Book Three

Home Movies

   My eyes, switched on at last, saw the following: a nurse reaching out to take me from the doctor; my mother’s triumphant face, as big as Mount Rushmore, as she watched me heading for my first bath. (I said it was impossible, but still I remember it.) Also other things, material and immaterial: the relentless glare of OR lights; white shoes squeaking over white floors; a housefly contaminating gauze; and all around me, up and down the halls of Women’s Hospital, individual dramas under way. I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new father’s terror as he calculated the tuition for triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.
   The nurse who cleaned me up was named Rosalee. She was a pretty, long-faced woman from the Tennessee mountains. After suctioning the mucus from my nostrils, she gave me a shot of vitamin K to coagulate my blood. Inbreeding is common in Appalachia, as are genetic deformities, but Nurse Rosalee noticed nothing unusual about me. She was concerned about a purple splotch on my cheek, thinking it was a port-wine stain. It turned out to be placenta, and washed off. Nurse Rosalee carried me back to Dr. Philobosian for an anatomical exam. She placed me down on the table but kept one hand on me for security’s sake. She’d noticed the doctor’s hand tremor during the delivery.
   In 1960, Dr. Nishan Philobosian was seventy-four. He had a camel’s head, drooping on its neck, with all the activity in the cheeks. White hair surrounded his otherwise bald head in a nimbus and plugged his big ears like cotton. His surgeon’s eyeglasses had rectangular loupes attached.
   He began with my neck, searching for cretinous folds. He counted my fingers and toes. He inspected my palate; he noted my Moro reflex without surprise. He checked my backside for a sacral tail. Then, putting me on my back again, he took hold of each of my curved legs and pulled them apart.
   What did he see? The clean, saltwater mussel of the female genitalia. The area inflamed, swollen with hormones. That touch of the baboon all babies have. Dr. Philobosian would have had to pull the folds apart to see any better, but he didn’t. Because right at that instant Nurse Rosalee (for whom the moment was also destiny) accidentally touched his arm. Dr. Phil looked up. Presbyopic, Armenian eyes met middle-aged, Appalachian ones. The gaze lingered, then broke away. Five minutes old, and already the themes of my life—chance and sex—announced themselves. Nurse Rosalee blushed. “Beautiful,” Dr. Philobosian said, meaning me but looking at his assistant. “A beautiful, healthy girl.”
   On Seminole, the birth celebrations were tempered by the prospect of death.
   Desdemona had found Lefty on our kitchen floor, lying next to his overturned coffee cup. She knelt beside him and pressed an ear to his chest. When she heard no heartbeat, she cried out his name. Her wail echoed off the kitchen’s hard surfaces: the toaster, the oven, the refrigerator. Finally she collapsed on his chest. In the silence that followed, however, Desdemona felt a strange emotion rising inside her. It spread in the space between her panic and grief. It was like a gas inflating her. Soon her eyes snapped open as she recognized the emotion: it was happiness. Tears were running down her face, she was already berating God for taking her husband from her, but on the other side of these proper emotions was an altogether improper relief. The worst had happened. This was it: the worst thing. For the first time in her life my grandmother had nothing to worry about.
   Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I’ll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here’s where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I’m a part of it. I’m talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn’t been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.
   The happiness that attends disaster didn’t possess Desdemona for long. A few seconds later she returned her head to her husband’s chest—and heard his heart beating! Lefty was rushed to the hospital. Two days later he regained consciousness. His mind was clear, his memory intact. But when he tried to ask whether the baby was a boy or a girl, he found he was unable to speak.
   According to Julie Kikuchi, beauty is always freakish. Yesterday, over strudel and coffee at Café Einstein, she tried to prove this to me. “Look at this model,” she said, holding up a fashion magazine. “Look at her ears. They belong on a Martian.” She started flipping pages. “Or look at the mouth on this one. You could put your whole head in it.”
   I was trying to get another cappuccino. The waiters in their Austrian uniforms ignored me, as they do everyone, and outside, the yellow lindens were dripping and weeping.
   “Or what about Jackie O.?” said Julie, still advocating. “Her eyes were so wide-set they were basically on the sides of her head. She looked like a hammerhead.”
   I’m working up with the foregoing to a physical description of myself. Baby pictures of the infant Calliope show a variety of features on the freakish side. My parents, looking fondly down into my crib, got stuck on every one. (I sometimes think that it was the arresting, slightly disturbing quality of my face that distracted everyone’s attention from the complications below.) Imagine my crib as a diorama in a museum. Press one button and my ears light up like two golden trumpets. Press another and my stark chin begins to glow. Another, and the high, ethereal cheekbones appear out of the darkness. So far the effect isn’t promising. On the evidence of ears, chin, and cheekbones I might be a baby Kafka. But the next button illuminates my mouth and things begin to improve. The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical. Then, in the middle of the map, comes the nose. It is nothing like the noses you see in classical Greek sculpture. Here is a nose that came to Asia Minor, like silk itself, from the East. In this case, the Middle East. The nose of the diorama baby already forms, if you look closely, an arabesque. Ears, nose, mouth, chin—now eyes. Not only are they widely set (like Jackie O.’s), they’re big. Too big for a baby’s face. Eyes like my grandmother’s. Eyes as big and sad as the eyes in a Keane painting. Eyes rimmed with long, dark eyelashes my mother couldn’t believe had formed inside her. How had her body worked in such detail? The complexion around these eyes: a pale olive. The hair: jet black. Now press all the buttons at once. Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
   As a baby, even as a little girl, I possessed an awkward, extravagant beauty. No single feature was right in itself and yet, when they were taken all together, something captivating emerged. An inadvertent harmony. A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
   Desdemona wasn’t interested in my looks. She was concerned with the state of my soul. “The baby she is two months old,” she said to my father in March. “Why you still no baptize her?” “I don’t want her baptized,” answered Milton. “It’s a bunch of hocus-pocus.” “Hokey pokey is it?” Desdemona now threatened him with an index finger. “You think Holy Tradition that the Church keep for two thousand years is hokey pokey?” And then she called on the Panaghia, using every one of her names. “All-Holy, immaculate, most blessed and glorified Lady, Mother of God and Ever-Virgin, do you hear what my son Milton is saying?” When my father still refused, Desdemona unleashed her secret weapon. She started fanning herself.
   To anyone who never personally experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the ominous, storm-gathering quality of my grandmother’s fanning. Refusing to argue anymore with my father, she walked on swollen ankles into the sun room. She sat down in a cane chair by the window. The winter light, coming from the side, reddened the far, translucent wing of her nose. She picked up her cardboard fan. The front of the fan was emblazoned with the words “Turkish Atrocities.” Below, in smaller print, were the specifics: the 1955 pogrom in Istanbul in which 15 Greeks were killed, 200 Greek women raped, 4,348 stores looted, 59 Orthodox churches destroyed, and even the graves of the Patriarchs desecrated. Desdemona had six atrocity fans. They were a collector’s set. Each year she sent a contribution to the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and a few weeks later a new fan arrived, making claims of genocide and, in one case, bearing a photograph of Patriarch Athenagoras in the ruins of a looted cathedral. Not appearing on Desdemona’s particular fan that day, but denounced nonetheless, was the most recent crime, committed not by the Turks but by her own Greek son, who refused to give his daughter a proper Orthodox baptism. Desdemona’s fanning wasn’t a matter of moving the wrist back and forth; the agitation came from deep within her. It originated from the spot between her stomach and liver where she once told me the Holy Spirit resided. It issued from a place deeper than her own buried crime. Milton tried to take shelter behind his newspaper, but the fan-disturbed air rustled the newsprint. The force of Desdemona’s fanning could be felt all over the house; it swirled dustballs on the stairs; it stirred the window shades; and, of course, since it was winter, it made everyone shiver. After a while the entire house seemed to be hyperventilating. The fanning even pursued Milton into his Oldsmobile, which began to make a soft hissing from the radiator.
   In addition to the fanning, my grandmother appealed to family feeling. Father Mike, her son-in-law and my very own uncle, was by this time back from his years in Greece and serving—in an assistant capacity—at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church.
   “Please, Miltie,” Desdemona said. “Think of Father Mike. They never give him top job at the church. You think if his own niece she no gets baptized it will look good? Think of your sister, Miltie. Poor Zoë! They no have much money.”
   Finally, in a sign that he was weakening, my father asked my mother, “What do they charge for a baptism these days?”
   “They’re free.”
   Milton’s eyebrows lifted. But after a moment’s consideration he nodded, confirmed in his suspicions. “Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.”
   By 1960, the Greek Orthodox congregation of Detroit’s East Side had yet another new building to worship in. Assumption had moved from Vernor Highway to a new site on Charlevoix. The erection of the Charlevoix church had been an event of great excitement. From the humble beginnings of the storefront on Hart Street, to the respectable but by no means splashy domicile off Beniteau, Assumption was finally going to get a grand church building. Many construction firms bid for the job, but in the end it was decided to give it to “someone from the community,” and that someone was Bart Skiotis.
   The motives behind building the new church were twofold: to resurrect the ancient splendor of Byzantium and to show the world the financial wherewithal of the prospering Greek American community. No expense was spared. An icon painter from Crete was imported to render the iconography. He stayed for over a year, sleeping in the unfinished structure on a thin mat. A traditionalist, he refrained from meat, alcohol, and sweets, in order to purify his soul and receive divine inspiration. Even his paintbrush was by the book, made from the tip of a squirrel’s tail. Slowly, over two years, our East Side Hagia Sophia went up, not far from the Ford Freeway. There was only one problem. Unlike the icon painter, Bart Skiotis had not worked with a pure heart. It turned out that he had used inferior materials, siphoning the remaining cash into his personal bank account. He laid the foundation incorrectly, so that it wasn’t long before cracks began to branch over the walls, scarring the iconography. The ceiling leaked, too.
   Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began. My godfather, Jimmy Papanikolas, took me from my father’s arms. He presented me to Father Mike. Smiling, overjoyed to be center stage for once, Father Mike cut a lock of my hair and tossed it into the baptismal pool. (It was this part of the ritual, I later suspected, that was responsible for the fuzzy quality of our font’s surfaces. Years and years of baby hair, stimulated by the life-giving water, had taken root and grown.) But now Father Mike was ready for the dunking. “The servant of God, Calliope Helen is baptized in the Name of the Father, Amen … “ and he pushed me under for the first time. In the Orthodox Church, we don’t go in for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you have to be buried first, so under the water I went. My family looked on, my mother seized with anxiety (what if I inhaled?), my brother dropping a penny into the water when no one was looking, my grandmother stilling her fan for the first time in weeks. Father Mike pulled me up into the air again—“and of the Son, Amen”—and dunked me under once more. This time I opened my eyes. Chapter Eleven’s penny, in freefall, glinted through the murk. Down it sank to the bottom where, I now noticed, lots of things were collected: other coins, for instance, hairpins, somebody’s old Band-Aid. In the green, scummy, holy water, I felt at peace. Everything was silent. The sides of my neck tingled in the place where humans once had gills. I was dimly aware that this beginning was somehow indicative of the rest of my life. My family were around me; I was in the hands of God. But I was in my own, separate element, too, submerged in rare sensations, pushing evolution’s envelope. This knowledge whizzed through my mind, and then Father Mike pulled me up again—“and of the Holy Spirit, Amen …” One more dunking to go. Down I went and back up again, into light and air. The three submersions had taken a while. In addition to being murky, the water was warm. By the third time up, therefore, I had indeed been reborn: as a fountain. From between my cherubic legs a stream of crystalline liquid shot into the air. Lit from the dome above, its yellow scintillance arrested everyone’s attention. The stream rose in an arc. Propelled by a full bladder, it cleared the lip of the font. And before my nouno had time to react, it struck Father Mike right in the middle of the face.
   Suppressed laughter from the pews, a few old ladies gasping in horror, then silence. Disgraced by his own partial immersion—and dabbing himself like a Protestant—Father Mike completed the ceremony. Taking the chrism on his fingertips, he anointed me, marking the sign of the Cross on the required places, first my forehead, then eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet. As he touched each place, he said, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Finally he gave me my First Communion (with one exception: Father Mike didn’t forgive me for my sin).
   “That’s my girl,” Milton crowed on the way home. “Pissed on a priest.”
   “It was an accident,” Tessie insisted, still hot with embarrassment. “Poor Father Mike! He’ll never get over it.”
   “That went really far,” marveled Chapter Eleven.
   In all the commotion, no one wondered about the engineering involved.
   Desdemona took my reverse baptism of her son-in-law as a bad omen. Already potentially responsible for her husband’s stroke, I had now committed a sacrilege at my first liturgical opportunity. In addition, I had humiliated her by being born a girl. “Maybe you should try guessing the weather,” Sourmelina teased her. My father rubbed it in: “So much for your spoon, Ma. It sort of pooped out on you.” The truth was that in those days Desdemona was struggling against assimilationist pressures she couldn’t resist. Though she had lived in America as an eternal exile, a visitor for forty years, certain bits of her adopted country had been seeping under the locked doors of her disapproval. After Lefty came home from the hospital, my father took a TV up to the attic to provide some entertainment. It was a small black-and-white Zenith, prone to vertical shift. Milton placed it on a bedside table and went back downstairs. The television remained, rumbling, glowing. Lefty adjusted his pillows to watch. Desdemona tried to do housework but found herself looking over at the screen more and more often. She still didn’t like cars. She covered her ears whenever the vacuum cleaner was on. But the TV was somehow different. My grandmother took to television right away. It was the first and only thing about America she approved of. Sometimes she forgot to turn the set off and would awaken at 2A.M. to hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing before the station signed off.
   The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents’ lives. Desdemona watched all day long, scandalized by the love affairs on As the World Turns. She liked detergent commercials especially, anything with animated scrubbing bubbles or avenging suds.
   Living on Seminole contributed to the cultural imperialism. On Sundays, instead of serving Metaxa, Milton fixed cocktails for his guests. “Drinks with the names of people,” Desdemona complained to her mute husband back in the attic. “Tom Collins. Harvey Wall Bang. This is a drink! And they are listening to music on the, how you say, the hi-fi. Milton he puts this music, and they drink Tom Collins and sometimes they are, you know, dancing, one on one, men together with the women. Like wrestling.”
   What was I to Desdemona but another sign of the end of things? She tried not to look at me. She hid behind her fans. Then one day Tessie had to go out and Desdemona was forced to baby-sit. Warily, she entered my bedroom. Taking cautious steps, she approached my crib. Black-draped sexagenarian leaned down to examine pink-swaddled infant. Maybe something in my expression set off an alarm. Maybe she was already making the connections she would later make, between village babies and this suburban one, between old wives’ tales and new endocrinology … Then again, maybe not. Because as she peered distrustfully over the rail of my crib, she saw my face—and blood intervened. Desdemona’s worried expression hovered above my (similarly) perplexed one. Her mournful eyes gazed down at my (equally) large black orbs. Everything about us was the same. And so she picked me up and I did what grandchildren are supposed to do: I erased the years between us. I gave Desdemona back her original skin.
   From then on, I was her favorite. Midmornings she would relieve my mother by taking me up to the attic. Lefty had regained most of his strength by this time. Despite his speech paralysis, my grandfather remained a vital person. He got up early every day, bathed, shaved, and put on a necktie to translate Attic Greek for two hours before breakfast. He no longer had aspirations to publish his translations but did the work because he liked it and because it kept his mind sharp. In order to communicate with the rest of the family, he kept a little chalkboard with him at all times. He wrote messages in words and personal hieroglyphics. Aware that he and Desdemona were a burden to my parents, Lefty was extremely helpful around the house, doing repairs, assisting with the cleaning, running errands. Every afternoon he took his three-mile walk, no matter the weather, and returned cheerful, his smile full of gold fillings. At night he listened to his rebetika records in the attic and smoked his hookah pipe. Whenever Chapter Eleven asked what was in the pipe, Lefty wrote on his chalkboard, “Turkish mud.” My parents always believed it was an aromatic brand of tobacco. Where Lefty obtained the hash is anybody’s guess. Out on his walks, probably. He still had lots of Greek and Lebanese contacts in the city.
   From ten to noon every day my grandparents took care of me. Desdemona fed me my bottles and changed my diapers. She finger-combed my hair. When I got fussy, Lefty carried me around the room. Since he couldn’t speak to me, he bounced me a lot and hummed to me, and touched his big, arching nose to my little, latent one. My grandfather was like a dignified, unpainted mime, and I was almost five before I realized that anything was wrong with him. When he tired of making faces, he carried me to the dormer window, where, together, from the opposite ends of life, we gazed down at our leafy neighborhood.
   Soon I was walking. Animated by brightly wrapped presents, I scampered into the frames of my father’s home movies. On those first celluloid Christmases I look as overdressed as the Infanta. Starved for a daughter, Tessie went a little overboard in dressing me. Pink skirts, lace ruffles, Yuletide bows in my hair. I didn’t like the clothes, or the prickly Christmas tree, and am usually shown bursting dramatically into tears…
   Or it might have been my father’s cinematography. Milton’s camera came equipped with a rack of merciless floodlights. The brightness of those films gives them the quality of Gestapo interrogations. Holding up our presents, we all cringe, as though caught with contraband. Aside from their blinding brightness, there was another odd thing about Milton’s home movies: like Hitchcock, he always appeared in them. The only way to check the amount of film left in the camera was by reading the counter inside the lens. In the middle of Christmas scenes or birthday parties there always came a moment when Milton’s eye would fill the screen. So that now, as I quickly try to sketch my early years, what comes back most clearly is just that: the brown orb of my father’s sleepy, bearish eye. A postmodern touch in our domestic cinema, pointing up artifice, calling attention to mechanics. (And bequeathing me my aesthetic.) Milton’s eye regarded us. It blinked. An eye as big as the Christ Pantocrator’s at church, it was better than any mosaic. It was a living eye, the cornea a little bloodshot, the eyelashes luxuriant, the skin underneath coffee-stained and pouchy. This eye would stare us down for as long as ten seconds. Finally the camera would pull away, still recording. We’d see the ceiling, the lighting fixture, the floor, and then us again: the Stephanides.
   First of all, Lefty. Still dapper despite stroke damage, wearing a starched white shirt and glenplaid trousers, he writes on his chalkboard and holds it up: “ Christos Anesti.” Desdemona sits across from him, her dentures making her look like a snapping turtle. My mother, in this home movie marked “Easter ’62,” is two years from turning forty. The crow’s-feet around her eyes are another reason (aside from the floodlights) why she holds a hand over her face. In this gesture I see the emotional sympathy I’ve always felt with Tessie, the two of us never happier than when unobserved, people-watching. Behind her hand I can see the traces of the novel she stayed up reading the previous night. All the big words she had to look up in the dictionary crowd her tired head, waiting to show up in the letters she writes me today. Her hand is also a refusal, her only way of getting back at a husband who has begun to disappear on her. (Milton came home every night; he didn’t drink or womanize but, preoccupied with business worries, he began to leave a little more of himself at the diner each day, so that the man who returned to us seemed less and less present, a kind of robot who carved turkeys and filmed holidays but who wasn’t really there at all.) Finally, of course, my mother’s upraised hand is a kind of warning, too, a predecessor of the black box.
   Chapter Eleven sprawls on the carpet, wolfing candy. Grandson of the two former silk farmers (with chalkboard and worry beads), he has never had to help in the cocoonery. He has never been to the Koza Han. Environment has already made its imprint on him. He has the tyrannical, self-absorbed look of American children…
   And now two dogs come bounding into the frame. Rufus and Willis, our two boxers. Rufus sniffs my diaper and, with perfect comic timing, sits on me. He will later bite someone, and both dogs will be given away. My mother appears, shooing Rufus … and there I am again. I stand up and toddle toward the camera, smiling, trying out my wave…
   I know this film well. “Easter ’62” was the home movie Dr. Luce talked my parents into giving him. This was the film he screened each year for his students at Cornell University Medical School. This was the thirty-five-second segment that, Luce insisted, proved out his theory that gender identity is established early on in life. This was the film Dr. Luce showed to me, to tell me who I was. And who was that? Look at the screen. My mother is handing me a baby doll. I take the baby and hug it to my chest. Putting a toy bottle to the baby’s lips, I offer it milk.
   My early childhood passed, on film and otherwise. I was brought up as a girl and had no doubts about this. My mother bathed me and taught me how to clean myself. From everything that happened later, I would guess that these instructions in feminine hygiene were rudimentary at best. I don’t remember any direct allusions to my sexual apparatus. All was shrouded in a zone of privacy and fragility, where my mother never scrubbed me too hard. (Chapter Eleven’s apparatus was called a “pitzi.” But for what I had there was no word at all.) My father was even more squeamish. In the rare times he diapered me or gave me a bath, Milton studiously averted his eyes. “Did you wash her all over?” my mother would ask him, speaking obliquely as usual. “Not all over. That’s your department.”
   It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome is a skillful counterfeiter. Until I reached puberty and androgens flooded my bloodstream, the ways in which I differed from other little girls were hard to detect. My pediatrician never noticed anything unusual. And by the time I was five Tessie had started taking me to Dr. Phil—Dr. Phil with his failing eyesight and his cursory examinations.
   On January 8, 1967, I turned seven years old. 1967 marked the end of many things in Detroit, but among these was my father’s home movies. “Callie’s 7th B-Day” was the last of Milton’s Super 8s. The setting was our dining room, decorated with balloons. On my head sits the usual conical hat. Chapter Eleven, twelve years old, does not join the boys and girls at the table but instead stands back against the wall, drinking punch. The difference in our ages meant that my brother and I were never close growing up. When I was a baby Chapter Eleven was a kid, when I was a kid he was a teenager, and by the time I became a teenager he was an adult. At twelve, my brother liked nothing better than to cut golf balls in half to see what was inside. Usually, his vivisection of Wilsons and Spaldings revealed cores consisting of extremely tightly bundled rubber bands. But sometimes there were surprises. In fact, if you look very closely at my brother in this home movie, you will notice a strange thing: his face, arms, shirt, and pants are covered by thousands of tiny white dots.
   Just before my birthday party had started, Chapter Eleven had been down in his basement laboratory, using a hacksaw on a newfangled Titleist that advertised a “liquid center.” The ball was held firmly in a vise as Chapter Eleven sawed. When he reached the center of the Titleist, there was a loud popping sound followed by a puff of smoke. The center of the ball was empty. Chapter Eleven was mystified. But when he emerged from the basement, we all saw the dots…
   Back at the party, my birthday cake is coming out with its seven candles. My mother’s silent lips are telling me to make a wish. What did I wish for at seven? I don’t remember. In the film I lean forward and, Aeolian, blow the candles out. In a moment, they reignite. I blow them out again. Same thing happens. And then Chapter Eleven is laughing, entertained at last. That was how our home movies ended, with a prank on my birthday. With candles that had multiple lives.
   The question remains: Why was this Milton’s last movie? Can it be explained by the usual petering out of parents’ enthusiasm for documenting their children on film? By the fact that Milton took hundreds of baby photographs of Chapter Eleven and no more than twenty or so of me? To answer these questions, I need to go behind the camera and see things through my father’s eyes.
   The reason Milton was disappearing on us: after ten years in business, the diner was no longer making a profit. Through the front window (over Athena olive oil tins) my father looked out day after day at the changes on Pingree Street. The white family who’d lived across the way, good customers once, had moved out. Now the house belonged to a colored man named Morrison. He came into the diner to buy cigarettes. He ordered coffee, asked for a million refills, and smoked. He never ordered any food. He didn’t seem to have a job. Sometimes other people moved into his house, a young woman, maybe Morrison’s daughter, with her kids. Then they were gone and it was just Morrison again. There was a tarp up on his roof with bricks around it, to cover a hole.
   Just down the block an after-hours place had opened up. Its patrons urinated in the doorway of the diner on their way home. Streetwalkers had started working Twelfth Street. The dry cleaner’s on the next block over had been held up, the white owner severely beaten. A. A. Laurie, who ran the optometrist’s shop next door, took down his eye chart from the wall as workers removed the neon eyeglasses out front. He was moving to a new shop in Southfield.
   My father had considered doing the same.
   “That whole neighborhood’s going down the tubes,” Jimmy Fioretos had advised one Sunday after dinner. “Get out while the getting’s good.”
   And then Gus Panos, who had had a tracheotomy and spoke through a hole in his neck, hissing like a bellows: “Jimmy’s right … sssss … You should move out to … ssss … Bloomfield Hills.”
   Uncle Pete had disagreed, making his usual case for integration and support for President Johnson’s War on Poverty.
   A few weeks later, Milton had had the business appraised and was met with a shock: the Zebra Room was worth less than when Lefty had acquired it in 1933. Milton had waited too long to sell it. The getting out was no longer good.
   And so the Zebra Room remained on the corner of Pingree and Dexter, the swing music on the jukebox growing increasingly out of date, the celebrities and sports figures on the walls more and more unrecognizable. On Saturdays, my grandfather often took me for a ride in the car. We drove out to Belle Isle to look for deer and then stopped in for lunch at the family restaurant. At the diner we sat in a booth while Milton waited on us, pretending we were customers. He took Lefty’s order and winked. “And what’ll the Mrs. have?”
   “I’m not the Mrs.!”
   “You’re not?”
   I ordered my usual of a cheeseburger, milk shake, and lemon meringue pie for dessert. Opening the cash register, Milton gave me a stack of quarters to use in the jukebox. While I chose songs, I looked out the front window for my neighborhood friend. Most Saturdays he was installed on the corner, surrounded by other young men. Sometimes he stood on a broken chair or a cinder block while he orated. Always his arm was in the air, waving and gesticulating. But if he happened to see me, his raised fist would open up, and he would wave.
   His name was Marius Wyxzewixard Challouehliczilczese Grimes. I was not allowed to speak to him. Milton considered Marius to be a troublemaker, a view in which many Zebra Room patrons, white and black both, concurred. I liked him, though. He called me “Little Queen of the Nile.” He said I looked like Cleopatra. “Cleopatra was Greek,” he said. “Did you know that?” “No.” “Yeah, she was. She was a Ptolemy. Big family back then. They were Greek Egyptians. I’ve got a little Egyptian blood in me, too. You and me are probably related.” If he was standing on his broken chair, waiting for a crowd to form, he would talk to me. But if other people were there he would be too busy.
   Marius Wyxzewixard Challouehliczilczese Grimes had been named after an Ethiopian nationalist, a contemporary of Fard Muhammad, in fact, back in the thirties. Marius had been an asthmatic child. He’d spent most of his childhood inside, reading the eclectic books in his mother’s library. As a teenager he’d been beaten up a lot (he wore glasses, Marius did, and had a habit of mouth-breathing). But by the time I got to know him, Marius W. C. Grimes was coming into his manhood. He worked at a record store and was going to U. of D. Law School, nights. There was something happening in the country, in the black neighborhoods especially, that was conducive to the ascension of a brother like Marius to the corner soapbox. It was suddenly cool to know stuff, to expatiate on the causes of the Spanish Civil War. Ché Guevara had asthma, too. And Marius wore a beret. A black paramilitary beret with black glasses and a little fledgling soul patch. In beret and glasses Marius stood on the corner waking people up to things. “Zebra Room,” he pointed a bony finger, “white-owned.” Then the finger went down the block. “TV store, white-owned. Grocery store, white-owned. Bank …” Brothers looked around … “You got it. No bank. They don’t give loans to black folks.” Marius was planning to become a public advocate. As soon as he graduated from law school he was going to sue the city of Dearborn for housing discrimination. He was currently number three in his law school class. But now it was humid out, his childhood asthma acting up, and Marius was feeling unhappy and unwell when I came roller-skating by.
   “Hi, Marius.”
   He did not vocally respond, a sign with him that he was in low spirits. But he nodded his head, which gave me the courage to continue.
   “Why don’t you get a better chair to stand on?”
   “You don’t like my chair?”
   “It’s all broken.”
   “This chair is an antique. That means it’s supposed to be broken.”
   “Not that broken.”
   But Marius was squinting across the street at the Zebra Room.
   “Let me ask you something, little Cleo.”
   “What?”
   “How come there’s always at least three big fat officers of the so-called peace sitting at the counter of your dad’s place?”
   “He gives them free coffee.”
   “And why do you think he does that?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “You don’t know? Okay, I’ll tell you. He’s paying protection money. Your old man likes to keep the fuzz around because he’s scared of us black folks.”
   “He is not,” I said, suddenly defensive.
   “You don’t think so?”
   “No.”
   “Okay, then, Queenie. You know best.”
   But Marius’s accusation bothered me. After that, I began to watch my father more closely. I noticed how he always locked the car doors when we drove through the black neighborhood. I heard him in the living room on Sundays: “They don’t take care of their properties. They let everything go to hell.” The next week, when Lefty took me to the diner, I was more aware than ever of the broad backs of policemen at the counter. I heard them joking with my father. “Hey, Milt, you better start putting some soul food on the menu.”
   “Think so?”—my father, jovially—“Maybe a little collard greens?”
   I snuck out, going to look for Marius. He was in his usual spot but sitting, not standing, and reading a book.
   “Test tomorrow,” he told me. “Gotta study.”
   “I’m in second grade,” I said.
   “Only second! I had you down for high school at least.”
   I gave him my most winning smile.
   “Must be that Ptolemy blood. Just stay away from the Roman men, okay?”
   “What?”
   “Nothing, Little Queen. Just playing with you.” He was laughing now, which he didn’t do that often. His face opened up, bright.
   And suddenly my father was shouting my name. “Callie!”
   “What?”
   “Get over here right now!”
   Marius stood up awkwardly from his chair. “We were just talking,” he said. “Smart little girl you got here.”
   “You stay away from her, you hear me?”
   “Daddy!” I protested, appalled, embarrassed for my friend.
   But Marius’s voice was soft. “It’s cool, little Cleo. Got this test and all. Go on back to your dad.”
   For the rest of that day Milton kept after me. “You are never, ever, to talk to strangers like that. What’s the matter with you?”
   “He’s not a stranger. His name is Marius Wyxzewixard Challouehliczilczese Grimes.”
   “You hear me? You stay away from people like that.”
   Afterward, Milton told my grandfather to stop bringing me down to the diner for lunch. But I would come again, in just a few months, under my own power.

Opa!

