equally averse to joining an online support group. More of a recluse

than a joiner, Chevey had always been obsessed with privacy (the first

piece of equipment he bought when he went into business for himself

was a shredder). He was so secretive, Mother and I never knew if he

had any clients! Even Ethel, when I told her, was surprised at his attitude. “But he
is
one of them,” she said.

I only gradually came to another interpretation. Because a trans-

sexual thinks constantly and obsessively about being a woman, there’s

a tension between the need for support on the one hand, and the de-

sire, if not to pass completely as a woman, at least to live in as utterly normal a way as possible. The last thing they want is to wear the label

“T,” join a club, and be seen by the world as freaks or at best hybrids.

They’re already so far out on the fringe, so beyond political legitimacy, there isn’t the same desire for political solidarity as among homosexuals or other minorities. Indeed, solidarity would only magnify their

problems. Most want, as Chevey says, “to blend in with the hetero-

sexual population.”

This all came home to me when I watched a CNN documentary,

Her Name Was Steven
, in which Steve Stanton (now Susan), the onetime city manager of Largo, Florida, gave a lucid and dispassionate

account of her feelings and decisions. Of particular interest to me was her appearance at a congress of transsexuals, where she infuriated her fellow transsexuals by refusing to toe the line and voice solidarity.

“Somehow I’ve been thrown into this role as a national spokesper-

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My Sister

son for a cause I don’t understand myself yet,” she says at one point.

Even as one applauds her courage, and sees a woman quite at peace

with herself, the ex- wife is a different story. She has refused to appear in the documentary but answers questions off- camera, and at one

point says poignantly, “I watched him gradually fade away, and it has

been like a slow death for me.” Eleanor must be feeling something like

this about Chevey.

I try to imagine losing Andrew in a way that is almost more com-

plete than death, because it brings into question the shared past and

the self that has morphed and mutated, but always within the endless

dance of marriage.

I ask Beth if Chevey’s revelation of transsexualism undermined

her sense of their marriage, and she replies in the negative. They were best friends before and remain so.

“He had such integrity,” she says, “more than anyone I’ve ever

known. And so does she. Nevertheless, I hope Ellen doesn’t want to

talk about hair and makeup all the time. And I’ve told him he can’t be

my friend if he wears frou- frou clothes. You know, over- the- top

feminine— plunging necklines and short skirts.” The truth is, we’re all more “masculine” than he is, or rather than the she that he will be.

The one person who can no longer joke is Eleanor. They’ve been

married twenty years, and this has upended her life. They met twenty-

two years ago, when Chevey had just formed The Argonaut Company

and advertised for an assistant. Not just any assistant but precisely the woman— lovely with pearly pale skin, competent and funny— who

walked through the door.

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c h a p t e r f ou r

My Brother Advertises for

a Secretary and Reels in a Wife

Richmond Times- Dispatch
, December 5, 1982:

s e c r e ta ry/r ec ep t ion i st

pa r t t i m e

For small West End business, 9 to 1 daily. I need someone

who is experienced in (or, with some tasks, willing to learn)

typing, carrying logs and laying a fire, light bookkeeping,

running errands, light housekeeping, taking occasional day

trips, light yard work, attending nighttime classes, swatting

flies, etc. If this job interests you, better see your psychia-

trist. If still interested, send your complete resume, along

with your explanation why you would ever want a job like

this one to CA 430 c/o this paper. Be sure to let me know

your needs and wants, too. Sorry, but if you smoke (to-

bacco), or have smoked within the last few months, save

your breath. We wouldn’t work well together.

U
nderstandably (and no doubt by intention) the responses were few.

The interested party had to have not only a sense of humor, but a fairly peculiar one. Mother and I thought it extremely funny, though Mother

also shook her head in disbelief. Not just at the wording, but at the ad itself. We still didn’t know if he had any clients: could he afford a secretary? We didn’t quite understand that it was a coded casting call for a wife. (Now, looking over those qualifications, I wonder if it might

have been an even more deeply encrypted SOS for a husband.) Chevey

may have been to all appearances a conservative guy, but he did every-

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My Sister

thing in his own idiosyncratic and oxymoronic way: that is, logical to

the point of fanaticism, applying rationalist precepts to areas where

sentiment and emotion rule. For example, when Mother was old, not

yet needing full- time help, but getting fragile, and worried about living alone, she wailed, “What’s going to happen if I die? I could lie

there for days and no one would know.”

“Well, it won’t matter,” said Chevey, “because you’ll be dead.”

