Book Four

The Oracular Vulva

   From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.
   My parents had at first refused to believe the emergency room doctor’s wild claim about my anatomy. The diagnosis, delivered over the phone to a largely uncomprehending Milton and then bowdlerized by him for Tessie’s benefit, amounted to a vague concern about the formation of my urinary tract along with a possible hormonal deficiency. The doctor in Petoskey hadn’t performed a karyotype. His job was to treat my concussion and contusions, and when he was done with that, he let me go.
   My parents wanted a second opinion. At Milton’s insistence I had been taken one last time to see Dr. Phil.
   In 1974, Dr. Nishan Philobosian was eighty-eight years old. He still wore a bow tie, but his neck no longer filled out the collar of his shirt. He was reduced in all his parts, freeze-dried. Nevertheless, green golf slacks extended from the hem of his white coat and a pair of tinted aviator-style glasses gripped his hairless head.
   “Hello, Callie, how are you?”
   “Fine, Dr. Phil.”
   “Starting school again? What grade are you in now?”
   “I’ll be in ninth this year. High school.”
   “High school? Already? I must be getting old.”
   His courtly manner was no different than it had ever been. The foreign sounds he still made, the evidence of the Old World in his teeth, put me somewhat at ease. All my life dignified foreigners had petted and pampered me. I was a sucker for the soft-handed Levantine affections. As a little girl I had sat on Dr. Philobosian’s knee while his fingers climbed my spinal column, counting off the vertebrae. Now I was taller than he was, gangly, freak-haired, a Tiny Tim of a girl, sitting in gown, bra, and underpants on the edge of an old-fashioned medical table with step-drawers of vulcanized rubber. He listened to my heart and lungs, his bald head dipping on the long neck like that of a brontosaurus, sampling leaves.
   “How’s your father, Callie?”
   “Fine.”
   “How’s the hot dog business?”
   “Good.”
   “How many hot dog places your dad has now?”
   “Like fifty or something.”
   “There’s one not too far from where Nurse Rosalee and I go in the winter. Pompano Beach.”
   He examined my eyes and ears and then politely asked me to stand and lower my underpants. Fifty years earlier, Dr. Philobosian had made his living treating Ottoman ladies in Smyrna. Propriety was an old habit with him.
   My mind was not fuzzy, as it had been up in Petoskey. I was fully aware of what was happening and where the focus of medical scrutiny lay. After I had pulled my panties down to my knees, a hot wave of embarrassment swept through me and by reflex I covered myself with my hand. Dr. Philobosian, not entirely gently, moved this aside. There was something of the impatience of the old in this. He forgot himself momentarily, and behind his aviator lenses his eyes glared. Still, he didn’t look down at me. He gazed gallantly off at the far wall while feeling for information with his hands. We were as close as dancing. Dr. Phil’s breathing was noisy; his hands shook. I glanced down myself only once. My embarrassment had retracted me. From my angle I was a girl again, white belly, dark triangle, foreshortened legs shaved smooth. My brassiere was bandoliered across my chest.
   It took only a minute. The old Armenian, crouching, lizard-backed, ran his yellowed fingers over my parts. It was no surprise that Dr. Philobosian had never noticed anything. Even now, alerted to the possibility, he didn’t seem to want to know.
   “You can get dressed now,” was all he said. He turned and walked very carefully to the sink. He turned on the water and thrust his hands into the stream. They seemed to be trembling more than ever. Liberally he squirted out the antibacterial soap. “Say hello to your dad,” he said before I left the room.
   Dr. Phil referred me to an endocrinologist at Henry Ford Hospital. The endocrinologist tapped a vein in my arm, filling an alarming number of vials with my blood. Why all this blood was needed he didn’t say. I was too frightened to ask. That night, however, I put my ear to my bedroom wall in hopes of finding out what was going on. “So what did the doctor say?” Milton was asking. “He said Dr. Phil should have noticed when Callie was born,” Tessie answered. “This whole thing could have been fixed back then.” And then Milton again: “I can’t believe he’d miss something like that.” (“Like what?” I silently asked the wall, but it didn’t specify.)
   Three days later we arrived in New York.
   Milton had booked us into a hotel called the Lochmoor in the East Thirties. He had stayed there twenty-three years earlier as a navy ensign. Always a thrifty traveler, Milton was also encouraged by the room rates. Our stay in New York was open-ended. The doctor Milton had spoken to—the specialist—refused to discuss details before he’d had a chance to examine me. “You’ll like it,” Milton assured us. “It’s pretty swank, as I remember.”
   It was not. We arrived from La Guardia in a taxi to find the Lochmoor fallen from its former glory. The desk clerk and cashier worked behind bulletproof glass. The Viennese carpeting was wet beneath the dripping radiators and the mirrors had been removed, leaving ghostly rectangles of plaster and ornamental screws. The elevator was prewar, with gilded, curving bars like a birdcage. Once upon a time, there had been an operator; no longer. We crammed our suitcases into the small space and I slid the gate closed. It kept coming off its track. I had to do it three times before the electrical current would flow. Finally the contraption rose and through the spray-painted bars we watched the floors pass by, each dim and identical except for the variation of a maid in uniform, or a room service tray outside a door, or a pair of shoes. Still, there was a feeling of ascension in that old box, of rising up out of a pit, and it was a letdown to get to our floor, number eight, and find it just as drab as the lobby.
   Our room had been carved out of a once-bigger suite. Now the angles of the walls were skewed. Even Tessie, pint-sized, felt constricted. For some reason the bathroom was nearly as large as the bedroom. The toilet stood stranded on loose tiles and ran continuously. The tub had a skid mark where the water drained out.
   There was a queen-size bed for my parents and, in the corner, a cot set up for me. I hauled my suitcase up onto it. My suitcase was a bone of contention between Tessie and me. She had picked it out for me before our trip to Turkey. It had a floral pattern of turquoise and green blossoms which I found hideous. Since going off to private school—and hanging around the Object—my tastes had been changing, becoming refined, I thought. Poor Tessie no longer knew what to buy me. Anything she chose was greeted by wails of horror. I was adamantly opposed to anything synthetic or with visible stitching. My parents found my new urge for purity amusing. Often my father would rub my shirt between his thumb and fingers and ask, “Is this preppy?”
   With the suitcase Tessie had had no time to consult me, and so there it was, bearing a design like a place mat’s. Unzipping the suitcase and flipping it open, I felt better. Inside were all the clothes I’d chosen myself: the crew neck sweaters in primary colors, the Lacoste shirts, the wide-wale corduroys. My coat was from Papagallo, lime green with horn-shaped buttons made from bone.
   “Do we have to unpack or can we leave everything in our suitcases?” I asked.
   “We better unpack and put our suitcases in the closet,” Milton answered. “Give us a little more room in here.”
   I put my sweaters neatly in the dresser drawers, my socks and underpants, too, and hung my pants up. I took my toiletry case into the bathroom and put it on the shelf. I had brought lip gloss and perfume with me. I wasn’t certain that they were obsolete.
   I closed the bathroom door, locked it, and bent close to the mirror to examine my face. Two dark hairs, still short, were visible above my upper lip. I got tweezers out of my case and plucked them. This made my eyes water. My clothes felt tight. The sleeves of my sweater were too short. I combed my hair and, optimistically, desperately, smiled at myself.
   I knew that my situation, whatever it was, was a crisis of some kind. I could tell that from my parents’ false, cheery behavior and from our speedy exit from home. Still, no one had said a word to me yet. Milton and Tessie were treating me exactly as they always had—as their daughter, in other words. They acted as though my problem was medical and therefore fixable. So I began to hope so, too. Like a person with a terminal illness, I was eager to ignore the immediate symptoms, hoping for a last-minute cure. I veered back and forth between hope and its opposite, a growing certainty that something terrible was wrong with me. But nothing made me more desperate than looking in the mirror.
   I opened the door and stepped back into the room. “I hate this hotel,” I said. “It’s gross.”
   “It’s not too nice,” Tessie agreed.
   “It used to be nicer,” said Milton. “I don’t understand what happened.”
   “The carpet smells.”
   “Let’s open a window.”
   “Maybe we won’t have to be here that long,” Tessie said, hopefully, wearily.
   In the evening we ventured outside, looking for something to eat, and then returned to the room to watch TV. Later, after we switched off the lights, I asked from my cot, “What are we doing tomorrow?”
   “We have to go the doctor’s in the morning,” said Tessie.
   “After that we have to see about some Broadway tickets,” said Milton. “What do you want to see, Cal?”
   “I don’t care,” I said gloomily.
   “I think we should see a musical,” said Tessie.
   “I saw Ethel Merman in Mame once,” Milton recalled. “She came down this big, long staircase, singing. When she finished, the place went wild. She stopped the show. So she just went right back up the staircase and sang the song over again.”
   “Would you like to see a musical, Callie?”
   “Whatever.”
   “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” said Milton. “That Ethel Merman can really belt it out.”
   No one spoke after that. We lay in the dark, in our strange beds, until we fell asleep.
   The next morning after breakfast we set off to see the specialist. My parents tried to seem excited as we left the hotel, pointing out sights from the taxi window. Milton exuded the boisterousness he reserved for all difficult situations. “This is some place,” he said as we drove up to New York Hospital. “River view! I might just check myself in.”
   Like any teenager, I was largely oblivious to the clumsy figure I cut. My stork movements, my flapping arms, my long legs kicking out my undersized feet in their fawn-colored Wallabees—all that machinery clanked beneath the observation tower of my head, and I was too close to see it. My parents did. It pained them to watch me advance across the sidewalk toward the hospital entrance. It was terrifying to see your child in the grip of unknown forces. For a year now they had been denying how I was changing, putting it down to the awkward age. “She’ll grow out of it,” Milton was always telling my mother. But now they were seized with a fear that I was growing out of control.
   We found the elevator and rode up to the fourth floor, then followed the arrows to something called the Psychohormonal Unit. Milton had the office number written out on a card. Finally we found the right room. The gray door was unmarked except for an extremely small, unobtrusive sign halfway down that read:


Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic

   If my parents saw the sign, they pretended not to. Milton lowered his head, bull-like, and pushed the door open.
   The receptionist welcomed us and told us to have a seat. The waiting room was unexceptional. Chairs lined the walls, divided evenly by magazine tables, and there was the usual rubber tree expiring in the corner. The carpeting was institutional, with a hectic, stain-camouflaging pattern. There was even a reassuringly medicinal smell in the air. After my mother filled out the insurance forms, we were shown into the doctor’s office. This, too, inspired confidence. An Eames chair stood behind the desk. By the window was a Le Corbusier chaise, made of chrome and cowhide. The bookshelves were filled with medical books and journals and the walls tastefully hung with art. Big-city sophistication attuned to a European sensibility. The surround of a triumphant psychoanalytic world-view. Not to mention the East River view out the windows. We were a long way from Dr. Phil’s office with its amateur oils and Medicaid cases.
   It was two or three minutes before we noticed anything out of the ordinary. At first the curios and etchings had blended in with the scholarly clutter of the office. But as we sat waiting for the doctor, we became aware of a silent commotion all around us. It was like staring at the ground and realizing, suddenly, that it is swarming with ants. The restful doctor’s office was churning with activity. The paperweight on his desk, for instance, was not a simple, inert rock but a tiny priapus carved from stone. The miniatures on the walls revealed their subject matter under closer observation. Beneath yellow silk tents, on paisley pillows, Mughal princes acrobatically copulated with multiple partners, keeping their turbans in place. Tessie blushed, looking; while Milton squinted; and I hid inside my hair as usual. We tried to look someplace else and so looked at the bookshelves. But here it wasn’t safe either. Amid a dulling surround of issues of JAMA and The New England Journal of Medicine were some eye-popping titles. One, with entwining snakes on the spine, was called Erotosexual Pair Bonding. There was a purple, pamphlety thing entitled Ritualized Homosexuality: Three Field Studies. On the desk itself, with a bookmark in it, was a manual called Hap-Penis: Surgical Techniques in Female-to-Male Sex Reassignment. If the sign on the front door hadn’t already, Luce’s office made it clear just what kind of specialist my parents had brought me to see. (And, worse, to see me.) There were sculptures, too. Reproductions from the temple at Kujaraho occupied corners of the room along with huge jade plants. Against the waxy green foliage, melon-breasted Hindu women bent over double, offering up orifices like prayers to the well-endowed men who answered them. An overloaded switchboard, a dirty game of Twister everywhere you turned.
   “Will you look at this place?” Tessie whispered.
   “Sort of unusual decor,” said Milton.
   And I: “What are we doing here?”
   It was right then that the door opened and Dr. Luce presented himself.
   At that stage, I didn’t know about his glamour status in the field. I had no idea of the frequency with which Luce’s name appeared in the relevant journals and papers. But I saw right away that Luce wasn’t your normal-looking doctor. Instead of a medical coat he wore a suede vest with fringe. Silver hair touched the collar of his beige turtleneck. His pants were flared and on his feet were a pair of ankle boots with zippers on the sides. He had eyeglasses, too, silver wire-rims, and a gray mustache.
   “Welcome to New York,” he said. “I’m Dr. Luce.” He shook my father’s hand, then my mother’s, and finally came to me. “You must be Calliope.” He was smiling, relaxed. “Let’s see if I can remember my mythology. Calliope was one of the Muses, right?”
   “Right.”
   “In charge of what?”
   “Epic poetry.”
   “You can’t beat that,” said Luce. He was trying to act casual, but I could see he was excited. I was an extraordinary case, after all. He was taking his time, savoring me. To a scientist like Luce I was nothing less than a sexual or genetic Kaspar Hauser. There he was, a famous sexologist, a guest on Dick Cavett, a regular contributor to Playboy, and suddenly on his doorstep, arriving out of the woods of Detroit like the Wild Boy of Aveyron, was me, Calliope Stephanides, age fourteen. I was a living experiment dressed in white corduroys and a Fair Isle sweater. This sweater, pale yellow, with a floral wreath at the neck, told Luce that I refuted nature in just the way his theory predicted. He must have hardly been able to contain himself, meeting me. He was a brilliant, charming, work-obsessed man, and watched me from behind his desk with keen eyes. While he chatted, speaking primarily to my parents, gaining their confidence, Luce was nevertheless making mental notes. He registered my tenor voice. He noted that I sat with one leg tucked under me. He watched how I examined my nails, curling my fingers into my palm. He paid attention to the way I coughed, laughed, scratched my head, spoke; in sum, all the external manifestations of what he called my gender identity.
   He kept up the calm manner, as if I had come to the Clinic with nothing more than a sprained ankle. “The first thing I’d like to do is give Calliope a short examination. If you’d care to wait here in my office, Mr. and Mrs. Stephanides.” He stood up. “Would you come with me please, Calliope?”
   I got up from my chair. Luce watched as the various segments, like those of a collapsible ruler, unfolded themselves, and I attained my full height, an inch taller than he was himself.
   “We’ll be right here, honey,” Tessie said.
   “We’re not going anywhere,” said Milton.
   Peter Luce was considered the world’s leading authority on human hermaphroditism. The Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, which he founded in 1968, had become the foremost facility in the world for the study and treatment of conditions of ambiguous gender. He was the author of a major sexological work, The Oracular Vulva, which was standard in a variety of disciplines ranging from genetics and pediatrics to psychology. He had written a column by the same name for Playboy from August 1972 to December 1973 in which the conceit was that a personified and all-knowing female pudendum answered the queries of male readers with witty and sometimes sibylline responses. Hugh Hefner had come across Peter Luce’s name in the papers in connection with a demonstration for sexual freedom. Six Columbia students had staged an orgy in a tent on the main green, which the cops broke up, and when asked what he thought about such activity on campus, Prof. Peter Luce, 46, had been quoted as saying, “I’m in favor of orgies wherever they happen.” That caught Hef’s eye. Not wanting to replicate Xaviera Hollander’s “Call Me Madam” column in Penthouse, Hefner saw Luce’s contribution as being devoted to the scientific and historical side of sex. Thus, in her first three issues, the Oracular Vulva delivered disquisitions on the erotic art of the Japanese painter Hiroshi Yamamoto, the epidemiology of syphilis, and the sex life of St. Augustine. The column proved popular, though intelligent queries were always hard to come by, the readership being more interested in the “Playboy Advisor” ‘s cunnilingus tips or remedies for premature ejaculation. Finally, Hefner told Luce to write his own questions, which he was only too glad to do.
   Peter Luce had appeared on Phil Donahue along with two hermaphrodites and a transsexual to discuss both the medical and psychological aspects of these conditions. On that program, Phil Donahue said, “Lynn Harris was born and raised a girl. You won the Miss Newport Beach Contest in 1964 in good old Orange County, California? Boy, wait till they hear this. You lived as a woman to the age of twenty-nine and then you switched to living as a man. He has the anatomical characteristics of both a man and a woman. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”
   He also said, “Here’s what’s not so funny. These live, irreplaceable sons and daughters of God, human beings all, want you to know, among other things, that that’s exactly what they are, human beings.”
   Because of certain genetic and hormonal conditions, it was sometimes very difficult to determine the sex of a newborn baby. Confronted with such a child, the Spartans had left the infant on a rocky hillside to die. Luce’s own forebears, the English, didn’t even like to mention the subject, and might never have done so had the nuisance of mysterious genitalia not thrown a wrench into the smooth workings of inheritance law. Lord Coke, the great British jurist of the seventeenth century, tried to clear up the matter of who would get the landed estates by declaring that a person should “be either male or female, and it shall succeed according to the kind of sex which doth prevail.” Of course, he didn’t specify any precise method for determining which sex did prevail. For most of the twentieth century, medicine had been using the same primitive diagnostic criterion of sex formulated by Klebs way back in 1876. Klebs had maintained that a person’s gonads determined sex. In cases of ambiguous gender, you looked at the gonadal tissue under the microscope. If it was testicular, the person was male; if ovarian, female. The hunch here was that a person’s gonads would orchestrate sexual development, especially at puberty. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Klebs had begun the task, but the world had to wait another hundred years for Peter Luce to come along and finish it.
   In 1955, Luce published an article called “Many Roads Lead to Rome: Sexual Concepts of Human Hermaphroditism.” In twenty-five pages of forthright, high-toned prose, Luce argued that gender is determined by a variety of influences: chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; hormones; internal genital structures; external genitals; and, most important, the sex of rearing. Drawing on studies of patients at the pediatric endocrine clinic at New York Hospital, Luce was able to compile charts demonstrating how these various factors came into play, and showing that a patient’s gonadal sex often didn’t determine his or her gender identity. The article made a big splash. Within months, pretty much everyone had given up Klebs’s criterion for Luce’s criteri a.
   On the strength of this success, Luce was given the opportunity to open the Psychohormonal Unit at New York Hospital. In those days he saw mostly kids with adrenogenital syndrome, the most common form of female hermaphroditism. The hormone cortisol, recently synthesized in the lab, had been found to arrest the virilization these girls normally underwent, allowing them to develop as normal females. The endocrinologists administered the cortisol and Luce oversaw the girls’ psychosexual development. He learned a lot. In a decade of solid, original research, Luce made his second great discovery: that gender identity is established very early on in life, about the age of two. Gender was like a native tongue; it didn’t exist before birth but was imprinted in the brain during childhood, never disappearing. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
   He published this theory in 1967, in an article in the The New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Early Establishment of Gender Identity: The Terminal Twos.” After that, his reputation reached the stratosphere. The funding flowed in, from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the N.I.S. It was a great time to be a sexologist. The Sexual Revolution provided new opportunities for the enterprising sex researcher. It was a matter of national interest, for a few years there, to examine the mechanics of the female orgasm. Or to plumb the psychological reasons why certain men exhibited themselves on the street. In 1968, Dr. Luce opened the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic. Luce treated everybody: the webbed-necked girl teens with Turner’s syndrome, who had only one sex chromosome, a lonely X; the leggy beauties with Androgen Insensitivity; or the XYY boys, who tended to be dreamers and loners. When babies with ambiguous genitalia were born at the hospital, Dr. Luce was called in to discuss the matter with the bewildered parents. Luce got the transsexuals, too. Everyone came to the Clinic, with the result that Luce had at his disposal a body of research material—of living, breathing specimens—no scientist had ever had before.
   And now Luce had me. In the examination room, he told me to get undressed and put on a paper gown. After taking some blood (only one vial, thankfully), he had me lie down on a table with my legs up in stirrups. There was a pale green curtain, the same color as my gown, that could be pulled across the table, dividing my upper and lower halves. Luce didn’t close it that first day. Only later, when there was an audience.
   “This shouldn’t hurt but it might feel a little funny.”
   I stared up at the ring light on the ceiling. Luce had another light on a stand, which he angled to suit his purposes. I could feel its heat between my legs as he pressed and prodded me.
   For the first few minutes I concentrated on the circular light, but finally, drawing in my chin, I looked down to see that Luce was holding the crocus between his thumb and forefinger. He was stretching it out with one hand while measuring it with the other. Then he let go of the ruler and made notes. He didn’t look shocked or appalled. In fact he examined me with great curiosity, almost connoisseurship. There was an element of awe or appreciation in his face. He took notes as he proceeded but made no small talk. His concentration was intense.
   After a while, still crouching between my legs, Luce turned his head to search for another instrument. Between the sight lines of my raised knees his ear appeared, an amazing organ all its own, whorled and flanged, translucent in the bright lights. His ear was very close to me. It seemed for a moment as though Luce were listening at my source. As though some riddle were being imparted to him from between my legs. But then he found what he had been looking for and turned back.
   He began to probe inside.
   “Relax,” he said.
   He applied a lubricant, huddled in closer.
   “Re lax.”
   There was a hint of annoyance, of command in his voice. I took a deep breath and did the best I could. Luce poked inside. For a moment it felt merely strange, as he’d suggested. But then a sharp pain shot through me. I jerked back, crying out.
   “Sorry.”
   Nevertheless, he kept on. He placed one hand on my pelvis to steady me. He probed in farther, though he avoided the painful area. My eyes were welling with tears.
   “Almost finished,” he said.
   But he was only getting started.
   The chief imperative in cases like mine was to show no doubt as to the gender of the child in question. You did not tell the parents of a newborn, “Your baby is a hermaphrodite.” Instead, you said, “Your daughter was born with a clitoris that is a little larger than a normal girl’s. We’ll need to do surgery to make it the right size.” Luce felt that parents weren’t able to cope with an ambiguous gender assignment. You had to tell them if they had a boy or a girl. Which meant that, before you said anything, you had to be sure what the prevailing gender was.
   Luce could not do this with me yet. He had received the results of the endocrinological tests performed at Henry Ford Hospital, and so knew of my XY karyotype, my high plasma testosterone levels, and the absence in my blood of dihydrotestosterone. In other words, before even seeing me, Luce was able to make an educated guess that I was a male pseudohermaphrodite—genetically male but appearing otherwise, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. But that, according to Luce’s thinking, did not mean that I had a male gender identity.
   My being a teenager complicated things. In addition to chromosomal and hormonal factors, Luce had to consider my sex of rearing, which had been female. He suspected that the tissue mass he had palpated inside me was testicular. Still, he couldn’t be sure until he had looked at a sample under a microscope.
   All this must have been going through Luce’s mind as he brought me back to the waiting room. He told me he wanted to speak to my parents and that he would send them out when he was finished. His intensity had lessened and he was friendly again, smiling and patting me on the back.
   In his office Luce sat down in his Eames chair, looked up at Milton and Tessie, and adjusted his glasses.
   “Mr. Stephanides, Mrs. Stephanides, I’ll be frank. This is a complicated case. By complicated I don’t mean irremediable. We have a range of effective treatments for cases of this kind. But before I’m ready to begin treatment there are a number of questions I have to answer.”
   My mother and father were sitting only a foot apart during this speech, but each heard something different. Milton heard the words that were there. He heard “treatment” and “effective.” Tessie, on the other hand, heard the words that weren’t there. The doctor hadn’t said my name, for instance. He hadn’t said “Calliope” or “Callie.” He hadn’t said “daughter,” either. He didn’t use any pronouns at all.
   “I’ll need to run further tests,” Luce was continuing. “I’ll need to perform a complete psychological assessment. Once I have the necessary information, then we can discuss in detail the proper course of treatment.”
   Milton was already nodding. “What kind of time line are we talking about, Doctor?”
   Luce jutted out a thoughtful lower lip. “I want to redo the lab tests, just to be sure. Those results will be back tomorrow. The psychological evaluation will take longer. I’ll need to see your child every day for at least a week, maybe two. Also it would be helpful if you could give me any childhood photographs or family movies you might have.”
   Milton turned to Tessie. “When does Callie start school?”
   Tessie didn’t hear him. She was distracted by Luce’s phrase: “your child.”
   “What kind of information are you trying to get, Doctor?” Tessie asked.
   “The blood tests will tell us hormone levels. The psychological assessment is routine in cases like this.”
   “You think it’s some kind of hormone thing?” Milton asked. “A hormone imbalance?”
   “We’ll know after I’ve had time to do what I need to do,” said Luce.
   Milton stood up and shook hands with the doctor. The consultation was over.
   Keep in mind: neither Milton nor Tessie had seen me undressed for years. How were they to know? And not knowing, how could they imagine? The information available to them was all secondary stuff—my husky voice, my flat chest—but these things were far from persuasive. A hormonal thing. It could have been no more serious than that. So my father believed, or wanted to believe, and so he tried to convince Tessie.
   I had my own resistance. “Why does he have to do a psychological evaluation?” I asked. “It’s not like I’m crazy.”
   “The doctor said it was routine.”
   “But why?”
   With this question I had hit upon the crux of the matter. My mother has since told me that she intuited the real reason for the psychological assessment, but chose not to dwell on it. Or, rather, didn’t choose. Let Milton choose for her. Milton preferred to treat the problem pragmatically. There was no sense in worrying about a psychological assessment that could only confirm what was obvious: that I was a normal, well-adjusted girl. “He probably bills the insurance extra for the psychological stuff,” Milton said. “Sorry, Cal, but you’ll have to put up with it. Maybe he can cure your neuroses. Got any neuroses? Now’s your time to let ’em out.” He put his arms around me, squeezed hard, and roughly kissed the side of my head.
   Milton was so convinced that everything was going to be okay that on Tuesday morning he flew down to Florida on business. “No sense cooling my heels in this hotel,” he told us.
   “You just want to get out of this pit,” I said.
   “I’ll make it up to you. Why don’t you and your mother go out for a fancy dinner tonight. Anyplace you want. We’re saving a couple bucks on this room, so you gals can splurge. Why don’t you take Callie to Delmonico’s, Tess.”
   “What’s Delmonico’s?” I asked.
   “It’s a steak joint.”
   “I want lobster. And baked Alaska,” I said.
   “Baked Alaska! Maybe they have that, too.”
   Milton left, and my mother and I tried to spend his money. We went shopping at Bloomingdale’s. We had high tea at the Plaza. We never made it to Delmonico’s, preferring a moderately priced Italian restaurant near the Lochmoor, where we felt more comfortable. We ate there every night, doing our best to pretend we were on a real trip, a vacation. Tessie drank more wine than usual and got tipsy, and when she went to the bathroom I drank her wine myself.
   Normally the most expressive thing about my mother’s face was the gap between her front teeth. When she was listening to me, Tessie’s tongue often pressed against that divot, that gate. This was the signal of her attention. My mother always paid great attention to whatever I said. And if I told her something funny, then her tongue dropped away, her head fell back, her mouth opened wide, and there were her front teeth, riven and ascendant.
   Every night at the Italian restaurant I tried to make this happen.
   In the mornings, Tessie took me to the Clinic for my appointments.
   “What are your hobbies, Callie?”
   “Hobbies?”
   “Is there anything you especially like to do?”
   “I’m not really a hobby-type person.”
   “What about sports? Do you like any sports?”
   “Does Ping-Pong count?”
   “I’ll put it down.” Luce smiled from behind his desk. I was on the Le Corbusier daybed across the room, lounging on the cowhide.
   “What about boys?”
   “What about them?”
   “Is there a boy at school you like?”
   “I guess you’ve never been to my school, Doctor.”
   He checked his file. “Oh, it’s a girls’ school, isn’t it?”
   “Yup.”
   “Are you sexually attracted to girls?” Luce said this quickly. It was like a tap from a rubber hammer. But I stifled my reflex.
   He put down his pen and knit his fingers together. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “I want you to know that this is all between us, Callie. I’m not going to tell your parents anything that you tell me here.”
   I was torn. Luce in his leather chair, with his longish hair and ankle boots, was the kind of adult a kid might open up to. He was as old as my father but in league with the younger generation. I longed to tell him about the Object. I longed to tell somebody, anybody. My feelings for her were still so strong they rushed up my throat. But I held them back, wary. I didn’t believe this was all private.
   “Your mother says you have a close relationship with a friend of yours,” Luce began again. He said the Object’s name. “Do you feel sexually attracted to her? Or have you had sexual relations with her?”
   “We’re just friends,” I insisted, a little too loudly. I tried again in a quieter voice. “She’s my best friend.” In response Luce’s right eyebrow rose from behind his glasses. It came out of hiding as though it, too, wanted to get a good look at me. And then I found a way out:
   “I had sex with her brother,” I confessed. “He’s a junior.”
   Again Luce showed neither surprise, disapproval, or interest. He made a note on his pad, nodding once. “And did you enjoy it?”
   Here I could tell the truth. “It hurt,” I said. “Plus I was scared about getting pregnant.”
   Luce smiled to himself, jotting in his notebook. “Not to worry,” he said.
   That was how it went. Every day for an hour I sat in Luce’s office and talked about my life, my feelings, my likes and dislikes. Luce asked all kinds of questions. The answers I gave were sometimes not as important as the way I answered them. He watched my facial expressions; he noted my style of argument. Females tend to smile at their interlocutors more than males do. Females pause and look for signs of agreement before continuing. Males just look into the middle distance and hold forth. Women prefer the anecdotal, men the deductive. It was impossible to be in Luce’s line of work without falling back on such stereotypes. He knew their limitations. But they were clinically useful.
   When I wasn’t being questioned about my life and feelings, I was writing about them. Most days I sat typing up what Luce called my “Psychological Narrative.” That early autobiography didn’t begin: “I was born twice.” Flashy, rhetorical openings were something I had to get the hang of. It started simply, with the words “My name is Calliope Stephanides. I am fourteen years old. Going on fifteen.” I began with the facts and followed them as long as I could.
   Sing, Muse, how cunning Calliope wrote on that battered Smith Corona! Sing how the typewriter hummed and trembled at her psychiatric revelations! Sing of its two cartridges, one for typing and one for correcting, that so eloquently represented her predicament, poised between the print of genetics and the Wite-Out of surgery. Sing of the weird smell the typewriter gave off, like WD-40 and salami, and of the Day-Glo flower decal the last person who’d used it had applied, and of the broken F key, which stuck. On that newfangled but soon-to-be obsolete machine I wrote not so much like a kid from the Midwest as a minister’s daughter from Shropshire. I still have a copy of my psychological narrative somewhere. Luce published it in his collected works, omitting my name. “I would like to tell of my life,” it runs at one point, “and of the experiences that make myriad my joys and sorrows upon this planet we call Earth.” In describing my mother, I say, “Her beauty is the kind which seems to be thrown into relief by grief.” A few pages on there comes the subheading “Calumnies Caustic and Catty by Callie.” Half the time I wrote like bad George Eliot, the other half like bad Salinger. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s television.” Not true: I loved television! But on that Smith Corona I quickly discovered that telling the truth wasn’t nearly as much fun as making things up. I also knew that I was writing for an audience—Dr. Luce—and that if I seemed normal enough, he might send me back home. This explains the passages about my love of cats (“feline affection”), the pie recipes, and my deep feelings for nature.
   Luce ate it all up. It’s true; I have to give credit where credit’s due. Luce was the first person to encourage my writing. Every night he read through what I had typed up during the day. He didn’t know, of course, that I was making up most of what I wrote, pretending to be the all-American daughter my parents wanted me to be. I fictionalized early “sex play” and later crushes on boys; I transferred my feeling for the Object onto Jerome and it was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
   Luce was interested in the gender giveaways of my prose, of course. He measured my jouissance against my linearity. He picked up on my Victorian flourishes, my antique diction, my girls’ school propriety. These all weighed heavily in his final assessment.
   There was also the diagnostic tool of pornography. One afternoon when I arrived for my session with Dr. Luce, there was a movie projector in his office. A screen had been set up before the bookcase, and the blinds drawn. In syrupy light Luce was feeding the celluloid through the sprocket wheel.
   “Are you going to show me my dad’s movie again? From when I was little?”
   “Today I’ve got something a little different,” said Luce.
   I took up my customary position on the chaise, my arms folded behind me on the cowhide. Dr. Luce switched off the lights and soon the movie began.
   It was about a pizza delivery girl. The title was, in fact, Annie Delivers to Your Door. In the first scene, Annie, wearing cutoffs and a midriff-revealing, Ellie-May blouse, gets out of her car before an oceanside house. She rings the bell. No one is at home. Not wanting the pizza to go to waste, she sits down next to the pool and begins to eat.
   The production values were low. The pool boy, when he arrived, was badly lit. It was hard to hear what he was saying. But soon enough he was no longer saying anything. Annie had begun to remove her clothes. She was down on her knees. The pool boy was naked, too, and then they were on the steps, in the pool, on the diving board, pumping, writhing. I closed my eyes. I didn’t like the raw meat colors of the film. It wasn’t at all beautiful like the tiny paintings in Luce’s office.
   In a straightforward voice Luce asked from the darkness, “Which one turns you on?”
   “Excuse me?”
   “Which one turns you on? The woman or the man?”
   The true answer was neither. But truth would not do.
   Sticking to my cover story, I managed to get out, very quietly, “The boy.”
   “The pool boy? That’s good. I dig the pizza girl myself. She’s got a great bod.” A sheltered child once, from a reserved Presbyterian home, Luce was now liberated, free of antisexualism. “She’s got incredible tits,” he said. “You like her tits? Do they turn you on?”
   “No.”
   “The guy’s cock turns you on?”
   I nodded, barely, wishing it would be over. But it was not over for a while yet. Annie had other pizzas to deliver. Luce wanted to watch each one.
   Sometimes he brought other doctors to see me. A typical unveiling went as follows. I was summoned from my writing studio in the back of the Clinic. In Luce’s office two men in business suits were waiting. They stood when I came in. Luce made introductions. “Callie, I want to you meet Dr. Craig and Dr. Winters.”
   The doctors shook my hand. It was their first bit of data: my handshake. Dr. Craig squeezed hard, Winters less so. They were careful about not seeming too eager. Like men meeting a fashion model, they trained their eyes away from my body and pretended to be interested in me as a person. Luce said, “Callie’s been here at the Clinic for just about a week now.”
   “How do you like New York?” asked Dr. Craig.
   “I’ve hardly seen it.”
   The doctors gave me sightseeing suggestions. The atmosphere was light, friendly. Luce put his hand on the small of my back. Men have an annoying way of doing that. They touch your back as though there’s a handle there, and direct you where they want you to go. Or they place their hand on top of your head, paternally. Men and their hands. You’ve got to watch them every minute. Luce’s hand was now proclaiming: Here she is. My star attraction. The terrible thing was that I responded to it; I liked the feel of Luce’s hand on my back. I liked the attention. Here were all these people who wanted to meet me.
   Pretty soon Luce’s hand was escorting me down the hall into the examination room. I knew the drill. Behind the screen I undressed while the doctors waited. The green paper gown was folded on the chair.
   “The family comes from where, Peter?”
   “Turkey. Originally.”
   “I’m only acquainted with the Papua New Guinea study,” said Craig.
   “Among the Sambia, right?” asked Winters.
   “Yes, that’s right,” Luce answered. “There’s a high incidence of the mutation there as well. The Sambia are interesting from a sexological point of view, too. They practice ritualized homosexuality. Sambia males consider contact with females highly polluting. So they’ve organized social structures to limit exposure as much as possible. The men and boys sleep on one side of the village, the women and girls on the other side. The men go into the women’s longhouse only to procreate. In and out. In fact, the Sambia word for ‘vagina’ translates literally as ‘that thing which is truly no good.’ ”
   Soft chuckling came from the other side of the screen.
   I came out, feeling awkward. I was taller than everyone else in the room, though I weighed much less. The floor felt cold against my bare feet as I crossed to the exam table and jumped up.
   I lay back. Without having to be told, I lifted my legs and fit my heels in the gynecological stirrups. The room had gone ominously silent. The three doctors came forward, staring down. Their heads formed a trinity above me. Luce pulled the curtain across the table.
   They bent over me, studying my parts, while Luce led a guided tour. I didn’t know what most of the words meant but after the third or fourth time I could recite the list by heart. “Muscular habitus … no gynecomastia … hypospadias … urogenital sinus … blind vaginal pouch …” These were my claim to fame. I didn’t feel famous, however. In fact, behind the curtain, I no longer felt as if I were in the room.
   “How old is she?” Dr. Winters asked.
   “Fourteen,” Luce answered. “She’ll be fifteen in January.”
   “So your position is that chromosomal status has been completely overridden by rearing?”
   “I think that’s pretty clear.”
   As I lay there, letting Luce, in rubber gloves, do what he had to do, I got a sense of things. Luce wanted to impress the men with the importance of his work. He needed funding to keep the clinic running. The surgery he performed on transsexuals wasn’t a selling point over at the March of Dimes. To get them interested you had to pull at the heartstrings. You had to put a face on suffering. Luce was trying to do that with me. I was perfect, so polite, so midwestern. No unseemliness attached itself to me, no hint of cross-dresser bars or ads in the back of louche magazines.
   Dr. Craig wasn’t convinced. “Fascinating case, Peter. No question. But my people will want to know the applications.”
   “It’s a very rare condition,” Luce admitted. “Exceedingly rare. But in terms of research, its importance can’t be overstated. For the reasons I outlined in my office.” Luce remained vague for my benefit, but still persuasive enough for theirs. He hadn’t gotten where he was without certain lobbyist gifts. Meanwhile I was there and not there, cringing at Luce’s touch, sprouting goose bumps, and worrying that I hadn’t washed properly.
   I remember this, too. A long narrow room on a different floor of the hospital. A riser set up at one end before a butterfly light. The photographer putting film in his camera.
   “Okay, I’m ready,” he said.
   I dropped my robe. Almost used to it now, I climbed up on the riser before the measuring chart.
   “Hold your arms out a little.”
   “Like this?”
   “That’s good. I don’t want a shadow.”
   He didn’t tell me to smile. The textbook publishers would make sure to cover my face. The black box: a fig leaf in reverse, concealing identity while leaving shame exposed.
   Every night Milton called us in our room. Tessie put on a bright voice for him. Milton tried to sound happy when I got on the line. But I took the opportunity to whine and complain.
   “I’m sick of this hotel. When can we go home?”
   “Soon as you’re better,” Milton said.
   When it was time for sleep, we drew the window curtains and turned off the lights.
   “Good night, honey. See you in the morning.”
   “Night.”
   But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that word: “better.” What did my father mean? What were they going to do to me? Street sounds made it up to the room, curiously distinct, echoing off the stone building opposite. I listened to the police sirens, the angry horns. My pillow was thin. It smelled like a smoker. Across the strip of carpet my mother was already asleep. Before my conception, she had agreed to my father’s outlandish plan to determine my sex. She had done this so that she wouldn’t be alone, so that she would have a girlfriend in the house. And I had been that friend. I had always been close to my mother. Our temperaments were alike. We liked nothing better than to sit on park benches and watch the faces go by. Now the face I was watching was Tessie’s in the other bed. It looked white, blank, as if her cold cream had removed not only her makeup but her personality. Tessie’s eyes were moving, though; under the lids they skated back and forth. Callie couldn’t imagine the things Tessie was seeing in her dreams back then. But I can. Tessie was dreaming a family dream. A version of the nightmares Desdemona had after listening to Fard’s sermons. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling, dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Tessie didn’t allow herself to think about such things during the day, so they came to her at night. Was it her fault? Should she have resisted Milton when he tried to bend nature to his will? Was there really a God after all, and did He punish people on Earth? These Old World superstitions had been banished from my mother’s conscious mind, but they still operated in her dreams. From the other bed I watched the play of these dark forces on my mother’s sleeping face.