   They always think it’s the old-school, gentlemanly routine. The slowness of my advances. The leisurely pace of my incursions. (I’ve learned to make the first move by now, but not the second.)
   I invited Julie Kikuchi to go away for the weekend. To Pomerania. The idea was to drive to Usedom, an island in the Baltic, and stay in an old resort once favored by Wilhelm II. I made a point to emphasize that we would have separate rooms.
   Since it was the weekend, I tried to dress down. It isn’t easy for me. I wore a camel-hair turtleneck, tweed blazer, and jeans. And a pair of handmade cordovans by Edward Green. This particular style is called the Dundee. They look dressy until you notice the Vibram soles. The leather is of a double thickness. The Dundee is a shoe designed for touring the landed estates, for tromping through mud while wearing a tie, with your spaniels trailing behind. I had to wait four months for these shoes. On the shoebox it says: “Edward Green: Master Shoemakers to the Few.” That’s me exactly. The few.
   I picked Julie up in a rented Mercedes, an unquiet diesel. She had made a bunch of tapes for the ride and had brought reading material: The Guardian, the last two issues of Parkett. We drove out the narrow, tree-lined roads to the northeast. We passed villages of thatch-roofed houses. The land grew marshier, inlets appeared, and soon we traveled over the bridge to the island.
   Shall I get right to it? No, slowly, leisurely, that’s the way. Let me first mention that it is October here in Germany. Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boisterously congregated in the striped Strandkörbe, the little beach huts.
   From the elegant boardwalk surrounded by pine and birch trees, I looked out at these naturists and wondered what I always wonder: What is it like to feel free like that? I mean, my body is so much better than theirs. I’m the one with the well-defined biceps, the bulging pectorals, the burnished glutes. But I could never saunter around in public like that.
   “Not exactly the cover of Sunshine and Health,” said Julie.
   “After a certain age, people should keep their clothes on,” I said, or something like that. When in doubt I resort to mildly conservative or British-sounding pronouncements. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying. I had suddenly forgotten all about the nudists. Because I was looking at Julie now. She had pushed her silver DDR-era eyeglasses onto the top of her head so that she could take pictures of the distant sunbathers. The wind off the Baltic was making her hair fly around. “Your eyebrows are like little black caterpillars,” I said. “Flatterer,” said Julie, still shooting. I said nothing else. As one does the return of sun after winter, I stood still and accepted the warm glow of possibility, of feeling right in the company of this small, oddly fierce person with the inky hair and the lovely, unemphasized body.
   Still, that night, and the night after, we slept in separate rooms.


* * *

   My father forbade me to talk to Marius Grimes in April, a damp, cool-headed month in Michigan. By May the weather grew warm; June was hot and July hotter still. In the backyard of our house on Seminole, I jumped through the sprinkler in my bathing suit, a two-piece number, while Chapter Eleven picked dandelions to make dandelion wine.
   During that summer, as the temperature climbed, Milton tried to come to grips with the predicament he found himself in. His vision had been to open not one restaurant but a chain. Now he realized that the first link in that chain, the Zebra Room, was a weak one, and he was thrown into doubt and confusion. For the first time in his life Milton Stephanides came up against a possibility he’d never entertained: failure. What was he going to do with the restaurant? Should he sell it for peanuts? What then? (For the time being, he decided to close the diner on Mondays and Tuesdays to cut payroll expenses.)
   My father and mother didn’t discuss the situation in front of us and slipped into Greek when discussing it with our grandparents. Chapter Eleven and I were left to figure out what was going on by the tone of a conversation that made no sense to us, and to be honest, we didn’t pay much attention. We only knew that Milton was suddenly around the house during the day. Milton, whom we had rarely seen in sunlight before, was suddenly out in the backyard, reading the newspaper. We discovered what our father’s legs looked like in short pants. We discovered what he looked like when he didn’t shave. The first two days his face got sandpapery the way it always did on weekends. But now, instead of seizing my hand and rubbing it against his whiskers until I screamed, Milton no longer had the high spirits to torment me. He just sat on the patio as the beard, like a stain, like a fungus, spread.
   Unconsciously Milton was adhering to the Greek custom of not shaving after a death in the family. Only in this case what had ended wasn’t a life but a livelihood. The beard fattened up his already plump face. He didn’t keep it trimmed or very clean. And because he didn’t utter a word about his troubles, his beard began to express silently all the things he wouldn’t allow himself to say. Its knots and whorls indicated his increasingly tangled thoughts. Its bitter odor released the ketones of stress. As summer progressed, the beard grew shaggy, unmown, and it was obvious that Milton was thinking about Pingree Street; he was going to seed the way Pingree Street was.
   Lefty tried to comfort his son. “Be strong,” he wrote. With a smile he copied out the warrior epitaph at Thermopylae: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by/that here obedient to their laws we lie.” But Milton barely read the quote. His father’s stroke had convinced him that Lefty was no longer at the top of his game. Mute, carrying his pitiful chalkboard around, lost in his restoration of Sappho, Lefty had begun to seem old to his son. Milton found himself getting impatient or not paying attention. Intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members, that’s what Milton felt, seeing his father sunk in desk light, jutting out a moist underlip, scanning a dead language.
   Despite the Cold War secrecy, bits of information leaked out to us kids. The deepening threat to our finances made itself known in the form of a jagged wrinkle, like a lightning bolt, that flashed above the bridge of my mother’s nose whenever I asked for something expensive in a toy store. Meat began appearing less often on our dinner table. Milton rationed electricity. If Chapter Eleven left a light on for more than a minute, he returned to total darkness. And to a voice in the darkness: “What did I tell you about kilowatts!” For a while we lived with a single lightbulb, which Milton carried from room to room. “This way I can keep track of how much power we’re using,” he said, screwing the bulb into the dining room fixture so that we could sit down to dinner. “I can’t see my food,” Tessie complained. “What do you mean?” said Milton. “This is what they call ambiance.” After dessert, Milton took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, unscrewed the hot lightbulb, and, tossing it like an unambitious juggler, conveyed it into the living room. We waited in darkness as he fumbled through the house, knocking into furniture. Finally there was a brownout in the distance and Milton cheerily called out, “Ready!”
   He kept up a brave front. He hosed down the sidewalk outside the diner and kept the windows spotless. He continued to greet customers with a hearty “How’s everything?” or a “ Yahsou, patriote!” But the Zebra Room’s swing music and old-time baseball players couldn’t stop time. It was no longer 1940 but 1967. Specifically, the night of Sunday, July 23, 1967. And there was something lumpy under my father’s pillow.
   Behold my parents’ bedroom: furnished entirely in Early American reproductions, it offers them connection (at discount prices) with the country’s founding myths. Notice, for instance, the veneer headboard of the bed, made from “pure cherrywood,” as Milton likes to say, just like the little tree George Washington chopped down. Direct your attention to the wallpaper with its Revolutionary War motif. A repeating pattern showing the famous trio of drummer boy, fife player, and lame old man. Throughout my earliest years on earth those bloodied figures marched around my parents’ bedroom, here disappearing behind a “Monticello” dresser, there emerging from behind a “Mount Vernon” mirror, or sometimes having no place to go at all and being cut in half by a closet.
   Forty-three years old now, my parents, on this historic night, lie sound asleep. Milton’s snores make the bed rattle; also, the wall connecting to my room, where I’m asleep myself in a grownup bed. And something else is rattling beneath Milton’s pillow, a potentially dangerous situation considering what the object is. Under my father’s pillow is the.45 automatic he brought back from the war.
   Chekhov’s first rule of playwriting goes something like this: “If there’s a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two.” I can’t help thinking about that storytelling precept as I contemplate the gun beneath my father’s pillow. There it is. I can’t take it away now that I’ve mentioned it. (It really was there that night.) And there are bullets in the gun and the safety is off…
   Detroit, in the stifling summer of 1967, is bracing for race riots. Watts had exploded two summers earlier. Riots had broken out in Newark recently. In response to the national turmoil, the all-white Detroit police force has been raiding after-hours bars in the city’s black neighborhoods. The idea is to make preemptive strikes against possible flashpoints. Usually, the police park their paddy wagons in back alleys and herd the patrons into the vehicles without anyone seeing. But tonight, for reasons that will never be explained, three police vehicles arrive at the Economy Printing Co. at 9125 Twelfth Street—three blocks from Pingree—and park at the curb. You might think this wouldn’t matter at five in the morning, but you would be wrong. Because in 1967, Detroit’s Twelfth Street is open all night.
   For instance, as the police arrive, there are girls lined along the street, girls in miniskirts, thigh-highs, and halter tops. (The sea wrack Milton hoses from the sidewalk every morning includes the dead jellyfish of prophylactics and the occasional hermit crab of a lost high heel.) The girls stand at the curbs as cars cruise by. Keylime Cadillacs, fire-red Toronados, wide-mouthed, trolling Lincolns, all in perfect shape. Chrome glints. Hubcaps shine. Not a single rust spot anywhere. (Which is something that always amazes Milton about black people, the contradiction between the perfection of their automobiles and the disrepair of their houses.) … But now the gleaming cars are slowing. Windows are rolling down and girls are bending to chat with the drivers. There are calls back and forth, the lifting of already minuscule skirts, and sometimes a flash of breast or an obscene gesture, the girls working it, laughing, high enough by 5A.M. to be numb to the rawness between their legs and the residues of men no amount of perfume can get rid of. It isn’t easy to keep yourself clean on the street, and by this hour each of those young women smells in the places that count like a very ripe, soft French cheese … They’re numb, too, to thoughts of babies left at home, six-month-olds with bad colds lying in used cribs, sucking on pacifiers, and having a hard time breathing … numb to the lingering taste of semen in their mouths along with peppermint gum, most of these girls no more than eighteen, this curb on Twelfth Street their first real place of employment, the most the country has to offer in the way of a vocation. Where are they going to go from here? They’re numb to that, too, except for a couple who have dreams of singing backup or opening up a hair shop … But this is all part of what happened that night, what’s about to happen (the police are getting out of their cars now, they are breaking in the door of the blind pig) … as a window opens and someone yells, “It’s the fuzz! Out the back way!” At the curb the girls recognize the cops because they have to do them for free. But something is different tonight, something is happening … the girls don’t disappear as usual when the cops show up. They stand and watch as the clients of the blind pig are led out in handcuffs, and a few girls even begin to grumble … and now other doors are opening and cars are stopping and suddenly everyone is out on the street … people stream out of other blind pigs and from houses and from street corners and you can feel it in the air, the way the air has somehow been keeping score, and how at this moment in July of 1967 the tally of abuses has reached a point so that the imperative flies out from Watts and Newark to Twelfth Street in Detroit, as one girl shouts, “Get yo’ hands offa them, motherfucking pigs!” … and then there are other shouts, and pushing, and a bottle just misses a policeman and shatters a squad car window behind … and back on Seminole my father is sleeping on a gun that has just been recommissioned, because the riots have begun…
   At 6:23A.M., the Princess telephone in my bedroom rang and I picked it up. It was Jimmy Fioretos, who in his panic mistook my voice for my mother’s. “Tessie, tell Milt to get down to the restaurant. The coloreds are rioting!”
   “Stephanides residence,” I continued politely, as I’d been taught. “Callie speaking.”
   “Callie? Jesus. Honey, let me speak to your father?”
   “Just one minute please.” I put down the pink phone, walked into my parents’ bedroom, and shook my father awake.
   “It’s Mr. Fioretos.”
   “Jimmy? Christ, what does he want?” He lifted his cheek, in which could be discerned the imprint of a gun barrel.
   “He says somebody’s rioting.”
   At which point, my father jumped out of bed. As though he still weighed one hundred and forty pounds instead of one ninety, Milton flipped gymnastically into the air and landed on his feet, completely unaware of both his nakedness and his dream-filled morning erection. (So it was that the Detroit riots will always be connected in my mind with my first sight of the aroused male genitalia. Even worse, they were my father’s, and worst of all, he was reaching for a gun. Sometimes a cigar is not a cigar.) Tessie was up now, too, shouting at Milton not to go, and Milton was hopping on one foot, trying to put on his pants; and before long everybody was into it.
   “I tell you this what happen!” Desdemona screamed at Milton as he ran down the stairs. “Do you fix the church for St. Christopher? No!”
   “Leave it to the police, Milt,” Tessie pleaded.
   And Chapter Eleven: “When are you going to be back, Dad? You promised to take me to Radio Shack today.”
   And me, still squeezing my eyes shut to erase what I’d seen: “I think I’ll go back to bed now.”
   The only person who didn’t say something was Lefty, because in all the confusion he couldn’t find his chalkboard.
   Half-dressed, in shoes but no socks, in pants but no underpants, Milton Stephanides raced his Delta 88 through the early morning streets. All the way to Woodward nothing seemed amiss. The roads were clear. Everyone was still asleep. As he turned onto West Grand Boulevard, however, he saw a pillar of smoke rising into the air. Unlike all the other pillars of smoke issuing from the city’s smokestacks, this pillar didn’t disperse into the general smog. It hung low to the ground like a vengeful tornado. It churned and kept its fearsome shape, fed by what it consumed. The Oldsmobile was heading straight for it. Suddenly people appeared. People running. People carrying things. People laughing and looking over their shoulders while other people waved their hands, appealing for them to stop. Sirens wailed. A police car raced past. The officer at the wheel signaled Milton to turn back, but Milton did not obey.
   And it was funny, because these were his streets. Milton had known them his whole life. Over there on Lincoln there used to be a fruit stand. Lefty used to stop there with Milton to buy cantaloupes, teaching Milton how to pick a sweet one by looking for tiny punctures left by bees. Over on Trumbull was where Mrs. Tsatsarakis lived. Used to always ask me to bring up Vernors from the basement, Milton thought to himself. Couldn’t climb stairs anymore. On the corner of Sterling and Commonwealth was the old Masonic Temple, where one Saturday afternoon thirty-five years before, Milton had been runner-up in a spelling bee. A spelling bee! Two dozen kids in their best clothes concentrating as hard as they could to piece out “prestidigitation” one letter at a time. That’s what used to happen in this neighborhood. Spelling bees! Now ten-year-olds were running in the streets, carrying bricks. They were throwing bricks through store windows, laughing and jumping, thinking it was some kind of game, some kind of holiday.
   Milton looked away from the dancing children and saw the pillar of smoke right in front of him, blocking the street. There was a second or two when he could have turned back. But he didn’t. He hit it dead on. The Oldsmobile’s hood ornament disappeared first, then the front fenders and the roof. The taillights gleamed redly for a moment and then winked out.
   In every chase scene we’d ever watched, the hero always climbed up to the roof. Strict realists in my family, we always objected: “Why do they always go up?” “Watch. He’s going to climb the tower. See? I told you.” But Hollywood knew more about human nature than we realized. Because, faced with this emergency, Tessie took Chapter Eleven and me up to the attic. Maybe it was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger. Or maybe my mother felt safer there because of the door that blended in with the wallpaper. Whatever the reason, we took a suitcase full of food up to the attic and stayed there for three days, watching the city burn on my grandparents’ small black-and-white. In housedress and sandals, Desdemona held her cardboard fan to her chest, shielding herself against the spectacle of life repeating itself. “Oh my God! Is like Smyrna! Look at the mavros! Like the Turks they are burning everything!”
   It was hard to argue with the comparison. In Smyrna people had taken their furniture down to the waterfront; and on television now people were carrying furniture, too. Men were lugging brand-new sofas out of stores. Refrigerators were sailing along the avenues, as were stoves and dishwashers. And just like in Smyrna everyone seemed to have packed all their clothes. Women were wearing minks despite the July heat. Men were trying on new suits and running at the same time. “Smyrna! Smyrna! Smyrna!” Desdemona kept wailing, and I’d already heard so much about Smyrna in my seven years that I watched the screen closely to see what it had been like. But I didn’t understand. Sure, buildings were burning, bodies were lying in the street, but the mood wasn’t one of desperation. I’d never seen people so happy in my entire life. Men were playing instruments taken from a music store. Other men were handing whiskey bottles through a shattered window and passing them around. It looked more like a block party than it did a riot.
   Up until that night, our neighborhood’s basic feeling about our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier’s performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, “You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want.” That was how we felt. (Even me back then, I won’t deny it, because we’re all the children of our parents.) We were ready to accept the Negroes. We weren’t prejudiced against them. We wanted to include them in our society if they would only act normal!
   In their support for Johnson’s Great Society, in their applause after To Sir with Love, our neighbors and relatives made clear their well-intentioned belief that the Negroes were fully capable of being just like white people—but then what was this? they asked themselves as they saw the pictures on television. What were those young men doing carrying a sofa down the street? Would Sidney Poitier ever take a sofa or a large kitchen appliance from a store without paying? Would he dance like that in front of a burning building? “No respect for private property whatsoever,” cried Mr. Benz, who lived next door. And his wife Phyllis: “Where are they going to live if they burn down their own neighborhood?” Only Aunt Zo seemed to sympathize: “I don’t know. If I was walking down the street and there was a mink coat just sitting there, I might take it.” “Zoë!” Father Mike was shocked. “That’s stealing!” “Oh, what isn’t, when you come right down to it. This whole country’s stolen.”
   For three days and two nights we waited in the attic to hear from Milton. The fires had knocked out phone service, and when my mother called the restaurant, all she got was a recorded message with an operator’s voice.
   For three days no one left the attic except Tessie, who hurried downstairs to get food from our emptying cupboards. We watched the death toll rise.


   Day 1: Deaths—15. Injuries—500. Stores looted—1,000. Fires—800.
   Day 2: Deaths—27. Injuries—700. Stores looted—1,500. Fires—1,000.
   Day 3: Deaths—36. Injuries—1,000. Stores looted—1,700. Fires—1,163.


   For three days we studied the photographs of the victims as they appeared on TV. Mrs. Sharon Stone, struck by a sniper’s bullet as her car was stopped at a traffic light. Carl E. Smith, a fireman, killed by a sniper as he battled a blaze.
   For three days we watched the politicians hesitate and argue: the Republican governor, George Romney, asking President Johnson to send in federal troops; and Johnson, a Democrat, saying he had an “inability” to do such a thing. (There was an election coming up in the fall. The worse the riots got, the worse Romney was going to do. And so before he sent in the paratroopers, President Johnson sent in Cyrus Vance to assess the situation. Nearly twenty-four hours passed before federal troops arrived. In the meantime the inexperienced National Guard was shooting up the town.)
   For three days we didn’t bathe or brush our teeth. For three days all the normal rituals of our life were suspended, while half-forgotten rituals, like praying, were renewed. Desdemona said the prayers in Greek as we gathered around her bed, and Tessie tried as usual to dispel her doubts and truly believe. The vigil light no longer contained oil but was an electric bulb.
   For three days we received no word from Milton. When Tessie returned from her trips downstairs I began to detect, in addition to the traces of tears on her face, faint streaks of guilt. Death always makes people practical. So while Tessie had been on the first floor, foraging for food, she had also been searching in Milton’s desk. She had read the terms of his life insurance policy. She had checked the balance in their retirement account. In the bathroom mirror she appraised her looks, wondering if she could attract another husband at her age. “I had you kids to think of,” she confessed to me years later. “I was wondering what we’d do if your father didn’t come back.”
   To live in America, until recently, meant to be far from war. Wars happened in Southeast Asian jungles. They happened in Middle Eastern deserts. They happened, as the old song has it, over there. But then why, peeking out the dormer window, did I see, on the morning after our second night in the attic, a tank rolling by our front lawn? A green army tank, all alone in the long shadows of morning, its enormous treads clanking against the asphalt. An armor-plated military vehicle encountering no greater obstacle than a lost roller skate. The tank rolled past the affluent homes, the gables and turrets, the porte cocheres. It stopped briefly at the stop sign. The gun turret looked both ways, like a driver’s ed student, and then the tank went on its way.
   What had happened: late Monday night, President Johnson, finally giving in to Governor Romney’s request, had ordered in federal troops. General John L. Throckmorton set up the headquarters of the 101st Airborne at Southeastern High, where my parents had gone to school. Though the fiercest rioting was on the West Side, General Throckmorton chose to deploy his paratroopers on the East Side, calling this decision “an operational convenience.” By early Tuesday morning the paratroopers were moving in to quell the disturbance.
   No one else was awake to see the tank rumble by. My grandparents were dozing in bed. Tessie and Chapter Eleven were curled on air mattresses on the floor. Even the parakeets were quiet. I remember looking at my brother’s face peeking out of his sleeping bag. On the flannel lining, hunters shot at ducks. This masculine background served only to emphasize Chapter Eleven’s lack of heroic qualities. Who was going to come to my father’s aid? Who could my father rely on? Chapter Eleven with his Coke-bottle glasses? Lefty with his chalkboard and sixty-plus years? What I did next had no connection, I believe, with my chromosomal status. It did not result from the high-testosterone plasma levels in my blood. I did what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules movies. In that instant, I decided to find my father, to save him, if necessary, or at least to tell him to come home.
   Crossing myself in the Orthodox fashion, I stole down the attic stairs, closing the door behind me. In my bedroom I put on sneakers and my Amelia Earhart aviator’s cap. Without waking anyone I let myself out the front door, ran to my bicycle parked at the side of the house, and pedaled away. After two blocks, I caught sight of the tank: it had stopped at a red light. The soldiers inside were busy looking at maps, trying to find the best route to the riots. They didn’t notice the little girl in the aviator’s cap stealing up on a banana bike. It was still dark out. The birds were beginning to sing. Summer smells of lawn and mulch filled the air, and suddenly I lost my nerve. The closer I got to the tank, the bigger it looked. I was frightened and wanted to run back home. But the light changed and the tank lurched forward. Standing up on my pedals, I sped after it.
   Across town, in the lightless Zebra Room, my father was trying to stay awake. Barricaded behind the cash register, holding the revolver in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other, Milton looked out the front window to see what was happening in the street. Over the last two sleepless nights the circles under Milton’s eyes had darkened steadily with each cup of coffee he drank. His eyelids hung at half mast, but his brow was damp with the perspiration of anxiety and vigilance. His stomach hurt. He needed to go to the bathroom in the worst way but didn’t dare.
   Outside, they were at it again: the snipers. It was almost 5A.M. Each night, the sinking sun, like a ring on a window shade, pulled night down over the neighborhood. From wherever the snipers disappeared to during the hot day, they returned. They took up their positions. From the windows of condemned hotels, from fire escapes and balconies, from behind cars jacked up in front yards, they extended the barrels of their assorted guns. If you looked closely, if you were brave or reckless enough to stick your head out the window this time of night, you could see by the moon—that other pull ring, going up—hundreds of glinting guns, pointed down into the street, through which the soldiers were now advancing.
   The only light inside the diner came from the red glow of the jukebox. It stood to one side of the front door, a Disco-Matic made of chrome, plastic, and colored glass. There was a small window through which you could watch the robotic changing of records. Through a circulatory system along the jukebox’s edges trails of dark blue bubbles rose. Bubbles representing the effervescence of American life, of our postwar optimism, of our fizzy, imperial, carbonated drinks. Bubbles full of the hot air of American democracy, boiling up from the stacked vinyl platters inside. “Mama Don’t Allow It” by Bunny Berigan maybe, or “Stardust” by Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra. But not tonight. Tonight Milton had the jukebox off so that he could hear if anyone was trying to break in.
   The cluttered walls of the restaurant took no notice of the rioting outside. Al Kaline still beamed from his frame. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox continued on their trek below the daily special. The menu board itself still offered eggs, hash browns, seven kinds of pie. So far nothing had happened. Somewhat miraculously. Squatting at the front window yesterday, Milton had seen looters break into every store down the block. They looted the Jewish market, taking everything but the matzoh and the yahrzeit candles. With a sharp sense of style, they stripped Joel Moskowitz’s shoe store of its higher-priced and more fashionable models, leaving only some orthopedic offerings and a few Florsheims. All that was left in Dyer’s Appliance, as far as Milton could tell, was a rack of vacuum bags. What would they loot if they looted the diner? Would they take the stained glass window, which Milton himself had taken? Would they show interest in the photo of Ty Cobb snarling as he slid, spikes first, into second base? Maybe they’d rip the zebra skins off the barstools. They liked anything African, didn’t they? Wasn’t that the new vogue, or the old vogue that was new again? Hell, they could have the goddamned zebra skins. He’d put them out front as a peace offering.
   But now Milton heard something. The doorknob, was it? He listened. For the last few hours he’d been hearing things. His eyes had been playing tricks on him, too. He crouched behind the counter, squinting into the darkness. His ears echoed the way seashells do. He heard the distant gunfire and the squawking sirens. He heard the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock. To all this was added the rush of his blood, roaring through the channels in his head. But no sound came from the doorway.
   Milton relaxed. He took another bite of the sandwich. Gently, experimentally, he lowered his head onto the counter. Just for a minute. When he closed his eyes, the pleasure was immediate. Then the doorknob rattled again, and Milton jumped. He shook his head, trying to wake himself up. He put down the sandwich and tiptoed out from behind the counter, holding the gun.
   He didn’t intend to use it. The idea was to scare the looter off. If that didn’t work, Milton was prepared to leave. The Oldsmobile was parked out back. He could be home in ten minutes. The knob rattled again. And without thinking Milton stepped toward the glass door and shouted, “I’ve got a gun!”
   Except it wasn’t the gun. It was the ham sandwich! Milton was threatening the looter with two pieces of toasted bread, a slice of meat, and some hot mustard. Nevertheless, because it was dark out, this worked. The looter outside the door held up his hands.
   It was Morrison from across the street.
   Milton stared at Morrison. Morrison stared back. And then my father said—this is what white people say in a situation like this, “Can I help you?”
   Morrison squinted, disbelieving. “What you doing here, man? You crazy? Ain’t safe for no white people down here.” A shot rang out. Morrison flattened himself against the glass. “Ain’t safe for nobody.”
   “I’ve gotta protect my property.”
   “You life ain’t you property?” Morrison raised his eyebrows to indicate the unimpeachable logic of this statement. Then he dropped the superior expression altogether and coughed. “Listen, chief, long as you here, maybe you can help me out.” He held up small change. “Came over for some cigarettes.”
   Milton’s chin dipped, fattening his neck, and his eyebrows slanted in disbelief. In a dry voice he said, “Now’d be a good time to kick the habit.”
   Another shot rang out, this time closer. Morrison jumped, then smiled. “It sure is bad for my health. And gettin’ more dangerous all the time.” Then he smiled broadly. “This’ll be my last pack,” he said, “swear to God.” He dropped the change through the mail slot. “Parliaments.” Milton looked down at the coins for a moment and then went and got the cigarettes.
   “Got any matches?” Morrison said.
   Milton slipped these through, too. As he did, the riots, his frayed nerves, the smell of fire in the air, and the audacity of this man Morrison dodging sniper fire for a pack of cigarettes all became too much for Milton. Suddenly he was waving his arms, indicating everything, and shouting through the door, “What’s the matter with you people?”
   Morrison took only a moment. “The matter with us,” he said, “is you.” And then he was gone.
   “The matter with us is you.” How many times did I hear that growing up? Delivered by Milton in his so-called black accent, delivered whenever any liberal pundit talked about the “culturally deprived” or the “underclass” or “empowerment zones,” spoken out of the belief that this one statement, having been delivered to him while the blacks themselves burned down a significant portion of our beloved city, proved its own absurdity. As the years went on, Milton used it as a shield against any opinions to the contrary, and finally it grew into a kind of mantra, the explanation for why the world was going to hell, applicable not only to African Americans but to feminists and homosexuals; and then of course he liked to use it on us, whenever we were late for dinner or wore clothes Tessie didn’t approve of.
   “The matter with us is you!” Morrison’s words echoed in the street, but Milton didn’t have time to concentrate on them. Because right then, like a creaky Godzilla in a Japanese movie, the first military tank lumbered into view. Soldiers stood on both sides, not cops now but National Guardsmen, camouflaged, helmeted, nervously holding rifles with bayonets. Pointing those rifles up at all the other rifles pointing down. There was a moment of relative silence, enough for Milton to hear the slamming of Morrison’s screen door across the street. Then there was a pop, a sound like a toy gun, and suddenly the street lit up with a thousand bursts of fire…
   I heard them, too, from a quarter mile away. Following the slow tank at a discreet distance, I had ridden my bike from Indian Village on the East Side all the way to the West. I tried to keep my bearings as best I could, but I was only seven and a half, and didn’t know many street names. While passing through downtown, I recognized The Spirit of Detroit, the Marshall Fredericks statue that stood in front of the City-County Building. A few years earlier, a prankster had painted a trail of red footprints in the statue’s size, leading across Woodward to rendezvous with a statue of a naked woman in front of the National Bank of Detroit. The footprints were still faintly visible as I pedaled past. The tank turned up Bush Street, and I followed it past Monroe and the lights of Greektown. On a normal day, the old Greek men of my grandfather’s generation would have been arriving at the coffee houses to spend the day playing backgammon, but on the morning of July 25, 1967, the street was empty. At some point my tank had found others; in a line they now headed northwest. Soon downtown vanished and I didn’t know where I was. Ducking aerodynamically over my handlebars, I pedaled furiously into the thick, oily exhaust of the moving column…
   …while, back on Pingree Street, Milton is crouching behind the crenellated olive oil tins. Bullets fly from every darkened window along the block, from Frank’s Pool Hall and the Crow Bar, from the bell tower of the African Episcopal Church, so many bullets they blur the air like rain, making the one working streetlamp look as if it’s flickering out. Bullets pounding on armor and ricocheting off brickwork and tattooing the parked cars. Bullets ripping the legs right out from under a U.S. Postal Service mailbox, so that it falls over on its side like a drunk. Bullets obliterating the window of the veterinarian office and continuing on through the walls to reach the cages of the animals in back. The German shepherd that has been barking nonstop for three days and two nights finally shuts up. A cat twists in the air, letting out a scream, its blazing green eyes going out like a light. A real battle is under way now, a firefight, a little bit of Vietnam brought back home. But in this case the Vietcong are lying on Beautyrest mattresses. They are sitting in camping chairs and drinking malt liquor, a volunteer army facing off against the enlistees in the streets.
   It’s impossible to know who all these snipers were. But it’s easy to understand why the police called them snipers. It’s easy to understand why Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh called them snipers, and Govenor George Romney, too. A sniper, by definition, acts alone. A sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen. It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren’t snipers, then what were they? The governor didn’t say it; the newspapers didn’t say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising.
   The Second American Revolution