True, but not very diplomatic. And when he saw the square footage

devoted to books and bookshelves in our New York apartment he was

shocked. “You could have a grandmother live here for the space they

occupy.” Although there were lovely scarves and clutch purses, promi-

nent among the gifts he gave me over the years were the practical ones: when I first moved to New York, a single girl with roommate in walk-up apartment, he gave me a fire extinguisher for Christmas; another

year, an adding machine; in later years (to Andrew and me), a smoke

detector (which sat on the shelf because we didn’t know how to install

the battery) and a scale that could be used for both postage and food.

Two computer programs he gave me, Quicken and Palm Desktop,

were expressions of his ultrarational philosophy of money managing,

his professional calling card, so to speak, laid out to every client: Keep a record of every expense. Try to forecast your expenditures for the

next six months, the next year, the distant future. We know now that

our expectations of the future, like our recollections of the past, are utterly irrational and miles off base, both being drawn from immediate experience, the here and now, since the future is unknowable, the

past selectively remembered. So his exhortations would have been an

exercise in futility, even if he hadn’t been waging a battle for rationality in that most unreceptive of terrains: the mind- set of investors who want to believe in the magic of the stock market.

I loved Quicken, but used it simply to balance my bank account,

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and, without a yearly tutorial from Chevey, could never remember at

tax time how to categorize expenditures. He, of course, carried a

PalmPilot at all times. We’d stop by a café for a cup of coffee and in

would go the date, time, and amount. He was a wonderful teacher,

endlessly patient. He occasionally taught night courses and once wrote

a series of articles in a neighborhood service paper on investing. They were lighthearted admonitions like “Ten Investment Mistakes,” meant

to foster the idea of financial planning— how to have reserves, keep

credit card debt down, maintain records, and plan for the future with

actuarial probabilities in mind. That most people (1) think they will

live forever or die before they run out of money, and (2) would rather

do almost anything than track their expenses (a task both tedious and

embarrassing: our
petites faiblesses
for junk food or shoes or booze, suddenly revealed, in irrefutable abundance, as vices and addictions),

this he understood. Never mind. He’d go on counseling his clients to

keep records and plan for the future, and simply hope that somewhere

and in someone a seed had been planted that might one day blossom

into financial circumspection. His sense of mission gave him satisfac-

tion enough.

I often wondered how he could even understand the mental fragil-

ity of the rest of us, so resistant was he to the siren call of instant gratification. Where most of us, according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel

scientist and author of the best seller
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, are mentally crippled by “cognitive biases,” decisions based on intuition and

emotion that override reason, Chevey belonged to that rare minority

who fall into Kahneman’s second category of those who think and be-

have according to reason and logic. Will Ellen migrate girlishly and

irrationally into category one?

A demon about security on every level, he didn’t like to talk on cell

phones for fear of being overheard (some of his precautions become

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My Sister

more significant in light of his emerging secret). For his computer, he kept four or five memory keys, one in the apartment, one in the car,

and the others who knows where, and rotated them regularly. He was

constantly urging me to keep a memory key off- site in case of fire. He knew a lot about a lot of things, and when he didn’t know something,

he was quick to admit it (now
that
should have been a tip- off!).

He was a true Virginian in his fiscal conservatism, but his practi-

cality was his own, a private joke among family and friends. I gave him a toast at the rehearsal dinner before his marriage to Beth, roasting

him on several points, and got a knowing laugh when I ended:

“Chevey, it’s Christmas Eve, we must buy a tree.”

“No, we’ll wait till tomorrow when we can get one for free.”

He was the go- to man for computer questions from his tech-

challenged harem— Eleanor, Beth, and me. He set up a DOS program

on my PC whereby I could save each day’s work without going through

the whole set of files and documents. When Bruce, my computer guy

in New York, came for some emergency, he would always recognize,

with some displeasure, any little improvement (or, as he saw it, inter-

ference) from my brother. Like the wife who detects a smear of lipstick not her own on her husband’s collar, he saw Chevey’s fingerprint the

minute he turned on the computer. But Bruce was too expensive to

call for little things, so I’d telephone Chevey in Virginia, and later at Pine Mountain.

“Hey, I was going to call you anyway,” I’d say sheepishly, if more or

less truthfully, “but I’ve got a little problem.” I’d lost the icon bar, the formatting, the screensaver, hit the wrong key and brought down

havoc, couldn’t find the Gmail “Away” message (Google had changed

the setting), and somehow he managed to fix it over the phone.

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At one point, much later, my right arm is in a sling and I’m trying

to write a review. I think of it not as
my
arm but The Arm, an append-age hanging from my shoulder with no relation to me. While I’m talk-

ing on the phone, The Arm lands on the backspace key and continues

to backspace until the whole document is erased.

“First take your hands off the computer and sit back,” he says when

I call him. (It’s already too late for that.) “Then go get a cup of coffee.

What’s important is not what you just did, but what you do next!” And