Looking Myself up in Webster’s

   I tossed and turned every night, unable to sleep straight through. I was like the princess and the pea. A pellet of disquiet kept unsettling me. Sometimes I awoke with the feeling that a spotlight had been trained on me while I slept. It was as if my ether body had been conversing with angels, somewhere up near the ceiling. When I opened my eyes they fled. But I could hear the traces of the communication, the fading echoes of the crystal bell. Some essential information was rising from the depths of my being. This information was on the tip of my tongue and yet never surfaced. One thing was certain: it was all connected with the Object somehow. I lay awake thinking about her, wondering how she was, and pining, grieving.
   I thought of Detroit, too, of its vacant lots of pale Osiris grass springing up between the condemned houses and those not yet condemned, and of the river with its iron runoff, the dead carp floating on the surface, white bellies flaking. I thought of fishermen standing on the concrete freighter docks with their bait buckets and tallboys, the baseball game on the radio. It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.” My time at the Clinic did that to me. I feel a direct line extending from that girl with her knees steepled beneath the hotel blankets to this person writing now in an Aeron chair. Hers was the duty to live out a mythical life in the actual world, mine to tell about it now. I didn’t have the resources at fourteen, didn’t know enough, hadn’t been to the Anatolian mountain the Greeks call Olympus and the Turks Uludag, just like the soft drink. I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It’s always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans.
   In the end, it took Luce two weeks to make his determination about me. He scheduled an appointment with my parents for the following Monday.
   Milton had been jetting around during the two weeks, checking on his Hercules franchises, but on the Friday preceding the appointment he flew back to New York. We spent the weekend spiritlessly sightseeing, assailed by unspoken anxieties. On Monday morning my parents dropped me off at the New York Public Library while they went to see Dr. Luce.
   My father had dressed that morning with special care. Despite an outward show of tranquillity, Milton was beset by an unaccustomed feeling of dread, and so armored himself in his most commanding clothes: over his plump body, a charcoal pinstripe suit; around his bullfrog neck, a Countess Mara necktie; and in the buttonholes of his shirtsleeves, his “lucky” Greek Drama cuff links. Like our Acropolis nightlight, the cuff links had come from Jackie Halas’s souvenir shop in Greektown. Milton wore them whenever he met with bank loan officers or auditors from the IRS. That Monday morning, however, he had trouble putting the cuff links in; his hands were not steady enough. In exasperation he asked Tessie to do it. “What’s the matter?” she asked tenderly. But Milton snapped, “Just put the cuff links in, will you?” He held out his arms, looking away, embarrassed by his body’s weakness.
   Silently Tessie inserted the links, tragedy in one sleeve, comedy in the other. As we came out of the hotel that morning they glittered in the early morning sun, and under the influence of those two-sided accessories, what happened next took on contrasting tones. There was tragedy, certainly, in Milton’s expression as they left me off at the library. During Milton’s time away, his image of me had reverted to the girl I’d been a year earlier. Now he faced the real me again. He saw my ungainly movements as I climbed the library steps, the broadness of my shoulders inside my Papagallo coat. Watching from the cab, Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is something determined before you’re born, something you can’t escape or do anything about, no matter how hard you try. And Tessie, so used to feeling the world through her husband, saw that my problem was getting worse, was accelerating. Their hearts were wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings, in a cuff link set all its own…
   …But now the cab was driving away, Milton was wiping his brow with his handkerchief; and the grinning face in his right sleeve came into view, for there was a comic aspect to events that day, too. There was comedy in the way Milton, while still worrying about me, kept one eye on the rocketing taxi meter. At the Clinic, there was comedy in the way Tessie, idly picking up a waiting-room magazine, found herself reading about the juvenile sexual rehearsal play of rhesus monkeys. There was even a brand of harsh satire in my parents’ quest itself, because it typified the American belief that everything can be solved by doctors. All this comedy, however, is retrospective. As Milton and Tessie prepared to see Dr. Luce, a hot foam was rising in their stomachs. Milton was thinking back to his early navy days, to his time in the landing craft. This was just like that. Any minute the door was going to drop away and they would have to plunge into the churning night surf…
   In his office Luce got straight to the point. “Let me review the facts of your daughter’s case,” he said. Tessie noted the change at once. Daughter. He had said “daughter.”
   The sexologist was looking reassuringly medical that morning. Over his cashmere turtleneck he wore an actual white coat. In his hand he held a sketchpad. His ballpoint pen bore the name of a pharmaceutical company. The blinds were drawn, the light low. The couples in the Mughal miniatures had modestly covered themselves in shadow. Sitting in his designer chair, with tomes and journals rising behind him, Dr. Luce appeared serious, full of expertise, as was his speech. “What I’m drawing here,” he began, “are the fetal genital structures. In other words, this is what a baby’s genitals look like in the womb, in the first few weeks after conception. Male or female, it’s all the same. These two circles here are what we call the all-purpose gonads. This little squiggle here is a Wolffian duct. And this other squiggle is a Müllerian duct. Okay? The thing to keep in mind is that everybody starts out like this. We’re all born with potential boy parts and girl parts. You, Mr. Stephanides, Mrs. Stephanides, me—everybody. Now”—he started drawing again—“as the fetus develops in the womb, what happens is that hormones and enzymes are released—let’s make them arrows. What do these hormones and enzymes do? Well, they turn these circles and squiggles into either boy parts or girl parts. See this circle, the all-purpose gonad? It can become either an ovary or a testis. And this squiggly Müllerian duct can either wither up”—he scratched it out—“or grow into a uterus, fallopian tubes, and the inside of the vagina. This Wolffian duct can either wither away or grow into a seminal vesicle, epididymis, and vas deferens. Depending on the hormonal and enzymatic influences.” Luce looked up and smiled. “You don’t have to worry about the terminology. The main thing to remember is this: every baby has Müllerian structures, which are potential girl parts, and Wolffian structures, which are potential boy parts. Those are the internal genitalia. But the same thing goes for the external genitalia. A penis is just a very large clitoris. They grow from the same root.”
   Dr. Luce stopped once more. He folded his hands. My parents, leaning forward in the chairs, waited.
   “As I explained, any determination of gender identity must take into account a host of factors. The most important, in your daughter’s case”—there it was again, confidently proclaimed—“is that she has been raised for fourteen years as a girl and indeed thinks of herself as female. Her interests, gestures, psychosexual makeup—all these are female. Are you with me so far?”
   Milton and Tessie nodded.
   “Due to her 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, Callie’s body does not respond to dihydrotestosterone. What this means is that, in utero, she followed a primarily female line of development. Especially in terms of the external genitalia. That, coupled with her being brought up as a girl, resulted in her thinking, acting, and looking like a girl. The problem came when she started to go through puberty. At puberty, the other androgen—testosterone—started to exert a strong effect. The simplest way to put it is like this: Callie is a girl who has a little too much male hormone. We want to correct that.”
   Neither Milton nor Tessie said a word. They weren’t following everything the doctor was saying but, as people do with doctors, they were attentive to his manner, trying to see how serious things were. Luce seemed optimistic, confident, and Tessie and Milton began to be filled with hope.
   “That’s the biology. It’s a very rare genetic condition, by the way. The only other populations where we know of this mutation expressing itself are in the Dominican Republic, Papua New Guinea, and southeastern Turkey. Not that far from the village your parents came from. About three hundred miles, in fact.” Luce removed his silver glasses. “Do you know of any family member who may have had a similar genital appearance to your daughter’s?”
   “Not that we know of,” said Milton.
   “When did your parents immigrate?”
   “Nineteen twenty-two.”
   “Do you have any relatives still living in Turkey?”
   “Not anymore.”
   Luce looked disappointed. He had one arm of his glasses in his mouth, and was chewing on it. Possibly he was imagining what it would be like to discover a whole new population of carriers of the 5-alpha-reductase mutation. He had to content himself with discovering me.
   He put his glasses back on. “The treatment I’d recommend for your daughter is twofold. First, hormone injections. Second, cosmetic surgery. The hormone treatments will initiate breast development and enhance her female secondary sex characteristics. The surgery will make Callie look exactly like the girl she feels herself to be. In fact, she will be that girl. Her outside and inside will conform. She will look like a normal girl. Nobody will be able to tell a thing. And then Callie can go on and enjoy her life.”
   Milton’s brow was still furrowed with concentration but from his eyes there was light appearing, rays of relief. He turned toward Tessie and patted her leg.
   But in a timid, breaking voice Tessie asked, “Will she be able to have children?”
   Luce paused only a second. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Stephanides. Callie will never menstruate.”
   “But she’s been menstruating for a few months now,” Tessie objected.
   “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Possibly there was some bleeding from another source.”
   Tessie’s eyes filled with tears. She looked away.
   “I just got a postcard from a former patient,” Luce said consolingly. “She had a condition similar to your daughter’s. She’s married now. She and her husband adopted two kids and they’re as happy as can be. She plays in the Cleveland Orchestra. Bassoon.”
   There was a silence, until Milton asked, “Is that it, Doctor? You do this one surgery and we can take her home?”
   “We may have to do additional surgery at a later date. But the immediate answer to your question is yes. After the procedure, she can go home.”
   “How long will she be in the hospital?”
   “Only overnight.”
   It was not a difficult decision, especially as Luce had framed it. A single surgery and some injections would end the nightmare and give my parents back their daughter, their Calliope, intact. The same enticement that had led my grandparents to do the unthinkable now offered itself to Milton and Tessie. No one would know. No one would ever know.
   While my parents were being given a crash course in gonadogenesis, I—still officially Calliope—was doing some homework myself. In the Reading Room of the New York Public Library I was looking up something in the dictionary. Dr. Luce was correct in thinking that his conversations with colleagues and medical students were over my head. I didn’t know what “5-alpha-reductase” meant, or “gynecomastia,” or “inguinal canal.” But Luce had underestimated my abilities, too. He didn’t take into consideration the rigorous curriculum at my prep school. He didn’t allow for my excellent research and study skills. Most of all, he didn’t factor in the power of my Latin teachers, Miss Barrie and Miss Silber. So now, as my Wallabees made squishing sounds between the reading tables, as a few men looked up from their books to see what was coming and then looked down (the world was no longer full of eyes), I heard Miss Barrie’s voice in my ear. “Infants, define this word for me: hypospadias. Use your Greek or Latin roots.”
   The little schoolgirl in my head wriggled in her desk, hand raised high. “Yes, Calliope?” Miss Barrie called on me.
   “Hypo. Below or beneath. Like ‘hypodermic.’ ”
   “Brilliant. And spadias?”
   “Um um …”
   “Can anyone come to our poor muse’s aid?”
   But, in the classroom of my brain, no one could. So that was why I was here. Because I knew that I had something below or beneath but I didn’t know what that something was.
   I had never seen such a big dictionary before. The Webster’s at the New York Public Library stood in the same relation to other dictionaries of my acquaintance as the Empire State Building did to other buildings. It was an ancient, medieval-looking thing, bound in brown leather that brought to mind a falconer’s gauntlet. The pages were gilded like the Bible’s.
   Flipping pages through the alphabet, past cantabile to eryngo, past fandango to formicate (that’s with an m), past hypertonia to hyposensitivity, and there it was:


   hypospadias new latin, from Greek, man with hypospadias fr. hypo + prob from spadon, eunuch, fr. span, to tear, pluck, pull, draw.—An abnormality of the penis in which the urethra opens on its under surface. See synonyms at eunuch.


   I did as instructed and got


   eunuch—1. a castrated man; especially, one of those who were employed as harem attendants or functionaries in certain Oriental courts.2. a man whose testes have not developed. See synonyms at hermaphrodite.


   Following where the trail led, I finally reached


   hermaphrodite–1. one having the sex organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics of both male and female. 2. anything comprised of a combination of diverse or contradictory elements. See synonyms at monster.