   And now the guardsmen are fighting back. When the riot first broke, the police, on the whole, acted with restraint. They moved off, trying to contain the disturbance. Likewise, the federal troops, the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and 101st, are battle-hardened veterans who know to use appropriate force. But the National Guard is a different story. Weekend warriors, they have been called from their homes into sudden battle. They are inexperienced, scared. They move through the streets, blasting away at anything they see. Sometimes they drive tanks right up onto front lawns. They drive onto people’s porches and crash through the walls. The tank in front of the Zebra Room has stopped momentarily. Ten or so troops surround it, taking aim at a sniper on the fourth floor of the Beaumont Hotel. The sniper fires; the National Guardsmen fire back, and the man drops, his legs tangling on the fire escape. Directly thereafter, another light flashes across the street. Milton looks up to see Morrison in his living room, lighting a cigarette. Lighting a Parliament with the zebra-striped matches. “No!” Milton shouts. “No!” … And Morrison, if he hears, just thinks it’s another diatribe against smoking, but let’s face it, he doesn’t hear. He only lights his cigarette and, two seconds later, a bullet rips through the front of his skull and he crumples in a heap. And then the soldiers move on.
   The street is empty again, silent. The machine guns and tanks begin ripping up the next block, or the block after that. Milton stands at the front door, looking across at the empty window where Morrison had stood. And the realization comes over him that the restaurant is safe. The soldiers have come and gone. The riot is over…
   …Except that now someone else is advancing along the street. As the tanks disappear down Pingree, a new figure is approaching from the other direction. Somebody who lives in the neighborhood is rounding the corner and heading for the Zebra Room…
   …following the line of tanks, I am no longer thinking about showing up my brother. The outbreak of so much shooting has taken me completely by surprise. I have looked through my father’s World War II scrapbook many times; I have seen Vietnam on television; I have ingested countless movies about Ancient Rome or the battles of the Middle Ages. But none of it has prepared me for warfare in my own hometown. The street we are moving down is lined with leafy elms. Cars are parked at the curb. We pass lawns and porch furniture, bird feeders and birdbaths. As I look up at the canopy of elms, the sky is just beginning to grow light. Birds move among the branches, and squirrels, too. A kite is stuck up in one tree. Over a limb of another, someone’s tennis shoes dangle with the laces knotted. Directly below these sneakers, I see a street sign. It is full of bullet holes, but I manage to read it: Pingree. All of a sudden I recognize where I am. There is Value Meats! And New Yorker Clothes. I am so happy to see them that for a moment I don’t register that both places are on fire. Letting the tanks get away, I ride up a driveway and stop behind a tree. I get off my bike and peek across the street at the diner. The zebra head sign is still intact. The restaurant is not burning. At that moment, however, the figure that has been approaching the Zebra Room enters my field of vision. From thirty yards away I see him lift a bottle in his hand. He lights the rag hanging from the bottle’s mouth and with a not terribly good arm flings the Molotov cocktail through the front window of the Zebra Room. And as flames erupt within the diner, the arsonist shouts in an ecstatic voice:
   “Opa, motherfucker!”
   I saw him only from the back. It was not yet fully light. Smoke rose from the adjacent burning buildings. Still, in the firelight, I thought I recognized the black beret of my friend Marius Wyxze-wixard Challouehliczilczese Grimes before the figure ran off.
   “Opa!” Inside the diner, my father heard the well-known cry of Greek waiters, and before he knew what was happening the place was going up like a flaming appetizer. The Zebra Room had become a saganaki! As the booths caught fire, Milton raced behind the counter to grab the fire extinguisher. Coming out again, he held the hose, like a lemon wedge wrapped in cheesecloth, over the flames, and prepared to squeeze…
   …when suddenly he stopped. And now I recognize a familiar expression on my father’s face, the expression he wore so often at the dinner table, the faraway look of a man who could never stop thinking about business. Success depends on adapting to new situations. And what situation was newer than this? Flames were climbing the walls; the photo of Jimmy Dorsey was curling up. And Milton was asking himself a few, pertinent questions. For instance: How would he ever run a restaurant in this neighborhood again? And: What do you suppose the already depressed real estate prices would be tomorrow morning? Most important of all: How was it a crime? Did he start the riot? Did he throw the Molotov cocktail? Like Tessie, Milton’s mind was searching the bottom drawer of his desk, in particular a fat envelope containing the three fire insurance policies from separate companies. He saw them in his mind’s eye; he read the fire indemnity coverage, and added them up. The final sum, $500,000, blinded him to everything else. Half a million bucks! Milton looked around with wild, eager eyes. The French toast sign was in flames. The zebra-skin barstools were like a row of torches. And madly, he turned and hurried outside to the Oldsmobile…
   Where he encountered me.
   “Callie! What the hell are you doing here?”
   “I came to help.”
   “What’s the matter with you!” Milton shouted. But despite the anger in his voice he was down on his knees, hugging me. I wrapped my arms around his neck.
   “The restaurant’s burning down, Daddy.”
   “I know it is.”
   I began to cry.
   “It’s okay,” my father told me, carrying me to the car. “Let’s go home now. It’s all over.”
   So was it a riot or a guerrilla uprising? Let me answer that question with other questions. After the riot was over, were, or were there not, caches of weapons found all over the neighborhood? And were these weapons, or were they not, AK-47s and machine guns? And why had General Throckmorton deployed his tanks on the East Side, miles from the rioting? Was that the kind of thing you did to subdue an unorganized gang of snipers? Or was it more in keeping with military strategy? Was it like establishing a front line in a war? Believe whatever you want. I was seven years old and followed a tank into battle and saw what I saw. It turned out that when it finally happened, the revolution wasn’t televised. On TV they called it only a riot.
   The following morning, as the smoke cleared, the city’s flag could once again be seen. Remember the symbol on it? A phoenix rising from its ashes. And the words beneath? Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”

Middlesex

   Shameful as it is to say, the riots were the best thing that ever happened to us. Overnight we went from being a family desperately trying to stay in the middle class to one with hopes of sneaking into the upper, or at least the upper-middle. The insurance money didn’t amount to quite as much as Milton had anticipated. Two of the companies refused to pay the full amount, citing double indemnity clauses. They paid only a quarter of their policies’ value. Still, taken all together, the money was much more than the Zebra Room had been worth, and it allowed my parents to make some changes in our lives.
   Of all my childhood memories, none has the magic, the pure dreaminess, of the night we heard a honk outside our house and looked out the window to see that a spaceship had landed in our driveway.
   It had set down noiselessly next to my mother’s station wagon. The front lights flashed. The back end gave off a red glow. For thirty seconds nothing more happened. But then finally the window of the spaceship slowly retracted to reveal, instead of a Martian inside, Milton. He had shaved off his beard.
   “Get your mother,” he called, smiling. “We’re going for a little ride.”
   Not a spaceship then, but close: a 1967 Cadillac Fleetwood, as intergalactic a car as Detroit ever produced. (The moon shot was only a year away.) It was as black as space itself and shaped like a rocket lying on its side. The long front end came to a point, like a nose cone, and from there the craft stretched back along the driveway in a long, beautiful, ominously perfect shape. There was a silver multi-chambered grille, as though to filter stardust. Chrome piping, like the housing for circuitry, led from conical yellow turn signals along the rounded sides of the car, all the way to the rear, where the vehicle flared propulsively into jet fins and rocket boosters.
   Inside, the Cadillac was as plushly carpeted and softly lit as the bar at the Ritz. The armrests were equipped with ashtrays and cigarette lighters. The interior itself was black leather and gave off a strong new smell. It was like climbing into somebody’s wallet.
   We didn’t move right away. We remained parked, as if it were enough just to sit in the car, as if now that we owned it, we could forget about our living room and stay in the driveway every night. Milton started the engine. Keeping the transmission in park, he showed us the marvels. He opened and closed the windows by pressing a button. He locked the doors by pressing another. He buzzed the front seat forward, then tilted it back until I could see the dandruff on his shoulders. By the time he put the car into gear we were all slightly giddy. We drove away down Seminole, past our neighbors’ houses, already saying farewell to Indian Village. At the corner, Milton put the blinker on and it ticked, counting the seconds down to our eventual departure.
   The ’67 Fleetwood was my father’s first Cadillac, but there were many more to come. Over the next seven years, Milton traded up almost every year, so it’s possible for me to chart my life in relation to the styling features of his long line of Cadillacs. When tail fins disappeared, I was nine; when power antennas arrived, eleven. My emotional life accords with the designs, too. In the sixties, when Cadillacs were futuristically self-assured, I was also self-confident and forward-looking. In the gas-short seventies, however, when the manufacturer came out with the unfortunate Seville—a car that looked as though it had been rear-ended—I also felt misshapen. Pick a year and I’ll tell you what car we had. 1970: the cola-colored Eldorado. 1971: the red sedan DeVille. 1972: the golden Fleetwood with the passenger sun visor that opened up into a starlet’s dressing room mirror (in which Tessie checked her makeup and I my first blemishes). 1973: the long, black, dome-roofed Fleetwood that made other cars stop, thinking a funeral was passing. 1974: the canary-yellow, two-door “Florida Special” with white vinyl top, sunroof, and tan leather seats that my mother is still driving today, almost thirty years later.
   But in 1967 it was the space-age Fleetwood. Once we got going the required speed, Milton said, “Okay. Now get a load of this.” He flipped a switch under the dash. There was a hissing sound, like balloons inflating. Slowly, as if lifted on a magic carpet, the four of us rose to the upper reaches of the car’s interior.
   “That’s what they call the ‘Air-Ride.’ Brand-new feature. Smooth, huh?”
   “Is it some kind of hydraulic suspension system?” Chapter Eleven wanted to know.
   “I think so.”
   “Maybe I won’t have to use my pillow when I drive,” said Tessie.
   For a moment after that, none of us spoke. We were headed east, out of Detroit, literally floating on air.
   Which brings me to the second part of our upward mobility. Shortly after the riots, like many other white Detroiters, my parents began looking for a house in the suburbs. The suburb they had their sights on was the affluent lakefront district of the auto magnates: Grosse Pointe.
   It was much harder than they ever expected. In the Cadillac, scouting the five Grosse Pointes (the Park, the City, the Farms, the Woods, the Shores), my parents saw for sale signs on many lawns. But when they stopped in at the realty offices and filled out applications, they found that the houses suddenly went off the market, or were sold, or doubled in price.
   After two months of searching, Milton was down to his last real estate agent, a Miss Jane Marsh of Great Lakes Realty. He had her—and some growing suspicions.
   “This property is rather eccentric,” Miss Marsh is telling Milton one September afternoon as she leads him up the driveway. “It takes a buyer with a little vision.” She opens the front door and leads him inside. “But it does have quite a pedigree. It was designed by Hudson Clark.” She waits for recognition. “Of the Prairie School?”
   Milton nods, dubiously. He swivels his head, looking over the place. He hadn’t much cared for the picture Miss Marsh had shown him over at the office. Too boxy-looking. Too modern.
   “I’m not sure my wife would go for this kind of thing, Miss Marsh.”
   “I’m afraid we don’t have anything more traditional to show at the moment.”
   She leads him along a spare white hallway and down a small flight of open stairs. And now, as they step into the sunken living room, Miss Marsh’s head begins to swivel, too. Smiling a polite smile that reveals a rabbity expanse of upper gum, she examines Milton’s complexion, his hair, his shoes. She glances at his real estate application again.
   “Stephanides. What kind of name is that?”
   “It’s Greek.”
   “Greek. How interesting.”
   More upper gum flashes as Miss Marsh makes a notation on her pad. Then she resumes the tour: “Sunken living room. Greenhouse adjoining the dining area. And, as you can see, the house is well supplied with windows.”
   “It pretty much is a window, Miss Marsh.” Milton moves closer to the glass and examines the backyard. Meanwhile, a few feet behind, Miss Marsh examines Milton.
   “May I ask what business you’re in, Mr. Stephanides?”
   “The restaurant business.”
   Another mark of pen on pad. “Can I tell you what churches we have in the area? What denomination are you?”
   “I don’t go in for that sort of thing. My wife takes the kids to the Greek church.”
   “She’s a Grecian, too?”
   “She’s a Detroiter. We’re both East Siders.”
   “And you need space for your two children, is that right?”
   “Yes, ma’am. Plus we have my folks living with us, too.”
   “Oh, I see.” And now pink gums disappear as Miss Marsh begins to add it all up. Let’s see. Southern Mediterranean. One point. Not in one of the professions. One point. Religion? Greek church. That’s some kind of Catholic, isn’t it? So there’s another point there. And he has his parents living with him! Two more points! Which makes—five! Oh, that won’t do. That won’t do at all.
   To explain Miss Marsh’s arithmetic: back in those days, the real estate agents in Grosse Pointe evaluated prospective buyers by something called the Point System. (Milton wasn’t the only one who worried about the neighborhood going to hell.) No one spoke of it openly. Realtors only mentioned “community standards” and selling to “the right sort of people.” Now that white flight had begun, the Point System was more important than ever. You didn’t want what was happening in Detroit to happen out here.
   Discreetly, Miss Marsh now draws a tiny “5” next to “Stephanides” and circles it. As she does so, however, she feels something. A kind of regret. The Point System isn’t her idea, after all. It was in place long before she came to Grosse Pointe from Wichita, where her father works as a butcher. But there is nothing she can do. Yes, Miss Marsh feels sorry. I mean, really. Look at this house! Who’s going to buy it if not an Italian or a Greek. I’ll never be able to sell it. Never!
   Her client is still standing at the window, looking out.
   “I do understand your preference for something more ‘Old World,’ Mr. Stephanides. We do get them from time to time. You just have to be patient. I’ve got your telephone number. I’ll let you know if anything comes on the market.”
   Milton doesn’t hear her. He is absorbed in the view. The house has a roof deck, plus a patio out back. And there are two other, smaller buildings beyond that.
   “Tell me more about this Hudson Clark fella,” he now asks.
   “Clark? Well, to be honest, he’s a minor figure.”
   “Prairie School, eh?”
   “Hudson Clark was no Frank Lloyd Wright, if that’s what you mean.”
   “What are these outbuildings I see here?”
   “I wouldn’t call them outbuildings, Mr. Stephanides. That’s making it a bit grand. One’s a bathhouse. Rather decrepit, I’m afraid. I’m not sure it even works. Behind that is the guest house. Which also needs a lot of work.”
   “Bathhouse? That’s different.” Milton turns away from the glass. He begins walking around the house, looking it over in a new light: the Stonehenge walls, the Klimt tilework, the open rooms. Everything is geometric and grid-like. Sunlight falls in beams through the many skylights. “Now that I’m in here,” Milton says, “I sort of get the idea behind this place. The photo you showed me doesn’t do it justice.”
   “Really, Mr. Stephanides, for a family such as yours, with young children, I’m not sure this is quite the best—“
   Before she can finish, however, Milton holds up his hands in surrender. “You don’t have to show me any more. Decrepit outbuildings or not, I’ll take it.”
   There is a pause. Miss Marsh smiles with her double-decker gums. “That’s wonderful, Mr. Stephanides,” she says without enthusiasm. “Of course, it’s all contingent on the approval of the loan.”
   But now it is Milton’s turn to smile. For all the disavowals of its existence, the Point System is no secret. Harry Karras tried unsuccessfully to buy a house in Grosse Pointe the year before. Same thing happened to Pete Savidis. But no one is going to tell Milton Stephanides where to live. Not Miss Marsh and not a bunch of country club real estate guys, either.
   “You don’t have to bother with that,” my father said, relishing the moment. “I’ll pay cash.”
   Over the barrier of the Point System, my father managed to get us a house in Grosse Pointe. It was the only time in his life he paid for anything up front. But what about the other barriers? What about the fact that real estate agents had shown him only the least-desirable houses, in the areas closest to Detroit? Houses no one else wanted? And what about his inability to see anything except the grand gesture, and the fact that he bought the house without first consulting my mother? Well, for those problems there was no remedy.
   On moving day we set off in two cars. Tessie, fighting tears, took Lefty and Desdemona in the family station wagon. Milton drove Chapter Eleven and me in the new Fleetwood. Along Jefferson, signs of the riots still remained, as did my unanswered questions. “What about the Boston Tea Party?” I challenged my father from the backseat. “The colonists stole all that tea and dumped it into the harbor. That was the same thing as a riot.”
   “That wasn’t the same at all,” Milton answered back. “What the hell are they teaching you in that school of yours? With the Boston Tea Party the Americans were revolting against another country that was oppressing them.”
   “But it wasn’t another country, Daddy. It was the same country. There wasn’t even such a thing as the United States then.”
   “Let me ask you something. Where was King George when they dumped all that tea into the drink? Was he in Boston? Was he in America even? No. He was way the hell over there in England, eating crumpets.”
   The implacable black Cadillac powered along, bearing my father, brother, and me out of the war-torn city. We crossed over a thin canal which, like a moat, separated Detroit from Grosse Pointe. And then, before we had time to register the changes, we were at the house on Middlesex Boulevard.
   The trees were what I noticed first. Two enormous weeping willows, like woolly mammoths, on either side of the property. Their vines hung over the driveway like streamers of sponge at a car wash. Above was the autumn sun. Passing through the willows’ leaves, it turned them a phosphorescent green. It was as though, in the middle of the block’s cool shade, a beacon had been switched on; and this impression was only strengthened by the house we’d now stopped in front of.
   Middlesex! Did anybody ever live in a house as strange? As sci-fi? As futuristic and outdated at the same time? A house that was more like communism, better in theory than reality? The walls were pale yellow, made of octagonal stone blocks framed by redwood siding along the roofline. Plate glass windows ran along the front. Hudson Clark (whose name Milton would drop for years to come, despite the fact that no one ever recognized it) had designed Middlesex to harmonize with the natural surroundings. In this case, that meant the two weeping willow trees and the mulberry growing against the front of the house. Forgetting where he was (a conservative suburb) and what was on the other side of those trees (the Turnbulls and the Picketts), Clark followed the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, banishing the Victorian vertical in favor of a midwestern horizontal, opening up the interior spaces, and bringing in a Japanese influence. Middlesex was a testament to theory uncompromised by practicality. For instance: Hudson Clark hadn’t believed in doors. The concept of the door, of this thing that swung one way or the other, was outmoded. So on Middlesex we didn’t have doors. Instead we had long, accordion-like barriers, made from sisal, that worked by a pneumatic pump located down in the basement. The concept of stairs in the traditional sense was also something the world no longer needed. Stairs represented a teleological view of the universe, of one thing leading to another, whereas now everyone knew that one thing didn’t lead to another but often nowhere at all. So neither did our stairs. Oh, they went up, eventually. They took the persistent climber to the second floor, but on the way they took him lots of other places as well. There was a landing, for instance, overhung with a mobile. The stairway walls had peepholes and shelves cut into them. As you climbed, you could see the legs of someone passing along the hallway above. You could spy on someone down in the living room.
   “Where are the closets?” Tessie asked as soon as we got inside.
   “Closets?”
   “The kitchen’s a million miles away from the family room, Milt. Every time you want a snack you have to traipse all the way across the house.”
   “It’ll give us some exercise.”
   “And how am I supposed to find curtains for those windows? They don’t make curtains that big. Everyone can see right in!”
   “Think of it this way. We can see right out.”
   But then there was a scream at the other end of the house:
   “Mana!”
   Against her better judgment, Desdemona had pressed a button on the wall. “What kind door this is?” she was shouting as we all came running. “It move by itself!”
   “Hey, cool,” said Chapter Eleven. “Try it, Cal. Put your head in the doorway. Yeah, like that …”
   “Don’t fool with that door, kids.”
   “I’m just testing the pressure.”
   “Ow!”
   “What did I tell you? Birdbrain. Now get your sister out of the door.”
   “I’m trying. The button doesn’t work.”
   “What do you mean it doesn’t work?”
   “Oh, this is wonderful, Milt. No closets, and now we have to call the fire department to get Callie out of the door.”
   “It’s not designed to have someone’s neck in it.”
   “Mana!”
   “Can you breathe, honey?”
   “Yeah, but it hurts.”
   “It’s like that guy at Carlsbad Caverns,” said Chapter Eleven. “He got stuck and they had to feed him for forty days and then he finally died.”
   “Stop wriggling, Callie. You’re making it—“
   “I’m not wriggling—“
   “I can see Callie’s underwear! I can see Callie’s underwear!”
   “Stop that right now.”
   “Here, Tessie, take Callie’s leg. Okay, on three. A-one and a-two and a-three!”
   We settled in, with our various misgivings. After the incident with the pneumatic door, Desdemona had a premonition that this house of modern conveniences (which was in fact nearly as old as she was) would be the last she would ever live in. She moved what remained of her and my grandfather’s belongings into the guest house—the brass coffee table, the silkworm box, the portrait of Patriarch Athenagoras—but she could never get used to the skylight, which was like a hole in the roof, or the push-pedal faucet in the bathroom, or the box that spoke on the wall. (Every room on Middlesex was equipped with an intercom. Back when they had been installed in the 1940s—over thirty years after the house itself had been built in 1909—the intercoms had probably all worked. But by 1967 you might speak into the kitchen intercom only to have your voice come out in the master bedroom. The speakers distorted our voices, so that we had to listen very closely to understand what was being said, like deciphering a child’s first, garbled speech.)
   Chapter Eleven tapped into the pneumatic system in the basement and spent hours sending a Ping-Pong ball around the house through a network of vacuum cleaner hoses. Tessie never stopped complaining about the lack of closet space and the impractical layout, but gradually, thanks to a touch of claustrophobia, she grew to appreciate Middlesex’s glass walls.
   Lefty cleaned them. Making himself useful as always, he took upon himself the Sisyphean task of keeping all those Modernist surfaces sparkling. With the same concentration he trained on the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs—a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that might never be completed—Lefty now cleaned the huge picture windows, the fogged glass of the greenhouse, the sliding doors that led to the courtyard, and even the skylights. As he was Windexing the new house, however, Chapter Eleven and I were exploring it. Or, I should say, them. The meditative, pastel yellow cube that faced the street contained the main living quarters. Behind that lay a courtyard with a dry pool and a fragile dogwood leaning over in vain to see its reflection. Along the western edge of this courtyard, extending from the back of the kitchen, ran a white, translucent tunnel, something like the tubes that conduct football teams onto the field. This tunnel led to a small domed outbuilding—a sort of huge igloo—surrounded by a covered porch. Inside was a bathing pool (just warming up now, getting ready to play its part in my life). Behind the bathhouse was yet another courtyard, floored with smooth black stones. Along the eastern edge of this, to balance the tunnel, ran a portico lined with thin brown iron beams. The portico led up to the guest house, where no guests ever stayed: only Desdemona, for a short time with her husband and a long time alone.
   But more important to a kid: Middlesex had lots of sneaker-sized ledges to walk along. It had deep, concrete window wells perfect for making into forts. It had sun decks and catwalks. Chapter Eleven and I climbed all over Middlesex. Lefty would wash the windows and, five minutes later, my brother and I would come along, leaning on the glass and leaving fingerprints. And seeing them, our tall, mute grandfather, who in another life might have been a professor but in this one was holding a wet rag and bucket, only smiled and washed the windows all over again.
   Although he never said a word to me, I loved my Chaplinesque papou. His speechlessness seemed to be an act of refinement. It went with his elegant clothes, his shoes with woven vamps, the glaze of his hair. And yet he was not stiff at all but playful, even comedic. When he took me for rides in the car Lefty often pretended to fall asleep at the wheel. Suddenly his eyes would close and he would slump to one side. The car would continue on, unpiloted, drifting toward the curb. I laughed, screamed, pulled my hair and kicked my legs. At the last possible second, Lefty would spring awake, taking the wheel and averting disaster.
   We didn’t need to speak to each other. We understood each other without speaking. But then a terrible thing happened.
   It is a Saturday morning a few weeks after our move to Middlesex. Lefty is taking me for a walk around the new neighborhood. The plan is to go down to the lake. Hand in hand we stroll across our new front lawn. Change is clinking in his trouser pocket, just below the level of my shoulders. I run my fingers over his thumb, fascinated by the missing nail, which Lefty has always told me a monkey bit off at the zoo.
   Now we reach the sidewalk. The man who makes the sidewalks in Grosse Pointe has left his name in the cement: J. P. Steiger. There is also a crack, where ants are having a war. Now we are crossing the grass between the sidewalk and the street. And now we are at the curb.
   I step down. Lefty doesn’t. Instead, he drops, cleanly, six inches into the street. Still holding his hand, I laugh at him for being so clumsy. Lefty laughs, too. But he doesn’t look at me. He keeps staring straight ahead into space. And, gazing up, I suddenly can see things about my grandfather I should be too young to see. I see fear in his eyes, and bewilderment, and, most astonishing of all, the fact that some adult worry is taking precedence over our walk together. The sun is in his eyes. His pupils contract. We remain at the curb, in its dust and leaf matter. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Long enough for Lefty to come face-to-face with the evidence of his own diminished faculties and for me to feel the onrush of my own growing ones.
   What nobody knew: Lefty had had another stroke the week before. Already speechless, he now began to suffer spatial disorientation. Furniture advanced and retreated in the mechanical manner of a fun house. Like practical jokers, chairs offered themselves and then pulled away at the last moment. The diamonds of the backgammon board undulated like player piano keys. Lefty told no one.
   Because he no longer trusted himself to drive, Lefty started taking me on walks instead. (That was how we’d arrived at that curb, the curb he couldn’t wake up and turn away from in time.) We went along Middlesex, the silent, old, foreign gentleman and his skinny granddaughter, a girl who talked enough for two, who babbled so fluently that her father the ex-clarinet man liked to joke she knew circular breathing. I was getting used to Grosse Pointe, to the genteel mothers in chiffon headscarves and to the dark, cypress-shrouded house where the one Jewish family lived (having also paid cash). Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he’d never been religious, he realized now that he’d always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.
   A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather. I was the new kid on the block and wanted to make friends. From our roof deck I sometimes glimpsed a girl about my age who lived in the house behind us. She came out onto a small balcony in the evenings and tugged petals off flowers in the window box. In friskier moods, she performed lazy pirouettes, as though to the accompaniment of my own music box, which I always brought to the roof to keep me company. She had long, white-blond hair cut in bangs, and since I never saw her in the daytime, I decided she was an albino.
   But I was wrong: because there she was one afternoon in sunshine, getting a ball that had flown onto our property. Her name was Clementine Stark. She wasn’t an albino, just very pale, and allergic to hard-to-avoid items (grass, house dust). Her father was about to have a heart attack, and my memories of her now are tinged with a blue wash of misfortune that hadn’t quite befallen her at the time. She was standing bare-legged in the jungly weeds that grew up between our houses. Her skin was already beginning to react to the grass cuttings stuck to the ball, whose sogginess was suddenly explained by the overweight Labrador who now limped into view.
   Clementine Stark had a canopy bed moored like an imperial barge at one end of her sea-blue bedroom carpet. She had a collection of mounted poisonous-looking insects. She was a year older than me, hence worldly, and had been to Krakow once, which was in Poland. Because of her allergies, Clementine was kept indoors a lot. This led to our being inside together most of the time and to Clementine’s teaching me how to kiss.
   When I told my life story to Dr. Luce, the place where he invariably got interested was when I came to Clementine Stark. Luce didn’t care about criminally smitten grandparents or silkworm boxes or serenading clarinets. To a certain extent, I understand. I even agree.
   Clementine Stark invited me over to her house. Without even comparing it to Middlesex, it was an overwhelmingly medieval-looking place, a fortress of gray stone, unlovely except for the one extravagance—a concession to the princess—of a single, pointed tower flying a lavender pennant. Inside there were tapestries on the walls, a suit of armor with French script over the visor, and, in black leotards, Clementine’s slender mother. She was doing leg lifts.
   “This is Callie,” Clementine said. “She’s coming over to play.”
   I beamed. I attempted a kind of curtsy. (This was my introduction to polite society, after all.) But Clementine’s mother didn’t so much as turn her head.
   “We just moved in,” I said. “We live in the house behind yours.”
   Now she frowned. I thought I’d said something wrong—my first etiquette mistake in Grosse Pointe. Mrs. Stark said, “Why don’t you girls go upstairs?”
   We did. In her bedroom Clementine mounted a rocking horse. For the next three minutes she rode it without saying another word. Then she abruptly got off. “I used to have a turtle but he escaped.”
   “He did?”
   “My mom says he could survive if he made it outside.”
   “He’s probably dead,” I said.
   Clementine accepted this bravely. She came over and held her arm next to mine. “Look, I’ve got freckles like the Big Dipper,” she announced. We stood side to side before the full-length mirror, making faces. The rims of Clementine’s eyes were inflamed. She yawned. She rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand. And then she asked, “Do you want to practice kissing?”
   I didn’t know what to answer. I already knew how to kiss, didn’t I? Was there something more to learn? But while these questions were going through my head, Clementine was going ahead with the lesson. She came around to face me. With a grave expression she put her arms around my neck.
   The necessary special effects are not in my possession, but what I’d like for you to imagine is Clementine’s white face coming close to mine, her sleepy eyes closing, her medicine-sweet lips puckering up, and all the other sounds of the world going silent—the rustling of our dresses, her mother counting leg lifts downstairs, the airplane outside making an exclamation mark in the sky—all silent, as Clementine’s highly educated, eight-year-old lips met mine.
   And then, somewhere below this, my heart reacting.
   Not a thump exactly. Not even a leap. But a kind of swish, like a frog kicking off from a muddy bank. My heart, that amphibian, moving that moment between two elements: one, excitement; the other, fear. I tried to pay attention. I tried to hold up my end of things. But Clementine was way ahead of me. She swiveled her head back and forth the way actresses did in the movies. I started doing the same, but out of the corner of her mouth she scolded, “You’re the man.” So I stopped. I stood stiffly with arms at my sides. Finally Clementine broke off the kiss. She looked at me blankly a moment, and then responded, “Not bad for your first time.”
   “Mo-om!” I shouted, coming home that evening. “I made a friend!” I told Tessie about Clementine, the old rugs on the walls, the pretty mother doing exercises, omitting only the kissing lessons. From the beginning I was aware that there was something improper about the way I felt about Clementine Stark, something I shouldn’t tell my mother, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it. I didn’t connect this feeling to sex. I didn’t know sex existed. “Can I invite her over?”
   “Sure,” said Tessie, relieved that my loneliness in the neighborhood was now over.
   “I bet she’s never seen a house like ours.”
   And now it is a cool, gray October day a week or so later. From the back of a yellow house, two girls emerge, playing geisha. We have coiled up our hair and crossed take-out chopsticks in it. We wear sandals and silk shawls. We carry umbrellas, pretending they’re parasols. I know bits of The Flower Drum Song, which I sing as we traverse the courtyard and mount the steps to the bathhouse. We come in the door, failing to notice a dark shape in the corner. Inside, the bath is a bright, bubbling turquoise. Silk robes fall to floor. Two giggling flamingos, one fair-skinned, the other light olive, test the water with one toe each. “It’s too hot.” “It’s supposed to be that way.” “You first.” “No, you.” “Okay.” And then: in. Both of us. The smell of redwood and eucalyptus. The smell of sandalwood soap. Clementine’s hair plastered to her skull. Her foot appearing now and then above the water like a shark fin. We laugh, float, waste my mother’s bath beads. Steam rises from the surface so thick it obscures the walls, the ceiling, the dark shape in the corner. I’m examining the arches of my feet, trying to understand what it means that they have “fallen,” when I see Clementine breasting through the water to me. Her face appears out of the steam. I think we’re going to kiss again, but instead she wraps her legs around my waist. She’s laughing hysterically, covering her mouth. Her eyes widen and she says into my ear, “Get some comfort.” She hoots like a monkey and pulls me back onto a shelf in the tub. I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink … and then we’re twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me, and giggling, and making bird cries. Steam envelops us, cloaks us; light sparkles on the agitated water; and we keep spinning, so that at some point I’m not sure which hands are mine, which legs. We aren’t kissing. This game is far less serious, more playful, free-style, but we’re gripping each other, trying not to let the other’s slippery body go, and our knees bump, our tummies slap, our hips slide back and forth. Various submerged softnesses on Clementine’s body are delivering crucial information to mine, information I store away but won’t understand until years later. How long do we spin? I have no idea. But at some point we get tired. Clementine beaches on the shelf, with me on top. I rise on my knees to get my bearings—and then freeze, hot water or not. For right there, sitting in the corner of the room—is my grandfather! I see him for a second, leaning over sideways—is he laughing? angry?—and then the steam rises again and blots him out.
   I am too stunned to move or speak. How long has he been there? What did he see? “We were just doing water ballet,” Clementine says lamely. The steam parts again. Lefty hasn’t moved. He’s sitting exactly as before, head tilted to one side. He looks as pale as Clementine. For one crazy second I think he’s playing our driving game, pretending to asleep, but then I understand that he will never play anything ever again…
   And next all the intercoms in the house are wailing. I shout to Tessie in the kitchen, who shouts to Milton in the den, who shouts to Desdemona in the guest house. “Come quick! Something’s wrong with papou!” And then more screaming and an ambulance flashing its lights and my mother telling Clementine it’s time for her to go home now.
   Later that night: the spotlight rises on two rooms in our new house on Middlesex. In one pool of light, an old woman crosses herself and prays, while in the other a seven-year-old girl is also praying, praying for forgiveness, because it was clear to me that I was responsible. It was what I did … what Lefty saw … And I am promising never to do anything like that again and asking Please don’t let papou die and swearing It was Clementine’s fault. She made me do it.
   (And now it’s time for Mr. Stark’s heart to have its moment. Its arteries coated with what looks like foie gras, it seizes up one day. Clementine’s father crumples forward in the shower. Down on the first floor, sensing something, Mrs. Stark stops doing leg lifts; and three weeks later she sells the house and moves her daughter away. I never saw Clementine again …)
   Lefty did recover and came home from the hospital. But this was only a pause in the slow but inevitable dissolution of his mind. Over the next three years, the hard disk of his memory slowly began to be erased, beginning with the most recent information and proceeding backward. At first Lefty forgot short-term things like where’d he put down his fountain pen or his glasses, and then he forgot what day it was, what month, and finally what year. Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back. In 1969 it became clear to us that he was living in 1968, because he kept shaking his head over the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. By the time we crossed over into the valley of the seventies, Lefty was back in the fifties. Once again he was excited about the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and he stopped referring to me altogether because I hadn’t been born. He reexperienced his gambling mania and his feelings of uselessness after retiring, but this soon passed because it was the 1940s and he was running the bar and grill again. Every morning he got up as though he were going to work. Desdemona had to devise elaborate ruses to satisfy him, telling him that our kitchen was the Zebra Room, only redecorated, and lamenting at how bad business was. Sometimes she invited ladies from church over who played along, ordering coffee and leaving money on the kitchen counter.
   In his mind Lefty Stephanides grew younger and younger while in actuality he continued to age, so that he often tried to lift things he couldn’t or to tackle stairs his legs couldn’t climb. Falls ensued. Things shattered. At these moments, bending to help him up, Desdemona would see a momentary clarity in her husband’s eyes, as if he were playing along too, pretending to relive his life in the past so as not to face the present. Then he would begin to cry and Desdemona would lie down next to him, holding him until the fit ended.
   But soon he was back in the thirties and was searching the radio, listening for speeches from FDR. He mistook our black milkman for Jimmy Zizmo and sometimes climbed up into his truck, thinking they were going rum-running. Using his chalkboard, he engaged the milkman in conversations about bootleg whiskey, and even if this had made sense, the milkman wouldn’t have been able to understand, because right about this time Lefty’s English began to deteriorate. He made spelling and grammatical mistakes he’d long mastered and soon he was writing broken English and then no English at all. He made written allusions to Bursa, and now Desdemona began to worry. She knew that the backward progression of her husband’s mind could lead to only one place, back to the days when he wasn’t her husband but her brother, and she lay in bed at night awaiting the moment with trepidation. In a sense she began to live in reverse, too, because she suffered the heart palpitations of her youth. O God, she prayed, Let me die now. Before Lefty gets back to the boat. And then one morning when she got up, Lefty was sitting at the breakfast table. His hair was pomaded à la Valentino with some Vaseline he’d found in the medicine chest. A dishrag was wrapped around his neck like a scarf. And on the table was the chalkboard, on which was written, in Greek, “Good morning, sis.”
   For three days he teased her as he used to do, and pulled her hair, and performed dirty Karaghiozis puppet shows. Desdemona hid his chalkboard, but it was no use. During Sunday dinner he took a fountain pen from Uncle Pete’s shirt pocket and wrote on the tablecloth, “Tell my sister she’s getting fat.” Desdemona blanched. She put her hands to her face and waited for the blow she’d always feared to descend. But Peter Tatakis only took the pen from Lefty and said, “It appears that Lefty is now under the delusion that you are his sister.” Everyone laughed. What else could they do? Hey there, sis, everyone kept saying to Desdemona all afternoon, and each time she jumped; each time she thought her heart would stop.
   But this stage didn’t last long. My grandfather’s mind, locked in its graveyard spiral, accelerated as it hurtled toward its destruction, and three days later he started cooing like a baby and the next he started soiling himself. At that point, when there was almost nothing left of him, God allowed Lefty Stephanides to remain another three months, until the winter of 1970. In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who’d been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away.
   From the beginning there existed a strange balance between my grandfather and me. As I cried my first cry, Lefty was silenced; and as he gradually lost the ability to see, to taste, to hear, to think or even remember, I began to see, taste, and remember everything, even stuff I hadn’t seen, eaten, or done. Already latent inside me, like the future 120 mph serve of a tennis prodigy, was the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. So that at the makaria after the funeral, I looked around the table at the Grecian Gardens and knew what everyone was feeling. Milton was beset by a storm of emotion he refused to acknowledge. He worried that if he spoke he might start to cry, and so said nothing throughout the meal, and plugged his mouth with bread. Tessie was seized with a desperate love for Chapter Eleven and me and kept hugging us and smoothing our hair, because children were the only balm against death. Sourmelina was remembering the day at Grand Trunk when she’d told Lefty that she would know his nose anywhere. Peter Tatakis was lamenting the fact that he would never have a widow to mourn his death. Father Mike was favorably reviewing the eulogy he’d given earlier that morning, while Aunt Zo was wishing she had married someone like her father.
   The only one whose emotions I couldn’t plumb was Desdemona. Silently, in the widow’s position of honor at the head of the table, she picked at her whitefish and drank her glass of Mavrodaphne, but her thoughts were as obscured to me as her face behind her black veil.
   Lacking any clairvoyance into my grandmother’s state of mind that day, I’ll just tell you what happened next. After the makaria, my parents, grandmother, brother, and I got into my father’s Fleetwood. With a purple funeral pennant flying from the antenna, we left Greektown and headed down Jefferson. The Cadillac was three years old now, the oldest one Milton ever had. As we were passing the old Medusa Cement factory, I heard a long hiss and thought that my yia yia, sitting next to me, was sighing over her misfortunes. But then I noticed that the seat was tilting. Desdemona was sinking down. She who had always feared automobiles was being swallowed by the backseat.
   It was the Air-Ride. You weren’t supposed to turn it on unless you were going at least thirty miles per hour. Distracted by grief, Milton had been going only twenty-five. The hydraulic system ruptured. The passenger side of the car sloped down and stayed like that from then on. (And my father began trading in his cars in every year.)
   Limping, dragging, we returned home. My mother helped Desdemona out of the car and led her to the guest house out back. It took some time. Desdemona kept leaning on her cane to rest. Finally, outside her door, she announced, “Tessie, I am going to bed now.”
   “Okay, yia yia,” my mother said. “You take a rest.”
   “I am going to bed,” Desdemona said again. She turned and went inside. Beside the bed, her silkworm box was still open. That morning, she had taken out Lefty’s wedding crown, cutting it away from her own so he could be buried with it. She looked into the box for a moment now before closing it. Then she undressed. She took off her black dress and hung it in the garment bag full of mothballs. She returned her shoes to the box from Penney’s. After putting on her nightgown, she rinsed out her panty hose in the bathroom and hung them over the shower rod. And then, even though it was only three in the afternoon, she got into bed.
   For the next ten years, except for a bath every Friday, she never got out again.

