‘Good on you, darl,’ Rick says as he grabs her car keys off the table and goes out for the night.
When making small talk with her mourners, Sandra will mention that she started this job ‘later in life’, which is true in its own way. She is only in her mid-thirties but she has lived and grown old and died in her previous, secret lives. Now, in these ‘later’ years, she starts changing to become more authentically herself. Her make-up is toned down, her clothes are toned down, her voice is turned up, her concerns are broadened and the road spools out before her. She breezes into work each day in a power suit looking impossibly gorgeous. She is slim and willowy and so golden blonde that she appears, in photos from this time, to have a halo. By the time Rick finally leaves her for one of the women he has been cheating with, a woman in a wheelchair who is about to come into some money, Sandra has set her sights higher.
Craig comes up to the office from the mortuary down the road to help carry a coffin or speak to the boss but lately it seems that he’s there more than usual and stays longer than necessary. Craig is skinny but strong, his freckled face is perpetually tanned and his thin lips hover above his perfect teeth in a cynical sneer. It was months before she had any reason to say more than a few words to him but she catches him staring at her all the time and she can tell when he’s doing it because it feels like a burning arrow. Lately, she’s started staring right back; it’s become sort of a game. One Friday evening, when everyone stays back for beers and then fish and chips, he laughs, watching her sip white wine on the boss’s knee, admiring the way she teases the old man whom everyone else defers to. Later he strolls into her office, where she is tipsily packing up her bag to go home.
‘It doesn’t quite match,’ he muses, walking too slowly around the room, pretending to admire the framed print she recently hung on the wall. He stops at her desk and squints at her through his dark blonde fringe. ‘Something’s not quite right. A beautiful blonde like this, flirting with an old cunt like that. What’s not right here?’ he wonders. She smiles, says nothing. She shoulders her bag, pushes her chair in and, just before she walks out to her car with her heart racing, she plucks her silver pen out from between the vases on her desk and writes her phone number on the palm of his hand.
When Sandra tells me about ‘The Hot-Friggen-Dog’ or ‘Johnny Hotcock from the Funeral Home Who Was Absolutely Gorgeous’, she is referring to Craig. Craig looms large in the Pantheon of Pankhurst; saying his name still gives her a visible boost. Even now, tonight, if her sleeping pills allowed her to dream, she would dream of Craig. He remained the love of her life long after she married George.
She met her husband when she buried his wife. That was the one-liner she gleefully tossed out like a black streamer over the course of their fourteen-year marriage. Alfred George Pankhurst was a grandfather in his early sixties when he arrived at the funeral home, his shirt as grey and as wrinkled as his last image of his wife’s hands. An image that haunted him less and less the more he looked at the golden goddess showing his friends to their seats as Pachelbel’s Canon played in the background. He had believed his life was over on that day when, really, it was beginning again.
George starts ringing Sandra, seeking her good counsel. Could she, possibly, help him with this or that? He’s so new to life as a widower. At his request, she drops in to see him at Mackay Rubber, where he is an export manager, and soon he asks her out and it starts to feel like she’s walked into a movie: the chairs pulled out and the doors opened, the champagne and the cocktails, the wine and ‘fine dining’, the managers who come over to shake George’s hand, his ‘first class manners’, the way he walks, always, on the outside of the kerb, keeping her protectively tucked in.
Sure, he’s a little overweight and balding and red from drink and far too eager. Sure, his thirty-year marriage just ended and she is only six years older than his son and eight years older than his daughter. But he is also a sweetheart and a gentleman and safe and competent and respectable. He even looks handsome in his suit with his remaining hair slicked back. And each time she gazes into his eyes she falls in love. Not with him per se, although she will remain loyal to him in her own way until his death. She falls in love with the idealised image of herself reflected back at her: the blonde bombshell; the career woman; the perfect homemaker; the good mother; the equal partner; the loved wife. She falls in love, finally, and over and over again, with herself.
When George asks Sandra to marry him, her reaction is to freeze. Fuck. I’ve got in over my head. What am I going to do? I’ve got to tell him what the story is here.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘I’ve got something I have to tell you but I don’t know how to tell you.’
