Emily Alford




Stevie

By Emily Alford




Anybody who has seen "Annie Hall" or "American Graffiti" knows the filmic device. A jump-cut or an improbable line takes us from innocent (or not-so-innocent ) children to whatever their fate will make of them. Looking at an old class photo or yearbook can do the same, though the direction is more likely to be backward, from whatever we have become to the way we were. In our community, especially, the gulf betweens what was and what is likely to be very wide indeed.

Just before the Holidays I was visiting my sister and she got out the family memorabilia. Both of us live thousands of miles now from where it all happened. One of the photos we looked at showed her elementary school class when she was eight or nine. Neither she nor I has any idea of what became of any of her classmates (or mine). It was easy, though, to put names to some of the faces, and to ask the predictable questions. Who died in Vietnam? Who got Aids? Who married a wife-beater? Whose life turned into a story of happy success?

Mostly, I was better at naming the girls in the photo than the boys. I had no trouble, though, in spotting Stevie among my sister's picket-fence rows of classmates. I wonder if he--or perhaps she--might be reading this. I'm not breaking confidence by using his real name, or by saying that the story happened in a little village just east of Albany, New York. My own playground name at the time was Skip, and it all took place forty years ago.

Stevie's sister Eileen was in my own grade, two classes above. He was the youngest of four children, with two brothers who were older still. The brothers were the tough sort, and were famous among the kids of our little village for their Daily Morning Fight. Stevie wasn't the tough sort at all. Eileen knew it.

Sometime in the autumn of the year that we were eight Eileen told me that she had dressed Stevie up in her clothes and put a mop on his head. I remember her precise words: "he looked just like a girl." I knew about myself by then. I had been cross-dressing in secret for at least two years. It was not long after Christine Jorgensen had burst into fame. Just as when I saw the Mother of Us All on the television news, I was fascinated and terrified by what Eileen had said. I remember telephoning her to tell her about dreaming that I too was wearing girls' clothes. Finally, I got up the nerve to talk to her direct. Almost.

We lived fairly close to each other, and I used to play at their house quite a lot. Now I became nervous about it when she invited me to come over. I can't recall what I said to her, but my meaning was transparent as we talked under the oak tree at the far end of the school playground. "All right, I'll put you in one of the dresses," she replied. Panic took over. "No, no, that's just what I don't want you to do," I replied, and she never did do it.

I must have been giving off all sorts of signals about myself by then. In school I would incessantly draw figures of crew-cut boys (like myself, as the times required) wearing puffy-sleeved dresses, and I am sure that my teachers spotted them. I don't have a graceful hand, and there could have been no mistaking the style. Eileen could not possibly have been the only one who knew. If I had said "yes, I want to" it could not have stayed a secret. I suspect very strongly that my whole life would hasve been very different from how it has turned out. No prizes for guessing what way.

I didn't see terribly much of Eileen and Stevie after that. But perhaps two years after I forfeited my first chance to come out, Stevie and I found ourselves next to each other in the school assembly room. I spoke first. "I used to wish I was a girl, I told him, "but of course I don't any more." "Me too," Stevie said. I knew that both he and I were lying. He probably did too.

We moved to another little village not long afterwards, and I don't remember that I ever saw Stevie again. Years later a teen-aged Eileen happened to pick me up when I was hitchhiking. I wondered as we drove along if she remembered what had happened on the playground. I certainly did, but I didn't ask. And I can't help wondering now what her brother Steve has made of the life that he was given.


Back to Transgender Forum's home page