The Mediterranean Diet

   She didn’t like being left on earth. She didn’t like being left in America. She was tired of living. She was having a harder and harder time climbing stairs. A woman’s life was over once her husband died. Somebody had given her the evil eye.
   Such were the answers Father Mike brought back to us the third day after Desdemona refused to get out of bed. My mother asked him to talk to her and he returned from the guest house with his Fra Angelico eyebrows lifted in tender exasperation. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass,” he said. “I see this kind of thing with widows all the time.”
   We believed him. But as the weeks went by, Desdemona only became more depressed and withdrawn. A habitual early riser, she began to sleep late. When my mother brought in a breakfast tray, Desdemona opened one eye and gestured for her to leave it. Eggs got cold. Coffee filmed over. The only thing that roused her was her daily lineup of soap operas. She watched the cheating husbands and scheming wives as faithfully as ever, but she didn’t reprimand them anymore, as if she’d given up correcting the errors of the world. Propped up against the headboard, her hairnet cinched on her forehead like a diadem, Desdemona looked as ancient and indomitable as the elderly Queen Victoria. A queen of a sceptered isle that consisted only of a bird-filled bedroom. A queen in exile, with only two attendants remaining, Tessie and me.
   “Pray for me to die,” she instructed me. “Pray for yia yia to die and go be with papou.”
   …But before I go on with Desdemona’s story, I want to update you on developments with Julie Kikuchi. With regard to the main point: there have been no developments. On our last day in Pomerania, we got very cozy, Julie and I. Pomerania belonged to East Germany. The seaside villas of Herringsdorf had been allowed to fall apart for fifty years. Now, after reunification, there is a real estate boom. Being Americans, Julie and I could not fail but be alert to this. As we strolled the wide boardwalk, holding hands, we speculated about buying this or that old, crumbling villa and fixing it up. “We could get used to the nudists,” Julie said. “We could get a Pomeranian,” I said. I don’t know what came over us. That “we.” We were prodigal in its usage, we were reckless with its implications. Artists have good instinct for real estate. And Herringsdorf energized Julie. We inquired about a few co-ops, a new thing here. We toured two or three mansions. It was all very marital. Under the influence of that old, aristocratic, nineteenth-century summer resort, Julie and I were acting old-fashioned, too. We discussed setting up house without even having slept together. But of course we never mentioned love or marriage. Only down payments.
   But on the way back to Berlin a familiar fear descended on me. Humming over the road, I began to look ahead. I thought of the next step and what would be required of me. The preparations, the explanations, the very real possibility of shock, horror, withdrawal, rebuff. The usual reactions.
   “What’s the matter?” Julie asked me.
   “Nothing.”
   “You seem quiet.”
   “Just tired.”
   In Berlin, I dropped her off. My hug was cold, peremptory. I haven’t called her since. She left a message on my machine. I didn’t respond. And now she has stopped calling, too. So it’s all over with Julie. Over before it began. And instead of sharing a future with someone, I am back again with the past, with Desdemona who wanted no future at all…
   I brought her dinner, sometimes lunch. I carried trays along the portico of brown metal posts. Above was the sun deck, underutilized, the redwood rotting. To my right was the bathhouse, smooth and poured. The guest house repeated the clean, rectilinear lines of the main house. The architecture of Middlesex was an attempt to rediscover pure origins. At the time, I didn’t know about all that. But as I pushed through the door into the skylit guest house I was aware of the disparities. The boxlike room, stripped of all embellishment or parlor fussiness, a room that wished to be timeless or ahistorical, and there, in the middle of it, my deeply historical, timeworn grandmother. Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of remembering. Against her heap of pillows she lay, exuding woe vapors, but in a kindly way. That was the signature of my grandmother and the Greek ladies of her generation: the kindliness of their despair. How they moaned while offering you sweets! How they complained of physical ailments while patting your knee! My visits always cheered Desdemona up. “Hello, dolly mou,” she said, smiling. I sat on the bed as she stroked my hair, cooing endearments in Greek. With my brother Desdemona kept a happy face the entire time he was there. But with me, after ten minutes, her buoyant eyes subsided, and she told me the truth about how she felt. “I am too old now. Too old, honey.”
   Her lifelong hypochondria had never had a better field in which to flower. When she first sentenced herself to the mahogany limbo of her four-poster bed, Desdemona complained only of her usual heart palpitations. But a week later she began to suffer fatigue, dizziness, and circulation problems. “I am having in my legs pain. The blood it doesn’t move.”
   “She’s fine,” Dr. Philobosian told my parents, after a half-hour examination. “Not young anymore, but I see nothing serious.”
   “I no can breathe!” Desdemona argued with him.
   “Your lungs sound fine.”
   “My leg it is like needles.”
   “Try rubbing it. To stimulate the circulation.”
   “He’s too old now too,” Desdemona said after Dr. Phil had left. “Get me a new doctor who he isn’t already dead himself.”
   My parents complied. Violating our family loyalty to Dr. Phil, they went behind his back and called in new physicians. A Dr. Tuttlesworth. A Dr. Katz. The unfortunately named Dr. Cold. Every single one gave Desdemona the same dire diagnosis that there was nothing wrong with her. They looked into the wrinkled prunes of her eyes; they peered into the dried apricots of her ears; they listened to the indestructible pump of her heart, and pronounced her well.
   We tried to cajole her out of bed. We invited her to watch Never on Sunday on the big television. We called Aunt Lina in New Mexico and put the phone up to the intercom. “Listen, Des, why don’t you visit me down here? It’s so hot you’ll think you’re back in the horeo.”
   “I no can hear you, Lina!” Desdemona shouted, despite her lung problems. “It is working no good the machine!”
   Finally, appealing to Desdemona’s fear of God, Tessie told her that it was a sin to miss church when you were physically able to go. But Desdemona patted the mattress. “The next time I go to the church is in a coffin.”
   She began to make final preparations. From her bed she directed my mother to clean out the closets. “ Papou ’s clothes you can give to the Goodwill. My nice dresses, too. Now I only need something for to bury me.” The necessity of caring for her husband during his final years had made Desdemona a bundle of activity. Only a few months before, she’d been peeling and stewing the soft food he ate, changing his diapers, cleaning his bedding and pajamas, and harrying his body with moistened towels and Q-tips. But now, at seventy, the strain of having no one to care for but herself aged her overnight. Her salt-and-pepper hair turned completely gray and her robust figure sprang a slow leak, so that she seemed to be deflating day by day. She grew paler. Veins showed. Tiny red sunspots burst on her chest. She stopped checking her face in the mirror. Because of her poor dentures, Desdemona hadn’t really had lips for years. But now she stopped putting lipstick even in the place where her lips used to be.
   “Miltie,” she asked my father one day, “you bought for me the place next to papou?”
   “Don’t worry, Ma. It’s a double plot.”
   “Nobody they are going take it?”
   “It’s got your name on it, Ma.”
   “It no have my name, Miltie! That why I worry. It have papou ’s name one side. Other side is grass only. I want you go put sign it says, this place is for yia yia. Some other lady maybe she die and try to get next to my husband.”
   But her funeral preparations didn’t end there. Not only did Desdemona pick out her burial plot. She also picked out her mortician. Georgie Pappas, Sophie Sassoon’s brother who worked at the T. J. Thomas Funeral Home, arrived at Middlesex in April (when a bout of pneumonia was looking promising). He carried his sample cases of caskets, crematory urns, and flower arrangements out to the guest house and sat by Desdemona’s bed while she looked the photographs over with the excitement of someone browsing travel brochures. She asked Milton what he could afford.
   “I don’t want to talk about it, Ma. You’re not dying.”
   “I am no asking for the Imperial. Georgie says Imperial is top of line. But for yia yia Presidential is okay.”
   “When the time comes, you can have whatever you want. But—“
   “And satin inside. Please. And a pillow. Like here. Page eight. Number five. Pay attention! And tell Georgie leave my glasses.”
   As far as Desdemona was concerned, death was only another kind of emigration. Instead of sailing from Turkey to America, this time she would be traveling from earth to heaven, where Lefty had already gotten his citizenship and had a place waiting.
   Gradually we became accustomed to Desdemona’s retreat from the family sphere. By this time, the spring of 1971, Milton was busy with a new “business venture.” After the disaster on Pingree Street, Milton vowed never to make the same mistake again. How do you escape the real estate rule of location, location, location? Simple: be everywhere at once.
   “Hot dog stands,” Milton announced at dinner one night. “Start with three or four and add on as you go.”
   With the remaining insurance money Milton rented space in three malls in the Detroit metropolitan area. On a pad of yellow paper, he came up with the design for the stands. “McDonald’s has Golden Arches?” he said. “We’ve got the Pillars of Hercules.”
   If you ever drove along the blue highways anywhere from Michigan to Florida, anytime from 1971 to 1978, you may have seen the bright white neon pillars that flanked my father’s chain of hot dog restaurants. The pillars combined his Greek heritage with the colonial architecture of his beloved native land. Milton’s pillars were the Parthenon and the Supreme Court Building; they were the Herakles of myth as well as the Hercules of Hollywood movies. They also got people’s attention.
   Milton started out with three Hercules Hot Dogs™ but quickly added franchises as profits allowed. He began in Michigan but soon spilled over into Ohio, and from there went on down the Interstate to the deep South. The format was more like Dairy Queen than McDonald’s. Seating was minimal or nonexistent (at most a couple of picnic tables). There were no play areas, no sweepstakes or “Happy Meals,” no giveaways or promotions. What there was was hot dogs, Coney Island style, as that term was used in Detroit, meaning they were served with chili sauce and onions. Hercules Hot Dogs were side-of-the-road places, and usually not the nicest roads. By bowling alleys, by train stations, in small towns on the way to bigger ones, anywhere where real estate was cheap and a lot of cars or people passed through.
   I didn’t like the stands. To me they were a steep come-down from the romantic days of the Zebra Room. Where were the knickknacks, the jukebox, the glowing shelf of pies, the deep maroon booths? Where were the regulars? I couldn’t understand how these hot dog stands could make so much more money than the diner ever had. But make money they did. After the first, touch-and-go year, my father’s chain of hot dog restaurants began to make him a comfortably wealthy man. Aside from securing good locations, there was another element to my father’s success. A gimmick or, in today’s parlance, a “branding.” Ball Park franks plumped when you cooked them, but Hercules Hot Dogs did something better. They came out of the package looking like normal, udder-pink wieners, but as they got hot, an amazing transformation took place. Sizzling on the grill, the hot dogs bulged in the middle, grew fatter, and, yes, flexed.
   This was Chapter Eleven’s contribution. One night, my then seventeen-year-old brother had gone down into the kitchen to make himself a late-night snack. He found some hot dogs in the refrigerator. Not wanting to wait for water to boil, he got out a frying pan. Next he decided to cut the hot dogs in half. “I wanted to increase the surface area,” he explained to me later. Rather than slicing the hot dogs lengthwise, Chapter Eleven tried various combinations to amuse himself. He made notches here and slits there and then he put all the hot dogs in a pan and watched what happened.
   Not much, that first night. But a few of my brother’s incisions resulted in the hot dogs assuming funny shapes. After that, it became a kind of game with him. He grew adept at manipulating the shapes of cooking hot dogs and, for fun, developed an entire line of gag frankfurters. There was the hot dog that stood on end when heated, resembling the Tower of Pisa. In honor of the moon landing, there was the Apollo 11, whose skin gradually stretched until, bursting, the wiener appeared to blast off into the air. Chapter Eleven made hot dogs that danced to Sammy Davis’s rendition of “Bojangles” and others that formed letters, L and S, though he never accomplished a decent Z. (For his friends he had hot dogs do other things. Laughter emanated from the kitchen late at night. You heard Chapter Eleven: “I call this the Harry Reems,” and then the other boys shouting: “No way, Stephanides!” And while we’re on the subject, was I the only one who was shocked by those old Ball Park ads with their shots of red franks swelling and lengthening? Where were the censors? Did anyone notice the expressions on mothers’ faces when those ads played, or the way, right afterward, they often discussed what kind of “buns” they preferred? I certainly noticed, because I was a girl at the time and those ads were designed to get my attention.)
   Once you ate a Hercules hot dog you never forgot it. Very quickly they had wide name recognition. A large food processing company offered to buy the rights and sell the hot dogs in stores, but Milton, mistakenly thinking that popularity is eternal, rejected it.
   Aside from inventing the Herculean frankfurters, my brother had little interest in the family business. “I’m an inventor,” he said. “Not a hot dog man.” In Grosse Pointe he fell into a group of boys whose main bond was their unpopularity. A hot Saturday night for them consisted of sitting in my brother’s room, staring at Escher prints. For hours they followed figures up staircases that were also going down, or watched geese turn into fish and then into geese again. They ate peanut butter crackers, getting gunk all over their teeth while quizzing each other on the periodic table. Steve Munger, Chapter Eleven’s best friend, used to infuriate my father with philosophical arguments. (“But how can you prove you exist, Mr. Stephanides?”) Whenever we picked my brother up at school I saw him through a stranger’s eyes. Chapter Eleven was geeky, nerdy. His body was a stalk supporting the tulip of his brain. As he walked to the car, his head was often tilted back, alert to phenomena in the trees. He didn’t pick up on styles or trends. Tessie still bought his clothes for him. Because he was my older brother, I admired him; but because I was his sister, I felt superior. In doling out our respective gifts God had given me all the important ones. Mathematical aptitude: to Chapter Eleven. Verbal aptitude: to me. Fix-it handiness: to Chapter Eleven. Imagination: to me. Musical talent: to Chapter Eleven. Looks: to me.
   The beauty I possessed as a baby only increased as I grew into a girl. It was no surprise why Clementine Stark had wanted to practice kissing with me. Everyone wanted to. Elderly waitresses bent close to take my order. Red-faced boys appeared at my desk, stammering, “Y-y-you dropped your eraser.” Even Tessie, angry about something, would look down at me—at my Cleopatra eyes—and forget what she was mad about. Wasn’t there the slightest rumble in the air whenever I brought in drinks to the Sunday debaters? Uncle Pete, Jimmy Fioretos, Gus Panos, men fifty, sixty, seventy years old looking up over expansive bellies and having thoughts they didn’t admit? Back in Bithynios, where sustained respiration rendered a bachelor eligible, men of equivalent age had successfully asked for the hand of a girl like me. Were they remembering those days, lounging on our love seats? Were they thinking, “If this wasn’t America, I just might …”? I can’t say. Looking back now, I can only remember a time when the world seemed to have a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open—on the bus, in the pharmacy—and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and the desperation.
   For hours at a time I would admire my looks myself, turning this way and that before the mirror, or assuming a relaxed pose to see what I looked like in real life. By holding a hand mirror I could see my profile, still harmonious at the time. I combed my long hair and sometimes stole my mother’s mascara to do my eyes. But increasingly my narcissistic pleasure was tempered by the unlovely condition of the pool into which I gazed.
   “He’s popping his zits again!” I complained to my mother.
   “Don’t be so squeamish, Callie. It’s just a little … here, I’ll wipe it off.”
   “Gross!”
   “Wait’ll you get pimples!” Chapter Eleven shouted, ashamed and furious, from the hallway.
   “I’m not going to.”
   “You will, too! Everybody’s sebaceous glands overproduce when they go through puberty!”
   “Quiet, both of you,” said Tessie, but she didn’t need to. I’d already gotten quiet on my own. It was that word: puberty. The source of a great amount of anxious speculation on my part at the time. A word that lay in wait for me, jumping out now and then, scaring me because I didn’t know exactly what it meant. But now at least I knew one thing: Chapter Eleven was involved in it somehow. Maybe that explained not only the pimples but the other thing about my brother I’d been noticing lately.
   Not long after Desdemona took to her bed, I’d begun to notice, in the vague creepy way of a sister with a brother, a new, solitary pastime of Chapter Eleven’s. It was a matter of a perceptible activity behind the locked bathroom door. Of a certain strain to the reply, “Just a minute,” when I knocked. Still, I was younger than he was and ignorant of the pressing needs of adolescent boys.
   But let me backtrack a minute. Three years earlier, when Chapter Eleven was fourteen and I was eight, my brother had played a trick on me. It happened on a night when our parents had gone out to dinner. It was raining and thundering. I was watching television when Chapter Eleven suddenly appeared. He was holding out a lemon cake. “Look what I have!” he sang.
   Magnanimously he cut me a slice. He watched me eat it. Then he said, “I’m telling! That cake was for Sunday.”
   “No fair!”
   I ran at him. I tried to hit him, but he caught my arms. We wrestled standing up, until finally Chapter Eleven offered a deal.
   As I said: in those days, the world was always growing eyes. Here were two more. They belonged to my brother, who, in the guest bathroom, amid the fancy hand towels, stood watching as I pulled down my underpants and lifted my skirt. (If I showed him, he wouldn’t tell.) Fascinated as he was, he stayed at a distance. His Adam’s apple rose and fell. He looked amazed and frightened. He didn’t have much to compare me to, but what he saw didn’t misinform him either: pink folds, a cleft. For ten seconds Chapter Eleven studied my documents, detecting no forgery, as the clouds burst overhead, and I made him get me one more piece of cake.
   Apparently, Chapter Eleven’s curiosity hadn’t been satisfied by looking at his eight-year-old sister. Now, I suspected, he was looking at pictures of the real thing.
   In 1971, all the men in our lives were gone, Lefty to death, Milton to Hercules Hot Dogs, and Chapter Eleven to bathroom solitaire. Leaving Tessie and me to deal with Desdemona.
   We had to cut her toenails. We had to hunt down flies that found their way into her room. We had to move her birdcages around according to the light. We had to turn on the television for the day’s soap operas and we had to turn it off before the murders on the evening news. Desdemona didn’t want to lose her dignity, however. When nature called, she called us on the intercom, and we helped her out of bed and into the bathroom.
   The simplest way to say it is: years passed. As the seasons changed outside the windows, as the weeping willows shed their million leaves, as snow fell on the flat roof and the angle of sunlight declined, Desdemona remained in bed. She was still there when the snow melted and the willows budded again. She was there when the sun, climbing higher, dropped a sunbeam straight though the skylight, like a ladder to heaven she was more than eager to climb.
   What happened while Desdemona was in bed:
   Aunt Lina’s friend Mrs. Watson died, and with the poor judgment grief always brings, Sourmelina decided to sell their adobe house and move back north to be close to her family. She arrived in Detroit in February of 1972. The winter weather felt colder than she ever remembered. Worse, her time in the Southwest had changed her. Somehow in the course of her life Sourmelina had become an American. Almost nothing of the village remained in her. Her self-entombed cousin, on the other hand, had never left it. They were both in their seventies, but Desdemona was an old, gray-haired widow waiting to die while Lina, another kind of widow entirely, was a bottle redhead who drove a Firebird and wore belted denim skirts with turquoise belt buckles. After her life in the sexual counterculture, Lina found my parents’ heterosexuality as quaint as a sampler. Chapter Eleven’s acne alarmed her. She disliked sharing a shower with him. A strained atmosphere existed in our house while Sourmelina stayed with us. She was as garish and out of place in our living room as a retired Vegas showgirl, and because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner.
   We got to know our new neighbors. There were the Picketts, Nelson, who’d played tackle for Georgia Tech and now worked for Parke-Davis, the pharmaceutical company, and his wife, Bonnie, who was always reading the miraculous tales in Guideposts. Across the street was Stew “Bright Eyes” Fiddler, an industrial parts salesman with a taste for bourbon and barmaids, and his wife, Mizzi, whose hair changed color like a mood ring. At the end of the block were Sam and Hettie Grossinger, the first Orthodox Jews we’d ever met, and their only child, Maxine, a shy violin prodigy. Sam, however, was funny, and Hettie was loud, and they talked about money without thinking it was impolite, and so we felt comfortable around them. Milt and Tessie often had the Grossingers over to dinner, though their dietary restrictions continually baffled us. My mother would drive all the way across town to buy kosher meat, for instance, only to serve it with a cream sauce. Or she would skip the meat and cream altogether and serve crab cakes. Though faithful to their religion, the Grossingers were midwestern Jews, low-key and assimilationist. They hid behind their wall of cypresses and at Christmas put up a Santa Claus along with lights.
   In 1971: Judge Stephen J. Roth of the U.S. District Court ruled that de jure segregation existed in the Detroit school system. He immediately ordered the schools to be desegregated. There was only one problem. By 1971 the Detroit student population was 80 percent black. “That busing judge can bus all he wants,” Milton crowed, reading about the decision in the paper. “Doesn’t make any difference now. You see, Tessie? You understand why your dear old husband wanted to get the kids out of that school system? Because if I didn’t, that goddamn Roth would be busing them to school in downtown Nairobi, that’s why.”
   In 1972: Five-foot five-inch S. Miyamoto, rejected by the Detroit police force for failing to meet the five-foot seven-inch requirement (he had tried elevator heels, etc.), appeared on The Tonight Show to plead his case. I wrote a letter to the police commissioner myself in support of Miyamoto, but I never received a reply, and Miyamoto was rejected. A few months later, Police Commissioner Nichols was thrown from his horse during a parade. “That’s what you get!” I said.
   In 1972: H. D. Jackson and L. D. Moore, who had brought a police brutality case for four million dollars, hijacked a Southern Airways jet to Cuba, outraged at being awarded damages in the amount of twenty-five dollars.
   In 1972: Mayor Roman Gribbs claimed that Detroit had turned around. The city had overcome the trauma of the ’67 riots. Therefore, he wasn’t planning on running for another term. A new candidate appeared, the man who would become the city’s first African American mayor, Coleman A. Young.
   And I turned twelve.
   A few months earlier, on the first day of sixth grade, Carol Horning came into class wearing a slight but unmistakably self-satisfied smile. Below this smile, as if displayed on a trophy shelf, were the new breasts she had gotten over the summer. She wasn’t the only one. During the growing months, quite a few of my schoolmates had—as adults liked to say—“developed.”
   I wasn’t entirely unprepared for this. I’d spent a month the previous summer at Camp Ponshewaing, near Port Huron. During the slow march of summer days I was aware, as one is aware of a drum steadily beating across a lake, of something unspooling itself in the bodies of my campmates. Girls were growing modest. They turned their backs to dress. Some had surnames stitched onto not only shorts and socks but training bras, too. Mostly, it was a personal matter that no one spoke about. But now and then there were dramatic manifestations. One afternoon during swimming hour, the tin door of the changing room clanged open and shut. The sound caromed off the trunks of pine trees, carrying past the meager beach out over the water, where I floated on an inner tube, reading Love Story. (Swimming hour was the only time I could get any reading done, and though the camp counselors tried to motivate me to practice my freestyle, I persevered every day in reading the new bestseller I’d found on my mother’s night table.) Now I looked up. Along a dusty brown path in the pine needles, Jenny Simonson was advancing in a red, white, and blue swimsuit. All nature grew hushed at the sight. Birds fell silent. Lake swans unfurled tremendous necks to get a glimpse. Even a chainsaw in the distance cut its engine. I beheld the magnificence of Jenny S. The golden, late afternoon light intensified around her. Her patriotic swimsuit swelled in ways no one else’s did. Muscles flexed in her long thighs. She ran to the end of the dock and plunged into the lake, where a throng of naiads (her friends from Cedar Rapids) swam over to meet her.
   Lowering my book, I looked down at my own body. There it was, as usual: the flat chest, the nothing hips, the forked, mosquito-bitten legs. Lake water and sun were making my skin peel. My fingers had gotten all wrinkly.
   Thanks to Dr. Phil’s decrepitude and Tessie’s prudishness, I arrived at puberty not knowing much about what to expect. Dr. Philobosian still had an office near Women’s Hospital, though the hospital itself had been closed down by then. His practice had changed considerably. There were a few remaining elderly patients who, having survived so long under his care, were afraid to change doctors. The rest were welfare families. Nurse Rosalee ran the office. She and Dr. Phil had been married a year after they met delivering me. Now she did the scheduling and administered shots. Her Appalachian childhood had acquainted her with government assistance, and she was a whiz with the Medicaid forms.
   In his eighties, Dr. Phil had taken up painting. His office walls were covered salon-style with thick, swirling oils. He didn’t use a brush much, mainly a palette knife. And what did he paint? Smyrna? The quay at dawn? The terrible fire? No. Like many amateurs, Dr. Phil assumed that the only proper subject for art was a picturesque landscape that had nothing to do with his experience. He painted sea vistas he’d never seen and forest hamlets he’d never visited, complete with a pipe-smoking figure resting on a log. Dr. Philobosian never talked about Smyrna and left the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his first wife, or his murdered sons and daughters. Maybe this was the reason for his survival.
   Nevertheless, Dr. Phil was becoming a fossil. For my annual physical in 1972 he used diagnostic methods popular back in medical school in 1910. There was a trick where he pretended to slap me in the face to check my reflexes. There was an auscultation accomplished with a wineglass. When he bent his head to listen to my heart I was treated to an aerial view of the Galápagos of scabs on his bald pate. (The archipelago changed position from year to year, continentally drifting across the globe of his skull but never healing.) Dr. Philobosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps. His medical diploma looked as if it were written on parchment. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, to cure fever, Dr. Phil had written out a prescription for leeches. He was correct with me, never friendly, and directed most of his conversation to Tessie, who sat in a chair in the corner. What memories, I wonder, was Dr. Phil avoiding in not looking at me? Did the ghosts of Levantine girls haunt those cursory checkups, suggested by the fragility of my collarbone, or the birdcall of my small, congested lungs? Was he trying not to think of water palaces and loosened robes, or was he just tired, old, half-blind, and too proud to admit it?
   Whatever the answer, year after year, Tessie faithfully took me to him, in repayment for an act of charity during a catastrophe he would no longer acknowledge. In his waiting room I encountered the same tattered Highlights magazine every visit. “Can you find these?” the puzzle asked inside. And there in the spreading chestnut tree were the knife, the dog, the fish, the old woman, the candlestick—all circled by my own hand, shaky with earache, years and years before.
   My mother avoided bodily matters, too. She never spoke openly about sex. She never undressed in front of me. She disliked dirty jokes or nudity in movies. For his own part, Milton was unable to discuss the birds and the bees with his young daughter, and so I was left, in those years, to figure things out for myself.
   From hints Aunt Zo let slip in the kitchen I was aware that something happened to women every so often, something they didn’t like, something men didn’t have to put up with (like everything else). Whatever it was, it seemed safely far off, like getting married or giving birth. And then one day at Camp Ponshewaing, Rebecca Urbanus climbed up on a chair. Rebecca was from South Carolina. She had slave-owning ancestors and a trained voice. During dances with the boys from the neighboring camp, she waved a hand in front of her face as though holding a fan. Why was she up on a chair? We were having a talent show. Rebecca Urbanus was maybe singing or reciting the poetry of Walter de la Mare. The sun was still high and her shorts were white. And then suddenly, as she sang (or recited), the back of her white shorts darkened. At first it appeared to be only a shadow of the surrounding trees. Some kid’s waving hand. But no: while our band of twelve-year-olds sat watching, each of us in camp T-shirt and Indian headband, we saw what Rebecca Urbanus didn’t. While her upper half performed, her bottom half upstaged her. The stain grew, and it was red. Camp counselors were unsure how to react. Rebecca sang, arms outflung. She revolved on her chair before her theater-in-the-round: us, staring, perplexed and horrified. Certain “advanced” girls understood. Others, like me, thought: knife wound, bear attack. Right then Rebecca Urbanus saw us looking. She looked down herself. And screamed. And fled the stage.
   I returned from camp browner and leaner, pinned with a single badge (ironically, for orienteering). But that other badge, which Carol Horning displayed so proudly the first day of school, I was still without. I felt ambivalent about this. On the one hand, if Rebecca Urbanus’s mishap was any indication, it might be safer to stay the way I was. What if something similar happened to me? I went through my closet and threw out anything white. I stopped singing altogether. You couldn’t control it. You never knew. It could happen anytime.
   Except, with me, it didn’t. Gradually, as most of the other girls in my grade began to undergo their own transformations, I began to worry less about possible accidents and more about being left behind, left out.
   I am in math class, sometime during the winter of sixth grade. Miss Grotowski, our youngish teacher, is writing an equation on the blackboard. Behind her, at wooden-topped desks, students follow her calculations, or doze, or kick each other from behind. A gray winter Michigan day. The grass outside resembles pewter. Overhead, fluorescent lights attempt to dispel the season’s dimness. A picture of the great mathematician Ramanujan (whom we girls at first took to be Miss Grotowski’s foreign boyfriend) hangs on the wall. The air is stuffy in the way only air at school can be stuffy.
   And behind our teacher’s back, in our desks, we are flying through time. Thirty kids, in six neat rows, being borne along at a speed we can’t perceive. As Miss Grotowski sketches equations on the board, my classmates all around me begin to change. Jane Blunt’s thighs, for instance, seem to get a little bit longer every week. Her sweater swells in front. Then one day Beverly Maas, who sits right next to me, raises her hand and I see darkness up her sleeve: a patch of light brown hair. When did it appear? Yesterday? The day before? The equations get longer and longer throughout the year, more complicated, and maybe it’s all the numbers, or the multiplication tables; we are learning to quantify large sums as, by new math, bodies arrive at unexpected answers. Peter Quail’s voice is two octaves lower than last month and he doesn’t notice. Why not? He’s flying too fast. Boys are getting peach fuzz on upper lips. Foreheads and noses are breaking out. Most spectacularly of all, girls are becoming women. Not mentally or emotionally even, but physically. Nature is making its preparations. Deadlines encoded in the species are met.
   Only Calliope, in the second row, is motionless, her desk stalled somehow, so that she’s the only one who takes in the true extent of the metamorphoses around her. While solving proofs she is aware of Tricia Lamb’s purse on the floor next to her desk, of the tampon she glimpsed inside it that morning—which you use how, exactly?—and whom can she ask? Still pretty, Calliope soon finds herself the shortest girl in the room. She drops her eraser. No boy brings it back. In the Christmas pageant she is cast not as Mary as in past years but as an elf … But there’s still hope, isn’t there? … because the desks are flying, day after day; arranged in their squadron, the students bank and roar through time, so that Callie looks up from her ink-stained paper one afternoon and sees it is spring, flowers budding, forsythia in bloom, elms greening; at recess girls and boys hold hands, kissing sometimes behind trees, and Calliope feels gypped, cheated. “Remember me?” she says, to nature. “I’m waiting. I’m still here.”
   As was Desdemona. By April of 1972, her application to join her husband in heaven was still working its way though a vast, celestial bureaucracy. Though Desdemona was perfectly healthy when she got into bed, the weeks, months, and finally years of inactivity, coupled with her own remarkable willpower to do away with herself, brought her the reward of a Physician’s Handbook of ailments. During her bedridden years Desdemona had fluid in her lungs; lumbago; bursitis; a spell of eclampsia that manifested itself a half-century later than etiologically normal and then just as mysteriously vanished, to Desdemona’s regret; a severe case of shingles that made her ribs and back the color and texture of ripe strawberries and stung like a cattle prod; nineteen colds; a week of purely figurative “walking” pneumonia; ulcers; psychosomatic cataracts which clouded her vision on the anniversaries of her husband’s death and which she basically just cried away; and Dupuytren’s contracture, where inflamed fascia in her hand curled her thumb and three fingers painfully into her palm, leaving her middle finger raised in an obscene gesture.
   One doctor enrolled Desdemona in a longevity study. He was writing an article for a medical journal on “The Mediterranean Diet.” To that end he plied Desdemona with questions about the cuisine of her homeland. How much yogurt had she consumed as a child? How much olive oil? Garlic? She answered every one of his queries because she thought his interest indicated that there was something, at last, organically the matter with her, and because she never missed a chance to stroll through the precincts of her childhood. The doctor’s name was Müller. German by blood, he renounced his race when it came to its cooking. With postwar guilt, he decried bratwurst, sauerbraten, and Königsberger Klopse as dishes verging on poison. They were the Hitler of foods. Instead he looked to our own Greek diet—our eggplant aswim in tomato sauce, our cucumber dressings and fish-egg spreads, our pilafi, raisins, and figs—as potential curatives, as life-giving, artery-cleansing, skin-smoothing wonder drugs. And what Dr. Müller said appeared to be true: though he was only forty-two, his face was wrinkled, burdened with jowls. Gray hair prickled up on the sides of his head; whereas my father, at forty-eight, despite the coffee stains beneath his eyes, was still the possessor of an unlined olive complexion and a rich, glossy, black head of hair. They didn’t call it Grecian Formula for nothing. It was in our food! A veritable fountain of youth in our dolmades and taramasalata and even in our baklava, which didn’t commit the sin of containing refined sugar but had only honey. Dr. Müller showed us graphs he’d made, listing the names and birth dates of Italians, Greeks, and a Bulgarian living in the Detroit metropolitan area, and we saw our own entrant—Desdemona Stephanides, age ninety-one—going strong in the midst of the rest. Plotted against Poles killed off by kielbasa, or Belgians done in by pommes frites, or Anglo-Saxons disappeared by puddings, or Spaniards stopped cold by chorizo, our Greek dotted line kept going where theirs tailed off in a tangle of downward trajectories. Who knew? As a people we hadn’t had, for the past few millennia, that much to be proud of. So it was perhaps understandable that during Dr. Müller’s house calls we failed to mention the troubling anomaly of Lefty’s multiple strokes. We didn’t want to skew the graph with new data, and so didn’t mention that Desdemona was actually seventy-one, not ninety-one, and that she always confused sevens with nines. We didn’t mention her aunts, Thalia and Victoria, who both died of breast cancer as young women; and we said nothing about the high blood pressure that taxed the veins within Milton’s own smooth, youthful exterior. We couldn’t. We didn’t want to lose out to the Italians or even that one Bulgarian. And Dr. Müller, lost in his research, didn’t notice the store display of mortuary services next to Desdemona’s bed, the photograph of the dead husband next to the photograph of his grave, the abundant paraphernalia of a widow abandoned on earth. Not a member of a band of immortals from Mount Olympus. Just the only member left alive.
   Meanwhile, tensions between my mother and me were rising.
   “Don’t laugh!”
   “I’m sorry, honey. But it’s just, you’ve got nothing to … to …”
   “Mom!”
   “… to hold it up.”
   A tantrum-edged scream. Twelve-year-old feet running up the stairs, while Tessie called out, “Don’t be so dramatic, Callie. We’ll get you a bra if you want.” Up into my bedroom, where, after locking the door, I pulled off my shirt before the mirror to see … that my mother was right. Nothing! Nothing at all to hold up anything. And I burst into tears of frustration and rage.
   That evening, when I finally came back down to dinner, I retaliated in the only way I could.
   “What’s the matter? You’re not hungry?”
   “I want normal food.”
   “What do you mean normal food?”
   “American food.”
   “I have to make what yia yia likes.”
   “What about what I like?”
   “You like spanikopita. You’ve always liked spanikopita.”
   “Well, I don’t anymore.”
   “Okay, then. Don’t eat. Starve if you want. If you don’t like what we give you, you can just sit at the table until we’re finished.”
   Faced with the mirror’s evidence, laughed at by my own mother, surrounded by developing classmates, I had come to a dire conclusion. I had begun to believe that the Mediterranean Diet that kept my grandmother alive against her will was also sinisterly retarding my maturity. It only served to reason that the olive oil Tessie drizzled over everything had some mysterious power to stop the body’s clock, while the mind, impervious to cooking oils, kept going. That was why Desdemona had the despair and fatigue of a person of ninety along with the arteries of a fifty-year-old. Might it be, I wondered, that the omega-3 fatty acids and the three-vegetables-per-meal I consumed were responsible for retarding my sexual maturity? Was yogurt for breakfast stalling my breast development? It was possible.
   “What’s the matter, Cal?” asked Milton, eating while reading the evening newspaper. “Don’t you want to live to be a hundred?”
   “Not if I have to eat this stuff the whole time.”
   But now Tessie was the one tearing up. Tessie who for almost two years now had taken care of an old lady who wouldn’t get out of bed. Tessie who had a husband more in love with hot dogs than her. Tessie who secretly monitored her children’s bowel movements and so of course knew exactly how greasy American foods could disrupt their digestion. “You don’t do the shopping,” she said, tearfully. “You don’t see what I see. When’s the last time you’ve been to the drugstore, Little Miss Normal Food? You know what the shelves are full of? Laxatives! Every time I go to the drugstore the person in front of me is buying Ex-Lax. And not just one box. They buy it by the bushel.”
   “That’s just old people.”
   “It’s not just old people. I see young mothers buying it. I see teenagers buying it. You want to know the truth? This entire country can’t do number two!”
   “Oh, now I really want to eat.”
   “Is this about the bra, Callie? Because if it is, I told you—“
   “Mo-om!”
   But it was too late. “What bra?” Chapter Eleven asked. And now, smiling: “Does the Great Salt Lake think she needs a bra?”
   “Shut up.”
   “Here. My glasses must be dirty. Let me clean them. Ah, that’s better. Now let’s have a look—“
   “Shut up!”
   “No, I wouldn’t say the Great Salt Lake has undergone any kind of geological—“
   “Well, your face has, zithead!”
   “Still as flat as ever. Perfect for time trials.”
   But then Milton shouted, “Goddamn it!”—drowning us both out.
   We thought he was tired of our bickering.
   “That goddamn judge!”
   He wasn’t looking at us. He was staring at the front page of The Detroit News. He was turning red and then—that high blood pressure we hadn’t mentioned—almost purple.
   That morning, at U.S. District Court, Judge Roth had devised a clever way to desegregate the schools. If there weren’t enough white students left in Detroit to go around, he would get them from somewhere else. Judge Roth had claimed jurisdiction over the entire “metropolitan area.” Jurisdiction over the city of Detroit and the surrounding fifty-three suburbs. Including Grosse Pointe.
   “Just when we get you kids out of that hellhole,” Milton was shouting, “that goddamn Roth wants to send you back!”