   And that is where I stopped. And looked up, to see if anyone was watching. The vast Reading Room thrummed with silent energy: people thinking, writing. The painted ceiling bellied overhead like a sail, and down below the green desk lamps glowed, illuminating faces bent over books. I was stooping over mine, my hair falling onto the pages, covering up the definition of myself. My lime green coat was hanging open. I had an appointment with Luce later in the day and my hair was washed, my underpants fresh. My bladder was full and I crossed my legs, putting off a trip to the bathroom. Fear was stabbing me. I longed to be held, caressed, and that was impossible. I laid my hand on the dictionary and looked at it. Slender, leaf-shaped, it had a braided rope ring on one finger, a gift from the Object. The rope was getting dirty. I looked at my pretty hand and then pulled it away and faced the word again.
   There it was, monster, in black and white, in a battered dictionary in a great city library. A venerable, old book, the shape and size of a headstone, with yellowing pages that bore marks of the multitudes who had consulted them before me. There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions. The chain suggested that some library visitors might take it upon themselves to see that the dictionary circulated. The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence. Callie herself was holding on to this chain now. She was tugging on it, winding it around her hand so that her fingers went white, as she stared down at that word. Monster. Still there. It had not moved. And she wasn’t reading this word on the wall of her old bathroom stall. There was graffiti in Webster’s but the synonym wasn’t part of it. The synonym was official, authoritative; it was the verdict that the culture gave on a person like her. Monster. That was what she was. That was what Dr. Luce and his colleagues had been saying. It explained so much, really. It explained her mother crying in the next room. It explained the false cheer in Milton’s voice. It explained why her parents had brought her to New York, so that the doctors could work in secret. It explained the photographs, too. What did people do when they came upon Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster? They tried to get a picture. For a second Callie saw herself that way. As a lumbering, shaggy creature pausing at the edge of woods. As a humped convolvulus rearing its dragon’s head from an icy lake. Her eyes were filling now, making the print swim, and she turned away and hurried out of the library.
   But the synonym pursued her. All the way out the door and down the steps between the stone lions, Webster’s Dictionary kept calling after her, Monster, Monster! The bright banners hanging from the tympanum proclaimed the word. The definition inserted itself into billboards and the ads on passing buses. On Fifth Avenue a cab was pulling up. Her father jumped out, smiling and waving. When Callie saw him, her heart lifted. The voice of Webster’s stopped speaking in her head. Her father wouldn’t be smiling like that unless the news from the doctor had been good. Callie laughed and sprinted down the library steps, almost tripping. Her emotions soared for the time it took to reach the street, maybe five or eight seconds. But coming closer to Milton, she learned something about medical reports. The more people smile, the worse the news. Milton grinned at her, perspiring in pinstripes, and once again the tragedy cuff link glinted in the sun.
   They knew. Her parents knew she was a monster. And yet here was Milton, opening the car door for her; here was Tessie, inside, smiling as Callie climbed in. The cab took them to a restaurant and soon the three of them were looking over menus and ordering food.
   Milton waited until the drinks were served. Then, somewhat formally, he began. “Your mother and I had a little chat with the doctor this morning, as you are aware. The good news is that you’ll be back at home this week. You won’t miss much school. Now for the bad news. Are you ready for the bad news, Cal?”
   Milton’s eyes were saying that the bad news was not all that bad.
   “The bad news is you have to have a little operation. Very minor. ‘Operation’ isn’t really the right word. I think the doctor called it a ‘procedure.’ They have to knock you out and you have to stay overnight in the hospital. That’s it. There’ll be some pain but they can give you painkillers for it.”
   With that, Milton rested. Tessie reached out and patted Callie’s hand. “It’ll be okay, honey,” she said in a thickened voice. Her eyes were watery, red.
   “What kind of operation?” Callie asked her father.
   “Just a little cosmetic procedure. Like getting a mole removed.” He reached out and playfully caught Callie’s nose between his knuckles. “Or getting your nose fixed.”
   Callie pulled her head away, angry. “Don’t do that!”
   “Sorry,” said Milton. He cleared his throat, blinking.
   “What’s wrong with me?” Calliope asked, and now her voice broke. Tears were running down her cheeks. “What’s wrong with me, Daddy?”
   Milton’s face darkened. He swallowed hard. Callie waited for him to say the word, to quote Webster’s, but he didn’t. He only looked at her across the table, his head low, his eyes dark, warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Milton’s eyes that it was impossible to look for truth.
   “It’s a hormonal thing, what you’ve got,” he said. “I was always under the impression that men had male hormones and women had female hormones. But everybody has both, apparently.”
   Still Callie waited.
   “What you’ve got, see, is you’ve got a little too much of the male hormones and not quite enough of the female hormones. So what the doctor wants to do is give you a shot every now and then to get everything working right.”
   He didn’t say the word. I didn’t make him.
   “It’s a hormonal thing,” Milton repeated. “In the grand scheme of things, no big deal.”
   Luce believed that a patient of my age was capable of understanding the essentials. And so, that afternoon, he did not mince words. In his mellow, pleasing, educated voice, looking directly into my eyes, Luce declared that I was a girl whose clitoris was merely larger than those of other girls. He drew the same charts for me as he had for my parents. When I pressed him on the details of my surgery, he said only this: “We’re going to do an operation to finish your genitalia. They’re not quite finished yet and we want to finish them.”
   He never mentioned anything about hypospadias, and I began to hope that the word didn’t apply to me. Maybe I had taken it out of context. Dr. Luce may have been referring to another patient. Webster’s had said that hypospadias was an abnormality of the penis. But Dr. Luce was telling me that I had a clitoris. I understood that both these things grew out of the same fetal gonad, but that didn’t matter. If I had a clitoris—and a specialist was telling me that I did—what could I be but a girl?
   The adolescent ego is a hazy thing, amorphous, cloudlike. It wasn’t difficult to pour my identity into different vessels. In a sense, I was able to take whatever form was demanded of me. I only wanted to know the dimensions. Luce was providing them. My parents supported him. The prospect of having everything solved was wildly attractive to me, too, and while I lay on the chaise I didn’t ask myself where my feelings for the Object fit in. I only wanted it all to be over. I wanted to go home and forget it had ever happened. So I listened to Luce quietly and made no objections.
   He explained the estrogen injections would induce my breasts to grow. “You won’t be Raquel Welch, but you won’t be Twiggy either.” My facial hair would diminish. My voice would rise from tenor to alto. But when I asked if I would finally get my period, Dr. Luce was frank. “No. You won’t. Ever. You won’t be able to have a baby yourself, Callie. If you want to have a family, you’ll have to adopt.”
   I received this news calmly. Having children wasn’t something I thought much about at fourteen.
   There was a knock on the door, and the receptionist stuck her head in. “Sorry, Dr. Luce. But could I bother you a minute?”
   “That depends on Callie.” He smiled at me. “You mind taking a little break? I’ll be right back.”
   “I don’t mind.”
   “Sit there a few minutes and see if any other questions occur to you.” He left the room.
   While he was gone, I didn’t think of any other questions. I sat in my chair, not thinking anything at all. My mind was curiously blank. It was the blankness of obedience. With the unerring instinct of children, I had surmised what my parents wanted from me. They wanted me to stay the way I was. And this was what Dr. Luce now promised.
   I was brought out of my abstracted state by a salmon-colored cloud passing low in the sky. I got up and went to the window to look out at the river. I pressed my cheek against the glass to see as far south as possible, where the skyscrapers rose. I told myself that I would live in New York when I grew up. “This is the city for me,” I said. I had begun to cry again. I tried to stop. Dabbing at my eyes, I wandered around the office and finally found myself in front of one of the Mughal miniatures. In the small, ebony frame, two tiny figures were making love. Despite the exertion implied by their activity, their faces looked peaceful. Their expressions showed neither strain nor ecstasy. But of course the faces weren’t the focal point. The geometry of the lovers’ bodies, the graceful calligraphy of their limbs led the eye straight to the fact of their genitalia. The woman’s pubic hair was like a patch of evergreen against white snow, the man’s member like a redwood sprouting from it. I looked. I looked once again to see how other people were made. As I looked, I didn’t take sides. I understood both the urgency of the man and the pleasure of the woman. My mind was no longer blank. It was filling with a dark knowledge.
   I swung around. I wheeled and looked at Dr. Luce’s desk. A file sat open there. He had left it when he hurried off.


PRELIMINARY STUDY:
GENETIC XY (MALE) RAISED AS FEMALE

   The following illustrative case indicates that there is no preordained correspondence between genetic and genital structure, or between masculine or feminine behavior and chromosomal status.

   SUBJECT: Calliope Stephanides
   INTERVIEWER: Peter Luce, M.D.

   INTRODUCTORY DATA: The patient is fourteen years old. She has lived as a female all her life. At birth, somatic appearance was of a penis so small as to appear to be a clitoris. The subject’s XY karyotype was not discovered until puberty, when she began to virilize. The girl’s parents at first refused to believe the doctor who delivered the news and subsequently asked for two other opinions before coming to the Gender Identity Clinic and New York Hospital Clinic.
   During examination, undescended testes could be palpated. The “penis” was slightly hypospadiac, with the urethra opening on the underside. The girl has always sat to urinate like other girls. Blood tests confirmed an XY chromosomal status. In addition, blood tests revealed that the subject was suffering from 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. An exploratory laparotomy was not performed.
   A family photograph (see case file) shows her at age twelve. She appears to be a happy, healthy girl with no visible signs of tomboyishness, despite her XY karyotype.
   FIRST IMPRESSION: The subject’s facial expression, though somewhat stern at times, is overall pleasant and receptive, with frequent smiling. The subject often casts her eyes downward in a modest or coy manner. She is feminine in her movements and gestures, and the slight gracelessness of her walk is in keeping with females of her generation. Though due to her height some people may find the subject’s gender at first glance somewhat indeterminate, any prolonged observation would result in a decision that she was indeed a girl. Her voice, in fact, has a soft, breathy quality. She inclines her head to listen when another person speaks and does not hold forth or assert her opinions in a bullying manner characteristic of males. She often makes humorous remarks.
   FAMILY: The girl’s parents are fairly typical Midwesterners of the World War II generation. The father identifies himself as a Republican. The mother is a friendly, intelligent, and caring person, perhaps slightly prone to depression or neurosis. She accedes to the subservient wifely role typical of women of her generation. The father only came to the Clinic twice, citing business obligations, but from those two meetings it is apparent that he is a dominating presence, a “self-made” man and former naval officer. In addition, the subject has been raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition, with its strongly sex-defined roles. In general the parents seem assimilationist and very “all-American” in their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not be overlooked.
   SEXUAL FUNCTION: The subject reports engaging in childhood sexual play with other children, in every case of which she acted as the feminine partner, usually pulling up her dress and letting a boy simulate coition atop her. She experienced pleasurable erotosexual sensations by positioning herself by the water jets of a neighbor’s swimming pool. She masturbated frequently from a young age.
   The subject has had no serious boyfriends, but this may be due to her attending an all-girls school or from a feeling of shame about her body. The subject is aware of the abnormal appearance of her genitalia and has gone to great lengths in the locker room and other communal dressing areas to avoid being seen naked. Nevertheless, she reports having had sexual intercourse, one time only, with the brother of her best friend, an experience she found painful but which was successful from the point of view of teenage romantic exploration.
   INTERVIEW: The subject spoke in rapid bursts, clearly and articulately but with the occasional breathlessness associated with anxiety. Speech patterning and characteristics appeared to be feminine in terms of oscillation of pitch and direct eye contact. She expresses sexual interest in males exclusively.
   CONCLUSION: In speech, mannerisms, and dress, the subject manifests a feminine gender identity and role, despite a contrary chromosomal status.
   It is clear by this that sex of rearing, rather than genetic determinants, plays a greater role in the establishment of gender identity.
   As the girl’s gender identity was firmly established as female at the time her condition was discovered, a decision to implement feminizing surgery along with corresponding hormonal treatments seems correct. To leave the genitals as they are today would expose her to all manner of humiliation. Though it is possible that the surgery may result in partial or total loss of erotosexual sensation, sexual pleasure is only one factor in a happy life. The ability to marry and pass as a normal woman in society are also important goals, both of which will not be possible without feminizing surgery and hormone treatment. Also, it is hoped that new methods of surgery will minimize the effects of erotosexual dysfunction brought about by surgeries in the past, when feminizing surgery was in its infancy.
   That evening, when my mother and I got back to the hotel, Milton had a surprise. Tickets to a Broadway musical. I acted excited but later, after dinner, crawled into my parents’ bed, claiming I was too tired to go.
   “Too tired?” Milton said. “What do you mean you’re too tired?”
   “That’s okay, honey,” said Tessie. “You don’t have to go.”
   “Supposed to be a good show, Cal.”
   “Is Ethel Merman in it?” I asked.
   “No, smartass,” Milton said, smiling. “Ethel Merman is not in it. She’s not on Broadway right now. So we’re seeing something with Carol Channing. She’s pretty good, too. Why don’t you come along?”
   “No thanks,” I said.
   “Okay, then. You’re missing out.”
   They started to go. “Bye, honey,” my mother said.
   Suddenly I jumped out of bed and ran to Tessie, hugging her.
   “What’s this for?” she asked.
   My eyes brimmed with tears. Tessie took them to be tears of relief at everything we’d been through. In the narrow entryway carved from a former suite, cockeyed, dim, the two of us stood hugging and crying.
   When they were gone, I got my suitcase from the closet. Then, looking at the turquoise flowers, I exchanged it for my father’s suitcase, a gray Samsonite. I left my skirts and my Fair Isle sweater in the dresser drawers. I packed only the darker garments, a blue crew neck, the alligator shirts, and my corduroys. The brassiere I abandoned, too. For the time being, I held on to my socks and panties, and I tossed in my toiletry case entire. When I was finished, I searched in Milton’s garment bag for the cash he’d hidden there. The wad was fairly large and came to nearly three hundred dollars.
   It wasn’t all Dr. Luce’s fault. I had lied to him about many things. His decision was based on false data. But he had been false in turn.
   On a piece of stationery, I left a note for my parents.

   Dear Mom and Dad,
   I know you’re only trying to do what’s best for me, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure what’s best. I love you and don’t want to be a problem, so I’ve decided to go away. I know you’ll say I’m not a problem, but I know I am. If you want to know why I’m doing this, you should ask Dr. Luce, who is a big liar! I am not a girl. I’m a boy. That’s what I found out today. So I’m going where no one knows me. Everyone in Grosse Pointe will talk when they find out.
   Sorry I took your money, Dad, but I promise to pay you back someday, with interest.
   Please don’t worry about me. I will be ALL RIGHT!

   Despite its content, I signed this declaration to my parents: “Callie.”
   It was the last time I was ever their daughter.

Go West, Young Man

   Once again, in Berlin, a Stephanides lives among the Turks. I feel comfortable here in Schöneberg. The Turkish shops along Hauptstrasse are like those my father used to take me to. The food is the same, the dried figs, the halvah, the stuffed grape leaves. The faces are the same, too, seamed, dark-eyed, significantly boned. Despite family history, I feel drawn to Turkey. I’d like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle.
   Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the döner restaurant downstairs. He bakes bread in a stone oven like those they used to have in Smyrna. He uses a long-handled spatula to shift and retrieve the bread. All day long he works, fourteen, sixteen hours, with unflagging concentration, his sandals leaving prints in the flour dust on the floor. An artist of bread baking. Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Hauptstrasse here in the year 2001. We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.