‘OK,’ George replies, confused, then crestfallen, then terrified. But Sandra can’t find the words. At first it feels like she lost them, as if they rolled away like a coin on the floor. But then she realises that she never had them to begin with. ‘We’ll go to the doctor’s, OK? And I’ll talk to the doctor about how to explain it,’ she says.
George’s stomach seizes up and he struggles to even get the question out. ‘Have you got cancer?’ he whispers.
‘No no no no,’ Sandra says with reassuring dismissiveness. ‘I just need to talk to my doctor.’
She makes an appointment for that afternoon. George drives her there and drops her off and though it’s still pretty early he probably goes for a quick drink before he circles back to wait for her in the car out the front, newspaper on his lap, unopened.
Inside, after Sandra waves away the doctor’s concern about what might be the matter, he sits back in his chair and listens while she explains about George. ‘So how am I going to tell this dude? He’s got no idea at all what’s going on,’ she says urgently.
The doctor thinks for a moment. ‘Well, just tell him that you’re transgender, that you’ve undergone “gender transformation” or “reassignment”. That’s a bit softer than saying you’ve had a sex change.’
As she gets back in the passenger seat, George searches her face and pleads with her to just tell him what’s going on. But Sandra asks him to drive to her thinking spot at the beach. She says she’ll tell him there.
When she is older than George is on this day, she will still remember precisely how to get to this small spot on Beach Road, right at the end of Charman Road, where she sat so many times and let her mind churn like the water.
George parks and they sit in the cocoon of the car, and he looks at her looking at the horizon.
‘George,’ she says finally. ‘I’ve had gender reassignment.’ She braces for whatever comes next, which she’s pretty sure will be a punch in the mouth because that’s what has happened before, with others. But there is only silence.
‘Well, George, what do you think about that?’ she prompts, turning cautiously to look at him.
‘So,’ he says, clearing his throat and pushing his palms onto his thighs, thick fingers spread wide on the dark material of his trousers. ‘You’re…ah…tellin’ me you want to be a, ah, a lesbian now?’ he asks uncertainly.
‘No, not quite,’ Sandra replies with a small smile. She tries again. ‘As I appear is not how I was born, you see?’
‘Huh,’ George nods, genuinely trying but absolutely failing to understand.
Sandra takes a deep breath. ‘George, I weren’t born the way I look. I was born in a different form, OK?’
Now she braces again, expecting that punch. Steeled, she squints at the water for what feels like ‘a fucking eternity’, listening for movement. But still, nothing.
‘Well?’ she demands, tight with tension, twisting towards him now with raised eyebrows.
But George is only quiet. He looks very small in that moment and, despite the stubble and the wrinkles, despite the jowls and the wiry white hairs in his eyebrows, she could have seen with perfect clarity, had she been looking for it, the baby boy born to a farmer and his wife over half a century before. He sits very still with his hands hanging from the wheel of his
hot car parked at the edge of a deep sea. He smells of alcohol and cologne and soap and sweat. He smells familiar now. And she knows that however he cuts her she will miss him.
‘Well,’ he says, clearing his throat and starting the car. ‘I met Sandra. And I fell in love with Sandra. And that’s all right by me.’
Mrs Pankhurst. Long after they eventually separate, long after George passes away and their marriage is bureaucratically ‘cancelled’ on the grounds of her sex, unamended on her birth certificate, Sandra will keep a photo from their wedding displayed on the small table by her front door. She will also keep her married name. That is who she was for well over a decade and also who she was always meant to be: not George’s wife, necessarily, but sufficiently normal, as a woman and as a person, to be deserving of love.
‘I’ve got a new lease on life!’ George brags to his colleagues around the table at the restaurant after introducing them to his beautiful new wife. ‘We’re thinking about buying a pram!’ And though she laughs lightly and smiles through the meal and the cheese platter and the brandies, Sandra explodes once they are alone in the car.