The Wolverette

   If you’ve just tuned in, we have one humdinger of a field hockey game on our hands! Final seconds of the last game of the season between those two archrivals, the BCDS Hornets and the B&I Wolverettes. Score tied 4 to 4. Face off at midfield and … the Hornets have it! Chamberlain stick-handling, passes to O’Rourke on the wing. O’Rourke faking left, going right … she’s by one Wolverette, by another … and now she passes crossfield to Amigliato! Here comes Becky Amigliato down the sideline! Ten seconds left, nine seconds! In goal for the Wolverettes it’s Stephanides and—oh my, my, she doesn’t see Amigliato coming! What in the devil? … She’s looking at a leaf, folks! Callie Stephanides is admiring a gorgeous, fire-red autumn leaf, but what a time to do it! Here comes Amigliato. Five seconds! Four seconds! This is it, folks, the championship of the Middle School Junior Varsity season is on the line—but hold on … Stephanides hears footsteps. Now she looks up … and Amigliato takes a slap shot! Ooowhee, it’s a bullet! You can feel that one all the way up here in the booth. The ball’s heading straight for Stephanides’ head! She drops the leaf! She’s watching it … watching it … gosh, you hate to see this, folks …”
   Is it true that right before death (by field hockey ball or otherwise) your life flashes before your eyes? Maybe not your whole life, but parts of it. As Becky Amigliato’s slap shot made for my face that fall day, the events of the last half year flickered in my possibly-soon-to-be-extinguished consciousness.
   First of all, our Cadillac—by then the golden Fleetwood—wending its way the previous summer up the long driveway of the Baker & Inglis School for Girls. In the backseat, one very unhappy twelve-year-old, me, arriving under duress for an interview. “I don’t want to go to a girls’ school,” I’m complaining. “I’d rather be bused.”
   And next another car picking me up, the following September, for my first day of seventh grade. Previously, I’d always walked to Trombley Elementary; but prep school has brought with it a host of changes: my new school uniform, for instance, crested and tartaned. Also: this carpool itself, a light green station wagon driven by a lady named Mrs. Drexel. Her hair is greasy, thinning. Above her upper lip, in an example of the foreshadowing I will learn to identify in the coming year’s English class, is a mustache.
   And now the station wagon is driving along a few weeks later. I’m looking out the window while Mrs. Drexel’s cigarette uncoils a rope of smoke. We head into the heart of Grosse Pointe. We pass long, gated driveways, the kind that always fill my family with wonder and awe. But now Mrs. Drexel is turning up these drives. (It is my new classmates who live at the end of them.) We rumble past privet hedges and under topiary arches to arrive at secluded lakefront homes where girls wait with satchels, standing very straight. They wear the same uniform I do, but somehow it looks different on them, neater, more stylish. Occasionally there is also a well-coifed mother in the picture, clipping a rose from the garden.
   And next it is two months later, near the end of the fall term, and the station wagon is climbing the hill to my no-longer-brand-new school. The car is full of girls. Mrs. Drexel is lighting another cigarette. She’s pulling up to the curb and getting ready to lay a curse on us. Shaking her head at the view—of the hilly, green campus, the lake in the distance—she says, “Youse girls better enjoy it now. Best time of life is when you’re young.” (At twelve, I hated her for saying that. I couldn’t imagine a worse thing to tell a kid. But maybe also, due to certain other changes that began that year, I suspected that the happy period of my childhood was coming to an end.)
   What else came back to me, as the hockey ball zeroed in? Just about everything a field hockey ball could symbolize. Field hockey, that New England game, handed down from old England, just like everything else in our school. The building with its long echoing hallways and churchy smell, its leaded windows, its Gothic gloom. The Latin primers the color of gruel. The afternoon teas. The curtsying of our tennis team. The tweediness of our faculty, and the curriculum itself, which began, Hellenically, Byronically, with Homer, and then skipped straight to Chaucer, moving on to Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, and E. M. Forster. Only connect.
   Miss Baker and Miss Inglis had founded the school back in 1911, in the words of the charter, “to educate girls in the humanities and sciences and to cultivate in them a love of learning, a modest comportment, an amiable grace, and an interest in civic duty above all.” The two women had lived together on the far side of the campus in “The Cottage,” a shingled bower that occupied a place in school mythology akin to Lincoln’s log cabin in national legend. Fifth graders were given a tour every spring. They filed by the two single bedrooms (which fooled them maybe), the founders’ writing desks still laid with fountain pens and licorice drops, and the gramophone on which they’d listened to Sousa marches. Miss Baker’s and Miss Inglis’s ghosts haunted the school, along with actual busts and portraits. A statue in the courtyard showed the bespectacled educators in a fanciful, springtime mood, Miss Baker gesturing, Pope-like, to bless the air, while Miss Inglis (forever the bottom) turned to see what her colleague was bringing to her attention. Miss Inglis’s floppy hat obscured her plain features. In the work’s only avant-garde touch, a thick wire extended from Miss Baker’s head, at the top of which hovered the object of wonder: a hummingbird.
   …All this was suggested by the spinning hockey ball. But there was something else, something more personal, that explained why I was its target. What was Calliope doing playing goalie? Why was she encumbered by mask and pads? Why was Coach Stork hollering at her to make the save?
   To answer simply: I wasn’t very good at sports. Softball, basketball, tennis: I was hopeless in every one. Field hockey was even worse. I couldn’t get used to the funny little sticks or the nebulous, European strategies. Short on players, Coach Stork put me in goal and hoped for the best. It rarely happened. With a lack of team spirit, some Wolverettes maintained that I possessed no coordination whatsoever. Did this charge have merit? Is there any connection between my present desk job and a lack of physical grace? I’m not going to answer that. But in my defense I will say that none of my more athletic teammates ever inhabited such a problematic body. They didn’t have, as I did, two testicles squatting illegally in their inguinal canals. Unknown to me, those anarchists had taken up residence in my abdomen, and were even hooked up to the utilities. If I crossed my leg the wrong way or moved too quickly, a spasm shot across my groin. On the hockey field I often doubled over, my eyes tearing up, while Coach Stork swatted me on the rump. “It’s just a cramp, Stephanides. Run it off.” (And now, as I moved to block the slap shot, just such a pain hit me. My insides twisted, erupting with a lava flow of pain. I bent forward, tripping on my goalie stick. And then I was tumbling, falling …)
   But there’s still time to record a few other physical changes. At the beginning of seventh grade I got braces, a full set. Rubber bands now hooked my upper and lower palates together. My jaw felt springy, like a ventriloquist dummy’s. Every night before going to sleep I dutifully fit my medieval headgear on. But in the darkness, while my teeth were slowly coerced into straightness, the rest of my face had begun to give in to a stronger, genetic predisposition toward crookedness. To paraphrase Nietzsche, there are two types of Greek: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I’d been born Apollonian, a sun-kissed girl with a face ringed with curls. But as I approached thirteen a Dionysian element stole over my features. My nose, at first delicately, then not so delicately, began to arch. My eyebrows, growing shaggier, arched, too. Something sinister, wily, literally “satyrical” entered my expression.
   And so the last thing the hockey ball (coming closer now, unwilling to endure any more exposition)—the last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we’re chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
   The hockey ball rocketed forward. It hit the side of my mask, which deflected it into the center of the net. We lost. The Hornets celebrated.
   In disgrace, as usual, I returned to the gymnasium. Carrying my mask, I climbed out of the green bowl of the hockey field, which was like an outdoor theater. Taking small steps, I walked along the gravel path back to the school. In the distance, down the hill and across the road, lay Lake St. Clair, where my grandfather Jimmy Zizmo had faked his death. The lake still froze in winter, but bootleggers didn’t drive over it anymore. Lake St. Clair had lost its sinister glamour and, like everything else, had become suburban. Freighters still plied the shipping channel, but now you mostly saw pleasure boats, Chris-Crafts, Santanas, Flying Dutchmen, 470s. On sunny days the lake still managed to look blue. Most of the time, however, it was the color of cold pea soup.
   But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was measuring my steps, trying to go as slowly as possible. I was looking at the gymnasium doors with an expression of wariness and anxiety.
   It was now, when the game was over for everyone else, that it began for me. While my teammates were catching their breath, I was psyching myself up. I had to act with grace, with swift, athletic timing. I had to shout from the sidelines of my being, “Heads up, Stephanides!” I had to be coach, star player, and cheerleader all in one.
   For despite the Dionysian revelry that had broken out in my body (in my throbbing teeth, in the wild abandon of my nose), not everything about me had changed. A year and a half after Carol Horning came to school with brand-new breasts, I was still without any. The brassiere I’d finally wheedled out of Tessie was still, like the higher physics, of only theoretical use. No breasts. No period, either. All through sixth grade I’d waited and then through the summer afterward. Now I was in seventh grade and still I was waiting. There were hopeful signs. From time to time my nipples became sore. Gingerly touching them, I felt a pebble beneath the pink, tender flesh. I always thought that this was the start of something. I thought I was budding. But time after time the swelling and soreness went away, and nothing came of it.
   Of all the things I had to get used to at my new school, the most difficult, therefore, was the locker room. Even now with the season over, Coach Stork was standing by the door, barking. “Okay, ladies, hit the showers! Come on. Hustle up!” She saw me coming and managed to smile. “Good effort,” she said, handing me a towel.
   Hierarchies exist everywhere, but especially in locker rooms. The swampiness, the nudity bring back original conditions. Let me perform a quick taxonomy of our locker room. Nearest the showers were the Charm Bracelets. As I passed by, I glanced down the steamy corridor to see them performing their serious, womanly movements. One Charm Bracelet was bending forward, wrapping a towel around her wet hair. She snapped upright, twisting it into a turban. Next to her another Bracelet was staring into space with empty blue eyes as she anointed herself with moisturizer. Still another Bracelet lifted a water bottle to her lips, exposing the long column of her neck. Not wanting to stare, I looked away, but I could still hear the sound they made getting dressed. Above the hiss of shower heads and the slap of feet on tiles, a high, thin tinkling reached my ears, a sound almost like the tapping of champagne flutes before a toast. What was it? Can’t you guess? From the slender wrists of these girls, tiny silver charms were chiming together. It was the ringing of tiny tennis rackets against tiny snow skis, of miniature Eiffel Towers against half-inch ballerinas on point. It was the sound of Tiffany frogs and whales chiming together; of puppies tinkling against cats, of seals with balls on their noses hitting monkeys with hand organs, of wedges of cheese ringing against clowns’ faces, of strawberries singing with inkwells, of valentine hearts striking the bells around the necks of Swiss cows. In the midst of all this soft chiming, one girl held out her wrist to her friends, like a lady recommending a perfume. Her father had just returned from a business trip, bringing her back this latest present.
   The Charm Bracelets: they were the rulers of my new school. They’d been going to Baker & Inglis since kindergarten. Since pre-kindergarten! They lived near the water and had grown up, like all Grosse Pointers, pretending that our shallow lake was no lake at all but actually the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean. Yes, that was the secret wish of the Charm Bracelets and their parents, to be not Midwesterners but Easterners, to affect their dress and lockjaw speech, to summer in Martha’s Vineyard, to say “back East” instead of “out East,” as though their time in Michigan represented only a brief sojourn away from home.
   What can I say about my well-bred, small-nosed, trust-funded schoolmates? Descended from hardworking, thrifty industrialists (there were two girls in my class who had the same last names as American car makers), did they show aptitudes for math or science? Did they display mechanical ingenuity? Or a commitment to the Protestant work ethic? In a word: no. There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich. The Charm Bracelets didn’t study. They never raised their hands in class. They sat in the back, slumping, and went home each day carrying the prop of a notebook. (But maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I’m dipping into principal, spending it all …)
   Passing by their lockers in seventh grade, I wasn’t aware of all this yet. I look back now (as Dr. Luce urged me to do) to see exactly what twelve-year-old Calliope was feeling, watching the Charm Bracelets undress in steamy light. Was there a shiver of arousal in her? Did flesh respond beneath goalie pads? I try to remember, but what comes back is only a bundle of emotions: envy, certainly, but also disdain. Inferiority and superiority at once. Above all, there was panic.
   In front of me girls were entering and exiting the showers. The flashes of nakedness were like shouts going off. A year or so earlier these same girls had been porcelain figurines, gingerly dipping their toes into the disinfectant basin at the public pool. Now they were magnificent creatures. Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came, kicking my heavy, padded legs and gaping through the goalie mask at the fantastic underwater life all around me. Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates’ legs. They came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving in the current, feeding on microscopic plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the depths.
   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. My classmates were as unastonished by their extravagant traits as a blowfish is by its quills. They seemed to be a different species. It was as if they had scent glands or marsupial pouches, adaptations for fecundity, for procreating in the wild, which had nothing to do with skinny, hairless, domesticated me. I hurried by, desolate, my ears ringing with the noise of the place.
   Beyond the Charm Bracelets I passed next into the area of the Kilt Pins. The most populous phylum in our locker room, the Kilt Pins took up three rows of lockers. There they were, fat and skinny, pale and freckled, clumsily putting on socks or pulling up unbecoming underwear. They were like the devices that held our tartans together, unremarkable, dull, but necessary in their way. I don’t remember any of their names.
   Past the Charm Bracelets, through the Kilt Pins, deeper into the locker room, Calliope limped. Back to where the tiles were cracked and the plaster yellowing, under the flickering light fixtures, by the drinking fountain with the prehistoric piece of gum in the drain, I hurried to where I belonged, to my niche of the local habitat.
   I wasn’t alone that year in having my circumstances altered. The specter of busing had started other parents looking into private schools. Baker & Inglis, with an impressive physical plant but a small endowment, wasn’t averse to increasing enrollment. And so, in the autumn of 1972, we had arrived (the steam thins out this far from the showers and I can see my old friends clearly): Reetika Churaswami, with her enormous yellow eyes and sparrow’s waist; and Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio, with her corrected clubfoot and (it must be admitted) John Birch Society affiliation; Norma Abdow, whose father had gone away on the Haj and never come back; Tina Kubek, who was Czech by blood; and Linda Ramirez, half Spanish, half Filipina, who was standing still, waiting for her glasses to unfog. “Ethnic” girls we were called, but then who wasn’t, when you got right down to it? Weren’t the Charm Bracelets every bit as ethnic? Weren’t they as full of strange rituals and food? Of tribal speech? They said “bogue” for repulsive and “queer” for weird. They ate tiny, crustless sandwiches on white bread—cucumber sandwiches, mayonnaise, and something called “watercress.” Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!
   Suffice it to say that, in seventh grade, Calliope found herself aligned with, taken in by, nurtured and befriended by the year’s newcomers. As I opened my locker, my friends said nothing about my porous goaltending. Instead Reetika kindly turned the subject to an upcoming math test. Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio slowly peeled off a knee sock. Correctional surgery had left her right ankle as thin as a broomstick. The sight of it always made me feel better about myself. Norma Abdow opened her locker, looked in, and shouted, “Gross!” I stalled, unlacing my pads. On either side, my friends, with quick, shivery movements, stripped off their clothes. They wrapped themselves in towels. “You guys?” Linda Ramirez asked. “Can I borrow some shampoo?” “Only if you’re my lunch peon tomorrow.” “No way!” “Then no shampoo.” “Okay, okay.” “Okay, what?” “Okay, Your Highness.”
   I waited until they left before I undressed. First I took off my knee socks. I reached under my athletic tunic and pulled down my shorts. After tying a bath towel around my waist, I unbuttoned the shoulder straps of my tunic and pulled it over my head. This left me with the towel and my jersey on. Now came the tricky part. The brassiere I had was size 30 AA. It had a tiny rosette between the cups and a label that read “Young Miss by Olga.” (Tessie had urged me to get an old-fashioned training bra, but I wanted something that looked like what my friends had, and preferably padded.) I now fastened this item around my waist, clasps in front, and then rotated it into position. At that point, one sleeve at a time, I pulled my arms inside my jersey so that it sat on my shoulders like a cloak. Working inside it, I slid the bra up my torso until I could slip my arms through the armholes. When that was accomplished, I put my kilt on under my towel, removed my jersey, put on my blouse, and tossed the towel away. I wasn’t naked for a second.
   The only witness to my cunning was our school mascot. On the wall behind me a faded felt banner proclaimed: “1955 State Field Hockey Champions.” Below this, striking her customary insouciant pose, was the B&I Wolverette. With her beady eyes, sharp teeth, and tapering snout, she stood leaning on her hockey stick, right foot crossed over left ankle. She wore a blue tunic with a red sash. A red ribbon sat between her furry ears. It was difficult to tell if she was smiling or snarling. There was something of the Yale bulldog’s tenacity in our Wolverette, but there was elegance, too. The Wolverette didn’t just play to win. She played to keep her figure.
   At the nearby drinking fountain, I pressed one finger over the hole, making the water squirt high in the air. I put my head into this stream. Coach Stork always touched our hair before letting us leave, making sure it was wet.
   The year I was packed off to private school, Chapter Eleven went off to college. Although he was safe from the long arm of Judge Roth, other arms had been reaching for him. One hot day the previous July, as I was passing down our upstairs hall, I heard a strange voice emanating from Chapter Eleven’s bedroom. The voice was a man’s and he was reading numbers and dates. “February fourth,” the voice said, “thirty-two. February fifth—three hundred and twenty-one. February sixth …” The accordion door wasn’t latched, so I peeked in.
   My brother was lying on his bed, wrapped in an old afghan Tessie had crocheted for him. His head extended from one end—eyes glazed—and his white legs from the other. Across the room his stereo amplifier was on, the radio needle jumping.
   That spring, Chapter Eleven had received two letters, one from the University of Michigan informing him of his acceptance and the other from the U.S. government informing him of his eligibility for the draft. Since then my apolitical brother had been taking an unusual interest in current events. Every night, he watched the news with Milton, tracking military developments and paying close attention to the guarded statements of Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks. “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac,” Kissinger famously said, and it must have been true: because Chapter Eleven was glued to the set night after night, following the machinations of diplomacy. At the same time, Milton was pricked by the strange desire of parents, and especially of fathers, to see their children repeat their own sufferings. “Might do you some good being in the service,” he said. To which Chapter Eleven replied, “I’ll go to Canada.” “You will not. If they call you up, you’ll serve your country just like I did.” And then Tessie: “Don’t worry. The whole thing’ll be over before they can get you.”
   In the summer of ’72, however, as I watched my number-stunned brother, the war was still officially on. Nixon’s Christmas bombings were still awaiting their holiday season. Kissinger was still shuttling between Paris and Washington to maintain his sex appeal. In actuality, the Paris Peace Accords would be signed the following January and the last American troops would pull out of Vietnam in March. But as I peeked in at my brother’s inert body, no one knew that yet. I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent to war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable? I felt a sympathy and protectiveness for my brother I’d never felt before. I thought of Chapter Eleven in an army uniform, squatting in the jungle. I imagined him wounded on a stretcher, and I started to cry. The voice on the radio droned on: “February twenty-first—one hundred and forty-one. February twenty-second—seventy-four. February twenty-third—two hundred and six.”
   I waited until March 20, Chapter Eleven’s birthday. When the voice announced his draft number—it was two hundred and ninety, he would never go to war—I burst into his room. Chapter Eleven leapt out of bed. We looked at each other and—almost unheard of between us—we hugged.
   The next fall, my brother left not for Canada but for Ann Arbor. Once again, as when Chapter Eleven’s egg had dropped, I was left alone. Alone at home to note my father’s growing anger at the nightly news, his frustration at the “half-assed” way the Americans were waging the war (napalm notwithstanding) and his increasing sympathy for President Nixon. Alone, also, to detect a feeling of uselessness that began to plague my mother. With Chapter Eleven out of the house and me growing up, Tessie found herself with too much time on her hands. She began to fill her days with classes at the War Memorial Community Center. She learned decoupage. She wove plant hangers. Our house began to fill up with her craft projects. There were painted baskets and beaded curtains, paperweights with various objects suspended in them, dried flowers, colored grains and beans. She went antiquing and hung an old washboard on the wall. She took yoga, too.
   It was the combination of Milton’s disgust at the antiwar movement and Tessie’s sense of uselessness that led them to begin reading the entire one-hundred-and-fifteen-volume set of the Great Books series. Uncle Pete had been touting these books for a long time, not to mention quoting from them liberally to score points in Sunday debates. And now, with so much learning in the air—Chapter Eleven majoring in engineering, I myself taking first-year Latin with Miss Silber, who wore sunglasses in class—Milton and Tessie decided it was time to round out their education. The Great Books arrived in ten boxes stamped with their contents. Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates in one; Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Virgil in another. As we shelved the books in the built-in stacks on Middlesex, we read the names, many familiar (Shakespeare), others not (Boethius). Canon-bashing wasn’t in vogue yet, and besides, the Great Books began with names not unlike our own (Thucydides), so we felt included. “Here’s a good one,” said Milton, holding up Milton. The only thing that disappointed him was that the series didn’t contain a book by Ayn Rand. Nevertheless, that evening after dinner, Milton began reading aloud to Tessie.
   They went chronologically, starting with volume one and working their way toward one hundred and fifteen. While I did my homework in the kitchen I heard Milton’s resonant, drill-like voice saying, “Socrates: ‘There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts.’ Adeimantus: ‘What are they?’ Socrates: ‘Wealth, I said, and poverty.’ ” When the Plato got to be hard going, Milton suggested skipping ahead to Machiavelli. After a few days of that, Tessie asked for Thomas Hardy, but an hour later Milton put the book down, unimpressed. “Too many heaths,” he complained. “Heath this and heath that.” Then they read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, which they enjoyed, and then they gave the project up.
   I bring up my parents’ failed assault on the Great Books for a reason. Throughout my formative years, the set remained on our library shelves, weighty and regal-looking with its gold spines. Even back then the Great Books were working on me, silently urging me to pursue the most futile human dream of all, the dream of writing a book worthy of joining their number, a one hundred and sixteenth Great Book with another long Greek name on the cover: Stephanides. That was when I was young and full of grand dreams. Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
   The life which, as I shelved books, was finally revealing itself. Because here is Calliope, opening another carton. Here she is taking out number forty-five (Locke, Rousseau). Here she is reaching up, without resorting to tiptoes, to put it on the top shelf. And here is Tessie, looking up and saying, “I think you’re growing, Cal.”
   It turned out to be an understatement. Beginning in January of seventh grade and continuing into the following August, my previously frozen body underwent a growth spurt of uncommon proportions and unforeseeable consequences. Though at home I was still kept on the Mediterranean Diet, the food at my new school—chicken pot pies, Tater Tots, cubed Jell-O—canceled out its fountain-of-youth effects and, in all ways but one, I began to grow up. I sprouted with the velocity of the mung beans we studied in Earth Science. Learning about photosynthesis, we kept one tray in the dark and one in the light, and measured them every day with metric rulers. Like a mung bean my body stretched up toward the great grow lamp in the sky, and my case was even more significant because I continued to grow in the dark. At night, my joints ached. I had trouble sleeping. I wrapped my legs in heating pads, smiling through the pain. Because along with my new height, something else was finally happening. Hair was beginning to appear in the required places. Every night, after locking my bedroom door, I angled my desk lamp just so and began to count the hairs. One week there were three; the next, six; two weeks later, seventeen. In a grand mood one day I ran a comb through them. “About time,” I said, and even that was different: my voice was beginning to change.
   It didn’t do so overnight. I don’t remember any cracking. Instead my voice began a slow descent that continued for the next couple of years. The earsplitting quality it had had—which I used as a weapon against my brother—disappeared. Hitting the “free” in the national anthem was a thing of the past. My mother kept thinking that I had a cold. Sales ladies looked past me for the woman who had asked for help. It was a not unbewitching sound, a mix of flute and bassoon, my consonants slightly slurred, a rush and breathiness to most of my pronouncements. And there were the signs only a linguist could pick up, middle-class elisions, grace notes passed down from Greek into midwestern twang, the heritage from my grandparents and parents that lived on in me like everything else.
   I grew tall. My voice matured. But nothing seemed unnatural. My slight build, my thin waist, the smallness of my head, hands, and feet raised no questions in anybody’s mind. Many genetic males raised as girls don’t blend in so easily. From an early age they look different, move differently, they can’t find shoes or gloves that fit. Other kids call them tomboys or worse: ape-women, gorillas. My skinniness disguised me. The early seventies were a good time to be flat-chested. Androgyny was in. My rickety height and foal’s legs gave me the posture of a fashion model. My clothes weren’t right, my face wasn’t right, but my angularity was. I had that saluki look. Plus, for whatever reason—my dreamy temperament, my bookishness—I fit right in.
   Still, it wasn’t uncommon for certain innocent, excitable girls to respond to my presence in ways they weren’t aware of. I’m thinking of Lily Parker, who used to lie down on the lobby couches and rest her head in my lap, looking up and saying, “You have the most perfect chin.” Or of June James, who used to pull my hair over her own head, so that we could share it like a tent. My body might have released pheromones that affected my schoolmates. How else to explain the way my friends tugged on me, leaned on me? At this early stage, before my male secondary characteristics had manifested themselves, before there were whispers about me in the halls and girls thought twice about laying their heads in my lap—in seventh grade, when my hair was glossy instead of frizzy, my cheeks still smooth, my muscles undeveloped, and yet, invisibly but unmistakably, I began to exude some kind of masculinity, in the way I tossed up and caught my eraser, for instance, or in the way I dive-bombed people’s desserts with my spoon, in the intensity of my knit brow or my eagerness to debate anyone on anything in class; when I was a changeling, before I changed, I was quite popular at my new school.
   But this stage was brief. Soon my headgear lost its nighttime war against the forces of crookedness. Apollo gave in to Dionysius. Beauty may always be a little bit freakish, but the year I turned thirteen I was becoming freakier than ever.
   Consider the yearbook. In the field hockey team photo, taken in the fall, I am on one knee in the front row. With my homeroom in the spring, I am stooping in the back. My face is shadowed with self-consciousness. (Over the years my perpetually perplexed expression would drive photographers to distraction. It ruined class photos and Christmas cards until, in the most widely published pictures of me, the problem was finally solved by blocking out my face altogether.)
   If Milton missed having a beautiful daughter, I never knew it. At weddings he still asked me to dance, regardless of how ridiculous we looked together. “Come on, kukla,” he’d say, “let’s cut the rug,” and we’d be off, the squat, plump father leading with confident, old-fashioned, fox-trot steps, and the awkward praying mantis of a daughter trying to follow along. My parents’ love for me didn’t diminish with my looks. I think it’s fair to say, however, that as my appearance changed in those years a species of sadness infiltrated my parents’ love. They worried that I wouldn’t attract boys, that I would be a wallflower, like Aunt Zo. Sometimes when we were dancing, Milton squared his shoulders and looked around the floor, as if daring anyone to make a crack.
   My response to all this growing was to grow my hair. Unlike the rest of me, which seemed bent on doing whatever it wanted, my hair remained under my control. And so like Desdemona after her disastrous YWCA makeover, I refused to let anyone cut it. All through seventh grade and into eighth I pursued my goal. While college students marched against the war, Calliope protested against hair clippers. While bombs were secretly dropped on Cambodia, Callie did what she could to keep her own secrets. By the spring of 1973, the war was officially over. President Nixon would be out of office in August of the next year. Rock music was giving way to disco. Across the nation, hairstyles were changing. But Calliope’s head, like a midwesterner who always got the fashions late, still thought it was the sixties.
   My hair! My unbelievably abundant, thirteen-year-old hair! Has there ever existed a head of hair like mine at thirteen? Did any girl ever summon as many Roto-Rooter men out of their trucks? Monthly, weekly, semiweekly, the drains in our house clogged. “Jesus Christ,” Milton complained, writing out yet another check, “you’re worse than those goddamn tree roots.” Hair like a ball of tumbleweed, blowing through the rooms of Middlesex. Hair like a black tornado wheeling across an amateur newsreel. Hair so vast it seemed to possess its own weather systems, because my dry split ends crackled with static electricity whereas closer in, near my scalp, the atmosphere grew warm and moist like a rain forest. Desdemona’s hair was long and silky, but I’d gotten Jimmy Zizmo’s spikier variety. Pomade would never subdue it. First ladies would never buy it. It was hair that could turn the Medusa to stone, hair snakier than all the snake pits in a minotaur movie.
   My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge—even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once—I swear—inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor’s cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat’s. “That’s so gross!” Becky Turnbull shouted. “I’m calling the SPCA!” In vain Milton tried to get me to wear one of the paper hats his employees had to wear by law. Tessie, as though I were still six, took a hairbrush to me.
   “I—don’t—see—why—you—won’t—let—Sophie—do—something—with—your—hair.”
   “Because I see what she does to her hair.”
   “Sophie has a perfectly nice hairstyle.”
   “Ow!”
   “Well, what do you expect? It’s a rat’s nest.”
   “Just leave it.”
   “Be still.” More brushing, tugging. My head jerking with every stroke. “Short hair’s the style now anyway, Callie.”
   “Are you finished?”
   A few final, frustrated strokes. Then, plaintively: “At least tie it back. Keep it out of your face.”
   What could I tell her? That that was the whole point of having long hair? To keep it in my face? Maybe I didn’t look like Dorothy Hamill. Maybe I was even starting to bear a strong resemblance to our weeping willow trees. But there were virtues to my hair. It covered tinsel teeth. It covered satyrical nose. It hid blemishes and, best of all, it hid me. Cut my hair? Never! I was still growing it out. My dream was to someday live inside it.
   Imagine me then at unlucky thirteen as I entered the eighth grade. Five feet ten inches tall, weighing one hundred and thirty-one pounds. Black hair hanging like drapes on either side of my nose. People knocking on the air in front of my face and calling out, “Anybody in there?”
   I was in there all right. Where else could I go?