* * *

   The bell on the door of Ed’s Barbershop in the Scranton bus station merrily rang. Ed, who had been reading the newspaper, lowered it to greet his next customer.
   There was a pause. And then Ed said, “What happened? You lose a bet?”
   Standing inside the door but looking as though he might flee back out of it was a teenage kid, tall, stringy, and an odd mix if ever Ed saw one. His hair was a hippie’s and came down past his shoulders. But he was wearing a dark suit. The jacket was baggy and the trousers were too short, riding high above his chunky tan, square-toed shoes. Even from across the shop Ed detected a musty, thrift-store smell. Yet the kid’s suitcase was big and gray, a businessman’s.
   “I’m just tired of the style,” the kid answered.
   “You and me both,” said Ed the barber.
   He directed me to a chair. I—the easily rechristened Cal Stephanides, teen runaway—set my suitcase down and hung my jacket on the rack. I walked across the room, concentrating as I did on walking like a boy. Like a stroke victim, I was having to relearn all the simple motor skills. As far as walking went, this wasn’t too difficult. The time when Baker & Inglis girls had balanced books on their heads was long gone. The slight gracelessness of my walk, which Dr. Luce had commented on, predisposed me to join the graceless sex. My skeleton was a male’s, with its higher center of gravity. It promoted a tidy, forward thrust. It was my knees that gave me trouble. I had a tendency to walk knock-kneed, which made my hips sway and my back end twitch. I tried to keep my pelvis steady now. To walk like a boy you let your shoulders sway, not your hips. And you kept your feet farther apart. All this I had learned in a day and a half on the road.
   I climbed into the chair, glad to stop moving. Ed the barber tied a paper bib around my neck. Next he draped an apron over me. All the while he was taking my measure and shaking his head. “I never understood what it was with you young people and the long hair. Nearly ruined my business. I get mostly retired fellas in here. Guys who come in my shop for a haircut, they don’t have any hair.” He chuckled, but only briefly. “Okay, so nowadays the hairstyles are a little bit shorter. I think, good, maybe I can make a living. But no. Now everyone wants to go unisex. They want to be shampooed.” He leaned toward me, suspicious. “You don’t want a shampoo, do you?”
   “Just a haircut.”
   He nodded, satisfied. “How do you want it?”
   “Short,” I ventured.
   “Short short?” he asked.
   “Short,” I said, “but not too short.”
   “Okay. Short but not too short. Good idea. See how the other half lives.”
   I froze, thinking he meant something by this. But he was only joking.
   As for himself, Ed kept a neat head. What hair he had was slicked back. He had a brutal, pugnacious face. His nostrils were dark and fiery as he labored around me, pumping up the chair and stropping his razor.
   “Your father let you keep your hair like this?”
   “Up until now.”
   “So the old man is finally straightening you out. Listen, you won’t regret it. Women don’t want a guy looks like a girl. Don’t believe what they tell you, they want a sensitive male. Bullshit!”
   The swearing, the straight razors, the shaving brushes, all these were my welcome to the masculine world. The barber had the football game on the TV. The calendar showed a vodka bottle and a pretty girl in a white fur bikini. I planted my feet on the waffle iron of the footrest while he swiveled me back and forth before the flashing mirrors.
   “Holy mackerel, when’s the last time you had a haircut anyway?”
   “Remember the moon landing?”
   “Yeah. That’s about right.”
   He turned me to face the mirror. And there she was, for the last time, in the silvered glass: Calliope. She still wasn’t gone yet. She was like a captive spirit, peeking out.
   Ed the barber put a comb in my long hair. He lifted it experimentally, making snipping sounds with his scissors. The blades weren’t touching my hair. The snipping was only a kind of mental barbering, a limbering up. This gave me time for second thoughts. What was I doing? What if Dr. Luce was right? What if that girl in the mirror really was me? How did I think I could defect to the other side so easily? What did I know about boys, about men? I didn’t even like them that much.
   “This is like taking down a tree,” opined Ed. “First you gotta go in and lop off the branches. Then you chop down the trunk.”
   I closed my eyes. I refused to return Calliope’s gaze any longer. I gripped the armrests and waited for the barber to do his work. But in the next second the scissors clinked onto the shelf. With a buzz, the electric clippers switched on. They circled my head like bees. Again Ed the barber lifted my hair with his comb and I heard the buzzer dive in toward my head. “Here we go,” he said.
   My eyes were still closed. But I knew there was no going back now. The clippers raked across my scalp. I held firm. Hair fell away in strips.
   “I should charge you extra,” said Ed.
   Now I did open my eyes, alarmed about the cost. “How much is it?”
   “Don’t worry. Same price. This is my patriotic deed today. I’m making the world safe for democracy.”
   My grandparents had fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was fleeing myself. I felt that I was saving myself just as definitively. I was fleeing without much money in my pocket and under the alias of my new gender. A ship didn’t carry me across the ocean; instead, a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come.
   I was also scared. I had never been out on my own before. I didn’t know how the world operated or how much things cost. From the Lochmoor Hotel I had taken a cab to the bus terminal, not knowing the way. At Port Authority I wandered past the tie shops and fast-food stalls, looking for the ticket booths. When I found them I bought a ticket for a night bus to Chicago, paying the fare as far as Scranton, Pennsylvania, which was as much as I thought I could afford. The bums and druggies occupying the scoop benches looked me over, sometimes hissing or smacking their lips. They scared me, too. I nearly gave up the idea of running away. If I hurried, I could make it back to the hotel before Milton and Tessie returned from seeing Carol Channing. I sat in the waiting area, considering this, the edge of the Samsonite clamped between my knees as though any minute someone might try to snatch it away. I played out scenes in my head where I declared my intention of living as a boy and my parents, at first protesting but then breaking down, accepted me. A policeman passed by. When he was gone I went to sit next to a middle-aged woman, hoping to be taken for her daughter. Over the loudspeaker a voice announced that my bus was boarding. I looked up at the other passengers, the poor traveling by night. There was an aging cowboy carrying a duffel bag and a souvenir Louis Armstrong statuette; there were two Sri Lankan Catholic priests; there were no less than three overweight mothers loaded down with children and bedding, and a little man who turned out to be a horse jockey, with cigarette wrinkles and brown teeth. They lined up to board the bus while the scene in my head began to go off on its own, to stop taking my directorial notes. Now Milton was shaking his head no, and Dr. Luce was putting on a surgical mask, and my schoolmates back in Grosse Pointe were pointing at me and laughing, their faces lit with malicious joy.
   In a trance of fear, dazed yet trembling, I proceeded onto the dark bus. For protection I took a seat next to the middle-aged lady. The other passengers, accustomed to these night journeys, were already taking out thermoses and unwrapping sandwiches. The smell of fried chicken began to waft from the back seats. I was suddenly very hungry. I wished that I were back at the hotel, ordering room service. I would have to get new clothes soon. I needed to look older and less like prey. I had to start dressing like a boy. The bus pulled out of Port Authority and I watched, terrified at what I was doing but unable to stop myself, as we made our way out of the city and through the long yellow-lit dizzy tunnel that led to New Jersey. Going underground, through the rock, with the filthy river bottom above us, and fish swimming in the black water on the other side of the curving tiles.
   At a Salvation Army outlet in Scranton, not far from the bus station, I went looking for a suit. I pretended I was shopping for my brother, though no one asked any questions. Male sizes baffled me. I held the jackets discreetly against me to see what might fit. Finally I found a suit roughly my size. It was sturdy-looking and all-weather. The label inside said “Durenmatt’s Men’s Clothiers, Pittsburgh.” I took off my Papagallo. Checking to see if anyone was watching, I tried the jacket on. I didn’t feel what a boy would feel. It wasn’t like putting on your father’s jacket and becoming a man. It was like being cold and having your date give you his jacket to wear. As it settled on my shoulders, the jacket felt big, warm, comforting, alien. (And who was my date in this case? The football captain? No. My steady was the World War II vet, dead of heart disease. My guy was the Elk Lodge member who had moved to Texas.)
   The suit was only part of my new identity. It was the haircut that mattered most. Now, in the barbershop, Ed was going at me with a whisk brush. The bristles cast a powder in the air and I closed my eyes. I felt myself being wheeled around again and the barber said, “Okay, that’s it.”
   I opened my eyes. And in the mirror I didn’t see myself. Not the Mona Lisa with the enigmatic smile any longer. Not the shy girl with the tangled black hair in her face, but instead her fraternal twin brother. With the screen of my hair removed, the recent changes in my face were far more evident. My jaw looked squarer, broader, my neck thicker, with a bulge of Adam’s apple in the center. It was unquestionably a male face, but the feelings inside that boy were still a girl’s. To cut off your hair after a breakup was a feminine reaction. It was a way to start over, to renounce vanity, to spite love. I knew that I would never see the Object again. Despite bigger problems, greater worries, it was heartbreak that seized me when I first saw my male face in the mirror. I thought: it’s over. By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.
   By the time I came out of Ed’s Barbershop, I was a new creation. The other people passing through the bus station, to the extent they noticed me at all, took me for a student at a nearby boarding school. A prep school kid, a touch arty, wearing an old man’s suit and no doubt reading Camus or Kerouac. There was a kind of beatnik quality to the Durenmatt’s suit. The trousers had a sharkskin sheen. Because of my height I could pass for older than I was, seventeen, maybe eighteen. Under the suit was a crew neck sweater, under the sweater was an alligator shirt, two protective layers of parental money next to my skin, plus the golden Wallabees on my feet. If anyone noticed me, they thought I was playing dress-up, as teenagers do.
   Inside these clothes my heart was still beating like mad. I didn’t know what to do next. Suddenly I had to pay attention to things I’d never paid any attention to. To bus schedules and bus fares, to budgeting money, to worrying about money, to scanning a menu for the absolutely cheapest thing that would fill me up, which that day in Scranton turned out to be chili. I ate a bowl of it, stirring in multiple packets of crackers, and looked over the bus routes. The best thing to do, it being fall, was to head south or west for the winter, and because I didn’t want to go south I decided to go west. To California. Why not? I checked to see what the fare would be. As I feared, it was too much.
   Throughout the morning it had drizzled on and off, but now the clouds were breaking up. Across the desperate eatery, through the rain-greased windows and beyond the access road that bounded a strip of sloping littered grass, ran the Interstate. I watched the traffic whizzing along, feeling less hungry now but still lonely and scared. The waitress came over and asked if I wanted coffee. Though I had never had a cup of coffee before, I said yes. After she served it to me, I doctored it with two packets of creamer and four of sugar. When it tasted roughly like coffee ice cream, I drank it.
   From the terminal buses were steadily pulling out, leaving gassy trails. Down on the highway cars sped along. I wanted to take a shower. I wanted to lie down in clean sheets and go to sleep. I could get a motel room for $9.95, but I wanted to be farther away before I did that. I sat in the booth for a long time. I couldn’t see my way to the next step. Finally, an idea occurred to me. Paying my bill, I left the bus terminal. I crossed the access road and shuffled down the slope. I set down my suitcase on the shoulder and, stepping out to face the oncoming traffic, tentatively stuck out my thumb.
   My parents had always cautioned me against hitchhiking. Sometimes Milton pointed out stories in the newspaper detailing the gruesome ends of coeds who had made that mistake. My thumb was not very high in the air. Half of me was against the idea. Cars sped past. No one stopped. My reluctant thumb was shaking.
   I had miscalculated with Luce. I thought that after talking to me he would decide that I was normal and leave me alone. But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people—and especially doctors—had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.
   As for my parents, I held them blameless. They were only trying to save me from humiliation, lovelessness, even death. I learned later that Dr. Luce had emphasized the medical risk in letting my condition go untreated. The “gonadal tissue,” as he referred to my undescended testes, often became cancerous in later years. (I’m forty-one now, however, and so far nothing has happened.)
   A semi appeared around the bend, blowing black smoke from an upright exhaust pipe. In the window of the red cab the driver’s head was bouncing like the head of a doll on a spring. His face turned in my direction, and as the huge truck roared past, he engaged the brakes. The rear wheels of the cab smoked a little, squealed, and then twenty yards ahead of me the truck was waiting.
   Lifting my suitcase, with a wild excitement, I ran up to the truck. But when I reached it I stopped. The door looked so high up. The huge vehicle sat rumbling, shuddering. I couldn’t see the driver from my vantage point and stood paralyzed with indecision. Then suddenly the trucker’s face appeared in the window, startling me. He opened the door.
   “You coming up or what?”
   “Coming,” I said.
   The cab was not clean. He had been traveling for some time and there were food containers and bottles strewn around.
   “Your job is to keep me awake,” the trucker said.
   When I didn’t respond right away he looked over at me. His eyes were red. Red, too, were the Fu Manchu mustache and the long sideburns. “Just keep talking,” he said.
   “What do you want to talk about?”
   “Fuck-all if I know!” he shouted angrily. But just as suddenly: “Indians! You know anything about Indians?”
   “American Indians?”
   “Yeah. I pick up a lot of Injuns when I drive out west. Those are some of the craziest motherfuckers I ever heard. They got all kinds of theories and shit.”
   “Like what?”
   “Like some of ’em say they didn’t come over the Bering land bridge. Are you familiar with the Bering land bridge? That’s up there in Alaska. Called the Bering Strait now. It’s water. Little sliver of water between Alaska and Russia. Long time ago, though, it was land, and that’s where the Indians came over from. From like China or Mongolia. Indians are really Orientals.”
   “I didn’t know that,” I said. I was feeling less scared now than before. The trucker was apparently taking me at face value.
   “But some of these Indians I pick up, they say their people didn’t come over the land bridge. They say they come from a lost island, like Atlantis.”
   “Join the club.”
   “You know what else they say?”
   “What?”
   “They say it was Indians wrote the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution!”
   As it turned out, he did most of the talking. I said very little. But my presence was enough to keep him awake. Talking about Indians reminded him about meteors; there was a meteor in Montana that the Indians considered sacred, and soon he was telling me about the celestial sights a trucker’s life acquainted a person with, the shooting stars and comets and green rays. “You ever seen a green ray?” he asked me.
   “No.”
   “They say you can’t take a picture of a green ray, but I got one. I always keep a camera in the cab in case I come across some mind-blowing shit like that. And one time I saw this green ray and I grabbed my camera and I got it. I’ve got the picture at home.”
   “What is a green ray?”
   “It’s the color the sun makes when it rises and sets. For two seconds. You can see it best in the mountains.”
   He took me as far as Ohio and let me off in front of a motel. I thanked him for the ride and carried my suitcase up to the office. Here the suit also came in useful. Plus the expensive luggage. I didn’t look like a runaway. The motel clerk may have had doubts about my age, but I laid money on the counter right away, and the key was forthcoming.
   After Ohio came Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. I rode in station wagons, sport cars, rented vans. Single women never picked me up, only men, or men with women. A pair of Dutch tourists stopped for me, complaining about the frigidity of American beer, and sometimes I got rides from couples who were fighting and tired of each other. In every case, people took me for the teenage boy I was every minute more conclusively becoming. Sophie Sassoon wasn’t around to wax my mustache, so it began to fill in, a smudge above my upper lip. My voice continued to deepen. Every jolt in the road dropped my Adam’s apple another notch in my neck.
   If people asked, I told them I was on my way to California for my freshman year at college. I didn’t know much about the world, but I knew something about colleges, or at least about homework, and so claimed that I was going to Stanford to live in a dorm. To be honest, my drivers weren’t too suspicious. They didn’t care one way or another. They had their own agendas. They were bored, or lonely, and wanted someone to talk to.
   Like a convert to a new religion, I overdid it at first. Somewhere near Gay, Indiana, I adopted a swagger. I rarely smiled. My expression throughout Illinois was the Clint Eastwood squint. It was all a bluff, but so was it on most men. We were all walking around squinting at each other. My swagger wasn’t that different from what lots of adolescent boys put on, trying to be manly. For that reason it was convincing. Its very falseness made it credible. Now and then I fell out of character. Feeling something stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I kicked up my heel and looked back over my shoulder to see what it was, rather than crossing my leg in front of me and twisting up my shoe. I picked correct change from my open palm instead of my trouser pocket. Such slips made me panic, but needlessly. No one noticed. I was aided by that: as a rule people don’t notice much.
   It would be a lie to tell you I understood everything I was feeling. You don’t, at fourteen. An instinct for self-preservation told me to run, and I was running. Dread pursued me. I missed my parents. I felt guilty for making them worry. Dr. Luce’s report haunted me. At night, in various motels, I cried myself to sleep. Running away didn’t make me feel any less of a monster. I saw ahead of me only humiliation and rejection, and I wept for my life.
   But in the mornings I woke up feeling better. I left my motel room and went out to stand in the air of the world. I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long. Somehow I was able to forget about myself for long stretches. I ate doughnuts for breakfast. I kept drinking very sweet, milky coffee. To lift my mood, I did things my parents wouldn’t have let me do, ordering two and sometimes three desserts and never eating salads. I was free now to let my teeth rot or to put my feet up on the backs of seats. Sometimes while I was hitching I saw other runaways. Under overpasses or in runoff drains they congregated, smoking cigarettes, the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled up. They were tougher than I was, scroungier. I steered clear of their packs. They were from broken homes, had been physically abused and now abused others. I wasn’t anything like them. I had brought my family’s upward mobility out onto the road. I joined no packs but went my way alone.
   And now, amid the prairie, appears the recreation vehicle belonging to Myron and Sylvia Bresnick, of Pelham, New York. Like a modern-day covered wagon, it rolls out of the waving grasslands and stops. A door opens, like the door of a house, and standing inside is a perky woman in her late sixties.
   “I think we’ve got room for you,” she says.
   A moment before, I had been on Route 80 in western Iowa. But now as I carry my suitcase onto this ship of the prairie, I am suddenly in the Bresnicks’ living room. Framed photographs of their children hang on the walls, along with Chagall prints. The history of Winston Churchill that Myron is working his way through at night at the hookups sits on the coffee table.
   Myron is a retired parts salesman, Sylvia a former social worker. In profile she resembles a cute Punchinello, her cheeks expressive, painted, and the nose carved for comic effect. Myron works his lips around his cigar, foul and intimate with his own juices.
   While Myron drives, Sylvia gives me a tour of the beds, the shower, the living area. What school do I go to? What do I want to be? She peppers me with questions.
   Myron turns from the wheel and booms, “Stanford! Good school!”
   And it is right then that it happens. At some moment on Route 80 something clicks in my head and suddenly I feel I am getting the hang of it. Myron and Sylvia are treating me like a son. Under this collective delusion I become that, for a little while at least. I become male-identified.
   But something daughterly must cling to me, too. For soon Sylvia has taken me aside to complain about her husband. “I know it’s tacky. This whole RV thing. You should see the people we meet in these camps. They call it the ‘RV lifestyle.’ Oh, they’re nice enough—but boring. I miss going to cultural events. Myron says he spent his life traveling around the country too busy to see it. So he’s doing it over again—slowly. And guess who gets dragged along?”
   “My heart?” Myron is calling to her. “Could you bring your husband an iced tea, please? He’s parched.”
   They let me off in Nebraska. I counted my money and found I had two hundred and thirty dollars left. I found a cheap room in a kind of boardinghouse and stayed the night. I was still too scared to hitchhike in the dark.
   On the road there was time for minor adjustments. Many of the socks I’d brought were the wrong color—pink, white, or covered with whales. Also my underpants weren’t the right kind. At a Woolworth’s in Nebraska City I bought a three-pack of boxer shorts. As a girl, I had worn size large. As a boy, medium. I trolled through the toiletries section, too. Instead of row upon row of beauty products there was only a single rack of hygienic essentials. The explosion in men’s cosmetics hadn’t happened yet. There were no pampering unguents disguised by rugged names. No Heavy-Duty Skin Repair. No Anti-Burn Shave Gel. I selected deodorant, disposable razors, and shaving cream. The colorful cologne bottles attracted me, but my experience with aftershaves was not favorable. Cologne made me think of voice coaches, of maître d’s, of old men and their unwanted embraces. I picked out a man’s wallet, too. At the register, I couldn’t look the cashier in the face, as embarrassed as if I were buying condoms. The cashier wasn’t much older than I was, with blond, feathered hair. That heartland look.
   At restaurants I began to use the men’s rooms. This was perhaps the hardest adjustment. I was scandalized by the filth of men’s rooms, the rank smells and pig sounds, the grunting and huffing from the stalls. Urine was forever puddled on the floors. Scraps of soiled toilet paper adhered to the commodes. When you entered a stall, more often than not a plumbing emergency greeted you, a brown tide, a soup of dead frogs. To think that a toilet stall had once been a haven for me! That was all over now. I could see at once that men’s rooms, unlike the ladies’, provided no comfort. Often there wasn’t even a mirror, or any hand soap. And while the closeted, flatulent men showed no shame, at the urinals men acted nervous. They looked straight ahead like horses with blinders.
   I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.
   A word on penises. What was Cal’s official position on penises? Among them, surrounded by them, his feelings were the same as they had been as a girl: by equal measures fascinated and horrified. Penises had never really done that much for me. My girlfriends and I had a comical opinion of them. We hid our guilty interest by giggling or pretending disgust. Like every schoolgirl on a field trip, I’d had my blushing moments among the Roman antiquities. I’d stolen peeks when the teacher’s back was turned. It’s our first art lesson as kids, isn’t it? The nudes are dressed. They’re dressed in high-mindedness. Being six years older, my brother had never shared a bathtub with me. The glimpses of his genitals I’d had over the years were fleeting. I’d studiously looked away. Even Jerome had penetrated me without my seeing what went on. Anything so long concealed couldn’t fail to intrigue me. But the glimpses those men’s rooms afforded were on the whole disappointing. The proud phallus was nowhere in evidence, only the feed bag, the dry tuber, the snail that had lost its shell.
   And I was scared to death of being caught looking. Despite my suit, my haircut, and my height, every time I went into a men’s room a shout rang out in my head: “You’re in the men’s!” But the men’s was where I was supposed to be. Nobody said a word. Nobody objected to my presence. And so I searched for a stall that looked halfway clean. I had to sit to urinate. Still do.
   At night, on the fungal carpets of motel rooms, I did exercises, push-ups and sit-ups. Wearing nothing but my new boxers, I examined my physique in the mirror. Not long ago I’d fretted over my failure to develop. That worry was gone now. I didn’t have to live up to that standard anymore. The impossible demands had been removed and I felt a vast relief. But there were also moments of dislocation, staring at my changing body. Sometimes it didn’t feel like my own. It was hard, white, bony. Beautiful in its own way, I supposed, but Spartan. Not receptive or pliant at all. Contents under pressure, rather.
   It was in those motel rooms that I learned about my new body, its specific instructions and contraindications. The Object and I had worked in the dark. She had never really explored my apparatus much. The Clinic had medicalized my genitals. During my time there they were numb or slightly tender from the constant examinations. My body had shut down in order to get through the ordeal. But traveling woke it up. Alone, with the door locked and the chain on, I experimented with myself. I put pillows between my legs. I lay on top of them. Half paying attention, while I watched Johnny Carson, my hand prospected. The anxiety I’d always felt about how I was made had kept me from exploring the way most kids did. So it was only now, lost to the world and everyone I knew, that I had the courage to try it out. I can’t discount the importance of this. If I had doubts about my decision, if I sometimes thought about turning back, running back to my parents and the Clinic and giving in, what stopped me was this private ecstasy between my legs. I knew it would be taken from me. I don’t want to overestimate the sexual. But it was a powerful force for me, especially at fourteen, with my nerves bright and jangling, ready to launch into a symphony at the slightest provocation. That was how Cal discovered himself, in voluptuous, liquid, sterile culmination, couchant upon two or three deformed pillows, with the shades drawn and the drained swimming pool outside and the cars passing, endlessly, all night.
   Outside Nebraska City, a silver Nova hatchback pulled over. I ran up with my suitcase and opened the passenger door. At the wheel was a good-looking man in his early thirties. He wore a tweed coat and yellow V-neck sweater. His plaid shirt was open at the collar, but the wings were crisp with starch. The formality of his clothes contrasted with his relaxed manner. “Hello deh,” he said, doing a Brooklyn accent.
   “Thanks for stopping.”
   He lit a cigarette and introduced himself, extending his hand. “Ben Scheer.”
   “My name’s Cal.”
   He didn’t ask the usual questions about my origin and destination. Instead, as we drove off, he asked, “Where did you get that suit?”
   “Salvation Army.”
   “Real nice.”
   “Really?” I said. And then reconsidered. “You’re teasing.”
   “No, I’m not,” said Scheer. “I like a suit somebody died in. It’s very existential.”
   “What’s that?”
   “What’s what?”
   “Existential?”
   He gave me a direct look. “An existentialist is someone who lives for the moment.”
   No one had ever talked to me like this before. I liked it. As we drove on through the yellow country, Scheer told me other interesting things. I learned about Ionesco and the Theater of the Absurd. Also about Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. It’s hard to express the excitement such phrases instilled in a kid like me from the cultural sticks. The Charm Bracelets wanted to pretend they were from the East, and I guess I had picked up that urge, too.
   “Did you ever live in New York?” I asked.
   “Used to.”
   “I was just there. I want to live there someday.”
   “I lived there ten years.”
   “Why did you leave?”
   Again the direct look. “I woke up one morning and realized, if I didn’t, I’d be dead in a year.”
   This, too, seemed marvelous.
   Scheer’s face was handsome, pale, with an Asiatic cast to his gray eyes. His light brown frizzy hair was scrupulously brushed, and parted by fiat. After a while I noticed other niceties of his dress, the monogrammed cuff links, the Italian loafers. I liked him immediately. Scheer was the kind of man I thought I would like to be myself.
   Suddenly, from the rear of the car there erupted a magnificent, weary, soul-emptying sigh.
   “How ya doin’, Franklin?” Scheer called.
   On hearing his name, Franklin lifted his troubled, regal head from the recesses of the hatchback, and I saw the black-and-white markings of an English setter. Ancient, rheumy-eyed, he gave me the once-over and dropped back out of sight.
   Scheer was meanwhile pulling off the highway. He had a breezy highway driving style, but when making any kind of maneuver he snapped into military action, pummeling the wheel with strong hands. He pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store. “Back in a minute.”
   Holding a cigarette at his hip like a riding crop, he walked with clipped steps into the store. While he was gone I looked around the car. It was immaculately clean, the floor mats freshly vacuumed. The glove box contained orderly maps and tapes of Mabel Mercer. Scheer reappeared with two full shopping bags.
   “I think road drinks are in order,” he said.
   He had a twelve-pack carton of beer, two bottles of Blue Nun, and a bottle of Lancers rosé, in a faux clay bottle. He set all of these on the backseat.
   This was part of being sophisticated, too. You drank cheap Liebfraumilch in plastic cups, calling it cocktails, and carved off hunks of Cheddar cheese with a Swiss Army knife. Scheer had assembled a nice hors d’oeuvre platter from meager sources. There were also olives. We headed back out across the no-man’s-land, while Scheer directed me to open the wine and serve him snacks. I was now his page. He had me put in the Mabel Mercer tape and then enlightened me about her meticulous phrasing.
   Suddenly he raised his voice. “Cops. Keep your glass down.”
   I quickly lowered my Blue Nun and we drove on, acting cool as the state trooper passed on our left.
   By now Scheer was doing the cop’s voice. “I know city slickers when I see ’em and them thar’s two of the slickest of ’em all. I’d wager they’re up to no good.”
   To all this I responded with laughter, happy to be in league against the world of hypocrites and rulemongers.
   When it began to grow dark, Scheer chose a steak house. I was worried it might be too expensive, but he told me, “Dinner’s on me tonight.”
   Inside, it was busy, a popular place, the only table open a small one near the bar.
   To the waitress Scheer said, “I’ll have a vodka martini, very dry, two olives, and my son here will have a beer.”
   The waitress looked at me.
   “He got any ID?”
   “Not on me,” I said.
   “Can’t serve you, then.”
   “I was there at his birth. I can vouch for him,” said Scheer.
   “Sorry, no ID, no alcohol.”
   “Okay, then,” said Scheer. “Changed my mind. I’ll have a vodka martini, very dry, two olives, and a beer chaser.”
   Through her tight lips the waitress said, “You gonna let your friend drink that beer I can’t serve it to you.”
   “They’re both for me,” Scheer assured her. He deepened his voice a little, opened the tone a little, injecting it with an Eastern or Ivy League authority whose influence did not entirely dissipate even all the way out here in the steak house on the plains. The waitress, resentful, complied.
   She walked off and Scheer leaned toward me. He did his hick voice again. “Nothing wrong with that gal that a good poke in the hay barn wouldn’t fix. And you’re just the stud for the job.” He didn’t seem drunk, but this crudeness was new; he was a little less precise in his movements now, his voice louder. “Yeah,” said Scheer, “I think she’s sweet on you. You and Mayella could be happy together.” I was feeling the wine strongly, too, my head like a mirrored ball, flashing lights.
   The waitress brought the drinks, setting them demonstratively on Scheer’s side of the table. As soon as she disappeared, he pushed the beer toward me and said, “There you go.”
   “Thanks.” I drank the beer in gulps, pushing it back across the table whenever the waitress passed by. It was fun to be sneaking it like this.
   But I was not unobserved. A man at the bar was watching me. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, he looked as though he disapproved. But then his face broke into a big, knowing smile. The smile made me uncomfortable and I looked away.
   When we came out again, the sky was completely dark. Before leaving, Scheer opened the hatch of the Nova to get Franklin out. The old dog could no longer walk, and Scheer had to lift him bodily out of the car. “Let’s go, Franks,” Scheer said, gruffly affectionate, and with a lit cigarette between his teeth, angled up in a patrician manner not unlike that of Franklin Roosevelt himself, in Gucci loafers and sidevented, gold-hued tweed jacket, his strong polo player’s legs braced under the weight, he carried the aged beast into the weeds.
   Before going back to the highway, he stopped at a convenience store to get more beer.
   We drove for another hour or so. Scheer consumed many beers; I worked my way through one or two. I was not at all sober and feeling sleepy. I leaned against my door, blearily looking out. A long white car came alongside us. The driver looked at me, smiling, but I was already falling asleep.
   Sometime later, Scheer shook me awake. “I’m too wrecked to drive. I’m pulling over.”
   I said nothing to this.
   “I’m going to find a motel. I’ll get you a room, too. On me.”
   I didn’t object. Soon I saw hazy motel lights. Scheer left the car and returned with my room key. He led me to my room, carrying my suitcase, and opened the door for me. I went to the bed and collapsed.
   My head was spinning. I managed to pull down the bedspread and get at the pillows.
   “You gonna sleep in your clothes?” Scheer asked as if amused.
   I felt his hand on my back, rubbing it. “You shouldn’t sleep in your clothes,” he said. He started to undress me, but I roused myself. “Just let me sleep,” I said.
   Scheer bent closer. In a thick voice he said, “Your parents kick you out, Cal? Is that it?” He sounded suddenly very drunk, as if all the day’s and night’s drinking had finally hit him.
   “I’m going to sleep,” I said.
   “Come on,” whispered Scheer. “Let me take care of you.”
   I curled up protectively, keeping my eyes closed. Scheer nuzzled me, but when I didn’t respond, he stopped. I heard him open the door and then close it behind him.
   When I awoke again, it was early in the morning. Light was coming in the windows. And Scheer was right next to me. He was hugging me clumsily, his eyes squeezed shut. “Just wanna sleep here,” he said, slurring. “Just wanna sleep.” My shirt had been unbuttoned. Scheer was wearing only his underwear. The television was on, and there were empty beers on it.
   Scheer clutched me, pressing his face into mine, making sounds. I tolerated this, feeling obliged for some reason. But when his drunken attentions became more avid, more targeted, I pushed him off me. He didn’t protest. He crumpled into a ball and quickly passed out.
   I got up and went into the bathroom. For a long while I sat on the toilet lid, hugging my knees. When I peeked out again, Scheer was still sound asleep. There was no lock on the door, but I was desperate for a shower. I took a quick one, keeping the curtain open and my eyes on the door. Then I changed into a new shirt, put my suit back on, and let myself out of the room.
   It was very early. No traffic was passing along the road. I walked away from the motel and sat on my Samsonite, waiting. Big open sky. A few birds in it. I was hungry again. My head hurt. I got out my wallet and counted my dwindling money. I contemplated calling home for the hundredth time. I started to cry but stopped myself. Then I heard a car coming. From the motel parking lot a white Lincoln Continental emerged. I put out my thumb. The car stopped alongside me and the power window slowly went down. At the wheel was the man from the restaurant the day before.
   “Where you headed?”
   “California.”
   That smile again. Like something bursting. “Well then, this is your lucky day. That’s where I’m headed, too.”
   I hesitated only a moment. Then I opened the back door of the big car and slid my suitcase in. I didn’t have, at that point, much choice in the matter.

Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco

   His name was Bob Presto. He had soft, white, fat hands and a plump face and wore a white guayabera shot with gold threads. He was vain of his voice, had been a radio announcer for many years before getting into his present line of business. What that was he didn’t specify. But its lucrative nature was evident in the white Continental with red leather seats and in Presto’s gold watch and jeweled rings, his newscaster’s hair. Despite these grown-man touches, there was much of the mama’s boy to Presto. He had the body of a little fatty, though he was big, close to two hundred pounds. He reminded me of the Big Boy at the Elias Brothers’ chain of restaurants, only older, coarsened and bloated by adult vices.
   Our conversation began the usual way, Presto asking me about myself and I giving the standard lies.
   “Where you off to in California?”
   “College.”
   “What school?”
   “Stanford.”
   “I’m impressed. I’ve got a brother-in-law went to Stanford. Big muckety-muck. Where is that again?”
   “Stanford?”
   “Yeah, what city?”
   “I forget.”
   “You forget? I thought Stanford students were supposed to be smart. How are you going to get there if you don’t know where it is?”
   “I’m meeting my friend. He’s got all the details and stuff.”
   “It’s nice to have friends,” Presto said. He turned and winked at me. I didn’t know how to interpret this wink. I kept quiet, staring forward at the road ahead.
   On the buffet-like front seat between us were many supplies, soft drink bottles and bags of chips and cookies. Presto offered me whatever I wanted. I was too hungry to refuse, and took a few cookies, trying not to wolf them down.
   “I’ll tell you,” Presto said, “the older I get, the younger college kids look. If you asked me, I’d say you were still in high school. What year you in?”
   “Freshman.”
   Again Presto’s face broke into the candy-apple grin. “I wish I were in your shoes. College is the best time of life. I hope you’re ready for all the girls.”
   A chuckle accompanied this, to which I was obliged to add one of my own. “I had a lot of girlfriends in college, Cal,” Presto said. “I worked for the college radio station. I used to get all kinds of free records. And if I liked a girl, I used to dedicate songs to her.” He gave me a sample of his style, crooning low: “This one goes out to Jennifer, queen of Anthro 101. I’d love to study your culture, baby.”
   Presto’s jowly head bowed and his eyebrows rose in modest recognition of his vocal gifts. “Let me give you a little advice about women, Cal. Voice. Voice is a big turn-on for women. Never discount voice.” Presto’s was indeed deep, dimorphically masculine. The fat of his throat increased its resonance as he explained, “Take my ex-wife, for example. When we first met, I could say anything to her and she’d go bananas. We’d be fucking and I’d say ‘English muffin’—and she’d come.”
   When I didn’t reply, Presto said, “I’m not offending you, am I? You’re not one of those Mormon kids on your mission, are you? In that suit of yours?”
   “No.”
   “Good. You had me worried for a minute. Let’s hear your voice again,” Presto said. “Come on, give me your best shot.”
   “What do you want me to say?”
   “Say ‘English muffin.’ ”
   “English muffin.”
   “I don’t work in radio anymore, Cal. I am not a professional broadcaster. But my humble opinion is that you are not DJ material. What you’ve got is a thin tenor. If you want to get laid, you’d better learn to sing.” He laughed, grinning at me. His eyes showed no merriment, however, but were hard, examining me closely. He drove one-handed, eating potato chips with the other.
   “Your voice has an unusual quality, actually. It’s hard to place.”
   It seemed best to keep quiet.
   “How old are you, Cal?”
   “I just told you.”
   “No, you didn’t.”
   “I just turned eighteen.”
   “How old do you think I am?”
   “I don’t know. Sixty?”
   “Okay, you can get out now. Sixty! I’m fifty-two, for Christ’s sake.”
   “I was going to say fifty.”
   “It’s all this weight.” He was shaking his head. “I didn’t look old until I gained all this weight. Skinny kid like you wouldn’t know about that, would you? I thought you were a chick at first, when I saw you standing by the road. I didn’t register the suit. I just saw your outline. And I thought, Jesus, what’s a young chick like that doing hitchhiking?”
   I was unable to meet Presto’s gaze now. I was beginning to feel scared again and very uncomfortable.
   “That’s when I recognized you. I saw you before. At that steak house. You were with that queer.” There was a pause. “I had him for a chicken hawk. Are you gay, Cal?”
   “What?”
   “You can tell me if you want. I’m not gay but I’ve got nothing against it.”
   “I’d like to get out now. Could you let me out?”
   Presto let go of the wheel and held his palms up in the air. “I’m sorry. I apologize. No more third degree. I won’t say another word.”
   “Just let me out.”
   “If that’s what you want, okay. But it doesn’t make sense. We’re going the same way, Cal. I’ll take you to San Francisco.” He didn’t slow down and I didn’t ask him to. He was true to his word and from then on remained mostly quiet, humming along to the radio. Every hour he made a pit stop to relieve himself and to buy more economy-sized bottles of Pepsi, more chocolate chip cookies, more red licorice and corn chips. Back on the road, he tanked up. He tilted his head back while he chewed, wary about getting crumbs on his shirtfront. Soft drinks glugged down his throat. Our conversation remained general. We drove up through the Sierra, out of Nevada and into California. We got lunch at a drive-thru. Presto paid for the hamburgers and milk shakes and I decided he was all right, friendly enough, and not after anything physical from me.
   “Time for my pills,” he said after we had eaten. “Cal, can you hand me my pill bottles? They’re in the glove compartment.”
   There were five or six different bottles. I handed them to Presto and he tried to read their labels, slanting his eyes. “Here,” he said, “steer for a minute.” I leaned over to take hold of the wheel, closer to Bob Presto than I wanted to be, while he struggled with the caps and shook out pills. “My liver’s all fucked up. Because of this hepatitis I picked up in Thailand. Fucking country almost killed me.” He held up a blue pill. “This is the one for the liver. I’ve got a blood thinner, too. And one for blood pressure. My blood’s all fucked up. I’m not supposed to eat so much.”
   In this way we drove all day, reaching San Francisco in the evening. When I saw the city, pink and white, a wedding cake arrayed on hills, a new anxiety took hold of me. All the way across the country I had absorbed myself in reaching my destination. Now I was there and I didn’t know what I would do or how I would survive.
   “I’ll drop you wherever you want,” Presto said. “You got an address where you’re staying, Cal? Your friend’s place?”
   “Anywhere’s fine.”
   “I’ll take you up to the Haight. That’ll be a good place for you to get your bearings.” We drove into the city and finally Bob Presto pulled his car over and I opened my door.
   “Thanks for the ride,” I said.
   “Sure, sure,” said Presto. He held out his hand. “And by the way, it’s Palo Alto.”
   “What?”
   “Stanford’s in Palo Alto. You should get that straight if you want anyone to believe you’re in college.” He waited for me to speak. Then in a surprisingly tender voice, a professional trick, too, no doubt, but not without effect, Presto asked, “Listen, guy, you got any place to stay?”
   “Don’t worry about me.”
   “Can I ask you something, Cal? What are you, anyway?”
   Without answering I got out of the car and opened the back door to get my suitcase. Presto turned around in his seat, a difficult maneuver for him. His voice remained soft, deep, fatherly. “Come on. I’m in the business. I might be able to help you out. You a tranny?”
   “I’m going now.”
   “Don’t get offended. I know all about pre-op and post-op and all that stuff.”
   “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I pulled my suitcase off the seat.
   “Hey, not so fast. Here. At least take my number. I could use a kid like you. Whatever you are. You need some money, don’t you? You need an easy way to make some good money, you give your old friend Bob Presto a call.”
   I took the number to get rid of him. Then I turned and walked off as though I knew where I was going.
   “Watch out in the park at night,” Presto called after me in his booming voice. “Lot of lowlifes in there.”
   My mother used to say that the umbilical cord attaching her to her children had never been completely cut. As soon as Dr. Philobosian had severed the cord of flesh, another, spiritual connection had grown up in its place. After I went missing, Tessie felt that this fanciful idea was truer than ever. In the nights, while she lay in bed waiting for the tranquilizers to take effect, she often put her hand to her navel, like a fisherman checking his line. It seemed to Tessie that she felt something. Faint vibrations reached her. From these she could tell that I was still alive, though far away, hungry, and possibly unwell. All this came in a kind of singing along the invisible cord, a singing such as whales do, crying out to one another in the deep.
   For almost a week after I disappeared, my parents had remained at the Lochmoor Hotel, hoping I might return. Finally, the NYPD detective assigned to the case told them that the best thing to do was return home. “Your daughter might call. Or turn up there. Kids usually do. If we find her, we’ll let you know. Believe me. The best thing to do is go home and stay by the phone.” Reluctantly, my parents took this advice.
   Before leaving, however, they had made an appointment with Dr. Luce. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Dr. Luce told them, offering an explanation for my disappearance. “Callie may have stolen a look at her file while I was out of my office. But she didn’t understand what she was reading.”
   “But what would make her run away?” Tessie asked. Her eyes were wide, imploring.
   “She misconstrued the facts,” Luce answered. “She oversimplified them.”
   “I’ll be honest with you, Dr. Luce,” said Milton. “Our daughter called you a liar in that note she left. I’d like an explanation why she might say something like that.”
   Luce smiled tolerantly. “She’s fourteen. Distrustful of adults.”
   “Can we take a look at that file?”
   “It won’t help you to see the file. Gender identity is very complex. It’s not a matter of sheer genetics. Neither is it a matter of purely environmental factors. Genes and environment come together at a critical moment. It’s not di-factorial. It’s tri-factorial.”
   “Let me get one thing straight,” Milton interrupted. “Is it, or is it not, still your medical opinion that Callie should stay the way she is?”
   “From the psychological assessment I was able to make during the brief time I treated Callie, I would say yes, my opinion is that she has a female gender identity.”
   Tessie’s composure broke and she sounded frantic. “Why does she say she’s a boy, then?”
   “She never said that to me,” said Luce. “That’s a new piece of the puzzle.”
   “I want to see that file,” demanded Milton
   “I’m afraid that’s not possible. The file is for my own private research purposes. You’re free to see Callie’s blood work and the other test results.”
   Milton exploded then. Shouting, swearing at Dr. Luce. “I hold you responsible. You hear me? Our daughter isn’t the kind to just run off like that. You must have done something to her. Scared her.”
   “Her situation scared her, Mr. Stephanides,” said Luce. “And let me emphasize something to you.” He rapped his knuckles against his desk. “It is of tantamount importance that you find her as soon as possible. The repercussions could be severe.”
   “What are you saying?”
   “Depression. Dysphoria. She’s in a very delicate psychological state.”
   “Tessie,” Milton looked at his wife, “you want to see the file or should we get out of here and let this bastard go screw himself.”
   “I want to see the file.” She was sniffling now. “And watch your language, please. Let’s try to be cordial.”
   Finally, Luce had given in and let them see it. After they had read the file, he offered to reevaluate my case at a future time, and expressed hope that I would soon be found.
   “I’d never take Callie back to him in a million years,” my mother said as they left.
   “I don’t know what he did to upset Callie,” said my father, “but he did something.”
   They returned to Middlesex in late September. The leaves were falling from the elms, robbing the street of shelter. The weather began to turn colder, and from her bed at night Tessie listened to the wind and the rustling leaves, wondering where I was sleeping and if I was safe. The tranquilizers didn’t subdue her panic so much as displace it. Under their sedation Tessie withdrew into an inner core of herself, a kind of viewing platform from which she could observe her anxiety. The fear was a little less with her at those times. The pills made her mouth dry. They made her head feel as though it were wrapped in cotton, and turned the periphery of her vision starry. She was supposed to take only one pill at a time, but she often took two.
   There was a place halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness where Tessie did her best thinking. During the day she busied herself with company—people were constantly stopping by the house with food, and she had to set out trays and clean up after them—but in the nights, approaching stupefaction, she had the courage to try to come to terms with the note I’d left behind.
   It was impossible for my mother to think of me as anything but her daughter. Her thoughts went in the same circle again and again. With her eyes half-open, Tessie gazed out across the dark bedroom glinting and sparking in the corners, and saw before her all the items I had ever worn or possessed. They all seemed to be heaped at the foot of her bed—the beribboned socks, the dolls, the hair clips, the full set of Madeline books, the party dresses, the red Mary Janes, the jumpers, the Easy-Bake Oven, the hula hoop. These objects were the trail that led back to me. How could such a trail lead to a boy?
   And yet now, apparently, it did. Tessie went back over the events of the last year and a half, looking for signs she might have missed. It wasn’t so different from what any mother would do, confronted with a shocking revelation about her teenage daughter. If I had died of a drug overdose or joined a cult, my mother’s thinking would have taken essentially the same form. The reappraisal was the same but the questions were different. Was that why I was so tall? Did it explain why I hadn’t gotten my period? She thought about our waxing appointments at the Golden Fleece and my husky alto—everything, really: the way I never filled out dresses right, the way women’s gloves no longer fit me. All the things Tessie had accepted as part of the awkward age suddenly seemed ominous to her. How could she not have known! She was my mother, she had given birth to me, she was closer to me than I was to myself. My pain was her pain, my joy her joy. But didn’t Callie’s face have a strange look sometimes? So intense, so … masculine. And no fat on her, nowhere at all, all bones, no hips. But it wasn’t possible … and Dr. Luce had said that Callie was a … and why hadn’t he mentioned anything about chromosomes … and how could it be true? So ran my mother’s thoughts, as her mind darkened and the glinting stopped. And after she had thought all these things, Tessie thought about the Object, about my close friendship with the Object. She remembered that day when the girl had died during the play, recalled rushing backstage to find me hugging the Object, comforting her, stroking her hair, and the wild look on my face, not really sadness at all…
   From this last thought Tessie turned back.
   Milton, on the other hand, didn’t waste time reevaluating the evidence. On hotel stationery Callie had proclaimed, “I am not a girl.” But Callie was just a kid. What did she know? Kids said all kinds of crazy things. My father didn’t understand what had made me flee my surgery. He couldn’t fathom why I wouldn’t want to be fixed, cured. And he was certain that speculating about my reasons for running away was beside the point. First they had to find me. They had to get me back safe and sound. They could deal with the medical situation later.
   Milton now dedicated himself to that end. He spent much of every day on the phone, calling police departments across the country. He pestered the detective in New York, asking if there was any progress in my case. At the public library he consulted telephone books, writing down the numbers and addresses of police departments and runaway shelters, and then he methodically went down this list, calling every number and asking if anyone had seen someone who fit my description. He sent my photograph to these police stations and he sent a memo to his franchise operators, asking them to post my picture at every Hercules restaurant. Long before my naked body appeared in medical textbooks, my face appeared on bulletin boards and in windows across the nation. The police station in San Francisco received one of the photographs, but there was little chance of my being recognized by it now. Like a real outlaw, I had already changed my appearance. And biology was perfecting my disguise day by day.
   Middlesex began to fill up with friends and relatives again. Aunt Zo and our cousins came over to give my parents moral support. Peter Tatakis closed his chiropractic office early one day and drove in from Birmingham to have dinner with Milt and Tessie. Jimmy and Phyllis Fioretos brought koulouria and ice cream. It was as if the Cyprus invasion had never happened. The women congregated in the kitchen, preparing food, while the men sat in the living room, conversing in low tones. Milton got the dusty bottles from the liquor cabinet. He removed the bottle of Crown Royal from its purple velvet sack and set it out for the guests. Our old backgammon set came out from under a stack of board games, and a few of the older women began to count their worry beads. Everyone knew that I had run away but no one knew why. Privately, they said to each other, “Do you think she’s pregnant?” And, “Did Callie have a boyfriend?” And, “She always seemed like a good kid. Never would have thought she’d pull something like this.” And, “Always crowing about their kid with the straight A’s at that hoity-toity school. Well, they’re not crowing now.”
   Father Mike held Tessie’s hand as she lay suffering on the bed upstairs. Removing his jacket, wearing only his black short-sleeved shirt and collar, he told her that he would pray for my return. He advised Tessie to go to church and light a candle for me. I ask myself now what Father Mike’s face looked like as he held my mother’s hand in the master bedroom. Was there any hint of Schadenfreude? Of taking pleasure in the unhappiness of his former fiancée? Of enjoyment at the fact that his brother-in-law’s money couldn’t protect him from this misfortune? Or of relief that for once, on the ride home, his wife, Zoë, wouldn’t be able to compare him unfavorably with Milton? I can’t answer these questions. As for my mother, she was tranquilized, and remembers only that the pressure in her eyes made Father Mike’s face appear oddly elongated, like a priest in a painting by El Greco.
   At night Tessie slept fitfully. Panic kept waking her up. In the morning she made the bed but, after breakfast, sometimes went to lie on it again, leaving her tiny white Keds neatly on the carpet and closing the shades. The sockets of her eyes darkened and the blue veins at her temples visibly throbbed. When the telephone rang, her head felt as if it would explode.
   “Hello?”
   “Any word?” It was Aunt Zo. Tessie’s heart sank.
   “No.”
   “Don’t worry. She’ll turn up.”
   They spoke for a minute before Tessie said she had to go. “I shouldn’t tie up the line.”
   Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is. After the Second World War, San Francisco was the main point of reentry for sailors returning from the Pacific. Out at sea, many of these sailors had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed in San Francisco, growing in number and attracting others, until the city became the gay capital, the homosexual Hauptstadt. (Further evidence of life’s unpredictability: the Castro is a direct outcome of the military-industrial complex.) It was the fog that appealed to those sailors because it lent the city the shifting, anonymous feeling of the sea, and in such anonymity personal change was that much easier. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the fog was rolling in over the city or whether the city was drifting out to meet it. Back in the 1940s, the fog hid what those sailors did from their fellow citizens. And the fog wasn’t done. In the fifties it filled the heads of the Beats like the foam in their cappuccinos. In the sixties it clouded the minds of the hippies like the pot smoke rising in their bongs. And in the seventies, when Cal Stephanides arrived, the fog was hiding my new friends and me in the park.
   On my third day in the Haight, I was in a café, eating a banana split. It was my second. The kick of my new freedom was wearing off. Gorging on sweets didn’t chase away the blues as it had a week earlier.
   “Spare some change?”
   I looked up. Slouching beside my small marble-topped table was a type I knew well. It was one of the underpass kids, the scroungy runaways I kept my distance from. The hood of his sweatshirt was up, framing a flushed face, ripe with pimples.
   “Sorry,” I said.
   The boy bent over, his face getting closer to mine. “Spare some change?” he said again.
   His persistence annoyed me. So I glowered at him and said, “I should ask you the same question.”
   “I’m not the one pigging out on a sundae.”
   “I told you I don’t have any spare change.”
   He glanced behind me and asked more affably, “How come you’re carrying that humongous suitcase around?”
   “That’s my business.”
   “I saw you yesterday with that thing.”
   “I have enough money for this ice cream but that’s it.”
   “Don’t you have any place to stay?”
   “I’ve got tons of places.”
   “You buy me a burger I’ll show you a good place.”
   “I said I’ve got tons.”
   “I know a good place in the park.”
   “I can go into the park myself. Anyone can go into the park.”
   “Not if they don’t want to get rolled they can’t. You don’t know what’s up, man. There’s places in the Gate that are safe and places that aren’t. Me and my friends got a nice place. Real secluded. The cops don’t even know about it, so we can just party all the time. Might let you stay there but first I need that double cheese.”
   “It was a hamburger a minute ago.”
   “You snooze, you lose. Price is going up all the time. How old are you, anyway?”
   “Eighteen.”
   “Yeah, right, like I’ll believe that. You ain’t no eighteen. I’m sixteen and you’re not any older than me. You from Marin?”
   I shook my head. It had been a while since I had spoken to anyone my age. It felt good. It made me less lonely. But I still had my guard up.
   “You’re a rich kid, though, right? Mr. Alligator?”
   I didn’t say anything. And suddenly he was all appeal, full of kid hungers, his knees shaking. “Come on, man. I’m hungry. Okay, forget the double cheese. Just a burger.”
   “All right.”
   “Cool. A burger. And fries. You said fries, right? You won’t believe this, man, but I got rich parents, too.”
   So began my time in Golden Gate Park. It turned out my new friend, Matt, wasn’t lying about his parents. He was from the Main Line. His father was a divorce lawyer in Philadelphia. Matt was the fourth child, the youngest. Stocky, with a lug’s jaw, a throaty, smoke-roughened voice, he had left home to follow the Grateful Dead the summer before but had never stopped. He sold tie-dyed T-shirts at their concerts, and dope or acid when he could. Deep in the park, where he led me, I found his cohorts.
   “This is Cal,” Matt told them. “He’s going to crash here for a while.”
   “That’s cool.”
   “You an undertaker, man?”
   “I thought it was Abe Lincoln at first.”
   “Nah, these are just Cal’s traveling clothes,” Matt said. “He’s got some others in that suitcase. Right?”
   I nodded.
   “You want to buy a shirt? I got some shirts.”
   “All right.”
   The camp was located in a grove of mimosa trees. The fuzzy red flowers on the branches were like pipe cleaners. Stretching over the dunes were huge evergreen bushes that formed natural huts. They were hollow inside, the soil dry underneath. The bushes kept the wind out and, most of the time, the rain. Inside, there was enough room to sit up. Each bush contained a few sleeping bags; you chose whichever one happened to be empty when you wanted to sleep. Communal ethics applied. Kids were always leaving the camp or showing up. It was equipped with all the stuff they abandoned: a camping stove, a pasta pot, miscellaneous silverware, jelly jar glasses, bedding, and a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee the guys tossed around, sometimes enlisting me to even out the sides. (“Jesus, Gator, you throw like a girl, man.”) They were well stocked with gorp, bongs, pipes, vials of amyl nitrate, but understocked on towels, underwear, toothpaste. There was a ditch thirty or so yards distant that we employed as a latrine. The fountain by the aquarium was good for washing oneself, but you had to do it at night to avoid the police.
   If one of the guys had a girlfriend there would be a girl around for a while. I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country. I didn’t want to be found out, so remained tight-lipped. But I would have been laconic in that company in any case. They were all Deadheads, and that was what the talk was. Who saw Jerry on which night. Who had a bootleg of which concert. Matt had flunked out of high school but had an impressive mind when it came to cataloguing Dead trivia. He carried the dates and cities of their tour in his head. He knew the lyrics of every song, when and where the Dead had played it, how many times, and what songs they had played only once. He lived in expectation of certain songs being performed as the faithful await the Messiah. Someday the Dead were going to play “Cosmic Charlie” and Matt Larson wanted to be there to see creation redeemed. He had once met Mountain Girl, Jerry’s wife. “She was so fucking cool,” he said. “I would fucking love a woman like that. If I found a lady as cool as Mountain Girl, I’d marry her and have kids and all that shit like that.”
   “Get a job, too?”
   “We could follow the tour. Keep our babies in little sacks. Papoose style. And sell weed.”
   We weren’t the only ones living in the park. Occupying some dunes on the other side of the field were homeless guys, with long beards, their faces brown from sun and dirt. They were known to ransack other people’s camps, so we never left ours unattended. That was pretty much the only rule we had. Someone always had to stand guard.
   I hung around the Deadheads because I was scared alone. My time on the road made me see the benefits of being in a pack. We had left home for different reasons. They weren’t kids I would ever have been friends with in normal circumstances, but for that brief time I made do, because I had nowhere else to go. I was never at ease around them. But they weren’t especially cruel. Fights broke out when kids had been drinking, but the ethos was nonviolent. Everyone was reading Siddhartha. An old paperback got passed around the camp. I read it, too. It’s one of the things I remember most about that time: Cal, sitting on a rock, reading Hermann Hesse and learning about the Buddha.
   “I heard the Buddha dropped acid,” said one Head. “That’s what his enlightenment was.”
   “They didn’t have acid back then, man.”
   “No, it was like, you know, a ‘shroom.”
   “I think Jerry’s the Buddha, man.”
   “Yeah!”
   “Like when I fucking saw Jerry play that forty-five-minute space jam on ‘Truckin’ in Santa Fe,’ I knew he was the Buddha.”
   In all these conversations I took no part. See Cal in the far underhang of the bushes, as all the Deadheads drift off to sleep.
   I had run away without thinking what my life would be like. I had fled without having anywhere to run to. Now I was dirty, I was running out of money. Sooner or later I would have to call my parents. But for the first time in my life, I knew that there was nothing they could do to help me. Nothing anyone could do.
   Every day I took the band to Ali Baba’s and bought them veggie burgers for seventy-five cents each. I opted out on the begging and the dope dealing. Mostly I hung around the mimosa grove, in growing despair. A few times I walked out to the beach to sit by the sea, but after a while I stopped doing that, too. Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere to go that wouldn’t be me.
   It was the opposite for my parents. Wherever they went, whatever they did, what greeted them was my absence. After the third week of my vanishing, friends and relatives stopped coming over to Middlesex in such numbers. The house got quieter. The phone didn’t ring. Milton called Chapter Eleven, who was now living in the Upper Peninsula, and said, “Your mother’s going through a rough period. We still don’t know where your sister is. I’m sure your mother would feel a little better if she could see you. Why don’t you come down for the weekend?” Milton didn’t mention anything about my note. Throughout my time at the Clinic he had kept Chapter Eleven apprised of the situation in only the simplest terms. Chapter Eleven heard the seriousness in Milton’s voice and agreed to start coming down on weekends and staying in his old bedroom. Gradually, he learned the details of my condition, reacting to them in a milder way than my parents had, which allowed them, or at least Tessie, to begin to accept the new reality. It was during those weekends that Milton, desperate to cement his restored relationship with his son, urged him once again to go into the family business. “You’re not still going with that Meg, are you?”
   “No.”
   “Well, you dropped out of your engineering studies. So what are you doing now? Your mother and I don’t have a very clear idea of your life up there in Marquette.”
   “I work in a bar.”
   “You work in a bar? Doing what?”
   “Short-order cook.”
   Milton paused only a moment. “What would you rather do, stay behind the grill or run Hercules Hot Dogs someday? You’re the one that invented them anyway.”
   Chapter Eleven did not say yes. But he did not say no. He had once been a science geek, but the sixties had changed that. Under the imperatives of that decade, Chapter Eleven had become a lacto-vegetarian, a Transcendental Meditation student, a chewer of peyote buttons. Once, long ago, he had sawed golf balls in half, trying to find out what was inside; but at some point in his life my brother had become fascinated with the interior of the mind. Convinced of the essential uselessness of formalized education, he had retreated from civilization. Both of us had our moments of getting back to nature, Chapter Eleven in the U.P. and me in my bush in Golden Gate Park. By the time my father made his offer, however, Chapter Eleven had begun to tire of the woods.
   “Come on,” Milton said, “let’s go have a Hercules right now.”
   “I don’t eat meat,” Chapter Eleven said. “How can I run the place if I don’t eat meat?”
   “I’ve been thinking about putting in salad bars,” said Milton. “Lotta people eating a low-fat diet these days.”
   “Good idea.”
   “Yeah? You think so? That can be your department, then.” Milton elbowed Chapter Eleven, kidding, “We’ll start you off as vice president in charge of salad bars.”
   They drove to the Hercules downtown. It was busy when they arrived. Milton greeted the manager, Gus Zaras. “ Yahsou.”
   Gus looked up and, a second late, began to smile broadly. “Hey there, Milt. How you doing?”
   “Fine, fine. I brought the future boss down to see the place.” He indicated Chapter Eleven.
   “Welcome to the family dynasty,” Gus joked, spreading his arms. He laughed too loudly. Seeming to realize this, he stopped. There was an awkward silence. Then Gus asked, “So, Milt, what’ll it be?”
   “Two with everything. And what do we got that’s vegetarian?”
   “We got bean soup.”
   “Okay. Get my kid here a bowl of bean soup.”
   “You got it.”
   Milton and Chapter Eleven chose stools and waited to be served. After another long silence, Milton said, “You know how many of these places your old man owns right now?”
   “How many?” said Chapter Eleven.
   “Sixty-six. Got eight in Florida.”
   That was as far as the hard sell went. Milton ate his Hercules hot dogs in silence. He knew perfectly well why Gus was acting so overfriendly. It was because he was thinking what everyone thinks when a girl disappears. He was thinking the worst. There were moments when Milton did, too. He didn’t admit it to anyone. He didn’t admit it to himself. But whenever Tessie spoke about the umbilical cord, when she claimed that she could still feel me out there somewhere, Milton found himself wanting to believe her.
   One Sunday as Tessie left for church, Milton handed her a large bill. “Light a candle for Callie. Get a bunch.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
   But after she was gone he shook his head. “What’s the matter with me? Lighting candles! Christ!” He was furious at himself for giving in to such superstition. He vowed again that he would find me; he would get me back. Somehow or other. A chance would come his way, and when it did, Milton Stephanides wouldn’t miss it.
   The Dead came to Berkeley. Matt and the other kids trooped off to the concert. I was given the job to look after the camp.
   It is midnight in the mimosa grove. I awaken, hearing noises. Lights are moving through the bushes. Voices are murmuring. The leaves over my head turn white and I can see the scaffolding of branches. Light speckles the ground, my body, my face. In the next second a flashlight comes blazing through the opening in my lair.
   The men are on me at once. One shines his flashlight in my face as the other jumps onto my chest, pinning my arms.
   “Rise and shine,” says the one with the flashlight.
   It is two homeless guys from the dunes opposite. While the one sits on top of me, the other begins searching the camp.
   “What kind of goodies you little fuckers got in here?”
   “Look at him,” says the other. “Little fucker’s gonna shit his pants.”
   I squeeze my legs together, the girlish fears still operating in me.
   They are looking for drugs mainly. The one with the flashlight shakes out the sleeping bags and searches my suitcase. After a while he comes back and gets down on one knee.
   “Where are all your friends, man? They go off and leave you all alone?”
   He has begun to go through my pockets. Soon he finds my wallet and empties it. As he does, my school ID falls out. He shines the flashlight on it.
   “What’s this? Your girlfriend?”
   He stares at the photo, grinning. “Your girlfriend like to suck cock? I bet she does.” He picks up the ID and holds it over the front of his pants, thrusting his hips. “Oh yeah, she does!”
   “Let me see that,” says the one on top of me.
   The guy with the flashlight tosses the ID onto my chest. The guy pinning me lowers his face close to mine and says in a deep voice, “Don’t you move, motherfucker.” He lets go of my arms and picks up the ID.
   I can see his face now. Grizzled beard, bad teeth, nose askew, showing septum. He contemplates the snapshot. “Skinny bitch.” He looks from me to the ID and his expression changes.
   “It’s a chick!”
   “Quick on the uptake, man. I always say that about you.”
   “No, I mean him.” He is pointing down at me. “It’s her! He’s a she.” He holds up the ID for the other one to see. The flashlight is again trained on Calliope in her blazer and blouse.
   At length the kneeling man grins. “You holding out on us? Huh? You got the goods stashed away under those pants? Hold her,” he orders. The man astride me pins my arms again while the other one undoes my belt.
   I tried to fight them off. I squirmed and kicked. But they were too strong. They got my pants down to my knees. The one aimed the flashlight and then sprang away.
   “Jesus Christ!”
   “What?”
   “Fuck!”
   “What?”
   “It’s a fucking freak.”
   “What?”
   “I’m gonna puke, man. Look!”
   No sooner had the other one done so than he let go of me as though I were contaminated. He stood up, enraged. By silent agreement, they then began to kick me. As they did, they uttered curses. The one who had pinned me drove his toe into my side. I grabbed his leg and hung on.
   “Let go of me, you fucking freak!”
   The other one was kicking me in the head. He did it three or four times before I blacked out.
   When I came to, everything was quiet. I had the impression they had gone. Then somebody chuckled. “Cross swords,” a voice said. The twin yellow streams, scintillant, intersected, soaking me.
   “Crawl back into the hole you came out of, freak.”
   They left me there.
   It was still dark out when I found the public fountain by the aquarium and bathed in it. I didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere. My right eye was swollen shut. My side hurt if I took a deep breath. I had my dad’s Samsonite with me. I had seventy-five cents to my name. I wished more than anything that I could call home. Instead, I called Bob Presto. He said he would be right over to pick me up.

Hermaphroditus

   It’s no surprise that Luce’s theory of gender identity was popular in the early seventies. Back then, as my first barber put it, everybody wanted to go unisex. The consensus was that personality was primarily determined by environment, each child a blank slate to be written on. My own medical story was only a reflection of what was happening psychologically to everyone in those years. Women were becoming more like men and men were becoming more like women. For a little while during the seventies it seemed that sexual difference might pass away. But then another thing happened.
   It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominids dating from 20,000B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can’t men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.) Why can’t women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won’t men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again.
   Therefore, it’s also no surprise that Dr. Luce’s theory had come under attack by the 1990s. The child was no longer a blank slate; every newborn had been inscribed by genetics and evolution. My life exists at the center of this debate. I am, in a sense, its solution. At first when I disappeared, Dr. Luce was desperate, feeling that he had lost his greatest find. But later, possibly realizing why I had run away, he came to the conclusion that I was not evidence in support of his theory but against it. He hoped I would stay quiet. He published his articles about me and prayed that I would never show up to refute them.
   But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t fit into any of these theories. Not the evolutionary biologists’ and not Luce’s either. My psychological makeup doesn’t accord with the essentialism popular in the intersex movement, either. Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl. I still don’t feel entirely at home among men. Desire made me cross over to the other side, desire and the facticity of my body. In the twentieth century, genetics brought the Ancient Greek notion of fate into our very cells. This new century we’ve just begun has found something different. Contrary to all expectations, the code underlying our being is woefully inadequate. Instead of the expected 200,000 genes, we have only 30,000. Not many more than a mouse.
   And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
   At any rate, in San Francisco in 1974, life was working hard to give me one.


* * *

   There it is again: the chlorine smell. Under the nasally significant odor of the girl sitting astride his lap, distinct, even, from the buttery popcorn smell that still pervades the old movie seats, Mr. Go can detect the unmistakable scent of a swimming pool. In here? In Sixty-Niners? He sniffs. Flora, the girl on his lap, says, “Do you like my perfume?” But Mr. Go does not answer. Mr. Go has a way of ignoring the girls he pays to wiggle in his lap. What he likes best is to have one girl frog-kicking on top of him while he watches another girl dancing around the glittery firemen’s pole on the stage. Mr. Go is multitasking. But tonight he is unable to divide his attentions. The swimming pool smell is distracting him. It has done so for over a week. Turning his head, which is gently bobbing under Flora’s exertions, Mr. Go looks at the line forming before the velvet rope. The fifty or so theater seats here in the Show Room are almost entirely empty. In the blue light only a few men’s heads are visible, some alone facing the stage, a few like Mr. Go with a companion riding them: those peroxide equestriennes.
   Behind the velvet rope rises a flight of stairs edged with blinking lights. To climb these stairs you must pay a separate admission of five dollars. Upon reaching the club’s second floor (Mr. Go has been told), your only option is to enter a booth, where it is then necessary to insert tokens, which you must buy downstairs for a quarter each. If you do all this, you will be afforded brief glimpses of something Mr. Go does not quite understand. Mr. Go’s English is more than adequate. He has lived in America for fifty-two years. But the sign advertising the attractions upstairs doesn’t make much sense to him. For that reason he is curious. The chlorine smell only makes him more so.
   Despite the increased traffic going upstairs in recent weeks, Mr. Go has not yet gone himself. He has remained faithful to the first floor where, for the single admission price of ten dollars, he has a choice of activities. Mr. Go might, if he so desires, quit the Show Room and go into the Dark Room at the end of the hall. In the Dark Room there are flashlights with pinpoint beams. There are huddled men, wielding said flashlights. If you work your way in far enough, you will find a girl, or sometimes two, lying on a riser carpeted in foam rubber. Of course it is in some sense an act of faith to postulate the existence of an actual girl, or even two. You never see a complete girl in the Dark Room. You see only pieces. You see what your flashlight illuminates. A knee, for instance, or a nipple. Or, of particular interest to Mr. Go and his fellows, you see the source of life, the thing of things, purified as it were, without the clutter of a person attached.
   Mr. Go might also venture into the Ball Room. In the Ball Room there are girls who long to slow-dance with Mr. Go. He doesn’t care for disco music, however, and at his age tires easily. It is too much effort to press the girls up against the padded walls of the Ball Room. Mr. Go much prefers to sit in the Show Room, in the stained Art Deco theater seats that originally belonged to a movie house in Oakland, now demolished.
   Mr. Go is seventy-three years old. Every morning, to retain his virility, he drinks a tea containing rhinoceros horn. He also eats the gall bladders of bears when he can get them at the Chinese apothecary shop near his apartment. These aphrodisiacs appear to work. Mr. Go comes into Sixty-Niners nearly every night. He has a joke he likes to tell the girls who sit on his lap. “Mr. Go go for go-go.” That is the only time he laughs or smiles, when he tells them that joke.
   If the club is not crowded—which it rarely is downstairs anymore—Flora will sometimes give Mr. Go her company for three or four songs. For a dollar she will ride him for one song, but she will sit through one or two more songs for free. This is one of Flora’s recommendations in Mr. Go’s mind. She is not young, Flora, but she has nice, clear skin. Mr. Go feels she is healthy.
   Tonight, however, after only two songs, Flora slides off Mr. Go, grumbling. “I’m not a credit bureau, you know.” She stalks off. Mr. Go rises, adjusting his pants, and right then the swimming pool smell hits him again and his curiosity gets the better of him. He shuffles out of the Show Room and gazes up the stairs at the printed sign:




   And now Mr. Go’s curiosity has gotten the better of him. He buys a ticket and a handful of tokens and waits in line with the others. When the bouncer lets him through, he climbs up the blinking stairs. The booths on the second floor have no numbers, only lights indicating whether they are occupied. He finds an empty one, closes the door behind him, and puts a token in the slot. Immediately, the screen slides away to reveal a porthole looking onto underwater depths. Music plays from a speaker in the roof and a deep voice begins narrating a story:
   “Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming there.” The voice continues, but Mr. Go is no longer paying attention. He is looking into the pool, which is blue and empty. He is wondering where the girls are. He is beginning to regret buying a ticket to Octopussy’s Garden. But just then the voice intones:
   “Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the god Hermaphroditus! Half woman, half man!”
   There is a splash from above. The water in the pool goes white, then pink. Only inches away on the other side of the porthole’s glass is a body, a living body. Mr. Go looks. He squints. He presses his face right up to the porthole. He has never seen anything like what he is seeing now. Not in all his years of visiting the Dark Room. He isn’t sure he likes what he sees. But the sight makes him feel strange, light-headed, weightless, and somehow younger. Suddenly the screen slides shut. Without hesitation Mr. Go drops another token in the slot.
   San Francisco’s Sixty-Niners, Bob Presto’s club: it stood in North Beach, within view of the skyscrapers downtown. It was a neighborhood of Italian cafés, pizza restaurants, and topless bars. In North Beach you had the glitzy strip palaces like Carol Doda’s with her famous bust outlined on the marquee. Barkers on the sidewalks collared passersby: “Gentlemen! Come in and see the show! Just have a look. Doesn’t cost anything to have a look.” While the guy outside the next club was shouting, “Our girls are the best, right this way through the curtain!” And the next, “Live erotic show, gentlemen! Plus in our establishment you can watch the football game!” The barkers were all interesting guys, poets manqués, most of them, and spent their time off in City Lights Bookstore, leafing through New Directions paperbacks. They wore striped pants, loud ties, sideburns, goatees. They tended to resemble Tom Waits, or maybe it was the other way around. Like Mamet characters, they populated an America that had never existed, a kid’s idea of sharpies and hucksters and underworld life.
   It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire. And though it would certainly add color to my story to present a descent into a seamy underworld, I can’t fail to mention that the North Beach Strip is only a few blocks long. The geography of San Francisco is too beautiful to allow seaminess to get much of a foothold, and so along with these barkers there were many tourists afoot, tourists carrying loaves of sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolates. In the daytime there were roller-skaters and hackey sack players in the parks. But at night things got a little seamy at last, and from 9P.M. to three in the morning the men streamed into Sixty-Niners.
   Which was where, obviously enough, I was now working. Five nights a week, six hours a day, for the next four months—and, fortunately, never again—I made my living by exhibiting the peculiar way I am formed. The Clinic had prepared me for it, benumbing my sense of shame, and besides, I was desperate for money. Sixty-Niners also had a perfect venue for me. I worked with two other girls, so called: Carmen and Zora.
   Presto was an exploiter, a porn dog, a sex pig, but I could have done worse. Without him I might never have found myself. After he had picked me up in the park, bruised and battered, Presto took me back to his apartment. His Namibian girlfriend, Wilhelmina, dressed my wounds. At some point I passed out again and they undressed me to put me in bed. It was then that Presto realized the extent of his windfall.
   I drifted in and out of consciousness, catching bits of what they said to each other.
   “I knew it. I knew it when I saw him at the steak house.”
   “You didn’t know a thing, Bob. You thought he was a sex-change.”
   “I knew he was a gold mine.”
   And later, Wilhelmina: “How old is he?”
   “Eighteen.”
   “He doesn’t look eighteen.”
   “He says he is.”
   “And you want to believe him, don’t you, Bob? You want him to work in the club.”
   “He called me. So I made him an offer.”
   And later still: “Why don’t you call his parents, Bob?”
   “The kid ran away from home. He doesn’t want to call his parents.”
   Octopussy’s Garden predated me. Presto had come up with the idea six months earlier. Carmen and Zora had been working there from the beginning, as Ellie and Melanie respectively. But Presto was always on the lookout for ever-freakier performers and knew I’d give him an edge over his competitors on the Strip. There was nothing like me around.
   The tank itself was not that large. Not much bigger than an above-ground swimming pool in someone’s backyard. Fifteen feet in length, maybe ten feet wide. We climbed down a ladder into the warm water. From the booths, you looked directly into the tank; it was impossible to see above the surface. So we could keep our heads out of the water, if we wanted, and talk to one another while we worked. As long as we submerged ourselves from the waist down the customers were content. “They don’t come here to see your pretty face,” was how Presto put it to me. All this made it much easier. I don’t think I could have performed in a regular peep show, face-to-face with the voyeurs. Their gaze would have sucked my soul out of me. But in the tank when I was underwater my eyes were closed. I undulated in the deep-sea silence. When I pressed myself against a porthole’s glass, I lifted my face up out of the water and so was unaware of the eyes studying my mollusk. How did I say it before? The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the creatures of air; down below, those of water. One planet, containing two worlds. The customers were the sea creatures; Zora, Carmen, and I remained essentially creatures of air. In her mermaid costume, Zora lay on the wet strip of outdoor carpeting, waiting to go on after me. Sometimes she held a joint to my lips so that I could smoke while I grabbed the rim of the pool. After my ten minutes were elapsed I clambered up onto the carpet and dried off. Over the sound system Bob Presto was saying, “Let’s hear it for Hermaphroditus, ladies and gentlemen! Only here at Octopussy’s Garden, where gender is always on a bender! I’m telling you, folks, we put the glam rock in the rock lobsters, we put the AC/DC in the mahi mahi …”
   Beached on her side, Zora with blue eyes and golden hair asked me, “Am I zipped?”
   I checked.
   “This tank is making me all congested. I’m always congested.”
   “You want something from the bar?”
   “Get me a Negroni, Cal. Thanks.”
   “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time for our next attraction here at Octopussy’s Garden. Yes, I see now that the boys from Steinhardt Aquarium are just bringing her in. Put those tokens in the boxes, ladies and gentlemen, this is something you won’t want to miss. May I have a drum roll, please? On second thought, make that a sushi roll.”
   Zora’s music started. Her overture.
   “Ladies and gentlemen, since time immemorial mariners have told stories of seeing incredible creatures, half woman, half fish, swimming in the seas. We here at Sixty-Niners did not give credence to such stories. But a tuna fisherman of our acquaintance brought us an amazing catch the other day. And now we know those stories are true. Ladies and gentlemen,” crooned Bob Presto, “does … anyone … smell … fish?”
   At that cue, Zora in her rubber suit with the flashing green sequin scales would tumble into the tank. The suit came up to her waist and left her chest and shoulders bare. Into the aquatic light Zora streamed, opening her eyes underwater as I did not, smiling at the men and women in the booths, her long blond hair flowing behind her like seaweed, tiny air bubbles beading her breasts like pearls, as she kicked her glittering emerald fish tail. She performed no lewdness. Zora’s beauty was so great that everyone was content merely to look at her, the white skin, the beautiful breasts, the taut belly with its winking navel, the magnificent curve of her swaying backside where flesh merged with scales. She swam with her arms at her sides, voluptuously fluctuating. Her face was serene, her eyes a light Caribbean blue. Downstairs a constant disco beat throbbed, but up here in Octopussy’s Garden the music was ethereal, a kind of melodious bubbling itself.
   Viewed from a certain angle, there was a kind of artistry to it. Sixty-Niners was a smut pavilion, but up in the Garden the atmosphere was exotic rather than raunchy. It was the sexual equivalent of Trader Vic’s. Viewers got to see strange things, uncommon bodies, but much of the appeal was the transport involved. Looking through their portholes, the customers were watching real bodies do the things bodies sometimes did in dreams. There were male customers, married heterosexual men, who sometimes dreamed of making love to women who possessed penises, not male penises, but thin, tapering feminized stalks, like the stamens of flowers, clitorises that had elongated tremendously from abundant desire. There were gay customers who dreamed of boys who were almost female, smooth-skinned, hairless. There were lesbian customers who dreamed of women with penises, not male penises but womanly erections, possessing a sensitivity and aliveness no dildo ever had. There is no way to tell what percentage of the population dreams such dreams of sexual transmogrification. But they came to our underwater garden every night and filled the booths to watch us.
   After Melanie the Mermaid came Ellie and Her Electrifying Eel. This eel was not at first apparent. What splashed down through the aquamarine depths appeared to be a slender Hawaiian girl, clad in a bikini of water lilies. As she swam, her top came off and she remained a girl. But when she stood on her head, in graceful water ballet, pulling her bikini bottom to her knees—ah, then it was the eel’s moment to shock. For there it was on the slender girl’s body, there it was where it should not have been, a thin brown ill-tempered-looking eel, an endangered species, and as Ellie rubbed against the glass the eel grew longer and longer; it stared at the customers with its cyclopean eye; and they looked back at her breasts, her slim waist, they looked back and forth from Ellie to eel, from eel to Ellie, and were electrified by the wedding of opposites.
   Carmen was a pre-op, male-to-female transsexual. She was from the Bronx. Small, delicately boned, she was fastidious about eyeliner and lipstick. She was always dieting. She stayed away from beer, fearing a belly. I thought she overdid the femme routine. There was entirely too much hip swaying and hair flipping in Carmen’s airspace. She had a pretty naiad’s face, a girl on the surface with a boy holding his breath just beneath. Sometimes the hormones she took made her skin break out. Her doctor (the much-in-demand Dr. Mel of San Bruno) had to constantly adjust her dosage. The only features that gave Carmen away were her voice, which remained husky despite the estrogen and progestin, and her hands. But the men never noticed that. And they wanted Carmen to be impure. That was the whole turn-on, really.
   Her story followed the traditional lines better than mine. From an early age Carmen had felt that she had been born into the wrong body. In the dressing room one day, she told me in her South Bronx voice: “I was like, yo! Who put this dick on me? I never asked for no dick.” It was still there, however, for the time being. It was what the men came to see. Zora, given to analytical thought, felt that Carmen’s admirers were motivated by latent homosexuality. But Carmen resisted this notion. “My boyfriends are all straight. They want a woman.”
   “Obviously not,” said Zora.
   “Soon as I save my money I’m having my bottom done. Then we’ll see. I’ll be more of a woman than you, Z.”
   “Fine with me,” replied Zora. “I don’t want to be anything in particular.”
   Zora had Androgen Insensitivity. Her body was immune to male hormones. Though XY like me, she had developed along female lines. But Zora had done it far better than I had. Aside from being blond, she was shapely and full-lipped. Her prominent cheekbones divided her face in Arctic planes. When Zora spoke you were aware of the skin stretching over these cheekbones and hollowing out between her jaws, the tight mask it made, banshee-like, with her blue eyes piercing through above. And then there was her figure, the milkmaid breasts, the swim champ stomach, the legs of a sprinter or a Martha Graham dancer. Even unclothed, Zora appeared to be all woman. There was no visible sign that she possessed neither womb nor ovaries. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome created the perfect woman, Zora told me. A number of top fashion models had it. “How many chicks are six two, skinny, but with big boobs? Not many. That’s normal for someone like me.”
   Beautiful or not, Zora didn’t want to be a woman. She preferred to identify herself as a hermaphrodite. She was the first one I met. The first person like me. Even back in 1974 she was using the term “intersexual,” which was rare then. Stonewall was only five years in the past. The Gay Rights Movement was under way. It was paving a path for all the identity struggles that followed, including ours. The Intersex Society of North America wouldn’t be founded until 1993, however. So I think of Zora Khyber as an early pioneer, a sort of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. Writ large, that wilderness was America, even the globe itself, but more specifically it was the redwood bungalow Zora lived in in Noe Valley and where I was now living, too. After Bob Presto had satisfied himself on the details of my manufacture, he had called Zora and arranged for me to stay with her. Zora took in strays like me. It was part of her calling. The fog of San Francisco provided cover for hermaphrodites, too. It’s no surprise that ISNA was founded in San Francisco and not somewhere else. Zora was part of all this at a very disorganized time. Before movements emerge there are centers of energy, and Zora was one of these. Mainly, her politics consisted of studying and writing. And, during the months I lived with her, in educating me, in bringing me out of what she saw as my great midwestern darkness.
   “You don’t have to work for Bob if you don’t want,” she told me. “I’m going to quit soon anyway. This is just temporary.”
   “I need the money. They stole all my money.”
   “What about your parents?”
   “I don’t want to ask them,” I said. I looked down and admitted, “I can’t call them.”
   “What happened, Cal? If you don’t mind me asking. What are you doing here?”
   “They took me to this doctor in New York. He wanted me to have an operation.”
   “So you ran away.”
   I nodded.
   “Consider yourself lucky. I didn’t know until I was twenty.”
   All this happened on my first day in Zora’s house. I hadn’t started working at the club yet. My bruises had to heal first. I wasn’t surprised to be where I was. When you travel like I did, vague about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your character. It’s the reason the first philosophers were peripatetic. Christ, too. I see myself that first day, sitting cross-legged on a batik floor pillow, drinking green tea out of a fired raku cup, and looking up at Zora with my big, hopeful, curious, attentive eyes. With my hair short, my eyes looked even bigger now, more than ever the eyes of someone in a Byzantine icon, one of those figures ascending the ladder to heaven, upward-gazing, while his fellows fall to the fiery demons below. After all my troubles, wasn’t it my right to expect some reward in the form of knowledge or revelation? In Zora’s rice-screen house, with misty light coming in at the windows, I was like a blank canvas waiting to be filled with what she told me.
   “There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That’s why everybody’s always searching for their other half. Except for us. We’ve got both halves already.”
   I didn’t say anything about the Object.
   “Okay, in some cultures we’re considered freaks,” she went on. But in others it’s just the opposite. The Navajo have a category of person they call a berdache. What a berdache is, basically, is someone who adopts a gender other than their biological one. Remember, Cal. Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. The Navajo understand this. If a person wants to switch her gender, they let her. And they don’t denigrate that person—they honor her. The berdaches are the shamans of the tribe. They’re the healers, the great weavers, the artists.”
   I wasn’t the only one! Listening to Zora, that was mainly what hit home with me. I knew right then that I had to stay in San Francisco for a while. Fate or luck had brought me here and I had to take from it what I needed. It didn’t matter what I might be compelled to do to make money. I just wanted to stay with Zora, to learn from her, and to be less alone in the world. I was already stepping through the charmed door of those druggy, celebratory, youthful days. By that first afternoon the soreness in my ribs was already lessening. Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
   Zora was writing a book. She claimed it was going to be published by a small press in Berkeley. She showed me the publisher’s catalogue. The selections were eclectic, books on Buddhism, on the mystery cult of Mithras, even a strange book (a hybrid itself) mixing genetics, cellular biology, and Hindu mysticism. What Zora was working on would certainly have fit this list. But I was never clear how actual her publishing plans were. In the years since, I’ve looked out for Zora’s book, which was called The Sacred Hermaphrodite. I’ve never found it. If she never finished it, it wasn’t a question of ability. I read most of the book myself. At my age then, I wasn’t much of a judge of literary or academic quality, but Zora’s learning was real. She had gone into her subject and had much of it by heart. Her bookshelves were full of anthropology texts and works by French structuralists and deconstructionists. She wrote nearly every day. She spread her papers and books out on her desk and took notes and typed.
   “I’ve got one question,” I asked Zora one day. “Why did you ever tell anybody?”
   “What do you mean?”
   “Look at you. No one would ever know.”
   “I want people to know, Cal.”
   “How come?”
   Zora folded her long legs under herself. With her fairy’s eyes, paisley-shaped, blue and glacial looking into mine, she said, “Because we’re what’s next.”
   “Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming there.”
   Here I lowered my feet into the pool. I lolled them back and forth as the narration continued. “Salmacis looked upon the handsome boy and her lust was kindled. She swam nearer to get a closer look.” Now I began to lower my own body into the water inch by inch: shin, knees, thighs. If I paced it the way Presto had instructed me, the peepholes slid shut at this point. Some customers left, but many dropped more tokens into the slots. The screens lifted from the portholes.
   “The water nymph tried to control herself. But the boy’s beauty was too much for her. Looking was not enough. Salmacis swam nearer and nearer. And then, overpowered by desire, she caught the boy from behind, wrapping her arms around him.” I began to kick my legs, churning up water so that it was hard for the customers to see. “Hermaphroditus struggled to free himself from the tenacious grip of the water nymph, ladies and gentlemen. But Salmacis was too strong. So unbridled was her lust that the two became one. Their bodies fused, male into female, female into male. Behold the god Hermaphroditus!” At which point I plunged into the pool entire, all of me exposed.
   And the peepholes slid shut.
   No one ever left a booth at this point. Everyone extended his or her membership to the Garden. Underwater I could hear the tokens clinking into the change boxes. It reminded me of being at home, submerging my head under bathwater and hearing the pinging in the pipes. I tried to think of things like that. It made everything seem far away. I pretended I was in the bathtub on Middlesex. Meanwhile faces filled the portholes, gazing with amazement, curiosity, disgust, desire.
   We were always stoned for work. That was a prerequisite. As we got into our costumes Zora and I would fire up a joint to start the night. Zora brought a thermos of Averna and ice, which I drank like Kool-Aid. What you aimed for was a state of half oblivion, a private party mood. This made the men less real, less noticeable. If it hadn’t been for Zora I don’t know what I would have done. Our little bungalow in the mist and trees, neatly surrounded by low-lying California ground cover, the tiny koi pond full of petstore goldfish, the outdoor Buddhist shrine made of blue granite—it was a refuge for me, a halfway house where I stayed, getting ready to go back into the world. My life during those months was as divided as my body. Nights we spent at Sixty-Niners, waiting around the tank, bored, high, giggling, unhappy. But you got used to that. You learned to medicate yourself against it and put it out of your mind.
   In the daytime Zora and I were always straight. She had one hundred and eighteen pages of her book written. These were typed on the thinnest onionskin paper I had ever seen. The manuscript was therefore perishable. You had to be careful in handling it. Zora made me sit at the kitchen table while she brought it out like a librarian with a Shakespeare folio. Otherwise, Zora didn’t treat me like a kid. She let me keep my own hours. She asked me to help with the rent. We spent most days padding around the house in our kimonos. Z. had a stern expression when she was working. I sat out on the deck and read books from her shelves, Kate Chopin, Jane Bowles, and the poetry of Gary Snyder. Though we looked nothing alike, Zora was always emphatic about our solidarity. We were up against the same prejudices and misunderstandings. I was gladdened by this, but I never felt sisterly around Zora. Not completely. I was always aware of her figure under the robe. I went around averting my eyes and trying not to stare. On the street people took me for a boy. Zora turned heads. Men whistled at her. She didn’t like men, however. Only lesbians.
   She had a dark side. She drank to extremes and sometimes acted ugly. She raged against football, male bonding, babies, breeders, politicians, and men in general. There was a violence in Zora at such times that set me on edge. She had been the high school beauty. She had submitted to caresses that had done nothing for her and to sessions of painful lovemaking. Like many beauties, Zora had attracted the worst guys. The varsity stooges. The herpetic section leaders. It was no surprise that she held a low opinion of men. Me she exempted. She thought I was okay. Not a real man at all. Which I felt was pretty much right.
   Hermaphroditus’s parents were Hermes and Aphrodite. Ovid doesn’t tell us how they felt after their child went missing. As for my own parents, they still kept the telephone nearby at all times, refusing to leave the house together. But now they were scared to answer the phone, fearing bad news. Ignorance seemed preferable to grief. Whenever the phone rang, they paused before answering it. They waited until the third or fourth peal.
   Their agony was harmonious. During the months I was missing, Milton and Tessie experienced the same spikes of panic, the same mad hopes, the same sleeplessness. It had been years since their emotional life had been so in sync and this had the result of bringing back the times when they first fell in love.
   They began to make love with a frequency they hadn’t known for years. If Chapter Eleven was out, they didn’t wait to go upstairs but used whatever room they happened to be in. They tried the red leather couch in the den; they spread out on the bluebirds and red berries of the living room sofa; and a few times they even lay down on the heavy-duty kitchen carpeting, which had a pattern of bricks. The only place they didn’t use was the basement because there was no telephone there. Their lovemaking was not passionate but slow and elegiac, carried out to the magisterial rhythms of suffering. They were not young anymore; their bodies were no longer beautiful. Tessie sometimes wept afterward. Milton kept his eyes squeezed shut. Their exertions resulted in no flowering of sensation, no release, or only seldom.
   Then one day, three months after I was gone, the signals coming over my mother’s spiritual umbilical cord stopped. Tessie was lying in bed when the faint purring or tingling in her navel ceased. She sat up. She put her hand to her belly.
   “I can’t feel her anymore!” Tessie cried.
   “What?”
   “The cord’s cut! Somebody cut the cord!”
   Milton tried to reason with Tessie, but it was no use. From that moment, my mother became convinced that something terrible had happened to me.
   And so: into the harmony of their suffering entered discord. While Milton fought to keep up a positive attitude, Tessie increasingly gave in to despair. They began to quarrel. Every now and then Milton’s optimism would sway my mother and she would become cheerful for a day or two. She would tell herself that, after all, they didn’t know anything definite. But such moods were temporary. When she was alone Tessie tried to feel something coming in over the umbilical cord, but there was nothing, not even a sign of distress.
   I had been missing four months by this time. It was now January 1975. My fifteenth birthday had passed without my being found. On a Sunday morning while Tessie was at church, praying for my return, the phone rang. Milton answered.
   “Hello?”
   At first there was no response. Milton could hear music in the background, a radio playing in another room maybe. Then a muffled voice spoke.
   “I bet you miss your daughter, Milton.”
   “Who is this?”
   “A daughter is a special thing.”
   “Who is this?” Milton demanded again, and the line went dead.
   He didn’t tell Tessie about the call. He suspected it was a crank. Or a disgruntled employee. The economy was in recession in 1975 and Milton had been forced to close a few franchises. The following Sunday, however, the phone rang again. This time Milton answered on the first ring.
   “Hello?”
   “Good morning, Milton. I have a question for you this morning. Would you like to know the question, Milton?”
   “You tell me who this is or I’m hanging up.”
   “I doubt you’ll do that, Milton. I’m the only chance you have to get your daughter back.”
   Milton did a characteristic thing right then. He swallowed, squared his shoulders, and with a small nod prepared himself to meet whatever was coming.
   “Okay,” he said, “I’m listening.”
   And the caller hung up.
   “Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool …” I could do it in my sleep now. I was asleep, considering our backstage festivities, the flowing Averna, the tranquilizing smoke. Halloween had come and gone. Thanksgiving, too, and then Christmas. On New Year’s, Bob Presto threw a big party. Zora and I drank champagne. When it was time for my act, I plunged into the pool. I was high, drunk, and so that night did something I didn’t normally do. I opened my eyes underwater. I saw the faces looking back at me and I saw that they were not appalled. I had fun in the tank that night. It was all beneficial in some way. It was therapeutic. Inside Hermaphroditus old tensions were roiling, trying to work themselves out. Traumas of the locker room were being released. Shame over having a body unlike other bodies was passing away. The monster feeling was fading. And along with shame and self-loathing another hurt was healing. Hermaphroditus was beginning to forget about the Obscure Object.
   In my last weeks in San Francisco I read everything Zora gave me, trying to educate myself. I learned what varieties we hermaphrodites came in. I read about hyperadrenocorticism and feminizing testes and something called cryptorchidism, which applied to me. I read about Kleinfelter’s Syndrome, where an extra X chromosome renders a person tall, eunuchoid, and temperamentally unpleasant. I was more interested in historical than medical material. From Zora’s manuscript I became acquainted with the hijras of India, the kwolu-aatmwols of the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, and the guevedoche of the Dominican Republic. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, writing in Germany in 1860, spoke of das dritte Geschlecht, the third gender. He called himself a Uranist and believed that he had a female soul in a male body. Many cultures on earth operated not with two genders but with three. And the third was always special, exalted, endowed with mystical gifts.
   One cold drizzly night I gave it a try. Zora was out. It was a Sunday and we were off work. I sat in a half-lotus position on the floor and closed my eyes. Concentrating, prayerful, I waited for my soul to leave my body. I tried to fall into a trance state or become an animal. I did my best, but nothing happened. As far as special powers went, I didn’t seem to have any. A Tiresias I wasn’t.
   All of which brings me to a Friday night in late January. It was after midnight. Carmen was in the tank, doing her Esther Williams. Zora and I were in the dressing room, maintaining traditions (thermos, cannabis). In the mermaid suit, Z. was none too mobile and stretched out across the couch, a Piscean odalisque. Her tail hung over the arm bolsters, dripping. She wore a T-shirt over her top. It had Emily Dickinson on it.
   Sounds from the tank were piped into the dressing room. Bob Presto was giving his spiel: “Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for a truly electrifying experience?”
   Zora and I mouthed along with the next line: “Are you ready for some high voltage?”
   “I’ve had enough of this place,” said Zora. “I really have.”
   “Should we quit?”
   “We should.”
   “What would we do instead?”
   “Mortgage banking.”
   There was a splash in the tank. “But where is Ellie’s eel today? It seems to be hiding, ladies and gentlemen. Could it be extinct? Maybe a fisherman caught it. That’s right, ladies and gentleman, maybe Ellie’s eel is for sale out on Fisherman’s Wharf.”
   “Bob thinks he’s a witty person,” said Zora.
   “Banish such worries, ladies and gentlemen. Ellie wouldn’t let us down. Here it is, folks. Have a look at Ellie’s electric eel!”
   A strange noise came over the speaker. A door banging. Bob Presto shouted: “Hey, what the hell? You’re not allowed in here.”
   And then the sound system went dead.
   Eight years earlier, policemen had raided a blind pig on Twelfth Street in Detroit. Now, at the start of 1975, they raided Sixty-Niners. The action provoked no riot. The patrons quickly emptied the booths, fanning out into the street and hurrying off. We were led downstairs and lined up with the other girls.
   “Well, hello there,” said the officer when he came to me. “And how old might you be?”
   From the police station I was allowed one call. And so I finally broke down, gave in, and did it: I called home.
   My brother answered. “It’s me,” I said. “Cal.” Before Chapter Eleven had time to respond, it all rushed out of me. I told him where I was and what had happened. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” I said.
   “I can’t,” said Chapter Eleven. “I can’t tell Dad.” And then in an interrogative tone that showed he could hardly believe it himself, my brother told me that there had been an accident and that Milton was dead.

Air-Ride

   In my official capacity as assistant cultural attaché, but on an unofficial errand, I attended the Warhol opening at the Neue Nationalgallerie. Within the famous Mies van der Rohe building, I passed by the famous silk-screened faces of the famous pop artist. The Neue Nationalgallerie is a wonderful art museum except for one thing: there’s nowhere to hang the art. I didn’t care much. I stared out the glass walls at Berlin and felt stupid. Did I think there would be artists at an art opening? There were only patrons, journalists, critics, and socialites.
   After accepting a glass of wine from a passing waiter, I sat down in one of the leather and chrome chairs that line the perimeter. The chairs are by Mies, too. You see knockoffs everywhere but these are original, worn-out by now, the black leather browning at the edges. I lit a cigar and smoked, trying to make myself feel better.
   The crowd chattered, circulating among the Maos and Marilyns. The high ceiling made the acoustics muddy. Thin men with shaved heads darted by. Gray-haired women draped in natural shawls showed their yellow teeth. Out the windows, the Staatsbibliotek was visible across the way. The new Potsdamer Platz looked like a mall in Vancouver. In the distance construction lights illuminated the skeletons of cranes. Traffic surged in the street below. I took a drag on my cigar, squinting, and caught sight of my reflection in the glass.
   I said before I look like a Musketeer. But I also tend to resemble (especially in mirrors late at night) a faun. The arched eyebrows, the wicked grin, the flames in the eyes. The cigar jutting up from between my teeth didn’t help.
   A hand tapped me on the back. “Cigar faddist,” said a woman’s voice.
   In Mies’s black glass I recognized Julie Kikuchi.
   “Hey, this is Europe,” I countered, smiling. “Cigars aren’t a fad here.”
   “I was into cigars way back in college.”
   “Oh yeah,” I challenged her. “Smoke one, then.”
   She sat down in the chair next to mine and held out her hand. I took another cigar from my jacket and handed it to her along with the cigar cutter and matches. Julie held the cigar under her nose and sniffed. She rolled it between her fingers to test its moistness. Clipping off the end, she put it in her mouth, struck a match, and got it going, puffing serially.
   “Mies van der Rohe smoked cigars,” I said, by way of promotion.
   “Have you ever seen a picture of Mies van der Rohe?” said Julie.
   “Point taken.”
   We sat side by side, not speaking, only smoking, facing the interior of the museum. Julie’s right knee was jiggling. After a while I swiveled around so I was facing her. She turned her face toward me.
   “Nice cigar,” she allowed.
   I leaned toward her. Julie leaned toward me. Our faces got closer until finally our foreheads were almost touching. We stayed like that for ten or so seconds. Then I said, “Let me tell you why I didn’t call you.”
   I took a long breath and began: “There’s something you should know about me.”