‘A pram, for fuck’s sake?! GEORGE! Fuckin’ stop this circus! You’re making it worse, you know! Don’t do this,’ she yells.
‘What?’ he says, tipsily tapping the key around the ignition. ‘You’re getting upset over nothing.’ She takes a big breath and lights a cigarette. It’s the same thing he did before they were engaged, when he took her to the picnic at Ballam Park to meet his family. His kids were there, some cousins as well. George kept parading her around like a show pony and mock-complaining to everyone about Sandra pushing him down the aisle. Even after she took him aside and said gently, ‘Now George, don’t do that, that’ll come back to bite me. Tell them the truth. You’re the one who’s hassling to marry me!’ But he kept it up and kept it up until she downed the rest of her drink and stormed off to the car with him running after her like a puppy.
‘Don’t you ever do that to me again, George. Don’t you ever fuckin’ insult me. You’re the one who’s pushing to get married. I don’t give a fuckin’ rat’s arse whether you want to marry or not. I don’t need to be fuckin’ married!’ she spat, her face bright pink from anger and fear and humiliation.
That had all sorted itself out, but here he was again tonight, exuberantly running his mouth, embarrassing her while intending only the opposite. She stares through the windshield, focusing on the road home, fading from bright to black and back again as they speed between streetlamps and the headlights of oncoming cars. Of course, she thinks with an audible snort, he’d have to be a little bizarre to be with someone like her anyhow.
But it’s much more familiar than that. George, too, loves gazing at himself in the mirror of their marriage. There he is young again. But unlike the first time he has the career and the house and the financial security of a lifetime of work behind him. There he is powerful, virile, attractive; his drinking is celebratory, his health is fine, his wife is gorgeous, she desires him and he is worthy of her desire. So while George knows that Sandra was assigned male at birth, that she fathered and then had to leave two children, that she worked as a prostitute for a decade and that she survived a brutal rape, he also un-knows each of these things.
Her past does not simply go unmentioned, it is erased entirely through the allusions to their putative babies. And while her deep anxiety is triggered by such comments, she also craves the suspension of knowledge that underlies them. It is, she thinks, her best chance at a normal life. Though it is lonely and crazy-making and unsustainable, the redemptive power of magical thinking is, also, an offer of sanctuary: a gift each gives the other. ‘I met Sandra. And I fell in love with Sandra. And that’s all right by me.’
When she agreed to move in to George’s triple-fronted brick veneer family home her terms were straightforward. ‘Your furniture has to go. I’m moving in with my furniture and we’ll rearrange the joint, we’ll change it,’ she told him. She has a wall knocked down to open up the lounge area and spends ‘more than the house is fucking worth’ on drapes for the large picture windows that look out onto the street. She spends hours landscaping the lawn, kneeling in the front garden. The old lady next door, who was so unwelcoming towards her at first, finally comes around; tells her with a soft smile that she has transformed the house, so dark and dormant during the drinking that dominated the final years of George’s first marriage, into ‘a real home’.
These are the days when she sits at the breakfast bar where the late afternoon sun hits the fruit bowl and the immaculately cleaned bench, flipping though the local paper while listening out for the sound of George’s car; when she hears the deep purr of his engine pulling up outside and runs out to open the gate for him to drive through; when she closes the gate behind him and runs up to kiss him and then runs back inside to fix him a Scotch before they sit down to the meal she prepared. These are the days when she regularly throws lavish dinner parties for his work colleagues and the clients he entertains from overseas. These are the days when they don’t need her money, so George asks her to quit the funeral home and travel with him on his frequent business trips.
Sandra applied for her first passport at the age of thirty-six, eight months before she was married. This required her first to change the name on her birth certificate to Sandra Anne Vaughan, although the sex said (and, when I met her, still said) male. The fact that a passport was issued to ‘Sandra Anne Vaughan, F’ is, therefore, not to be underestimated.