Waxing Lyrical

   Iam back to my old ways. To my solitary walks through Victoria park. To my Romeo y Julietas, my Davidoff Grand Crus. To my embassy receptions, my Philharmonie concerts, my nightly rounds at the Felsenkeller. It’s my favorite time of year, fall. The slight chill to the air, quickening the brain, and all the schoolkid, school-year memories attached to autumn. You don’t get the bright leaves here in Europe the way you do in New England. The leaves smolder but never catch flame. It’s still warm enough to bicycle. Last night I rode from Schöneberg to Orianenburgstrasse in Mitte. I met a friend for a drink. Leaving, riding through the streets, I was hailed by the intergalactic streetwalkers. In their Manga suits, their moon boots, they tossed their teased doll’s hair and called, Hallo hallo. Maybe they would be just the thing for me. Remunerated to tolerate most anything. Shocked by nothing. And yet, as I pedaled past their lineup, their Strich, my feelings toward them were not a man’s. I was aware of a good girl’s reproachfulness and disdain, along with a perceptible, physical empathy. As they shifted their hips, hooking me with their darkly painted eyes, my mind filled not with images of what I might do with them, but with what it must be like for them, night after night, hour after hour, to have to do it. The Huren themselves didn’t look too closely at me. They saw my silk scarf, my Zegna pants, my gleaming shoes. They saw the money in my wallet. Hallo, they called. Hallo. Hallo.


* * *

   It was fall then, too, the fall of 1973. I was only a few months from turning fourteen. And one Sunday after church Sophie Sassoon whispered in my ear, “Hon? You’re getting just the tiniest bit of a mustache. Have your mother bring you by the shop. I’ll take care of it for you.”
   A mustache? Was it true? Like Mrs. Drexel? I hurried to the bathroom to see. Mrs. Tsilouras was reapplying lipstick, but as soon as she left I put my face up to the mirror. Not a full-fledged mustache: only a few darkish hairs above my upper lip. This wasn’t as surprising as it may seem. In fact, I’d been expecting it.
   Like the Sun Belt or the Bible Belt, there exists, on this multifarious earth of ours, a Hair Belt. It begins in southern Spain, congruent with Moorish influence. It extends over the dark-eyed regions of Italy, almost all of Greece, and absolutely all of Turkey. It dips south to include Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. Continuing on (and darkening in color as maps do to indicate ocean depth) it blankets Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, before lightening gradually in India. After that, except for a single dot representing the Ainu in Japan, the Hair Belt ends.
   Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair! Sing of depilatory creams and tweezers! Of bleach and beeswax! Sing how the unsightly black fuzz, like the Persian legions of Darius, sweeps over the Achaean mainland of girls barely into their teens! No, Calliope was not surprised by the appearance of a shadow above her upper lip. My Aunt Zo, my mother, Sourmelina, and even my cousin Cleo all suffered from hair growing where they didn’t want it to. When I close my eyes and summon the fond smells of childhood, do I smell gingerbread baking or the pine-fresh scent of Christmas trees? Not primarily. The aroma that fills, as it were, the nostrils of my memory is the sulfurous, protein-dissolving fetor of Nair.
   I see my mother, with her feet in the tub, waiting for the bubbling, stinging foam to work. I see Sourmelina, heating up a tin of wax on the stove. The pains they took to make themselves smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was life itself.
   I told my mother to make an appointment for me at Sophie Sassoon’s beauty parlor at the Eastland Mall.
   Wedged between a movie theater and a submarine sandwich shop, the Golden Fleece did what it could to distance itself socially from its neighbors. A tasteful awning hung over the entrance, bearing the silhouette of a Parisian grande dame. Inside, flowers sat on the front desk. Just as colorful as the flowers was Sophie Sassoon herself. In a purple muumuu, braceleted and begemmed, she glided from chair to chair. “How we doing here? Oh, you look gorgeous. That color takes ten years off.” Then to the next customer: “Don’t look so worried. Trust me. This is how they’re wearing their hair now. Reinaldo, tell her.” And Reinaldo in his hip-huggers: “Like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Sick flick, but she looked great.” By then Sophie had moved on to the next person. “Hon, let me give you some advice. Don’t blow-dry your hair. Let it dry wet. Also I’ve got a conditioner for you you won’t believe. I’m an authorized dealer.” It was Sophie Sassoon’s personal attention the women came for, the feeling of safety the salon gave them, the assurance that in here they could expose their flaws without embarrassment and Sophie would take care of them. It must have been the love they came for. Otherwise the customers would have noticed that Sophie Sassoon was herself in need of beauty advice. They would have seen that her eyebrows were drawn on as though by Magic Marker, and that her face, owing to the Princess Borghese makeup she sold on commission, was the color of a brick. But did I see it that day myself, or in the weeks that followed? Like everyone else, instead of judging the final effect of Sophie Sasoon’s makeup job, I was impressed by the complexity of it. I knew, as did my mother and the other ladies, that to “put on her face” every morning it took Sophie Sassoon no less than one hour and forty-five minutes. She had to apply eye creams and under-eye creams. She had to lay down various layers, like shellacking a Stradivarius. In addition to the brick-colored final coat there were others: dabs of green to control redness, pinks to add blush, blues above the eyes. She used dry eyeliner, liquid eyeliner, lip liner, lip conditioner, a frosted highlighter, and a pore minimizer. Sophie Sasoon’s face: it was created with the rigor of a sand painting blown grain by grain by Tibetan monks. It lasted only a day and then it was gone.
   This face now said to us, “Right this way, ladies.” Sophie was warm, as always, loving as always. Her hands, treated every night with vanishing cream, fluttered around us, stroking, rubbing. Her earrings looked like something Schliemann had dug up at Troy. She led us past a line of women having their hair set, across a stifling ghetto of hair dryers, and through a blue curtain. In the front of the Golden Fleece, Sophie fixed people’s hair; in the back she removed it. Behind the blue curtain half-naked women presented portions of themselves to wax. One large woman was on her back, her blouse pulled up to expose her navel. Another was lying on her stomach, reading a magazine while wax dried on the back of her thighs. There was a woman sitting in a chair, her sideburns and chin smeared with dark golden wax, and there were two beautiful young women lying naked from the waist down, having their bikini lines done. The smell of the beeswax was strong, pleasant. The atmosphere was like a Turkish bath without the heat, a lazy, draped feeling to everything, steam curling off pots of wax.
   “I’m only having my face done,” I told Sophie.
   “She sounds like she’s paying,” Sophie joked to my mother.
   My mother laughed, and the other women joined in. Everyone was looking our way, smiling. I’d come from school and was still in my uniform.
   “Be glad it’s just your face,” said one of the bikini-liners.
   “Few years from now,” said the other, “you might be heading south.”
   Laughter. Winks. Even, to my astonishment, a sly smile spreading over my mother’s face. As if behind the blue curtain Tessie was another person. As if, now that we were getting waxed together, she could treat me like an adult.
   “Sophie, maybe you can convince Callie to get her hair cut,” Tessie said.
   “It’s a little bushy, hon,” Sophie leveled with me. “For your face shape.”
   “Just a wax, please,” I said.
   “She won’t listen,” said Tessie.
   A Hungarian woman (from the outskirts of the Hair Belt) did the honors. With the short-order efficiency of Jimmy Papanikolas, she positioned us around the room like food on a grill: in one corner the large woman as pink as a slab of Canadian bacon; down at the bottom Tessie and me, lumped together like home fries; over on the left the bikini-liners, lying sunny side up. Helga kept us all sizzling. Holding her aluminum tray, she moved from body to body, spreading maple-syrup-colored wax where it was needed with a flat wooden spoon, and pressing in strips of gauze before it hardened. When the large woman was done on one side, Helga flipped her over. Tessie and I lay in our chairs, listening to wax being violently removed. “Oh my!” cried the large lady. “Is nothing,” belittled Helga. “I do it perfect.” “Oweee!” yelped a bikini-liner. And Helga, taking an oddly feminist stance: “See what you do for the mens? You suffer. Is not worth it.”
   Now Helga came over to me. She took hold of my chin and moved my head from side to side, examining. She spread wax above my upper lip. She moved to my mother and did the same. Thirty seconds later the wax had hardened.
   “I have a surprise for you,” Tessie said.
   “What?” I asked, as Helga ripped. I was certain my fledgling mustache was gone. Also, my upper lip.
   “Your brother’s coming home for Christmas.”
   My eyes were tearing. I blinked and said nothing, momentarily dumbfounded. Helga turned to my mother.
   “Some surprise,” I said.
   “He’s bringing a girlfriend.”
   “He’s got a girlfriend? Who would go out with him?”
   “Her name is …” Helga ripped. After a moment my mother resumed, “Meg.”
   From then on, Sophie Sassoon took care of my facial hair. I went in about twice a month, adding depilation to an ever-growing list of upkeep requirements. I started shaving my legs and underarms. I plucked my eyebrows. The dress code at my school forbade cosmetics. But on weekends I got to experiment, within limits. Reetika and I painted our faces in her bedroom, passing a hand mirror back and forth. I was particularly given to dramatic eyeliner. My model here was Maria Callas, or possibly Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. The triumphant, long-nosed divas. At home I snooped in Tessie’s bathroom. I loved the amulet-like vials, the sweet-smelling, seemingly edible creams. I tried out her facial steamer, too. You put your face to the plastic cone and were blasted by heat. I stayed away from greasy moisturizers, worried they would make me break out.
   With Chapter Eleven off at college—he was a sophomore now—I had the bathroom to myself. This was evident from the medicine cabinet. Two pink Daisy razors stood upright in a small drinking cup, next to a spray can of Psssssst instant shampoo. A tube of Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, which tasted like the soft drink, kissed a bottle of “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific.” My Breck Creme Rinse with Body promised to make me “the girl with the hair” (but wasn’t I already?). From there we move on to the facial products: my Epi*Clear Acne Kit; my Crazy Curl hair iron; a bottle of FemIron pills which I was hoping to someday need; and a shaker of Love’s Baby Soft body powder. Then there was my aerosol can of Soft & Dri non-sting antiperspirant and my two bottles of perfume: Woodhue, a mildly disturbing Christmas present from my brother, which I consequently never wore; and L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci (“Only the romantic need apply”). I also had a tub of Jolén Creme Bleach, for between appointments at the Golden Fleece. Interspersed amid these totemic items were stray Q-tips and cotton balls, lip liners, Max Factor eye makeup, mascara, blush, and everything else I used in a losing battle to make myself beautiful. Finally, hidden in the back of the cabinet, was the box of Kotex pads, which my mother had given me one day. “We better just keep these on hand,” she’d said, astonishing me completely. No further explanation than that.
   The hug I had given Chapter Eleven in the summer of ’72 turned out to be a kind of farewell, because when he returned home from college after his freshman year my brother had become another person. He’d grown his hair out (not as long as mine, but still). He’d started learning the guitar. Perched on his nose was a pair of granny glasses and instead of straight-legs he now wore faded bell-bottom jeans. The members of my family have always had a knack for self-transformation. While I finished my first year at Baker & Inglis and began my second, while I went from being a short seventh grader to an alarmingly tall eighth grader, Chapter Eleven, up at college, went from science geek to John Lennon look-alike.
   He bought a motorcycle. He started meditating. He claimed to understand 2001: A Space Odyssey, even the ending. But it wasn’t until Chapter Eleven descended into the basement to play Ping-Pong with Milton that I understood what was behind all this. We’d had a Ping-Pong table for years, but so far, no matter how much my brother or I practiced, we had never come close to beating Milton. Neither my new long reach nor Chapter Eleven’s beetle-browed concentration was sufficient to counter Milton’s wicked spin or his “killer shot” which left red marks on our chests, through our clothes. But that summer, something was different. When Milton used his extra-fast serve, Chapter Eleven returned it with a minimum of effort. When Milton employed the “English” he’d learned in the Navy, Chapter Eleven counter-spun. Even when Milton smashed a winner across the table, Chapter Eleven, with stupendous reflexes, sent it back where it came from. Milton began to sweat. His face turned red. Chapter Eleven remained cool. He had a strange, distracted look on his face. His pupils were dilated. “Go!” I cheered him on. “Beat Dad!” 12–12. 12–14. 14–15. 17–18. 18–21! Chapter Eleven had done it! He’d beaten Milton!
   “I’m on acid,” he explained later.
   “What?”
   “Windowpane. Three hits.”
   The drug had made everything seem as if it were happening in slow motion. Milton’s fastest serves, his most arching spin shots and smashes, seemed to float in the air.
   LSD? Three hits? Chapter Eleven had been tripping the whole time! He had been tripping during dinner! “That was the hardest part,” he said. “I was watching dad carve the chicken and then it flapped its wings and flew away!”
   “What’s the matter with that kid?” I heard my father ask my mother through the wall separating our rooms. “Now he’s talking about dropping out of engineering. Says it’s too boring.”
   “It’s just a stage. It’ll pass.”
   “It better.”
   Shortly thereafter, Chapter Eleven had returned to college. He hadn’t come back for Thanksgiving. And so, as Christmas of ’73 approached, we all wondered what he would be like when we saw him again.
   We quickly found out. As my father had feared, Chapter Eleven had scuttled his plans to become an engineer. Now, he informed us, he was majoring in anthropology.
   As part of an assignment for one of his courses, Chapter Eleven conducted what he called “fieldwork” during most of that vacation. He carried a tape recorder around with him, recording everything we said. He took notes on our “ideation systems” and “rituals of kin bonding.” He said almost nothing himself, claiming that he didn’t want to influence the findings. Every now and then, however, while observing our extended family eat and joke and argue, Chapter Eleven would let out a laugh, a private Eureka that made him fall back in his chair and lift his Earth shoes off the floor. Then he would lean forward and begin writing madly in his notebook.
   As I’ve mentioned, my brother didn’t pay much attention to me while we were growing up. That weekend, however, spurred on by his new mania for observation, Chapter Eleven took a new interest in me. On Friday afternoon while I was diligently doing some advance homework at the kitchen table, he came and sat down. He stared at me thoughtfully for a long time.
   “Latin, huh? That what they’re teaching you in that school?”
   “I like it.”
   “You a necrophiliac?”
   “A what?”
   “That’s someone who gets off on dead people. Latin’s dead, isn’t it?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “I know some Latin.”
   “You do?”
   “Cunnilingus.”
   “Don’t be gross.”
   “Fellatio.”
   “Ha ha.”
   “Mons veneris.”
   “I’m dying of laughter. You’re killing me. Look, I’m dead.”
   Chapter Eleven was quiet for a while. I tried to go on studying but felt him staring at me. Finally, exasperated, I closed my book. “What are you looking at?” I said.
   There was a pause characteristic of my brother. Behind his granny glasses his eyes looked bland, but the mind behind them was working things out.
   “I’m looking at my little sister,” he said.
   “Okay. You saw her. Now go.”
   “I’m looking at my little sister and thinking she doesn’t look like my little sister anymore.”
   “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
   Again the pause. “I don’t know,” said my brother. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
   “Well, when you figure it out, let me know. Right now I’ve got stuff to do.”
   On Saturday morning, Chapter Eleven’s girlfriend arrived. Meg Zemka was as small as my mother and as flat-chested as me. Her hair was a mousy brown, her teeth, owing to an impoverished childhood, not well cared for. She was a waif, an orphan, a runt, and six times as powerful as my brother.
   “What are you studying up at college, Meg?” my father asked at dinner.
   “Poli. sci.”
   “That sounds interesting.”
   “I doubt you’d like my emphasis. I’m a Marxist.”
   “Oh, you are, are you?”
   “You run a bunch of restaurants, right?”
   “That’s right. Hercules Hot Dogs. Haven’t you ever had one? We’ll have to take you down to one of our stands.”
   “Meg doesn’t eat meat,” my mother reminded.
   “Oh yeah, I forgot,” said Milton. “Well, you can have some french fries. We’ve got french fries.”
   “What do you pay your workers?” Meg asked.
   “The ones behind the counter? They get minimum wage.”
   “And you live out here in this big house in Grosse Pointe.”
   “That’s because I handle the entire business and accept the risk.”
   “Sounds like exploitation to me.”
   “It does, does it?” Milton smiled. “Well, if giving somebody a job is exploiting them, then I guess I’m an exploiter. Those jobs didn’t exist before I started the business.”
   “That’s like saying that the slaves didn’t have jobs until they built the plantations.”
   “You got a real live wire here,” Milton said, turning to my brother. “Where did you find her?”
   “I found him,” said Meg. “On top of an elevator.”
   That was when we learned how Chapter Eleven was spending his time at college. His favorite pastime was to unscrew the ceiling panel on the dorm elevator and climb up on top. He sat there for hours, riding up and down in the darkness.
   “The first time I did it,” Chapter Eleven now confessed, “the car started going up to the top. I thought I might get crushed. But they leave some air space.”
   “This is what we’re paying your tuition for?” Milton asked.
   “That’s what you’re exploiting your workers for,” said Meg.
   Tessie made Chapter Eleven and Meg sleep in separate bedrooms, but in the middle of the night there was a lot of tiptoeing and giggling in the dark. Trying to be the big sister I never had, Meg gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
   Chapter Eleven, swept up in the sexual revolution, tried to educate me, too.
   “You ever masturbate, Cal?”
   “What!”
   “You don’t have to be embarrassed. It’s natural. This friend of mine told me you could do it with your hand. So I went into the bathroom—“
   “I don’t want to hear about—“
   “—and tried it out. All of sudden, all the muscles in my penis started contracting—“
   “In our bathroom?”
   “—And then I ejaculated. It felt really amazing. You should try it, Cal, if you haven’t already. Girls are a little different, but physiologically it’s pretty much the same. I mean, the penis and the clitoris are analogous structures. You gotta experiment to see what works.”
   I put my fingers in my ears and started humming.
   “You don’t have to have any hang-ups with me,” Chapter Eleven said loudly. “I’m your brother.”
   The rock music, the reverence for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the avocado pits sprouting on the windowsill, the rainbow-colored rolling papers. What else? Oh yeah: my brother had stopped using deodorant.
   “You stink!” I objected one day, sitting next to him in the TV room.
   Chapter Eleven gave the tiniest of shrugs. “I’m a human,” he said. “This is what humans smell like.”
   “Then humans stink.”
   “Do you think I stink, Meg?”
   “No way,” nuzzling up to his armpit. “It turns me on.”
   “Will you guys get out of here! I’m trying to watch this show.”
   “Hey, baby, my little sister wants us to split. What do you say to a little nookie?”
   “Groovy.”
   “See you, sis. We’ll be upstairs in flagrante delicto.”
   Where could all this lead? Only to family dissension, shouting matches, and heartbreak. On New Year’s Eve, as Milton and Tessie toasted the new year with glasses of Cold Duck, Chapter Eleven and Meg swigged on bottles of Elephant Malt Liquor, going outside every so often to secretly smoke a joint. Milton said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about finally making that trip to the old country. We could go back and see papou and yia yia ’s village.”
   “And fix that church, like you promised,” said Tessie.
   “What do you think?” Milton asked Chapter Eleven. “Maybe we could take a family vacation this summer.”
   “Not me,” said Chapter Eleven.
   “Why not?”
   “Tourism is just another form of colonialism.”
   And so on and so forth. Before long, Chapter Eleven declared that he didn’t share Milton and Tessie’s values. Milton asked what was wrong with their values. Chapter Eleven said he was against materialism. “All you care about is money,” he told Milton. “I don’t want to live like this.” He gestured toward the room. Chapter Eleven was against our living room, everything we had, everything Milton had worked for. He was against Middlesex! Then shouting; and Chapter Eleven uttering two words to Milton, one beginning with f, the other with y; and more shouting, and Chapter Eleven’s motorcycle roaring away, with Meg on the back.
   What had happened to Chapter Eleven? Why had he changed so much? It was being away from home, Tessie said. It was the times. It was all this trouble with the war. I, however, have a different answer. I suspect that Chapter Eleven’s transformation was caused in no small part by that day on his bed when his life was decided by lottery. Am I projecting? Saddling my brother with my own obsessions with chance and fate? Maybe. But as we planned a trip—a trip that had been promised when Milton was saved from another war—it appeared that Chapter Eleven, taking chemical trips of his own, was trying to escape what he had dimly perceived while wrapped in an afghan: the possibility that not only his draft number was decided by lottery, but that everything was. Chapter Eleven was hiding from this discovery, hiding behind windowpane, hiding on the top of elevators, hiding in the bed of Meg Zemka with her multiple O’s and bad teeth, Meg Zemka who hissed in his ear while they made love, “Forget your family, man! They’re bourgeois pigs! Your dad’s an exploiter, man! Forget ’em. They’re dead, man. Dead. This is what’s real. Right here. Come and get it, baby!”