* * *

   My story began in 1922 and there were concerns about the flow of oil. In 1975, when my story ends, dwindling oil supplies again had people worried. Two years earlier the Organization of Arab Oil Exporting Countries had begun an embargo. There were brownouts in the U.S. and long lines at the pumps. The President announced that the lights on the White House Christmas tree would not be lit, and the gas-tank lock was born.
   Scarcity was weighing on everybody’s mind in those days. The economy was in recession. Across the nation families were eating dinner in the dark, the way we used to do on Seminole under one lightbulb. My father, however, took a dim view of conservation policies. Milton had come a long way from the days when he counted kilowatts. And so, on the night he set out to ransom me, he remained at the wheel of an enormous, gas-guzzling Cadillac.
   My father’s last Cadillac: a 1975 Eldorado. Painted a midnight blue that looked nearly black, the car bore a strong resemblance to the Batmobile. Milton had all the doors locked. It was just past 2A.M. The roads in this downriver neighborhood were full of potholes, the curbs choked with weeds and litter. The powerful high beams picked up sprays of broken glass in the street, as well as nails, shards of metal, old hubcaps, tin cans, a flattened pair of men’s underpants. Beneath an overpass a car had been stripped, tires gone, windshield shattered, all the chrome detailing peeled away, and the engine missing. Milton stepped on the gas, ignoring the scarcity not only of petroleum but of many other things as well. There was, for instance, a scarcity of hope on Middlesex, where his wife no longer felt any stirrings in her spiritual umbilicus. There was a scarcity of food in the refrigerator, of snacks in the cupboards, and of freshly ironed shirts and clean socks in his dresser. There was a scarcity of social invitations and phone calls, as my parents’ friends grew afraid to call a house that existed in a limbo between exhilaration and grief. Against the pressure of all this scarcity, Milton flooded the Eldorado’s engine, and when that wasn’t enough, he opened the briefcase on the seat beside him and stared in dashboard light at the twenty-five thousand dollars in cash bundled inside.
   My mother had been awake when Milton slipped out of bed less than an hour earlier. Lying on her back, she heard him dressing in the dark. She hadn’t asked him why he was getting up in the middle of the night. Once upon a time, she would have, but not anymore. Since my disappearance, daily routines had crumbled. Milton and Tessie often found themselves in the kitchen at four in the morning, drinking coffee. Only when Tessie heard the front door close had she become concerned. Next Milton’s car started up and began backing down the drive. My mother listened until the engine faded away. She thought to herself with surprising calmness, “Maybe he’s leaving for good.” To her list of runaway father and runaway daughter she now added a further possibility: runaway husband.
   Milton hadn’t told Tessie where he was going for a number of reasons. First, he was afraid she would stop him. She would tell him to call the police, and he didn’t want to call the police. The kidnapper had told him not to involve the law. Besides, Milton had had enough of cops and their blasé attitude. The only way to get something done was to do it yourself. On top of all that, this whole thing might be a wild-goose chase. If he told Tessie about it she would only worry. She might call Zoë and then he’d get an earful from his sister. In short, Milton was doing what he always did when it came to important decisions. Like the time he joined the Navy, or the time he moved us all to Grosse Pointe, Milton did whatever he wanted, confident that he knew best.
   After the last mysterious phone call, Milton had waited for another. The following Sunday morning it came.
   “Hello?”
   “Good morning, Milton.”
   “Listen, whoever you are. I want some answers.”
   “I didn’t call to hear what you want, Milton. What’s important is what I want.”
   “I want my daughter. Where is she?”
   “She’s here with me.”
   The music, or singing, was still perceptible in the background. It reminded Milton of something long ago.
   “How do I know you have her?”
   “Why don’t you ask me a question? She’s told me a lot about her family. Quite a lot.”
   The rage surging through Milton at that moment was nearly unbearable. It was all he could do to keep from smashing the phone against the desk. At the same time, he was thinking, calculating.
   “What’s the name of the village her grandparents came from?”
   “Just a minute.” The phone was covered. Then the voice said, “Bithynios.”
   Milton’s knees went weak. He sat down at the desk.
   “Do you believe me yet, Milton?”
   “We went to these caverns in Tennessee once. A real rip-off tourist trap. What were they called?”
   Again the phone was covered. In a moment the voice replied, “The Mammothonics Caves.”
   At that Milton shot up out of his chair again. His face darkened and he tugged at his collar to help himself breathe.
   “Now I have a question, Milton.”
   “What?”
   “How much is it worth to you to get your daughter back?”
   “How much do you want?”
   “Is this business, now? Are we negotiating a deal?”
   “I’m ready to make a deal.”
   “How exciting.”
   “What do you want?”
   “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
   “All right.”
   “No, Milton,” the voice corrected, “you don’t understand. I want to bargain.”
   “What?”
   “Haggle, Milton. This is business.”
   Milton was perplexed. He shook his head at the oddity of this request. But in the end he fulfilled it.
   “Okay. Twenty-five’s too much. I’ll pay thirteen thousand.”
   “We’re talking about your daughter, Milton. Not hot dogs.”
   “I haven’t got that kind of cash.”
   “I might take twenty-two thousand.”
   “I’ll give you fifteen.”
   “Twenty is as low as I can go.”
   “Seventeen is my final offer.”
   “How about nineteen?”
   “Eighteen.”
   “Eighteen five.”
   “Deal.”
   The caller laughed. “Oh, that was fun, Milt.” Then, in a gruff voice: “But I want twenty-five.” And he hung up.
   Back in 1933, a disembodied voice had spoken to my grandmother through the heating grate. Now, forty-two years later, a disguised voice spoke to my father over the phone.
   “Good morning, Milton.”
   There was the music again, the faint singing.
   “I’ve got the money,” said Milton. “Now I want my girl.”
   “Tomorrow night,” the kidnapper said. And then he told Milton where to leave the money, and where to wait for me to be released.
   Across the lowland downriver plain Grand Trunk rose before Milton’s Cadillac. The train station was still in use in 1975, though just barely. The once-opulent terminal was now only a shell. False Amtrak façades concealed the flaking, peeling walls. Most corridors were blocked off. Meanwhile, all around the operative core, the great old building continued to fall into ruin, the Guastavino tiles in the Palm Court falling, splintering on the ground, the immense barbershop now a junk room, the skylights caved in, heaped with filth. The office tower attached to the terminal was now a thirteen-story pigeon coop, all five hundred of its windows smashed, as if with diligence. At this same train station my grandparents had arrived a half century earlier. Lefty and Desdemona, one time only, had revealed their secret here to Sourmelina; and now their son, who never learned it, was pulling in behind the station, also secretly.
   A scene like this, a ransom scene, calls for a noirish mood: shadows, sinister silhouettes. But the sky wasn’t cooperating. We were having one of our pink nights. They happened every so often, depending on temperature and the level of chemicals in the air. When particulate matter in the atmosphere was sufficient, light from the ground got trapped and reflected back, and the entire Detroit sky would become the soft pink of cotton candy. It never got dark on pink nights, but the light was nothing like daytime. Our pink nights glowed with the raw luminescence of the night shift, of factories running around the clock. Sometimes the sky would become as bright as Pepto-Bismol, but more often it was a muted, a fabric-softener color. Nobody thought it was strange. Nobody said anything about it. We had all grown up with pink nights. They were not a natural phenomenon, but they were natural to us.
   Under this strange nocturnal sky Milton pulled his car as close to the train platform as possible and stopped. He shut off the engine. Taking the briefcase, he got out into the still, crystalline winter air of Michigan. All the world was frozen, the distant trees, the telephone lines, the grass in the yards of the downriver houses, the ground itself. Out on the river a freighter bellowed. Here there were no sounds, the station completely deserted at night. Milton had on his tasseled black loafers. Dressing in the dark, he had decided they were the easiest to slip on. He was also wearing his car coat, beige and dingy, with a muff of fur at the collar. Against the cold he had worn a hat, a gray felt Borsalino, with a red feather in the black band. An old-timer’s hat now in 1975. With hat, briefcase, and loafers, Milton might have been on his way to work. And certainly he was walking quickly. He climbed the metal steps to the train platform. He headed along it, looking for the trash can where he was supposed to drop the briefcase. The kidnapper said it would have an X chalked on the lid.
   Milton hurried along the platform, the tassels on his loafers bouncing, the tiny feather in his hat rippling in the cold wind. It would not be strictly truthful to say that he was afraid. Milton Stephanides did not admit to being afraid. The physiological manifestations of fear, the racing heart, the torched armpits, went on in him without official acknowledgment. He wasn’t alone among his generation in this. There were lots of fathers who shouted when they were afraid or scolded their children to deflect blame from themselves. It’s possible that such qualities were indispensable in the generation that won the war. A lack of introspection was good for bolstering your courage, but in the last months and weeks it had done damage to Milton. Throughout my disappearance Milton had kept up a brave front while doubts worked invisibly inside him. He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through. What was he doing out there on the dark train platform? Why did he go out there alone? We would never be able to explain it adequately.
   It didn’t take him long to find the trash can marked with chalk. Swiftly Milton lifted its triangular green lid and laid the briefcase inside. But when he tried to pull his arm back out, something wouldn’t let him: it was his hand. Since Milton had stopped thinking things through, his body was now doing the work for him. His hand seemed to be saying something. It was voicing reservations. “What if the kidnapper doesn’t set Callie free?” the hand was saying. But Milton answered, “There’s no time to think about that now.” Again he tried to pull his arm out of the trash can, but his hand stubbornly resisted: “What if the kidnapper takes this money and then asks for more?” asked the hand. “That’s the chance we’ll have to take,” Milton snapped back, and with all his strength pulled his arm out of the trash can. His hand lost its grip; the briefcase fell onto the refuse inside. Milton hurried back across the platform (dragging his hand with him) and got into the Cadillac.
   He started the engine. He turned on the heat, warming the car up for me. He leaned forward staring through the windshield, expecting me to appear any minute. His hand was still smarting, muttering to itself. Milton thought about the briefcase lying out in the trash can. His mind filled with the image of the money inside. Twenty-five grand! He saw the individual stacks of hundred-dollar bills; the repeating face of Benjamin Franklin in the doubled mirrors of all that cash. Milton’s throat went dry; a spasm of anxiety known to all Depression babies gripped his body; and in the next second he was jumping out of the car again, running back to the platform.
   This guy wanted to do business? Then Milton would show him how to do business! He wanted to negotiate? How about this! (Milton was climbing the steps now, loafers ringing against the metal.) Instead of leaving twenty-five thousand bucks, why not leave twelve thousand five hundred? This way I’ll have some leverage. Half now, half later. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? What the hell was the matter with him? He was under too much strain … No sooner had he reached the platform, however, than my father stopped cold. Less than twenty yards away, a dark figure in a stocking cap was reaching into the trash can. Milton’s blood froze. He didn’t know whether to retreat or advance. The kidnapper tried to pull the briefcase out, but it wouldn’t fit through the swinging door. He went behind the can and lifted up the entire metal lid. In the chemical brightness Milton saw the patriarchal beard, the pale, waxen cheeks, and—most tellingly—the tiny five-foot-four frame. Father Mike.
   Father Mike? Father Mike was the kidnapper? Impossible. Incredible! But there was no doubt. Standing on the platform was the man who had once been engaged to my mother and who, at my father’s hands, had had her stolen away. Taking the ransom was the former seminarian who had married Milton’s sister, Zoë, instead, a choice that had sentenced him to a life of invidious comparisons, of Zoë always asking why he hadn’t invested in the stock market when Milton had, or bought gold when Milton had, or stashed money away in the Cayman Islands as Milton had; a choice that had condemned Father Mike to being a poor relation, forced to endure Milton’s lack of respect while accepting his hospitality, and compelling him to carry a dining room chair into the living room if he wanted to sit. Yes, it was a great shock for Milton to discover his brother-in-law on the train platform. But it also made sense. It was clear now why the kidnapper had wanted to haggle over the price, why he wanted to feel like a businessman for once, and, alas, how he had known about Bithynios. Explained, too, were why the telephone calls had come on Sundays, whenever Tessie was at church, and the music in the background, which Milton now identified as the priests chanting the liturgy. Long ago, my father had stolen Father’s Mike’s fiancée and married her himself. The child of the union, me, had poured salt in the wound by baptizing the priest in reverse. Now Father Mike was trying to get even.
   But not if Milton could help it. “Hey!” he shouted, putting his hands on his hips. “Just what the hell are you trying to pull, Mike?” Father Mike didn’t answer. He looked up and, out of priestly habit, smiled benignantly at Milton, his white teeth appearing in the great bush of black beard. But already he was backing away, stepping on crushed cups and other litter, hugging the briefcase to his chest like a packed parachute. Three or four steps backward, smiling that gentle smile, before he turned and fled in earnest. He was small but quick. Like a shot he disappeared down a set of stairs on the other side of the platform. In pink light Milton saw him crossing the train tracks to his car, a bright green (“Grecian green” according to the catalogue), fuel-efficient AMC Gremlin. And Milton ran back to the Cadillac to follow him.
   It wasn’t like a car chase in the movies. There was no swerving, no near collisions. It was, after all, a car chase between a Greek Orthodox priest and a middle-aged Republican. As they sped (relatively speaking) away from Grand Trunk, heading in the direction of the river, Father Mike and Milton never exceeded the limit by more than ten miles per hour. Father Mike didn’t want to attract the police. Milton, realizing that his brother-in-law had nowhere to go, was content to follow him to the water. So they went along in their pokey fashion, the weirdly shaped Gremlin making rolling stops at traffic signs and the Eldorado, a little bit later, doing the same. Down nameless streets, past junk houses, across a dead-end piece of land created by the freeways and the river, Father Mike unwisely attempted to escape. It was just like always; Aunt Zo should have been there to holler at Father Mike, because only an idiot would have headed toward the river instead of the highway. Every street he could possibly take would go nowhere. “I got you now,” Milton exulted. The Gremlin made a right. The Eldorado made a right. The Gremlin made a left, and so did the Cadillac. Milton’s tank was full. He could track Father Mike all night if he had to.
   Feeling confident, Milton adjusted the heat, which was a little too high. He turned on the radio. He let a little more space get between the Gremlin and the Eldorado. When he looked up again, the Gremlin was making another right. Thirty seconds later, when Milton turned the same corner, he saw the sweeping expanse of the Ambassador Bridge. And his confidence crumbled. This was not just like always. Tonight, his brother-in-law the priest, who spent his life in the fairy tale world of the Church, dressed up like Liberace, had figured things out for once. As soon as Milton saw the bridge strung like a giant, glittering harp over the river, panic seized his soul. With horror Milton understood Father Mike’s plan. As Chapter Eleven had intended when he threatened to dodge the draft, Father Mike was heading for Canada! Like Jimmy Zizmo the bootlegger, he was heading for the lawless, liberal hideaway to the north! He was planning to take the money out of the country. And he was no longer going slow.
   Yes, despite its thimble-sized engine that sounded like a sewing machine, the Gremlin was managing to accelerate. Leaving the no-man’s-land around Grand Trunk Station, it had now entered the bright, Customs-controlled, high-traffic area of the United States–Canada border. Tall, carbon-gas streetlights irradiated the Gremlin, whose bright green color now looked even more acid than ever. Putting distance between itself and the Eldorado (like the Joker’s car getting away from the Batmobile), the Gremlin joined the trucks and cars converging around the entrance to the great suspension bridge. Milton stepped on it. The huge engine of the Cadillac roared; white smoke spumed from the tailpipe. At this point the two cars had become exactly what cars are supposed to be; they were extensions of their owners. The Gremlin was small and nimble, as Father Mike was; it disappeared and reappeared in traffic much as he did behind the icon screen at church. The Eldorado, substantial and boat-like—as was Milton—proved difficult to maneuver in the late-night bridge traffic. There were huge semis. There were passenger cars heading for the casinos and strip clubs in Windsor. In all this traffic Milton lost sight of the Gremlin. He pulled into a line and waited. Suddenly, six cars ahead, he saw Father Mike dart out of line, cutting off another car and slipping into a toll booth. Milton rolled down his automatic window. Sticking his head out into the cold, exhaust-clouded air, he shouted, “Stop that man! He’s got my money!” The Customs officer didn’t hear him, however. Milton could see the officer asking Father Mike a few questions and then—No! Stop!—he was waving Father Mike through. At that point Milton started hammering on his horn.
   The blasts erupting from beneath the Eldorado’s hood might have been emanating from Milton’s own chest. His blood pressure was surging, and inside his car coat his body began to drip with sweat. He had been confident of bringing Father Mike to justice in the U.S. courts. But who knew what would happen once he got to Canada? Canada with its pacifism and its socialized medicine! Canada with its millions of French speakers! It was like … like … like a foreign country! Father Mike might become a fugitive over there, living it up in Quebec. He might disappear into Saskatchewan and roam with the moose. It wasn’t only losing the money that enraged Milton. In addition to absconding with twenty-five thousand dollars and giving Milton false hopes of my return, Father Mike was abandoning his own family. Brotherly protectiveness mixed with financial and paternal pain in Milton’s heaving breast. “You don’t do this to my sister, you hear me?” Milton fruitlessly shouted from the driver’s seat of his huge, boxed-in car. Next he called after Father Mike, “Hey, dumbass. Haven’t you ever heard of commissions? Soon as you change that money you’re going to lose five percent!” Fulminating at the wheel, his progress curtailed by semis in front and strip-clubbers behind, Milton squirmed and hollered, his fury unbearable.
   My father’s honking hadn’t gone unnoticed, however. Customs agents were used to the horn-blowing of impatient drivers. They had a way of handling them. As soon as Milton pulled up to the booth, the official signaled him to pull over.
   Through his open window Milton shouted, “There’s a guy who just came through. He stole some money of mine. Can you have him stopped at the other end? He’s driving a Gremlin.”
   “Pull your car over there, sir.”
   “He stole twenty-five thousand dollars!”
   “We can talk about that as soon as you pull over and get out of your car, sir.”
   “He’s trying to take it out of the country!” Milton explained one last time. But the Customs agent continued to direct him to the inspection area. Finally Milton gave up. Withdrawing his face from the open window, he took hold of the steering wheel and obediently began pulling over to the empty lane. As soon as he was clear of the Customs booth, however, he stomped a tasseled loafer down on the accelerator and the squealing Cadillac rocketed away.
   Now it was something like a car chase. For out on the bridge, Father Mike, too, had stepped on the gas. Snaking between the cars and trucks, he was racing toward the international divide, while Milton pursued, flashing his brights to get people out of the way. The bridge rose up over the river in a graceful parabola, its steel cables strung with red lights. The Cadillac’s tires hummed over its striated surface. Milton had his foot to the floor, engaging what he called the goose gear. And now the difference between a luxury automobile and a newfangled cartoon car began to show itself. The Cadillac engine roared with power. Its eight cylinders fired, the carburetor sucking in vast quantities of fuel. The pistons thumped and jumped and the drive wheel spun like mad, as the long, superhero car passed others as if they were standing still. Seeing the Eldorado coming so fast, other drivers moved aside. Milton cut straight through the traffic until he spotted the green Gremlin up ahead. “So much for your high gas mileage,” Milton cried. “Sometimes you need a little power!”
   By this time Father Mike saw the Eldorado looming, too. He floored the accelerator, but the Gremlin’s engine was already working at capacity. The car vibrated wildly but picked up no speed. On and on came the Cadillac. Milton didn’t take his foot off the pedal until his front bumper was nearly touching the Gremlin’s rear. They were traveling now at seventy miles per hour. Father Mike looked up to see Milton’s avenging eyes filling the rearview mirror. Milton, gazing ahead into the Gremlin’s interior, saw a slice of Father Mike’s face. The priest seemed to be asking for forgiveness, or explaining his actions. There was a strange sadness in his eyes, a weakness, which Milton could not interpret.
   …And now I have to enter Father Mike’s head, I’m afraid. I feel myself being sucked in and I can’t resist. The front part of his mind is a whirl of fear, greed, and desperate thoughts of escape. All to be expected. But going deeper in, I discover things about him I never knew. There’s no serenity, for instance, none at all, no closeness to God. The gentleness Father Mike had, his smiling silence at family meals, the way he would bend down to be face-to-face with children (not far for him, but still)—all these attributes existed apart from any communication with a transcendent realm. They were just a passive-aggressive method of survival, the result of having a wife with a voice as loud as Aunt Zo’s. Yes, echoing inside Father Mike’s head is all the shouting Aunt Zo has done over the years, ever since she was pregnant nonstop in Greece without a washer or dryer. I can hear: “Do you call this a life?” And: “If you’ve got the ear of God, tell Him to send me a check for the drapes.” And: “Maybe the Catholics have the right idea. Priests shouldn’t have families.” At church Michael Antoniou is called Father. He is deferred to, catered to. At church he has the power to forgive sins and consecrate the host. But as soon as he steps through the front door of their duplex in Harper Woods, Father Mike suffers an immediate drop in status. At home he is nobody. At home he is bossed around, complained about, ignored. And so it was not so difficult to see why Father Mike decided to flee his marriage, and why he needed money…
   …none of which, however, could Milton read in his brother-in-law’s eyes. And in the next moment those eyes changed again. Father Mike had shifted his gaze back to the road, where they met a terrifying sight. The red brake lights of the car in front of him were flashing. Father Mike was going much too fast to stop in time. He stomped on his brakes, but it was too late: the Grecian green Gremlin slammed into the car ahead. The Eldorado came next. Milton braced himself for the impact. But it was then an amazing thing happened. He heard metal crunching and glass shattering, but this was coming from the cars ahead. As for the Cadillac itself, it never stopped moving forward. It climbed right up Father Mike’s car. The weird, slanted back end of the Gremlin acted as a kind of ramp, and in the next second Milton realized he was airborne. The midnight blue Eldorado rose above the accident on the bridge. It sailed up over the guardrails, through the cables, plunging off the middle span of the Ambassador Bridge.
   The Eldorado fell hood first, gathering speed. Through the tinted windshield Milton could see the Detroit River below; but only briefly. In those last seconds, as life prepared to leave his body, it withdrew its laws, too. Instead of falling into the river, the Cadillac swooped upward and leveled itself. Milton was surprised but very pleased. He didn’t remember the salesman’s having mentioned anything about a flight feature. Even better, Milton hadn’t paid extra for it. As the car floated away from the bridge he was smiling. “Now, this is what I call an Air-Ride,” he said to himself. The Eldorado was flying high above the river, wasting who knew how much gas. The sky outside was pink while the lights on the dashboard were green. There were all sorts of switches and gauges. Milton had never noticed most of them before. It looked more like an airplane cockpit than a car, and Milton was at the controls, Milton was flying his last Cadillac over the Detroit River. It didn’t matter what eyewitnesses saw, or that the newspapers reported the next day that the Cadillac was part of the ten-car pileup on the bridge. Sitting back in the comfortable leather bucket seat, Milton Stephanides could see the downtown skyline approaching. Music was playing on the radio, an old Artie Shaw tune, why not, and Milton watched the red light on the Penobscot Building blinking on and off. After a certain amount of trial and error, he learned how to steer the flying car. It wasn’t a matter of turning the wheel but of willing it, as in a lucid dream. Milton brought the car in over land. He passed above Cobo Hall. He circled the Top of the Pontch, where he had once taken me to lunch. For some reason Milton was no longer afraid of heights. He guessed that this was because his death was imminent; there was nothing left to fear. Without vertigo or perspiration, he gazed down at Grand Circus Park until he spotted what was left of the wheels of Detroit; and after that he headed for the West Side to look for the old Zebra Room. Back on the bridge, my father’s head had been crushed against the steering wheel. The detective who later informed my mother of the accident, when asked about the condition of Milton’s body, said only, “It was consistent with a crash of a vehicle going at seventy-plus miles an hour.” Milton no longer had any brain waves, so it was understandable why, hovering in the Cadillac, he might have forgotten that the Zebra Room had burned down long ago. He was mystified at not being able to find it. All that was left of the old neighborhood was empty land. It seemed that most of the city was gone, as he gazed down. Empty lot followed empty lot. But Milton was wrong about this, too. Corn was sprouting up in some places, and grass was coming back. It looked like farmland down there. “Might as well give it back to the Indians,” Milton thought. “Maybe the Potowatomies would want it. They could put up a casino.” The sky had turned to cotton candy and the city had become a plain again. But another red light was blinking now. Not on the Penobscot Building; inside the car. It was one of the gauges Milton had never seen before. He knew what it indicated.
   At that moment, Milton began to cry. All of a sudden his face was wet and he touched it, sniffling and weeping. He slumped back, and because no one was there to see, he opened his mouth to give outlet to his overpowering grief. He hadn’t cried since he was a boy. The sound of his deep voice crying surprised him. It was the sound of a bear, wounded or dying. Milton bellowed in the Cadillac as the car began, once again, to descend. He was crying not because he was about to die but because I, Calliope, was still gone, because he had failed to save me, because he had done everything he could to get me back and still I was missing.
   As the car tipped its nose down, the river appeared again. Milton Stephanides, an old navy man, prepared to meet it. Right at the end he was no longer thinking about me. I have to be honest and record Milton’s thoughts as they occurred to him. At the very end he wasn’t thinking about me or Tessie or any of us. There was no time. As the car plunged, Milton only had time to be astonished by the way things had turned out. All his life he had lectured everybody about the right way to do things and now he had done this, the stupidest thing ever. He could hardly believe he had loused things up quite so badly. His last word, therefore, was spoken softly, without anger or fear, only with bewilderment and a measure of bravery. “Birdbrain,” Milton said, to himself, in his last Cadillac. And then the water claimed him.
   A real Greek might end on this tragic note. But an American is inclined to stay upbeat. These days, whenever we talk about Milton, my mother and I come to the conclusion that he got out just in time. He got out before Chapter Eleven, taking over the family business, ran it into the ground in less than five years. Before Chapter Eleven, in a reprise of Desdemona’s gender prognostications, began wearing a tiny silver spoon around his neck. He got out before the draining of bank accounts and the jacking up of credit cards. Before Tessie was forced to sell Middlesex and move down to Florida with Aunt Zo. And he got out three months before Cadillac, in April 1975, introduced the Seville, a fuel-efficient model that looked as though it had lost its pants, after which Cadillacs were never the same. Milton got out before many of the things that I will not include in this story, because they are the common tragedies of American life, and as such do not fit into this singular and uncommon record. He got out before the Cold War ended, before missile shields and global warming and September 11 and a second President with only one vowel in his name.
   Most important, Milton got out without ever seeing me again. That would not have been easy. I like to think that my father’s love for me was strong enough that he could have accepted me. But in some ways it’s better that we never had to work that out, he and I. With respect to my father I will always remain a girl. There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

The Last Stop

   It sort of still applies,” said Julie Kikuchi.
   “It does not,” I said.
   “It’s in the same ballpark.”
   “What I told you about myself has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay or closeted. I’ve always liked girls. I liked girls when I was a girl.”
   “I wouldn’t be some kind of last stop for you?”
   “More like a first stop.”
   Julie laughed. She still had not made a decision. I waited. Then at last she said, “All right.”
   “All right?” I asked.
   She nodded.
   “All right,” I said.
   So we left the museum and went back to my apartment. We had another drink; we slow-danced in the living room. And then I led Julie into the bedroom, where I hadn’t led anyone in quite a long time.
   She switched off the lights.
   “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you turning off the lights because of you or because of me?”
   “Because of me.”
   “Why?”
   “Because I’m a shy, modest Oriental lady. Just don’t expect me to bathe you.”
   “No bathing?”
   “Not unless you do a Zorba dance.”
   “Where did I put that bouzouki of mine, anyway?” I was trying to keep up the banter. I was also taking off my clothes. So was Julie. It was like jumping into cold water. You had to do it without thinking too much. We got under the covers and held each other, petrified, happy.
   “I might be your last stop, too,” I said, clinging to her. “Did you ever think of that?”
   And Julie Kikuchi answered, “It crossed my mind.”