Repeating this process less than a year later in order to have her documents changed into her married name was fraught. It was complicated by the lack of consistency in relation to her name and her sex across the rest of her identifying documents. It was also complicated by the fact that marriage was (and is) legally understood to mean the union of an opposite-sex couple. It required hiring an expensive lawyer who wrote elaborately to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages brandishing Sandra’s successfully registered marriage certificate, hoping that the bureaucrats would not look too closely at the birth certificate underlying it. Again, she was successful.
Still, she is extremely nervous and self-conscious on her first flight overseas; she is ‘paranoid’, unsure how ‘convincing’ she looks to the officials who stamp her passport, terrified of being an embarrassment to George. That’s the problem with being put on a pedestal, she thinks to herself as they start the descent into Hong Kong. You’re too frightened to fucking move or you’ll fall off.
There are never any problems at the airports or at any of the hotels when they travel to Asia and America. But though she tries her best to unfurl and be a lady of leisure, she is bored and restless, crackling with unspent energy.
She meets George in the freezing lobby of their hotel in Bangkok where he leaps up from his martini to help her with her shopping bags. He signals for the waiter: ‘Two more, please. Good man,’ and then he gives his wife his full attention, smiling wetly at her with his thick lips. ‘New dress? Let’s see.’
She waves the request away. Then she leans forward, rests her elbows on her knees and clasps her hands together. ‘There’s only so much travel I can do, George,’ she sighs, exasperated. ‘There’s only so much shopping I can do, so many lunches I can do.’ His forehead pleats. ‘We need to buy a business,’ she concludes. She has been thinking of a boutique, picturing herself as a lady in a shop.
George remembers seeing an ad in the local paper before they left; the thought that had pecked through his mind like a bird crossing a road. ‘Let’s buy a hardware store.’
‘Huh.’ Sandra is nonplussed. Then she is intrigued.
North Brighton Paint & Hardware on Bay Street, the main shopping strip in Brighton, would become Sandra’s launch pad. As co-owner she was instantly embedded in the daily life of one of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs. Though she lived at the edges in a neighbouring suburb, Brighton was where she spent her time. These customers were her community, their concerns were her concerns, their values
were her values, their legitimacy was her legitimacy.
‘Sandra Pankhurst became the credible person. George made me credible,’ Sandra explains. ‘George treated me like I was a princess, like I was somebody, someone to respect, someone to treat nicely. He gave me belief in myself and the strength in myself to realise that I could have a better path in life. He was there at that time to make me realise that I could be whatever I wanted.’
The executive director of Transgender Victoria, Sally Goldner, once told me about speaking with ‘a trans woman who survived the St Kilda street scene from the 1970s and she said that you had two choices for work: the parlours or the drag shows. The chances of getting any other job were virtually zero. There was that instant limitation of potential’.
In this context, the self-propelled rise of Ms Sandra Anne Vaughan is so remarkable that, despite Sandra’s belief that George ‘made her credible’, I have to be extremely cautious about overestimating the impact of her marriage. It is true that upper-middle-class Australia in the late 1980s would not have automatically opened up to Ms Vaughan. However, before she even met George she had already secured, thanks to her own skill and intellect, an adequately paid and profoundly satisfying ‘straight’ job. Had she never met him, Sandra could have worked at the funeral home long term and made a future for herself. Or her deeply restless and ambitious nature could have propelled her towards bigger opportunities. But the perceived impact of her marriage on her subsequent choices is not in doubt: ‘I was important for the first time in my life.’
Welcome to the world, Sandra Pankhurst, President of the North Brighton Chamber of Commerce! Newsprint from October 1992 shows Sandra dressed up for a Halloween street party: a ringmaster in striped Lycra tights, bowtie and tails, arms raised triumphantly like Nadia Comăneci. In clippings, quotes and photos from that period President Pankhurst, placard in hand, leads the resistance of local traders to the expansion of the retail behemoths. She appears at charity balls and promotional events. She is chairwoman of the Brighton Police Community Consultative Committee: launching a new register for senior citizens to discourage their social isolation; pictured at a fundraiser for at-risk youth. In 1996 Oprah Winfrey comes into possession of Sandra’s résumé as Sandra writes to her exuberantly proposing a series of fundraising shows Down Under.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 18