The Obscure Object

   It occurred to me today that I’m not as far along as I thought. Writing my story isn’t the courageous act of liberation I had hoped it would be. Writing is solitary, furtive, and I know all about those things. I’m an expert in the underground life. Is it really my apolitical temperament that makes me keep my distance from the intersexual rights movement? Couldn’t it also be fear? Of standing up. Of becoming one of them.
   Still, you can only do what you’re able. If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn’t feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I’m comfortable with. Just the two of us, here in the dark.
   Things weren’t always like this. In college, I had a girlfriend. Her name was Olivia. We were drawn together by our common woundedness. Olivia had been savagely attacked when she was only thirteen, nearly raped. The police had caught the guy who did it and Olivia had testified in court numerous times. The ordeal had arrested her development. Instead of doing the normal things a high school girl did, she had had to remain that thirteen-year-old girl on the witness stand. While Olivia and I were both intellectually capable of handling the college curriculum, of excelling in it even, we remained in key ways emotionally adolescent. We cried a lot in bed. I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages. I was as much of a man as Olivia could bear at that point. I was her starter kit.
   After college, I took a trip around the world. I tried to forget my body by keeping it in motion. Nine months later, back home, I took the Foreign Service exam and, a year after that, started working for the State Department. A perfect job for me. Three years in one place, two in another. Never long enough to form a solid attachment to anyone. In Brussels, I fell in love with a bartender who claimed not to care about the uncommon way I was made. I was so grateful that I asked her to marry me, though I found her dull company, ambitionless, too much of a shouter, a hitter. Fortunately, she refused my proposal and ran off with someone else. Who has there been since? A few here and there, never long-lasting. And so, without permanence, I have fallen into the routine of my incomplete seductions. The chatting up I’m good at. The dinners and drinks. The clinches in doorways. But then I’m off. “I’ve got a meeting with the ambassador in the morning,” I say. And they believe me. They believe the ambassador wants to be briefed on the upcoming Aaron Copland tribute.
   It’s getting harder all the time. With Olivia and every woman who came after her there has been this knowledge to deal with: the great fact of my condition. The Obscure Object and I met unawares, however, in blissful ignorance.


* * *

   After all the screaming in our house, there reigned, that winter on Middlesex, only silence. A silence so profound that, like the left foot of the President’s secretary, it erased portions of the official record. A soggy, evasive season during which Milton, unable to admit that Chapter Eleven’s attack had broken his heart, began visibly to swell with rage, so that almost anything set him off, a long red light, ice milk for dessert instead of ice cream. (His was a loud silence but a silence nonetheless.) A winter during which Tessie’s worries about her children immobilized her, so that she failed to return Christmas presents that didn’t fit, and merely put them in the closet, without getting a refund. At the end of this wounded, dishonest season, as the first crocuses appeared, returning from their winter in the underworld, Calliope Stephanides, who also felt something stirring in the soil of her being, found herself reading the classics.
   Spring semester of eighth grade brought me into Mr. da Silva’s English class. A group of only five students, we met in the greenhouse on the second floor. Spider plants let down vines from the glass roof. Closer to our heads geraniums crowded in, giving off a smell somewhere between licorice and aluminum. In addition to me, there was Reetika, Tina, Joanne, and Maxine Grossinger. Though our parents were friends, I hardly knew Maxine. She didn’t mix with the other kids on Middlesex. She was always practicing her violin. She was the only Jewish kid at school. She ate lunch alone, spooning kosher food from Tupperware. I assumed her pallor was the result of being indoors all the time and that the blue vein that beat wildly at her temple was a kind of inner metronome.
   Mr. da Silva had been born in Brazil. This was hard to notice. He wasn’t exactly the Carnival type. The Latin details of his childhood (the hammock, the outdoor tub) had been erased by a North American education and a love of the European novel. Now he was a liberal Democrat and wore black armbands in support of radical causes. He taught Sunday school at a local Episcopal church. He had a pink, cultivated face and dark blond hair that fell into his eyes when he recited poetry. Sometimes he picked thistles or wildflowers from the green and wore them in the lapel of his jacket. He had a short, compact body, and often did isometric exercises between class periods. He played the recorder, too. A music stand in his classroom held sheet music, early Baroque pieces, mostly.
   He was a great teacher, Mr. da Silva. He treated us with complete seriousness, as if we eighth graders, during fifth period, might settle something scholars had been arguing about for centuries. He listened to our chirping, his hairline pressing down on his eyes. When he spoke himself, it was in complete paragraphs. If you listened closely it was possible to hear the dashes and commas in his speech, even the colons and semicolons. Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life. Instead of eating his lunch, he told you what Oblonsky and Levin had for lunch in Anna Karenina. Or, describing a sunset from Daniel Deronda, he failed to notice the one that was presently falling over Michigan.
   Mr. da Silva had spent a summer in Greece six years before. He was still keyed up about it. When he described visiting the Mani, his voice became even mellower than usual, and his eyes glistened. Unable to find a hotel one night, he had slept on the ground, awaking the next morning to find himself beneath an olive tree. Mr. da Silva had never forgotten that tree. They had had a meaningful exchange, the two of them. Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It’s easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them. Mr. da Silva had felt this, waking up in his sleeping bag.
   I was curious about Greece myself, of course. I was eager to visit. Mr. da Silva encouraged me in feeling Greek.
   “Miss Stephanides,” he called on me one day. “Since you hail from Homer’s own land, would you be so kind as to read aloud?” He cleared his throat. “Page eighty-nine.”
   That semester, our less academically inclined sisters were reading The Light in the Forest. But in the greenhouse we were making our way through The Iliad. It was a paperback prose translation, abridged, set loose from its numbers, robbed of the music of the ancient Greek but—as far as I was concerned—still a terrific read. God, I loved that book! From the pouting of Achilles in his tent (which reminded me of the President’s refusal to hand over the tapes) to Hector’s being dragged around the city by his feet (which made me cry), I was riveted. Forget Love Story. Harvard couldn’t match Troy as a setting, and in Segal’s whole novel only one person died. (Maybe this was another sign of the hormones manifesting themselves silently inside me. For while my classmates found The Iliad too bloody for their taste, an endless catalogue of men butchering one another after formally introducing themselves, I thrilled to the stabbings and beheadings, the gouging out of eyes, the juicy eviscerations.)
   I opened my paperback and lowered my head. My hair fell forward, cutting off everything—Maxine, Mr. da Silva, the greenhouse’s geraniums—except the book. From behind the velvet curtain, my lounge singer’s voice began to purr. “Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire, lovely whispers, and the force of seduction, which takes away foresight and judgment even from the most reasonable people.”
   It was one o’clock. An after-lunch lethargy lay over the room. Outside, rain threatened. There was a knock at the door.
   “Excuse me, Callie. Could you stop for a moment, please?” Mr. da Silva turned toward the door. “Come in.”
   Along with everyone else, I looked up. Standing in the doorway was a redheaded girl. Two clouds bumped up above, skidding past each other, and let down a beam of light. This beam struck the glass roof of the greenhouse. Passing through the hanging geraniums, it picked up the rosy light which now, in a kind of membrane, enveloped the girl. It was also possible that the sun wasn’t doing this at all, but a certain intensity, a soul ray, from my eyes.
   “We’re in the middle of class, dear.”
   “I’m supposed to be in this class,” said the girl, unhappily. She held out a slip of paper.
   Mr. da Silva examined it. “Are you sure Miss Durrell wants you transferred into this class?” he said.
   “Mrs. Lampe doesn’t want me in her class anymore,” replied the girl.
   “Take a seat. You’ll have to share with someone. Miss Stephanides has been reading from Book Three of The Iliad for us.”
   I started reading again. That is, my eyes kept tracing over the sentences and my mouth kept forming the words. But my mind had stopped paying attention to their meaning. When I finished I didn’t toss my hair back. I let it stay hanging over my face. Through a keyhole in it I peeked out.
   The girl had taken a seat across from me. She was leaning toward Reetika as though to look on with her, but her eyes were taking in the plants. Her nose wrinkled up at the mulchy smell.
   Part of my interest was scientific, zoological. I’d never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears.
   Since we’re in English class, let me quote a poem. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” which begins, “Glory be to God for dappled things.” When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheaded girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing in her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the gold highlights in the strawberry hair. It was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.
   Meanwhile she remained slumped sideways in her desk, her legs with the blue knee socks shoved out, revealing the worn heels of her shoes. Because she hadn’t done the reading she was exempt from being called on, but Mr. da Silva sent concerned looks her way. The new girl didn’t notice. She sprawled in her orange light and sleepily opened and closed her eyes. At one point she yawned and, halfway through, cut the yawn off, as though it hadn’t gone right. She swallowed something back and pounded a fist against her breastbone. She burped quietly and whispered to herself, “Ay, caramba.” As soon as class was over she was gone.
   Who was she? Where had she come from? Why had I never noticed her in school before? She was obviously not new at Baker & Inglis. Her oxfords were stamped down at the heels so that she could slip into them like clogs. This was something the Charm Bracelets did. Also, she had an antique ring on her finger, with real rubies in it. Her lips were thin, austere, Protestant. Her nose was not really a nose at all. It was only a beginning.
   She came to class every day wearing the same distant, bored expression. She shuffled in her oxford-clogs, with a gliding or skating motion, her knees bent and her weight thrust forward. It added to the overall desultory impression. I would be watering Mr. da Silva’s plants when she entered. He asked me to do this before class. So every day began like that, me at one end of the crystal room, engulfed by geranium blooms, and this answering burst of red coming through the door.
   The way she dragged her feet made it clear how she felt about the weird, old, dead poem we were reading. She wasn’t interested. She never did the homework. She tried to bluff her way through class. She hacked up the quizzes and tests. If she’d had a fellow Charm Bracelet with her, they could have formed a faction of uninterested note-passers. Alone, she could only mope. Mr. da Silva gave up trying to teach her anything and called on her as little as possible.
   I watched her in class and I watched her outside it, too. As soon as I arrived at school I was on the lookout. I sat in one of the lobby’s yellow wing chairs, pretending to do homework, and waited for her to pass. Her brief appearances always knocked me out. I was like somebody in a cartoon, with stars vibrating around the head. She would come around the corner, chewing on a Flair pen and shuffling, as if wearing slippers. There was always a rush to her walk. If she didn’t keep her feet digging forward her crushed-down shoes would fly off. This brought out the muscles in her calves. She was freckled down there, too. It was almost a kind of suntan. Sliding, she charged by, talking to some other Charm Bracelet, both of them moving with that lazy, confident hauteur they all had. Sometimes she looked at me but showed no recognition. A nictitating membrane lowered itself over her eyes.
   Allow me an anachronism. Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire didn’t come out until 1977. By that time the redheaded girl and I were no longer in touch. I doubt she ever saw the movie. Nevertheless, That Obscure Object of Desire is what I think about when I think about her. I saw it on television, in a Spanish bar, when I was stationed in Madrid. I didn’t catch most of the dialogue. The plot was clear enough, though. An older gentleman played by Fernando Rey is smitten with a young and beautiful girl played by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina. I didn’t care about any of that. It was the surrealist touch that got me. In many scenes Fernando Rey is shown holding a heavy sack over his shoulder. The reason for this sack is never mentioned. (Or if it is, I missed that, too.) He just goes around lugging this sack, into restaurants and through city parks. That was exactly how I felt, following my own Obscure Object. As though I were carrying around a mysterious, unexplained burden or weight. I’m going to call her that, if you don’t mind. I’m going to call her the Obscure Object. For sentimental reasons. (I also have to protect her identity.)
   There she was in gym class, malingering. There she was at lunch, having a laugh attack. Doubled over the table, she tried to hit the joker responsible. Her mouth bubbled milk. Her nose leaked a few drops, which started everyone laughing harder. Next I saw her after school, riding double with an unknown boy. She climbed up on the bicycle seat while he stood on the pedals. She didn’t put her arms around his waist. She managed the thing by balance alone. This gave me hope.
   One day in class Mr. da Silva asked the Object to read aloud.
   She was lounging in her desk as usual. At a girls’ school you didn’t have to be so vigilant about keeping your knees together or your skirt tugged down. The Object’s knees were spread apart and her legs, which were somewhat heavy in the thigh, were bare high up. Without moving, she said, “I forgot my book.”
   Mr. da Silva compressed his lips.
   “You can look on with Callie.”
   The only sign of agreement she gave was to sweep her hair off her face. She placed a hand to her forehead and ran it back like a plow though her hair, her fingers leaving furrows. At the end of the stroke came a little flick of the head, a flourish. There was her cheek, permitting approach. I scooted over. I slid my book onto the crack between our desks. The Object leaned over it.
   “From where?”
   “Top of page one hundred and twelve. The description of the shield of Achilles.”
   I’d never been this close to the Obscure Object before. It was hard on my organism. My nervous system launched into “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The violins were sawing away in my spine. The timpani were banging in my chest. At the same time, trying to conceal all this, I didn’t move a muscle. I hardly breathed. That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within.
   I could smell her cinnamon gum. It was still in the back of her mouth somewhere. I didn’t look directly at her. I kept my eyes on the book. A strand of her red-gold hair fell onto the desk between us. Where the sun hit the hair, there was a prismatic effect. But while I was witnessing the half-inch rainbow she began to read.
   I expected a nasal monotone, riddled with mispronunciations. I expected bumps, swerves, screeching brakes, head-on collisions. But the Obscure Object had a good reading voice. It was clear, strong, supple in its rhythms. It was a voice she’d picked up at home, from poetry-reciting uncles who drank too much. Her expression changed, too. A concentrated dignity, previously absent, marked her features. Her head rose on a proud neck. Her chin was lifted. She sounded twenty-four instead of fourteen. I wonder which was stranger, the Eartha Kitt voice that came out of my mouth or the Katharine Hepburn that came out of hers.
   When she was finished there was silence. “Thank you,” said Mr. da Silva, as surprised as the rest of us. “That was very nicely done.”
   The bell rang. Immediately the Object leaned away from me. She ran a hand through her hair again, as though rinsing it in the shower. She slipped out of the desk and left the room.
   On certain days, when the greenhouse was lit just so and the Obscure Object’s blouse unbuttoned two buttons, when the light illuminated the scapulars dangling between the cups of her brassiere, did Calliope feel any inkling of her true biological nature? Did she ever, while the Obscure Object passed in the hall, think that what she was feeling was wrong? Yes and no. Let me remind you where all this was happening.
   It was perfectly acceptable at Baker & Inglis to get a crush on a fellow classmate. At a girls’ school a certain amount of emotional energy, normally expended on boys, gets redirected into friendships. Girls walked arm in arm at B&I, the way French schoolgirls do. They competed for affection. Jealousies arose. Betrayals occurred. It was common to come into the bathroom and hear somebody sobbing in one of the stalls. Girls cried because so-and-so wouldn’t sit by them at lunch, or because their best friend had a new boyfriend who monopolized her time. On top of this, school rituals reinforced an intimate atmosphere. There was Ring Day, where Big Sisters initiated Little Sisters into maturity by giving them flowers and gold bands. There was the Distaff Dance, a maypole without men, held in the spring. There were the bimonthly “Heart-to-Hearts,” confessional meetings run by the school chaplain, which invariably ended in paroxysms of hugging and weeping. Nevertheless, the ethos of the school remained militantly heterosexual. My classmates might act cozy during the day, but boys were the number one after-school activity. Any girl suspected of being attracted to girls was gossiped about, victimized, and shunned. I was aware of all this. It scared me.
   I didn’t know if the way I felt about the Obscure Object was normal or not. My friends tended to get envious crushes on other girls. Reetika swooned over the way Alwyn Brier played Finlandia on the piano. Linda Ramirez was smitten with Sofia Cracchiolo because she was taking three languages at once. Was that it? Was the crush I had on the Object a result of her elocutionary talent? I doubted it. It felt physical, my crush. It wasn’t a judgment but a tumult in my veins. For that reason I kept quiet about it. I hid out in the basement bathroom to think the matter through. Every day, whenever I could, I took the back stairs down to the deserted washroom and shut myself up for at least half an hour.
   Is there anyplace as comforting as an old, institutional, prewar bathroom? The kind of bathroom they used to build in America when the country was on the rise. The basement bathroom at Baker & Inglis was done up like a box at the opera. Edwardian lighting fixtures gleamed overhead. The sinks were deep white bowls set in blue slate. When you bent to wash your face you saw tiny cracks in the porcelain, as in a Ming vase. Gold chains held the drain-stoppers in place. Beneath the taps, dripping had worn the porcelain thin in green stripes.
   Above each sink hung an oval mirror. I wanted nothing to do with any of them. (“The hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age” started early for me.) Avoiding my reflection, I headed straight for the toilet stalls. There were three, and I chose the middle. Like the others, it was marble. Gray New England marble, two inches thick, quarried in the nineteenth century and studded with fossils millions of years old. I closed the door and latched it. I took a Safe-T-Guard from the dispenser and laid it over the toilet seat. Germ-protected, I lowered my underpants, lifted my kilt, and sat. Right away I could feel my body relaxing, my stoop unkinking itself. I brushed my hair out of my face so that I could see. There were little fern-shaped fossils, and fossils that looked like scorpions stinging themselves to death. Down beneath my legs the toilet bowl had a rust stain, ancient, too.
   The basement bathroom was the opposite of our locker room. The stalls were seven feet high and extended all the way to the floor. Fossilized marble concealed me even better than my hair. In the basement bathroom was a time frame I felt much more comfortable with, not the rat race of the school upstairs but the slow, evolutionary progress of the earth, of its plant and animal life forming out of the generative, primeval mud. The faucets dripped with the slow, inexorable movement of time and I was alone down there, and safe. Safe from my confused feelings about the Obscure Object; and safe, too, from the bits of conversation I’d been overhearing from my parents’ bedroom. Just the night before, Milton’s exasperated voice had reached my ears: “You still got a headache? Christ, take some aspirin.” “I took some already,” my mother replied. “Nothing helps.” Then my brother’s name, and my father grumbling something I couldn’t make out. Then Tessie: “I’m worried about Callie, too. She still hasn’t gotten her period.” “Hell, she’s only thirteen.” “She’s fourteen. And look how tall she is. I think something’s wrong.” Silence a moment, after which my father asked, “What does Dr. Phil say?” “Dr. Phil! He doesn’t say anything. I want to take her to someone else.”
   The humming of my parents’ voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic. So I exchanged it for walls of marble, which echoed only with the sound of dripping water, of the flushing of my toilet, or of my voice softly reading The Iliad aloud.
   And when I got tired of Homer, I started reading the walls.
   That was another selling point of the basement bathroom. It was covered with graffiti. Upstairs, class photos showed rows and rows of student faces. Down here it was mostly bodies. Sketched in blue ink were little men with gigantic sexual parts. And women with enormous breasts. Also various permutations: men with dinky penises; and women with penises, too. It was an education both in what was and what might be. Over the gray marble this new, jagged etching of bodies doing things, growing parts, fitting together, changing shape. Plus also jokes, words to the wise, confessions. In one spot: “I love sex.” In another, “Patty C. is a slut.” Where else would a girl like me, hiding from the world a knowledge she didn’t quite understand herself—where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn’t say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?
   For that spring, while the crocuses bloomed, while the headmistress checked on the daffodil bulbs in the flower beds, Calliope, too, felt something budding. An obscure object all her own, which in addition to the need for privacy was responsible for bringing her down to the basement bathroom. A kind of crocus itself, just before flowering. A pink stem pushing up through dark new moss. But a strange kind of flower indeed, because it seemed to go through a number of seasons in a single day. It had its dormant winter when it slept underground. Five minutes later, it stirred in a private springtime. Sitting in class with a book in my lap, or riding home in car pool, I’d feel a thaw between my legs, the soil growing moist, a rich, peaty aroma rising, and then—while I pretended to memorize Latin verbs—the sudden, squirming life in the warm earth beneath my skirt. To the touch, the crocus sometimes felt soft and slippery, like the flesh of a worm. At other times it was as hard as a root.
   How did Calliope feel about her crocus? This is at once the easiest and the hardest thing to explain. On the one hand she liked it. If she pressed the corner of a textbook against it, the sensation was pleasurable. This wasn’t new. It had always felt nice to apply pressure there. The crocus was part of her body, after all. There was no reason to ask questions.
   But there were times when I felt that something was different about the way I was made. At Camp Ponshewaing I’d learned, on certain humid bunkhouse nights, of the bicycle seats and fence posts that had seduced my campmates at tender ages. Lizzie Barton, roasting a marshmallow on a stick, told us how she had become fond of the post of a leather saddle. Margaret Thompson was the first girl in town whose parents owned a massaging shower head. I added my own sense data to these clinical histories (that was the year I fell in love with gym ropes), but there remained a vague, indefinable gap between the stirrings my friends reported and the clutching ecstasy of my own dry spasms. Sometimes, hanging down from my top bunk into the beam of someone’s flashlight, I would finish my little self-revelation with “You know?” And in the dimness three or four stringy-haired girls would nod, once, and bite the corner of their lips, and shift their eyes away. They didn’t know.
   I worried at times that my crocus was too elaborate a bloom, not a common perennial but a hothouse flower, a hybrid named by its originator like a rose. Iridescent Hellene. Pale Olympus. Greek Fire. But no—that wasn’t right. My crocus wasn’t for show. It was in a state of becoming and might turn out fine if I waited patiently. Maybe it happened like this to everybody. In the meantime, it was best to keep everything under wraps. Which was what I was doing down in the basement.
   Another tradition at Baker & Inglis: every year the eighth graders put on a classical Greek play. Originally, these plays had been performed in the Middle School auditorium. But after Mr. da Silva took his trip to Greece, he got the idea of converting the hockey field into a theater. With its bleachers set into the slope and its natural acoustics, it was a perfect mini-Epidaurus. The custodial staff brought risers out and set up a stage on the grass.
   The year of my infatuation with the Obscure Object, the play Mr. da Silva selected was Antigone. There were no auditions. Mr. da Silva filled the major roles with his pets from Advanced English. Everyone else he stuck in the chorus. So the cast list read like this: Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio as Creon; Tina Kubek as Eurydice; Maxine Grossinger as Ismene. In the role of Antigone herself—the only real possibility from even a physical standpoint—was the Obscure Object. Her midterm grade had been only a C minus. Still, Mr. da Silva knew a star when he saw one.
   “We have to learn all these lines?” asked Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio at our first rehearsal. “In two weeks?”
   “Learn what you can,” said Mr. da Silva. “Everyone’s going to be wearing a robe. You can keep your script underneath. Miss Fagles will also be our prompter. She’ll be in the orchestra pit.”
   “We’re going to have an orchestra?” Maxine Grossinger wanted to know.
   “The orchestra,” Mr. da Silva said, pointing to his recorder, “is I.”
   “I hope it doesn’t rain,” said the Object.
   “Will it rain the Friday after next?” said Mr. da Silva. “Why don’t we ask our Tiresias?” And then he turned to me.
   You expected someone else? No, if the Obscure Object was perfect to play the avenging sister, I was a shoo-in to play the old, blind prophet. My wild hair suggested clairvoyance. My stoop made me appear brittle with age. My half-changed voice had a disembodied, inspired quality. Tiresias had also been a woman, of course. But I didn’t know that then. And it wasn’t mentioned in the script.
   I didn’t care what part I played. All that mattered, all I could think about, was that now I would be near the Obscure Object. Not near her as I was during class, when it was impossible to speak. Not near her as I was in the lunchroom, when she was spitting milk at another table. But near her in rehearsals for a school play, with all the waiting around that implied, all the backstage intimacy, all the intense, fraught, giddy, emotional abandon brought on by assuming identities not your own.
   “I don’t think we should use scripts,” the Obscure Object now declared. She had arrived for rehearsal looking professional, all her lines highlighted in yellow. Her sweater was tied around her shoulders like a cloak. “I think we should all memorize our lines.” She looked from face to face. “Otherwise it’ll be too fakey.”
   Mr. da Silva was smiling. Learning lines would require effort on the Object’s part. A novel undertaking. “Antigone has far and away the most lines,” he said. “So if Antigone wants to be off book, then I think the rest of you should be off book, too.”
   The other girls groaned. But Tiresias, already having a vision of the future, turned toward the Object. “I’ll go over your lines with you. If you want.”
   The future. It was already happening. The Object was looking at me. The nictitating membranes were lifting. “Okay,” she said, distantly.
   We agreed to meet the next day, a Tuesday evening. The Obscure Object wrote out her address and Tessie dropped me at the house. She was sitting on a green velvet sofa when I was shown into the library. Her oxfords were off but she still had her uniform on. Her long red hair was tied back, the better to do what she was doing, which was to light her cigarette. Sitting Indian style, the Object leaned forward, holding the cigarette in her mouth over a green ceramic lighter shaped like an artichoke. The lighter was low on fluid. She shook it and flicked the button with her thumb until at last a small flame shot out.
   “Your parents let you smoke?” I said.
   She looked up, surprised, then returned to the work at hand. She got the cigarette going, inhaled deeply, and let it out, slowly, satisfyingly. “ They smoke,” she said. “They’d be pretty big hypocrites if they didn’t let me smoke.”
   “But they’re adults.”
   “Mummy and Daddy know I’m going to smoke if I want to. If they don’t let me do it, I’ll just sneak it.”
   By the looks of it, this dispensation had been in effect for some time. The Object was not new to smoking. She was already a professional. As she sized me up, her eyes narrowing, the cigarette hung aslant from her mouth. Smoke drifted close to her face. It was a strange opposition: the hard-bitten private-eye expression on the face of a girl wearing a uniform for private school. Finally she reached up and took the cigarette out of her mouth. Without looking for the ashtray, she flicked her ash. It fell in.
   “I doubt a kid like you smokes,” she said.
   “That would be a good guess.”
   “You interested in starting?” She held out her pack of Tareytons.
   “I don’t want to get cancer.”
   She tossed the pack down, shrugging. “I figure they’ll be able to cure it by the time I get it.”
   “I hope so. For your sake.”
   She inhaled again, even more deeply. She held the smoke in and then turned in cinematic profile and let it out.
   “You don’t have any bad habits, I bet,” she said.
   “I’ve got tons of bad habits.”
   “Like what?”
   “Like I chew my hair.”
   “I bite my nails,” she said competitively. She lifted one hand to show me. “Mummy got me this stuff to put on them. It tastes like shit. It’s supposed to help you quit.”
   “Does it work?”
   “At first it did. But now I sort of like the taste.” She smiled. I smiled. Then, briefly, trying it out, we laughed together.
   “That’s not as bad as chewing your hair,” I resumed.
   “Why not?”
   “Because when you chew your hair it starts smelling like what you had for lunch.”
   She made a face and said, “Bogue.”
   At school we would have felt funny talking together, but here no one could see us. In the bigger scheme of things, out in the world, we were more alike than different. We were both teenagers. We were both from the suburbs. I set down my bag and came over to the sofa. The Object put her Tareyton in her mouth. Planting her palms on either side of her crossed legs, she lifted herself up, like a yogi levitating, and scooted over to make room for me.
   “I’ve got a history test tomorrow,” she said.
   “Who do you have for history?”
   “Miss Schuyler.”
   “Miss Schuyler has a vibrator in her desk.”
   “A what!”
   “A vibrator. Liz Clark saw it. It’s in her bottom drawer.”
   “I can’t believe it!” The Object was shocked, amused. But then she squinted, thinking. In a confidential voice she asked, “What are those for, anyway?”
   “Vibrators?”
   “Yeah.” She knew she was supposed to know. But she trusted I wouldn’t make fun of her. This was the form of the pact we made that day: I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like vibrators; she would handle the social sphere.
   “Most women can’t have orgasms by regular intercourse,” I said, quoting from the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves Meg Zemka had given me. “They need clitoral stimulation.”
   Behind her freckles, a blush rose to the Object’s face. She was, of course, transfixed by such information. I was speaking into her left ear. The blush spread across her face from that side, as if my words left a visible trace.
   “I can’t believe you know all this stuff.”
   “I’ll tell you who knows about it. Miss Schuyler, that’s who.”
   The laugh, the hoot, shot out of her mouth like a geyser, and then the Object was falling back on the couch. She screamed, with delight, with revulsion. She kicked her legs, knocking her cigarettes off the table. She was fourteen again, instead of twenty-four, and against all odds we were becoming friends.
   “‘Unwept, unfriended, without marriage song, I am led forth in my horror—’”
   “‘—sorrow—’”
   “‘—in my sorrow on this journey that can be delayed no more. No longer …’”
   “‘… hapless one …’”
   “‘Hapless one!’ I hate that! ‘No longer, hapless one, may I behold yon day-star’s sacred eye; but for my fate no tear is shed, no … no …’”
   “‘No friend makes moan.’”
   “‘No friend makes moan.’”
   We were at the Object’s house again, going over our lines. We were in the sun room, sprawled on the Caribbean sofas. Parrots flocked behind the Object’s head as she squeezed her eyes shut, reciting. We’d been at it for two hours. The Object had gone through almost a full pack. Beulah, the maid, brought us sandwiches on a tray along with two sixty-four-ounce bottles of Tab. The sandwiches were white, crustless, but not cucumber or watercress. A salmon-colored spread caked the spongy bread.
   We took frequent breaks. The Object required constant refreshment. I still wasn’t comfortable in the house. I couldn’t get used to being waited on. I kept jumping up to serve myself. Beulah was black, too, which didn’t make it any easier.
   “I’m really glad we’re in this play together,” the Object said, munching. “I would’ve never talked to a kid like you.” She paused, realizing how this sounded. “I mean, I never knew you were such a cool kid.”
   Cool? Calliope cool? I had never dreamed of such a thing. But I was ready to accept the Object’s judgment.
   “Can I tell you something, though?” she asked. “About your part?”
   “Sure.”
   “You know how you’re supposed to be blind and everything? Well, where we go in Bermuda there’s this man who runs a hotel. And he’s blind. And the thing about him is, it’s like his ears are his eyes. Like if someone comes into the room, he turns one ear that way. The way you do it—“ She stopped suddenly and seized my hand. “You’re not getting mad at me, are you?”
   “No.”
   “You’ve got the worst expression on your face, Callie!”
   “I do?”
   She had my hand. She wasn’t letting go. “You sure you’re not mad?”
   “I’m not mad.”
   “Well, the way you pretend to be blind is you just, sort of, stumble around a lot. But the thing is, this blind man down in Bermuda, he never stumbles. He stands up really straight and he knows where everything is. And his ears are always focusing in on stuff.”
   I turned my face away.
   “See, you’re mad!”
   “I’m not.”
   “You are.”
   “I’m being blind,” I said. “I’m looking at you with my ear.”
   “Oh. That’s good. Yeah, like that. That’s really good.”
   Without letting go of my hand, she leaned closer and I heard, felt, very softly, her hot breath in my ear. “Hi, Tiresias,” she said, giggling. “It’s me. Antigone.”
   The day of the play arrived (“opening night” we called it, though there would be no others). In an improvised “dressing room” behind the stage we lead actors sat on folding chairs. The rest of the eighth graders were already onstage, standing in a big semicircle. The play was set to begin at seven o’clock and finish before sunset. It was 6:55. Beyond the flats we could hear the hockey field filling up. The low rumble got steadily louder—voices, footsteps, the creaking of bleachers, and the slamming of car doors up in the parking lot. We were each dressed in a floor-length robe, tie-dyed black, gray, and white. The Obscure Object, however, was wearing a white robe. Mr. da Silva’s concept was minimal: no makeup, no masks.
   “How many people are out there?” Tina Kubek asked.
   Maxine Grossinger peeked out. “Tons.”
   “You must be used to this, Maxine,” I said. “From all your recitals.”
   “I don’t get nervous when I’m playing the violin. This is way worse.”
   “I am sooo nervous,” the Object said.
   In her lap she had a jar of Rolaids, which she was eating like candy. I understood now why she had pounded her chest the first day of class. The Obscure Object suffered from a more or less constant case of heartburn. It was worse during times of stress. A few minutes earlier, she had wandered off to smoke her last cigarette before showtime. Now she was chewing on the antacid tablets. Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross, adult needs and desperate palliatives. The Object was still too young for the effects to tell on her. She didn’t have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close. Her stomach was a mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display. The cat eyes above the snub nose were alert, blinking and resetting their attention to the growing noise beyond the flats.
   “There’s my mom and dad!” Maxine Grossinger shouted. She turned back to us and broke into a big smile. I’d never seen Maxine smile before. Her teeth were jagged and gappy, like those of a Sendak creature. She had braces, too. Her unconcealed joy made me understand her. She had a whole other life apart from school. Maxine was happy in her house behind the cypresses. Meanwhile, curly hair gushed from her fragile, musical head.
   “Oh, Jesus.” Maxine was peeking out again. “They’re sitting right in the front row. They’re going to be staring right at me.”
   We all peeked out, each in our turn. Only the Obscure Object remained seated. I saw my parents arrive. Milton stopped at the crest of the slope to look down at the hockey field. His expression suggested that the spectacle before him, the emerald grass, the white wooden bleachers, the school in the distance with its blue slate roof and ivy, pleased him. In America, England is where you go to wash yourself of ethnicity. Milton had on a blue blazer and cream-colored trousers. He looked like the captain of a cruise ship. With one arm on her back, he was gently leading Tessie down the steps to get a good seat.
   We heard the audience grow quiet. Then a pan flute was heard—Mr. da Silva playing his recorder.
   I went over to the Object and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
   She had been repeating her lines silently to herself but now stopped.
   “You’re a really good actress,” I continued.
   She turned away and lowered her head, moving her lips again.
   “You won’t forget your lines. We went over them a billion times. You had them down perfect yester—“
   “Will you stop bugging me for a minute?” the Object snapped. “I’m trying to get psyched up.” She glared at me. Then she turned and walked off.
   I stood watching her, crestfallen, hating myself. Cool? I was anything but. I’d already made the Obscure Object sick of me. Feeling as if I might cry, I grabbed one of the black curtains and wrapped myself up in it. I stood in the darkness, wishing I were dead.
   I hadn’t just been flattering her. She was good. Onstage, the Object’s fidgetiness stilled itself. Her posture improved. And of course there was the sheer physical fact of her, the blood-tinged blade that she was, the riot of color that caught everyone’s attention. The pan flute stopped and the hockey field got silent again. People coughed, getting it out of their systems. I peeked out from the curtains and saw the Object waiting to go on. She was standing just inside the middle arch, no more than ten feet from me. I had never seen her so serious before, so concentrated. Talent is a kind of intelligence. As she waited to go on, the Obscure Object was coming into hers. Her lips moved as if she were speaking Sophocles’ lines to Sophocles himself, as if, contrary to all intellectual evidence, she understood the literary reasons for their endurance. So the Object stood, waiting to go on. Far away from her cigarettes and her snobbishness, her cliquish friends, her atrocious spelling. This was what she was good at: appearing before people. Stepping out and standing there and speaking. She was just beginning to realize it then. What I was witnessing was a self discovering the self it could be.
   On cue, our Antigone took a deep breath and walked onstage. Her white robe was cinched around her torso with silver braid. The robe fluttered as she stepped out in the warm breeze.
   “Wilt thou aid this hand to lift the dead?”
   Maxine-Ismene replied, “Thou wouldst bury him, when ‘tis forbidden to Thebes?”
   “I will do my part, and thou wilt not, to a brother. False to him will I never be found.”
   I wasn’t on for a while. Tiresias wasn’t that big a part. So I closed the curtain around me again and waited. I had a staff in my hand. It was my only prop, a plastic stick painted to look like wood.
   It was then I heard a small, choking sound. Again the Object said, “False to him will I never be found.” Followed by silence. I peeked out the curtain. Through the central arch I could see them. The Object had her back to me. Farther downstage Maxine Grossinger stood with a blank look on her face. Her mouth was open, though no words were coming out. Beyond, just above the lip of the stage, was Miss Fagles’s florid face, whispering Maxine’s next line.
   It wasn’t stage fright. An aneurysm had burst in Maxine Grossinger’s brain. At first, the audience took her quick stagger and shocked expression to be part of the play. Titters had begun at the way the girl playing Ismene was hamming it up. But Maxine’s mother, knowing exactly what pain looked like on her child’s face, shot up out of her seat. “No,” she cried. “No!” Twenty feet away, elevated under a setting sun, Maxine Grossinger was still mute. A gurgle escaped from her throat. With the suddenness of a lighting cue her face went blue. Even in the back rows people could see the oxygen leave her blood. Pinkness drained away, down her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. Later, the Obscure Object would swear that Maxine had been looking at her with a kind of appeal, that she had seen the light go out of Maxine’s eyes. According to the doctors, however, this was probably not true. Wrapped in her dark robe, still on her feet, Maxine Grossinger was already dead. She toppled forward seconds later.
   Mrs. Grossinger scrambled up onstage. She made no sound now. No one did. In silence she reached Maxine and tore open her robe. In silence the mother began to give the daughter mouth-to-mouth. I froze. I let the curtains untwist and I stepped out and gawked. Suddenly a white blur filled the arch. The Obscure Object was fleeing the stage. For a second I had a crazy idea. I thought Mr. da Silva had been holding out on us. He was doing things the traditional way after all. Because the Obscure Object was wearing a mask. The mask for tragedy, her eyes like knife slashes, her mouth a boomerang of woe. With this hideous face she threw herself on me. “Oh my God!” she sobbed. “Oh my God, Callie,” and she was shaking and needing me.
   Which leads me to a terrible confession. It is this. While Mrs. Grossinger tried to breathe life back into Maxine’s body, while the sun set melodramatically over a death that wasn’t in the script, I felt a wave of pure happiness surge through my body. Every nerve, every corpuscle, lit up. I had the Obscure Object in my arms.