* * *

   Chapter Eleven flew to San Francisco to collect me from jail. My mother had to sign a letter requesting that the police release me into my brother’s custody. A trial date would be set in the near future but, as a juvenile and first-time offender, I was likely to receive only probation. (The offense came off my record, never interfering with my subsequent job prospects at the State Department. Not that I concerned myself with these details at the time. I was too stunned, sick with grief poisons, and wanted to go home.)
   When I came out into the outer police station, my brother was sitting alone on a long wooden bench. He looked up at me with no expression, blinking. That was Chapter Eleven’s way. Everything went on in him internally. Inside his braincase sensations were being reviewed, evaluated, before any official reaction was given. I was used to this, of course. What is more natural than the tics and habits of one’s close relatives? Years ago, Chapter Eleven had made me pull down my underpants so that he could look at me. Now his eyes were raised but no less riveted. He was taking in my deforested head. He was getting a load of the funereal suit. It was a lucky thing that my brother had taken as much LSD as he had. Chapter Eleven had gone in early for mind expansion. He contemplated the veil of Maya, the existence of various planes of being. For a personality thus prepared, it was somewhat easier to deal with your sister becoming your brother. There have been hermaphrodites like me since the world began. But as I came out from my holding pen it was possible that no generation other than my brother’s was as well disposed to accept me. Still, it was not nothing to witness me so changed. Chapter Eleven’s eyes widened.
   We hadn’t seen each other for over a year. Chapter Eleven had changed, too. His hair was shorter. It had receded farther. His friend’s girlfriend had given him a home perm. Chapter Eleven’s previously lank hair was now leonine in back, while the front retreated. He didn’t look like John Lennon anymore. Gone were his faded bell-bottoms, his granny glasses. Now he wore brown hip-huggers. His wide-lapel shirt shimmered under the fluorescent lights. The sixties have never really come to an end. They’re still going on right now in Goa. But by 1975 the sixties had finally ended for my brother.
   At any other time, we would have lingered over these details. But we didn’t have the luxury for that. I came across the room. Chapter Eleven stood up and then we were hugging, swaying. “Dad’s dead,” my brother repeated in my ear. “He’s dead.”
   I asked him what had happened and he told me. Milton had charged through customs. Father Mike had also been on the bridge. He was now in the hospital. Milton’s old briefcase had been found in the wreckage of the Gremlin, full of money. Father Mike had confessed everything to the police, the kidnapping ruse, the ransom.
   When this had sunk in, I asked, “How’s Mom?”
   “She’s all right. She’s holding up. She’s pissed at Milt.”
   “Pissed?”
   “For going out there. For not telling her. She’s glad you’re coming home. That’s what she’s focusing on. You coming back for the funeral. So that’s good.”
   We were scheduled to take the red-eye out that night. The funeral was the next morning. Chapter Eleven had been dealing with the bureaucratic side of things, getting the death certificates and placing the obituaries. He asked me nothing about my time in San Francisco or at Sixty-Niners. Only when we were on the plane and Chapter Eleven had had a few beers did he allude to my condition. “So, I guess I can’t call you Callie anymore.”
   “Call me whatever you want.”
   “How about ‘bro’?”
   “Fine with me.”
   He was quiet, blinking. There was the usual lag time while he thought. “I never heard much about what happened out there at that clinic. I was up in Marquette. I wasn’t talking to Mom and Dad that much.”
   “I ran away.”
   “Why?
   “They were going to cut me up.”
   I could feel him staring at me, with that outer glaze that concealed considerable mental activity. “It’s a little bit weird for me,” he said.
   “It’s weird for me, too.”
   A moment later he let out a laugh. “Hah! Weird! Pretty fucking weird.”
   I was shaking my head in comic despair. “You can say that again. Bro.”
   Confronted with the impossible, there was no option but to treat it as normal. We didn’t have an upper register, so to speak, but only the middle range of our shared experience and ways of behaving, of joking around. But it got us through.
   “One good thing about this gene I have, though,” I said.
   “What?”
   “I’ll never go bald.”
   “Why not?”
   “You have to have DHT to go bald.”
   “Huh,” said Chapter Eleven, feeling his scalp. “I guess I’m a little heavy on the DHT. I guess I’m what they’d call DHT-rich.”
   We reached Detroit a little after six in the morning. The smashed-up Eldorado had been towed to a police yard. Waiting in the airport parking lot was our mother’s car, the “Florida Special.” The lemon-colored Cadillac was all we had left of Milton. It was already beginning to take on the attributes of a relic. The driver’s seat was sunken from the weight of his body. You could see the impression of Milton’s cloven backside in the leather upholstery. Tessie filled this hollow with throw pillows in order to see over the steering wheel. Chapter Eleven had tossed the pillows into the backseat.
   In the unseasonal car, with its powerful air-conditioning switched off and sunroof closed, we started for home. We passed the giant Uniroyal tire and the thready woods of Inkster.
   “What time’s the funeral?” I asked.
   “Eleven.”
   It was just getting light. The sun was rising from wherever it rose, behind the distant factories maybe, or over the blind river. The growing light was like a leakage or flood, seeping into the ground.
   “Go through downtown,” I told my brother.
   “It’ll take too long.”
   “We’ve got time. I want to see it.”
   Chapter Eleven obliged me. We took I-94 past River Rouge and Olympia Stadium and then curled in toward the river on the Lodge Freeway and entered the city from the north.
   Grow up in Detroit and you understand the way of all things. Early on, you are put on close relations with entropy. As we rose out of the highway trough, we could see the condemned houses, many burned, as well as the stark beauty of all the vacant lots, gray and frozen. Once-elegant apartment buildings stood next to scrapyards, and where there had been furriers and movie palaces there were now blood banks and methadone clinics and Mother Waddles Perpetual Mission. Returning to Detroit from bright climes usually depressed me. But now I welcomed it. The blight eased the pain of my father’s death, making it seem like a general state of affairs. At least the city didn’t mock my grief by being sparkling or winsome.
   Downtown looked the same, only emptier. You couldn’t knock down the skyscrapers when the tenants left; so instead boards went over the windows and doors, and the great shells of commerce were put in cold storage. On the riverfront the Renaissance Center was being built, inaugurating a renaissance that has never arrived. “Let’s go through Greektown,” I said. Again my brother humored me. Soon we came down the block of restaurants and souvenir stores. Amid the ethnic kitsch, there were still a few authentic coffee houses, patronized by old men in their seventies and eighties. Some were already up this morning, drinking coffee, playing backgammon, and reading the Greek newspapers. When these old men died, the coffee houses would suffer and finally close. Little by little, the restaurants on the block would suffer, too, their awnings getting ripped, the big yellow lightbulbs on the Laikon marquee burning out, the Greek bakery on the corner being taken over by South Yemenis from Dearborn. But all that hadn’t happened yet. On Monroe Street, we passed the Grecian Gardens, where we had held Lefty’s makaria.
   “Are we having a makaria for Dad?” I asked.
   “Yeah. The whole deal.”
   “Where? At the Grecian Gardens?”
   Chapter Eleven laughed. “You kidding? Nobody wanted to come down here.”
   “I like it here,” I said. “I love Detroit.”
   “Yeah? Well, welcome home.”
   He had turned back onto Jefferson for the long miles through the blighted East Side. A wig shop. Vanity Dancing, the old club, now for rent. A used-record store with a hand-painted sign showing people grooving amid an explosion of musical notes. The old dime stores and sweet shops were closed, Kresge’s, Woolworth’s, Sanders Ice Cream. It was cold out. Not many people were on the streets. On one corner a man stood impervious, cutting a fine figure against the winter sky. His leather coat reached to his ankles. Space funk goggles wrapped around his dignified, long-jawed head, on top of which sat, or sailed really, the Spanish galleon of a velvet maroon hat. Not part of my suburban world, this figure; therefore exotic. But nevertheless familiar, and suggestive of the peculiar creative energies of my hometown. I was glad to see him anyway. I couldn’t take my eyes away.
   When I was little, street-corner dudes like that would sometimes lower their shades to wink, keen on getting a rise out of the white girl in the backseat passing by. But now the dude gave me a different look altogether. He didn’t lower his sunglasses, but his mouth, his flared nostrils, and the tilt of his head communicated defiance and even hate. That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn’t become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn’t want to.
   I made Chapter Eleven go through Indian Village, passing our old house. I wanted to take a nostalgia bath to calm my nerves before seeing my mother. The streets were still full of trees, bare in winter, so that we could see all the way to the frozen river. I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death. Seen this way, my bodily metamorphosis was a small event. Only the pimp might have been interested.
   Soon we reached Grosse Pointe. The naked elms reached across our street from both sides, touching fingertips, and snow lay crusted in the flower beds before the warm, hibernatory houses. My body was reacting to the sight of home. Happy sparks were shooting off inside me. It was a canine feeling, full of eager love, and dumb to tragedy. Here was my home, Middlesex. Up there in that window, on the tiled window seat, I used to read for hours, eating mulberries off the tree outside.
   The driveway hadn’t been shoveled. Nobody had had time to think about that. Chapter Eleven took the driveway a little fast and we bounced in our seats, the tailpipe hitting. After we got out of the car, he opened the trunk and began carrying my suitcase to the house. But halfway there he stopped. “Hey, bro,” he said. “You can carry this yourself.” He was smiling with mischief. You could see he was enjoying the paradigm shift. He was taking my metamorphosis as a brain teaser, like the ones in the back of his sci-fi magazines.
   “Let’s not get carried away,” I answered. “Feel free to carry my luggage anytime.”
   “Catch!” shouted Chapter Eleven, and hefted the suitcase. I caught it, staggering back. Right then the door of the house opened and my mother, in house slippers, stepped out into the frost-powdery air.
   Tessie Stephanides, who in a different lifetime when space travel was new had decided to go along with her husband and create a girl by devious means, now saw before her, in the snowy driveway, the fruit of that scheme. Not a daughter at all anymore but, at least by looks, a son. She was tired and heartsick and had no energy to deal with this new event. It was not acceptable that I was now living as a male person. Tessie didn’t think it should be up to me. She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else. Tessie didn’t know how this had happened. Though she could still see Calliope in my face, each feature seemed changed, thickened, and there were whiskers on my chin and above my upper lip. There was a criminal aspect to my appearance, in Tessie’s eyes. She couldn’t help herself thinking that my arrival was part of some settling of accounts, that Milton had been punished and that her punishment was just beginning. For all these reasons she stood still, red-eyed, in the doorway.
   “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I’m home.”
   I went forward to meet her. I set down my suitcase, and when I looked up again, Tessie’s face had altered. She had been preparing for this moment for months. Now her faint eyebrows lifted, the corners of her mouth rose, crinkling the wan cheeks. Her expression was that of a mother watching a doctor remove bandages from a severely burned child. An optimistic, dishonest, bedside face. Still, it told me all I needed to know. Tessie was going to try to accept things. She felt crushed by what had happened to me but she was going to endure it for my sake.
   We embraced. Tall as I was, I laid my head on my mother’s shoulder, and she stroked my hair while I sobbed.
   “Why?” she kept crying softly, shaking her head. “Why?” I thought she was talking about Milton. But then she clarified: “Why did you run away, honey?”
   “I had to.”
   “Don’t you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?”
   I lifted my face and looked into my mother’s eyes. And I told her: “This is the way I was.”
   You will want to know: How did we get used to things? What happened to our memories? Did Calliope have to die in order to make room for Cal? To all these questions I offer the same truism: it’s amazing what you can get used to. After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. In most ways I remained the person I’d always been. Even now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter. I’m still the one who remembers to call her every Sunday. I’m the one she recounts her growing list of ailments to. Like any good daughter, I’ll be the one to nurse her in her old age. We still discuss what’s wrong with men; we still, on visits back home, have our hair done together. Bowing to the changing times, the Golden Fleece now cuts men’s hair as well as women’s. (And I’ve finally let dear old Sophie give me that short haircut she always wanted.)
   But all that came later. Right then, we were in a hurry. It was almost ten. The limousine from the funeral parlor would be arriving in thirty-five minutes. “You better get cleaned up,” Tessie said to me. The funeral did what funerals are supposed to do: it gave us no time to dwell on our feelings. Hooking her arm in mine, Tessie led me into the house. Middlesex, too, was in mourning. The mirror in the den was covered by a black cloth. There were black streamers on the sliding doors. All the old immigrant touches. Aside from that, the house seemed unnaturally still and dim. As always, the enormous windows brought the outdoors in, so that it was winter in the living room; snow lay all around us.
   “I guess you can wear that suit,” Chapter Eleven said to me. “It looks pretty appropriate.”
   “I doubt you even have a suit.”
   “I don’t. I didn’t go to a stuck-up private school. Where did you get that thing, anyway? It smells.”
   “At least it’s a suit.”
   While my brother and I teased each other, Tessie watched closely. She was picking up the cue from my brother that this thing that had happened to me might be handled lightly. She wasn’t sure she could do this herself, but she was watching how the younger generation pulled it off.
   Suddenly there was a strange noise, like an eagle’s cry. The intercom on the living room wall crackled. A voice shrieked, “Yoo-hoo! Tessie honey!”
   The immigrant touches, of course, weren’t around the house because of Tessie. The person shrieking over the intercom was none other than Desdemona.
   Patient reader, you may have been wondering what happened to my grandmother. You may have noticed that, shortly after she climbed into bed forever, Desdemona began to fade away. But that was intentional. I allowed Desdemona to slip out of my narrative because, to be honest, in the dramatic years of my transformation, she slipped out of my attention most of the time. For the last five years she had remained bedridden in the guest house. During my time at Baker & Inglis, while I was falling in love with the Object, I had remained aware of my grandmother only in the vaguest of ways. I saw Tessie preparing her meals and carrying trays out to the guest house. Every evening I saw my father make a dutiful visit to her perpetual sickroom with its hot-water bottles and pharmaceutical supplies. At those times Milton spoke to his mother in Greek, with increasing difficulty. During the war Desdemona had failed to teach her son to write Greek. Now in her old age she recognized with horror that he was forgetting how to speak it as well. Occasionally, I brought Desdemona’s food trays out and for a few minutes would reacquaint myself with her time-capsule life. The framed photograph of her burial plot still stood on her bedside table for reassurance.
   Tessie went to the intercom. “Yes, yia yia,” she said. “Did you need something?”
   “My feet they are terrible today. Did you get the Epsom salts?”
   “Yes. I’ll bring them to you.”
   “Why God no let yia yia die, Tessie? Everybody’s dead! Everybody but yia yia! Yia yia she is too old to live now. And what does God do? Nothing.”
   “Are you finished with your breakfast?”
   “Yes, thank you, honey. But the prunes they were not good ones today.”
   “Those are the same prunes you always have.”
   “Something maybe it happen to them. Get a new box, please, Tessie. The Sunkist.”
   “I will.”
   “Okay, honey mou. Thank you, honey.”
   My mother silenced the intercom and turned back to me. “ Yia yia ’s not doing so good anymore. Her mind’s going. Since you’ve been away she’s really gone downhill. We told her about Milt.” Tessie faltered, near tears. “About what happened. Yia yia couldn’t stop crying. I thought she was going to die right then and there. And then a few hours later she asked me where Milt was. She forgot the entire thing. Maybe it’s better that way.”
   “Is she going to the funeral?”
   “She can barely walk. Mrs. Papanikolas is coming to watch her. She doesn’t know where she is half the time.” Tessie smiled sadly, shaking her head. “Who would have thought she would outlive Milt?” She teared up again and forced the tears back.
   “Can I go and see her?”
   “You want to?”
   “Yes.”
   Tessie looked apprehensive. “What will you tell her?”
   “What should I tell her?”
   For another few seconds my mother was silent, thinking. Then she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever you say she won’t remember. Take this out to her. She wants to soak her feet.”
   Carrying the Epsom salts and a piece of the baklava wrapped in cellophane, I came out of the house and walked along the portico past the courtyard and bathhouse to the guesthouse behind. The door was unlocked. I opened it and stepped in. The only light in the room came from the television, which was turned up extremely loud. Facing me when I entered was the old portrait of Patriarch Athenagoras that Desdemona had saved from the yard sale years ago. In a birdcage by the window, a green parakeet, the last surviving member of my grandparents’ former aviary, was moving back and forth on its balsa wood perch. Other familiar objects and furnishings were still in evidence, Lefty’s rebetika records, the brass coffee table, and, of course, the silkworm box, sitting in the middle of the engraved circular top. The box was now so stuffed with mementos it wouldn’t shut. Inside were snapshots, old letters, precious buttons, worry beads. Somewhere below all that, I knew, were two long braids of hair, tied with crumbling black ribbons, and a wedding crown made of ship’s rope. I wanted to look at these things, but as I stepped farther into the room my attention was diverted by the grand spectacle on the bed.
   Desdemona was propped up, regally, against a beige corduroy cushion known as a husband. The arms of this cushion encircled her. Protruding from the elastic pocket on the outside of one arm was an aspirator, along with two or three pill bottles. Desdemona was in a pale white nightgown, the bedcovers pulled up to her waist, and in her lap sat one of her Turkish atrocity fans. None of this was surprising. It was what Desdemona had done with her hair that shocked me. On hearing about Milton’s death, she had removed her hairnet, tearing at the masses of hair that tumbled down. Her hair was completely gray but still very fine and, in the light coming from the television, it appeared to be almost blond. The hair fell over her shoulders and spread out over her body like the hair of Botticelli’s Venus. The face framed by this astonishing cascade, however, was not that of a beautiful young woman but that of an old widow with a square head and dried-out mouth. In the unmoving air of the room and the smell of medicine and skin salves I could feel the weight of the time she had spent in this bed waiting and hoping to die. I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness. The lesson of Desdemona’s suffering and rejection of life insisted that old age would not continue the manifold pleasures of youth but would instead be a long trial that slowly robbed life of even its smallest, simplest joys. Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.
   As I was standing there taking my grandmother in, Desdemona suddenly turned her head and noticed me. Her hand went up to her breast. With a frightened expression she reared back into her pillows and shouted, “Lefty!”
   Now I was the one who was shocked. “No, yia yia. It’s not papou. It’s me. Cal.”
   “Who?”
   “Cal.” I paused. “Your grandson.”
   This wasn’t fair, of course. Desdemona’s memory was no longer sharp. But I wasn’t helping her out any.
   “Cal?”
   “They called me Calliope when I was little.”
   “You look like my Lefty,” she said.
   “I do?”
   “I thought you were my husband coming to take me to heaven.” She laughed for the first time.
   “I’m Milt and Tessie’s kid.”
   As quickly as it had come, the humor left Desdemona’s face and she looked sad and apologetic. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you, honey.”
   “I brought you these.” I held out the Epsom salts and baklava.
   “Why Tessie isn’t coming?”
   “She has to get dressed.”
   “Dressed for why?”
   “For the funeral.”
   Desdemona gave a cry and clutched her breast again. “Who died?”
   I didn’t answer. Instead I turned down the volume on the television. Then, pointing at the birdcage, I said, “I remember when you used to have about twenty birds.”
   She looked over at the cage but said nothing.
   “You used to live in the attic. On Seminole. Remember? That’s when you got all the birds. You said they reminded you of Bursa.”
   At the sound of the name, Desdemona smiled again. “In Bursa we have all kind of birds. Green, yellow, red. All kind. Little birds but very beautiful. Like made from glass.”
   “I want to go there. Remember that church there? I want to go and fix it up someday.”
   “Milton is going to fix it. I keep telling him.”
   “If he doesn’t do it, I will.”
   Desdemona looked at me a moment as if measuring my ability to fulfill this promise. Then she said, “I don’t remember you, honey, but please can you fix for yia yia the Epsom salts?”
   I got the foot basin and filled it with warm water from the bathtub faucet. I sprinkled in the soaking salts and brought it back into the bedroom.
   “Put it next the chair, dolly mou.”
   I did so.
   “Now help yia yia to get out of bed.”
   Coming closer, I bent down. I slid each of her legs out of the covers, turning her. Putting her arm over my shoulder, I pulled her to her feet for the short walk to the chair.
   “I can’t do nothing anymore,” she lamented on the way. “I’m too old, honey.”
   “You’re doing okay.”
   “No, I can’t remember nothing. I have aches and pains. My heart it is not good.”
   We had reached the chair now. I maneuvered around behind her to ease her down. Coming around to the front again, I lifted her swollen, blue-veined feet into the sudsy water. Desdemona murmured with pleasure. She closed her eyes.
   For the next few minutes Desdemona was silent, luxuriating in the warm foot bath. Color returned to her ankles and rose up her legs. This rosiness disappeared under the hem of her nightgown but, a minute later, peeked out the collar. The flush spread up to her face, and when she opened her eyes there was a clarity in them that had been absent before. She stared straight at me. And then she shouted, “Calliope!”
   She held her hand to her mouth. “ Mana! What happen to you?”
   “I grew up,” was all I said. I hadn’t intended to tell her but now it was out. I had an idea it wouldn’t make any difference. She wouldn’t remember this conversation.
   She was still examining me, the lenses of her glasses magnifying her eyes. Had she had all her wits, Desdemona could not possibly have fathomed what I was saying. But in her senility she somehow accommodated the information. She lived now amid memories and dreams, and in this state the old village stories grew near again.
   “You’re a boy now, Calliope?”
   “More or less.”
   She took this in. “My mother she use to tell me something funny,” she said. “In the village, long time ago, they use to have sometimes babies who were looking like girls. Then—fifteen, sixteen—they are looking like boys! My mother tell me this but I never believe.”
   “It’s a genetic thing. The doctor I went to says it happens in little villages. Where everyone marries each other.”
   “Dr. Phil he used to talk about this, too.”
   “He did?”
   “It’s all my fault.” She shook her head grimly.
   “What was? What was your fault?”
   She was not crying exactly. Her tear ducts were dried up and no moisture rolled down her cheeks. But her face was going through the motions, her shoulders quaking.
   “The priests say even first cousins never should marry,” she said. “Second cousins is okay, but you have to ask first the archbishop.” She was looking away now, trying to remember it all. “Even if you want to marry your godparents’ son, you can’t. I thought it was only something for the Church. I didn’t know it was because what can happen to the babies. I was just stupid girl from village.” She went on in that vein for a while, castigating herself. She had momentarily forgotten that I was there or that she was speaking aloud. “And then Dr. Phil he tell me terrible things. I was so scared I had an operation! No more babies. Then Milton he have children and again I was scared. But nothing happen. So I think, after so long time, everything was okay.”
   “What are you saying, yia yia? Papou was your cousin?”
   “Third cousin.”
   “That’s all right.”
   “Not third cousin only. Also brother.”
   My heart skipped. “ Papou was your brother?”
   “Yes, honey,” Desdemona said with infinite weariness. “Long time ago. In another country.”
   Right then the intercom sounded:
   “Callie?” Tessie coughed, correcting herself: “Cal?”
   “Yeah.”
   “You better get cleaned up. The car’s coming in ten minutes.”
   “I’m not going.” I paused. “I’m going to stay here with yia yia.”
   “You need to be there, honey,” said Tessie.
   I crossed to the intercom and put my mouth against the speaker and said in a deep voice, “I’m not going into that church.”
   “Why not?”
   “Have you seen what they charge for those goddamn candles?”
   Tessie laughed. She needed to. So I kept going, lowering my voice to sound like my father’s. “Two bucks for a candle? What a racket! Maybe you could convince somebody from the old country to shell out for that kind of thing, but not here in the U.S.A.!”
   It was infectious to do Milton. Now Tessie lowered her voice in the speaker: “Total rip-off!” she said, and laughed again. We understood then that this was how we were going to do it. This was how we were going to keep Milton alive.
   “Are you sure you don’t want to go?” she asked me.
   “It’ll be too complicated, Mom. I don’t want to have to explain everything to everybody. Not yet. It’ll be too big of a distraction. It’ll be better if I’m not there.”
   In her heart Tessie agreed, and so she soon relented. “I’ll tell Mrs. Papanikolas she doesn’t need to come stay with yia yia.”
   Desdemona was still looking at me but her eyes had gone dreamy. She was smiling. And then she said, “My spoon was right.”
   “I guess so.”
   “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry this happen to you.”
   “It’s all right.”
   “I’m sorry, honey mou.”
   “I like my life,” I told her. “I’m going to have a good life.” She still looked pained, so I took her hand.
   “Don’t worry, yia yia. I won’t tell anyone.”
   “Who’s to tell? Everybody’s dead now.”
   “You’re not. I’ll wait until you’re gone.”
   “Okay. When I die, you can tell everything.”
   “I will.”
   “Bravo, honey mou. Bravo.”
   At Assumption Church, no doubt against his wishes, Milton Stephanides was given a full Orthodox funeral. Father Greg performed the service. As for Father Michael Antoniou, he was later convicted of attempted grand larceny and served two years in prison. Aunt Zo divorced him and moved to Florida with Desdemona. Where to exactly? New Smyrna Beach. Where else? A few years later, when my mother was forced to sell our house, she moved to Florida, too, and the three of them lived together as they once had on Hurlbut Street, until Desdemona’s death in 1980. Tessie and Zoë are still in Florida today, two women living on their own.
   Milton’s casket remained closed during the funeral. Tessie had given Georgie Pappas, the undertaker, her husband’s wedding crown, so that it could be buried along with him. When it came time to give the deceased the final kiss, the mourners filed past Milton’s coffin and kissed its burnished lid. Fewer people came to my father’s funeral than we expected. None of the Hercules franchise owners showed up, not one of the men Milton had socialized with for years and years; and so we realized that, despite his bonhomie, Milton had never had any friends, only business associates. Family members turned out instead. Peter Tatakis, the chiropractor, arrived in his wine-dark Buick, and Bart Skiotis paid his respects at the church whose foundation he had laid with substandard materials. Gus and Helen Panos were there and, because it was a funeral, Gus’s tracheotomy made his voice sound even more like the voice of death. Aunt Zo and our cousins didn’t sit in front. That pew was reserved for my mother and brother.
   And so it was I who, upholding an old Greek custom no one remembered anymore, stayed behind on Middlesex, blocking the door, so that Milton’s spirit wouldn’t reenter the house. It was always a man who did this, and now I qualified. In my black suit, with my dirty Wallabees, I stood in the doorway, which was open to the winter wind. The weeping willows were bare but still massive and threw up their twisted arms like women in grief. The pastel yellow cube of our modern house sat cleanly on the white snow. Middlesex was now almost seventy years old. Though we had ruined it with our colonial furniture, it was still the beacon it was intended to be, a place with few interior walls, divested of the formalities of bourgeois life, a place designed for a new type of human being, who would inhabit a new world. I couldn’t help feeling, of course, that that person was me, me and all the others like me.
   After the funeral service, everyone got back into the cars for the drive to the cemetery. Purple pennants flew from the antennas as the procession drove slowly through the streets of the old East Side where my father had grown up, where he had once serenaded my mother from his bedroom window. The motorcade came down Mack Avenue and when they passed Hurlbut, Tessie looked out the limousine window to see the old house. But she couldn’t find it. Bushes had grown up all around, the yards were littered, and the decrepit houses now all looked the same to her. A little later, the hearse and limousines encountered a line of motorcycles and my mother noticed that the drivers were all wearing fezzes. They were Shriners, in town for a convention. Respectfully, they pulled over to let the funeral procession pass.
   On Middlesex, I remained in the front doorway. I took my duty seriously and didn’t budge, despite the freezing wind. Milton, the child apostate, would have been confirmed in his skepticism, because his spirit never returned that day, trying to get past me. The mulberry tree had no leaves. The wind swept over the crusted snow into my Byzantine face, which was the face of my grandfather and of the American girl I had once been. I stood in the door for an hour, maybe two. I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking about what was next.