Tiresias in Love

   Imade a doctor’s appointment for you.”
   ”I just went to the doctor.”
   ”Not with Dr. Phil. With Dr. Bauer.”
   “Who’s Dr. Bauer?”
   “He’s … a ladies’ doctor.”
   There was a hot bubbling in my chest. As if my heart were eating Pop Rocks. But I played it cool, looking out at the lake.
   “Who says I’m a lady?”
   “Very funny.”
   “I just went to the doctor, Mom.”
   “That was for your physical.”
   “What’s this for?”
   “When girls get to be a certain age, Callie, they have to go get checked.”
   “Why?”
   “To make sure everything’s okay.”
   “What do you mean, everything?”
   “Just—everything.”
   We were in the car. The second-best Cadillac. When Milton got a new car he gave Tessie his old one. The Obscure Object had invited me to spend the day at her club and my mother was taking me to her house.
   It was summer now, two weeks since Maxine Grossinger had collapsed onstage. School was out. On Middlesex preparations were under way for our trip to Turkey. Determined not to let Chapter Eleven’s condemnation of tourism ruin our travel plans, Milton was making airplane reservations and haggling with car rental agencies. Every morning he scanned the newspaper, reporting the weather conditions in Istanbul. “Eighty-one degrees and sunny. How does that sound, Cal?” In response to which I generally twirled an index finger. I wasn’t keen on visiting the homeland anymore. I didn’t want to waste my summer painting a church. Greece, Asia Minor, Mount Olympus, what did they have to do with me? I’d just discovered a whole new continent only a few miles away.
   In the summer of 1974 Turkey and Greece were about to be in the news again. But I didn’t pay any mind to the rising tensions. I had troubles of my own. More than that, I was in love. Secretly, shamefully, not entirely consciously, but for all that quite head-over-heels in love.
   Our pretty lake was trimmed in filth. The usual June scum of fish flies. There was also a new guardrail, which gave me a somber feeling as we drove past. Maxine Grossinger wasn’t the only girl at school who had died that year. Carol Henkel, a junior, had died in a car accident. One Saturday night her drunken boyfriend, a guy named Rex Reese, had plunged his parents’ car into the lake. Rex had survived, swimming back to shore. But Carol had been trapped inside the car.
   We passed Baker & Inglis, closed for vacation and succumbing to the unreality of schools during summertime. We turned up Kerby Road. The Object lived on Tonnacour, in a gray stone and clapboard house with a weather vane. Parked on the gravel was an unprepossessing Ford sedan. I felt self-conscious in the second-best Cadillac and got out quickly, wishing my mother gone.
   When I rang the bell, Beulah answered. She led me to the staircase and pointed up. That was all. I climbed to the second floor. I’d never been upstairs at the Object’s house before. It was messier than ours, the carpeting not new. The ceiling hadn’t been painted in years. But the furniture was impressively old, heavy, and sent out signals of permanence and settled judgment.
   I tried three rooms before I found the Object’s. Her shades were drawn. Clothes were scattered all over the shag carpeting and I had to wade through them to reach the bed. But there she was, sleeping, in a Lester Lanin T-shirt. I called her name. I jiggled her. Finally she sat up against her pillows and blinked.
   “I must look like shit,” she said after a moment.
   I didn’t say whether she did or not. It strengthened my position to keep her in doubt.
   We had breakfast in the breakfast nook. Beulah served us without elaboration, bringing and taking plates. She wore an actual maid’s uniform, black, with white apron. Her eyeglasses hailed from her other, more stylish life. In gold script her name curled across the left lens.
   Mrs. Object arrived, clacking in sensible heels: “Good morning, Beulah. I’m off to the vet’s. Sheba’s getting a tooth pulled. I’ll drop her back here, but then I’m off to lunch. They say she’ll be woozy. Oh—and the men are coming for the drapes today. Let them in and give them the check that’s on the counter. Hello, girls! I didn’t see you. You must be a good influence, Callie. Nine-thirty and this one’s up already?” She mussed the Object’s hair. “Are you spending the day at the Little Club, dear? Good. Your father and I are going out with the Peterses tonight. Beulah will leave something for you in the fridge. Bye, all!”
   All this while, Beulah rinsed glasses. Keeping to her strategy. Giving Grosse Pointe the silent treatment.
   The Object spun the lazy Susan. French jams, English marmalades, an unclean butter dish, bottles of ketchup and Lea & Perrins circled past, before what the Object wanted: an economy-size jar of Rolaids. She shook out three tablets.
   “What is heartburn, anyway?” I said.
   “You’ve never had heartburn?” asked the Object, amazed.
   The Little Club was only a nickname. Officially the club was known as the Grosse Pointe Club. Though the property was on the lake, there were no docks or boats in sight, only a mansion-like clubhouse, two paddle tennis courts, and a swimming pool. It was beside this pool that we lay every day that June and July.
   As far as swimwear went, the Obscure Object favored bikinis. She looked good in them but by no means perfect. Like her thighs, her hips were on the large side. She claimed to envy my thin, long legs, but she was only being nice. Calliope appeared poolside, that first day and every day thereafter, in an old-fashioned one-piece with a skirt. It had belonged to Sourmelina during the 1950s. I found it in an old trunk. The stated intent was to look funky, but I was grateful for the full coverage. I also hung a beach towel around my neck or wore an alligator shirt over my suit. The bodice of the bathing suit was a plus, too. The cups were rubberized, pointy, and beneath a towel or a shirt gave me the suggestion of a bust I didn’t have.
   Beyond us, pelican-bellied ladies in swim caps followed kickboards back and forth across the pool. Their bathing suits were a lot like mine. Little kids waded and splashed in the shallow end. There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan. The Object was in it. As we revolved on our towels that summer, self-basting, the Object’s freckles darkened, going from butterscotch to brown. The skin between them darkened, too, knitting her freckles together into a speckled harlequin mask. Only the tip of her nose remained pink. The part in her hair flamed with sunburn.
   Club sandwiches, on wave-rimmed plates, sailed out to us. If we were feeling sophisticated, we ordered the French dip. We had milk shakes, too, ice cream, french fries. For everything the Object signed her father’s name. She talked about Petoskey, where her family had a summer house. “We’re going up in August. Maybe you could come up.”
   “We’re going to Turkey,” I said unhappily.
   “Oh, right. I forgot.” And then: “Why do you have to paint a church?”
   “My dad made this promise.”
   “How come?”
   Behind us married couples were playing paddle tennis. Pennants flew from the clubhouse roof. Was this the place to mention St. Christopher? My father’s war stories? My grandmother’s superstitions?
   “You know what I keep thinking?” I said.
   “What?”
   “I keep thinking about Maxine. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
   “I know. It doesn’t seem like she’s really dead. It’s like I dreamed it.”
   “The only way we know it’s true is that we both dreamed it. That’s what reality is. It’s a dream everyone has together.”
   “That’s deep,” said the Object.
   I smacked her.
   “Ow!”
   “That’s what you get.”
   Bugs were attracted by our coconut oil. We killed them without mercy. The Object was making a slow, scandalized progress through The Lonely Lady by Harold Robbins. Every few pages she shook her head and announced, “This book is sooo dirty.” I was reading Oliver Twist, one of the assigned volumes for our summer reading list.
   Suddenly the sun went in. A drop of water hit my page. But this was nothing compared to the cascade that was being shaken onto the Obscure Object. An older boy was leaning over sideways, shaking his wet mop of hair.
   “Goddamn you,” she said, “cut it out!”
   “What’s the matter? I’m cooling you off.”
   “Quit it!”
   Finally, he did. He straightened up. His bathing suit had fallen down over his skinny hipbones. This exposed an ant trail of hair running down from his navel. The ant trail was red. But on his head the hair was jet black.
   “Who’s the latest victim of your hospitality?” the boy asked.
   “This is Callie,” said the Object. Then to me: “This is my brother. Jerome.”
   The resemblance was clear. The same palette had gone into Jerome’s face (oranges and pale blues, primarily) but there was a crudeness to the overall sketch, something bulbous about the nose, the eyes on the squinty side, pinpricks of light. What threw me at first was the dark, sheenless hair, which I soon realized was dyed.
   “You were the one in the play, right?”
   “Yes.”
   Jerome nodded. With slitty eyes glinting he said, “A thespian, eh? Just like you. Right, sis?”
   “My brother has a lot of problems,” the Object said.
   “Hey, since you gals are into the thee-a-tah, maybe you want to be in my next film.” He looked at me. “I’m making a vampire movie. You’d make a great vampire.”
   “I would?”
   “Let me see your teeth.”
   I didn’t oblige, taking my cue from the Object not to be too friendly.
   “Jerome is into monster movies,” she said.
   “Horror films,” he corrected, still directing his words to me. “Not monster movies. My sister, as usual, belittles my chosen medium. Want to know the title?”
   “No,” said the Object.
   “Vampires in Prep School. It’s about this vampire, played by moi, who gets sent off to prep school because his affluent but terribly unhappy parents are going through a divorce. Anyway, he doesn’t get along too well out there at boarding school. He doesn’t wear the right clothes. He doesn’t have the right haircut. But then one day after this kegger he takes a walk across campus and gets attacked by a vampire. And—here’s the kicker—the vampire is smoking a pipe. He’s wearing a Harris tweed. It’s the fucking headmaster, man! So the next morning, our hero wakes up and goes right out and buys a blue blazer and some Top-Siders and—presto—he’s a total prep!”
   “Will you move, you’re blocking my sun.”
   “It’s a metaphor for the whole boarding school experience,” Jerome said. “Each generation puts the bite on the next, turning them into the living dead.”
   “Jerome has been kicked out of two boarding schools.”
   “And I shall have my revenge upon them!” Jerome proclaimed in a hoary voice, shaking his fist in the air. Then without another word he ran to the pool and jumped. As he did, he spun around so he was facing us. There Jerome hung, skinny, sunken-chested, as white as a saltine, his face scrunched up and one hand clutching his nuts. He held that pose all the way down.
   I was too young to ask myself what was behind our sudden intimacy. In the days and weeks that followed, I didn’t consider the Object’s own motivations, her love vacuum. Her mother had engagements all day long. Her father left for the office at six forty-five. Jerome was a brother and therefore useless. The Object didn’t like being alone. She had never learned to amuse herself. And so one evening at her house, as I was about to get on my bike and ride home, she suggested that I sleep over.
   “I don’t have my toothbrush.”
   “You can use mine.”
   “That’s gross.”
   “I’ll get you a new toothbrush. We’ve got a box of them. God, you’re such a priss.”
   I was only feigning squeamishness. In actuality I wouldn’t have minded sharing the Object’s toothbrush. I wouldn’t have minded being the Object’s toothbrush. I was already well acquainted with the splendors of her mouth. Smoking is good for that. You get a full display of the puckering and the sucking. The tongue often makes an appearance, licking from the lips any stickiness imparted by the filter. Sometimes bits of paper adhere to the bottom lip and the smoker, pulling them away, reveals the candied lower teeth against the pulpy gums. And if the smoker is a blower of smoke rings, you get to see all the way in to the dark velvet of the inner cheeks.
   That was how it went with the Obscure Object. A cigarette in bed was the tombstone marking each day’s end and the reed through which she breathed herself back to life each morning. You’ve heard of installation artists? Well, the Object was an exhalation artist. She had a whole repertoire. There was the Sidewinder, where she politely funneled smoke away from the person she was talking to out the corner of her mouth. There was the Geyser when she was angry. There was the Dragon Lady, featuring a plume from each nostril. There was the French Recycle, where she let smoke out her mouth only to inhale it back through her nose. And there was the Swallow. The Swallow was reserved for crisis situations. Once, in the Science Wing bathroom, the Object had just finished taking a long drag when a teacher charged in. My friend had time to flick her cigarette into the toilet bowl and flush. But what about the smoke? Where could it go?
   “Who’s been smoking in here?” the teacher asked.
   The Object shrugged, keeping her mouth closed. The teacher leaned toward her, sniffing. And the Object swallowed. No smoke came out. Not a wisp. Not a puff. A little moistness in her eyes the only sign of the Chernobyl in her lungs.
   I accepted the Object’s invitation to sleep over. Mrs. Object called Tessie to see if it was all right and, by eleven o’clock, my friend and I went up to bed together. She gave me a T-shirt to wear. It said “Fessenden” on the front. I put it on and the Object snickered.
   “What?”
   “That’s Jerome’s T-shirt. Does it reek?”
   “Why’d you give me his shirt?” I said, going stiff, shrinking from the cotton’s touch while still wearing it.
   “Mine are too small. You want one of Daddy’s? They smell like cologne.”
   “Your dad wears cologne?”
   “He lived in Paris after the war. He’s got all kinds of fruity habits.” She was climbing up onto the big bed now. “Plus he slept with about a million French prostitutes.”
   “He told you that?”
   “Not exactly. But whenever Daddy talks about France he acts all horny. He was in the Army there. He was like in charge of running Paris after the war. And Mummy gets really pissed when he talks about it.” She imitated her mother now. “ ‘That’s enough Francophilia for one evening, dear.’ ” As usual, when she did something dramatic, her IQ suddenly soared. Then she flopped onto her stomach. “He killed people, too.”
   “He did?”
   “Yeah,” said the Object, adding by way of explanation, “Nazis.”
   I climbed into the big bed. At home I had one pillow. Here there were six.
   “Back rub,” the Object called out cheerily.
   “I’ll do you if you do me.”
   “Deal.”
   I sat astride her, on the saddle of her hips, and started with her shoulders. Her hair was in the way, so I moved it. We were quiet for a while, me rubbing, and then I asked, “Have you ever been to a gynecologist?”
   The Object nodded into her pillow.
   “What’s it like?”
   “It’s torture. I hate it.”
   “What do they do?”
   “First they make you strip and put this little gown on. It’s made of paper and all this cold air gets in. You freeze. Then they make you lie on this table, spread-eagled.”
   “Spread-eagled?”
   “Yep. You have to put your legs in these metal things. Then the gyno gives you a pelvic exam, which kills.”
   “What do you mean, pelvic exam?”
   “I thought you were supposed to be the sex expert.”
   “Come on.”
   “A pelvic exam is, you know, inside. They shove this little doohickey in you to spread you all open and everything.”
   “I can’t believe this.”
   “It kills. And it’s freezing. Plus you’ve got the gyno making lame jokes while he’s nosing around in there. But the worst is what he does with his hands.”
   “What?”
   “Basically he reaches in until he can tickle your tonsils.”
   Now I was mute. Absolutely paralyzed with shock and fear.
   “Who are you going to?” the Object asked.
   “Someone named Dr. Bauer.”
   “Dr. Bauer! That’s Renee’s dad. He’s a total perv!”
   “What do you mean?”
   “I went swimming over at Renee’s one time. They have a pool. Dr. Bauer came out and stood there, watching. Then he goes, ‘Your legs have perfect proportions. Absolutely perfect proportions.’ God, what a perv! Dr. Bauer. I pity you.”
   She raised her stomach in order to free her shirt. I massaged her lower back, reaching under the shirt to knead her shoulder blades.
   The Object got quiet after that. So did I. I kept my mind off gynecology by losing myself in the back rub. It wasn’t hard. Her honey– or apricot-colored back tapered at the waist in a way mine didn’t. There were white spots here and there, anti-freckles. Wherever I rubbed, her skin flushed. I was aware of the blood underneath, coursing and draining. Her underarms were rough like a cat’s tongue. Below them the sides of her breasts swelled out, flattened against the mattress.
   “Okay,” I said, after a long while, “my turn.”
   But that night was like all the others. She was asleep.
   It was never my turn with the Object.
   They come back to me, the scattered days of that summer with the Object, each encased in a souvenir snow globe. Let me shake them up again. Watch the flakes float down:
   We are lying in bed together on a Saturday morning. The Object is on her back. I’m fulcrumed on one elbow, leaning over to inspect her face.
   “You know what sleep is?” I say.
   “What?”
   “Snot.”
   “It is not.”
   “It is. It’s mucus. It’s snot that comes out your eyes.”
   “That’s so gross!”
   “You’ve got a little sleep in your eyes, my dear,” I say in a fake deep voice. With my finger I flick the crust from the Object’s eyelashes.
   “I can’t believe I’m letting you do this,” she says. “You’re touching my snot.”
   We look at each other a moment.
   “I’m touching your snot!” I scream. And we writhe around, throwing pillows and screaming some more.
   On another day, the Object is taking a bath. She has her own bathroom. I’m on the bed, reading a gossip magazine.
   “You can tell Jane Fonda isn’t really naked in that movie,” I say.
   “How?”
   “She’s got a body stocking on. You can see it.”
   I go into the bathroom to show her. In the claw-footed tub, under a layer of whipped cream, the Object lolls, pumicing one heel.
   She looks at the photograph and says, “You’re never naked, either.”
   I am frozen, speechless.
   “Do you have some kind of complex?”
   “No, I don’t have a complex.”
   “What are you afraid of, then?”
   “I’m not afraid.”
   The Object knows this isn’t true. But her intentions aren’t malicious. She isn’t trying to catch me out, only to put me at ease. My modesty baffles her.
   “I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she says. “You’re my best friend.”
   I pretend to be engrossed in the magazine. I can’t get myself to look away. Inside, however, I’m bursting with happiness. I’m erupting with joy, but I keep staring at the magazine as though I’m mad at it.
   It’s late. We’ve stayed up watching TV. The Object is brushing her teeth when I come into the bathroom. I pull down my underpants and sit on the toilet. I do this sometimes as a compensatory tactic. The T-shirt is long enough to cover my lap. I pee while the Object brushes.
   It’s then I smell smoke. Looking up, I see, besides a toothbrush in the Object’s mouth, a cigarette.
   “You even smoke while you brush your teeth?”
   She looks at me sideways. “Menthol,” she says.
   The thing about those souvenirs, though: the glitter falls fast.
   A reminder taped to our refrigerator brought me back to reality: “Dr. Bauer, July 22, 2P.M.”
   I was filled with dread. Dread of the perverted gynecologist and his inquisitorial instruments. Dread of the metal things that would spread my legs and of the doohickey that would spread something else. And dread of what all this spreading might reveal.
   It was in this state, this emotional foxhole, that I started going to church again. One Sunday in early July my mother and I dressed up (Tessie in heels, me not) and drove down to Assumption. Tessie was suffering, too. It had been six months since Chapter Eleven had sped away from Middlesex on his motorcycle, and since that time he hadn’t been back. Worse, in April he had broken the news that he was dropping out of college. He was planning to move to the Upper Peninsula with some friends and, as he put it, live off the land. “You don’t think he’d do something crazy like run off and marry that Meg, do you?” Tessie asked Milton. “Let’s hope not,” he answered. Tessie worried that Chapter Eleven wasn’t taking care of himself, either. He wasn’t going to the dentist regularly. His vegetarianism made him pale. And he was losing his hair. At the age of twenty. This made Tessie feel suddenly old.
   United in anxiety, seeking solace for differing complaints (Tessie wanting to get rid of her pains while I wanted mine to begin), we entered the church. As far as I could tell, what happened every Sunday at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church was that the priests got together and read the Bible out loud. They started with Genesis and kept going straight through Numbers and Deuteronomy. Then on through Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, all the way up to the New Testament. Then they read that. Given the length of our services, I saw no other possibility.
   They chanted as the church slowly filled up. Finally the central chandelier flicked on and Father Mike, like a life-size puppet, sprang through the icon screen. The transformation my uncle went through every Sunday always amazed me. At church Father Mike appeared and disappeared with the capriciousness of a divinity. One minute he was up on the balcony, singing in his tender, tone-deaf voice. The next minute he was back on ground level, swinging his censer. Glittering, bejeweled, as overdone in his vestments as a Fabergé egg, he promenaded around the church, giving us God’s blessing. Sometimes his censer produced so much smoke it seemed that Father Mike had the ability to cloak himself in a mist. When the mist dispersed, however, later that afternoon in our living room, he was once again a short, shy man, in black, polyester-blend clothes and a plastic collar.
   Aunt Zoë’s authority went in the opposite direction. At church she was meek. The round gray hat she wore looked like the head of a screw fastening her to her pew. She was constantly pinching her sons to keep them awake. I could barely connect the anxious person hunched down every week in front of us to the funny woman who, under the inspiration of wine, launched into comedy routines in our kitchen. “You men stay out!” she’d shout, dancing with my mother. “We’ve got knives in here.”
   So startling was the contrast between churchgoing Zoë and wine-drinking Zoë that I always made a point of watching her closely during the liturgy. On most Sundays, when my mother tapped her on the shoulder in greeting, Aunt Zo responded only with a weak smile. Her large nose looked swollen with grief. Then she turned back, crossed herself, and settled in for the duration.
   And so: Assumption Church that July morning. Incense rising with the pungency of irrational hope. Closer in (it had been drizzling out), the smell of wet wool. The dripping of umbrellas stashed under pews. The rivulets from these umbrellas flowing down the uneven floor of our poorly built church, pooling in spots. The smell of hairspray and perfume, of cheap cigars, and the slow ticking of watches. The grumbling of more and more stomachs. And the yawning. The nodding off and the snoring and the being elbowed awake.
   Our liturgy, endless; my own body immune to the laws of time. And right in front of me, Zoë Antoniou, on whom time had also been doing a number.
   The life of a priest’s wife had been even worse than Aunt Zo had expected. She had hated her years in the Peloponnese. They had lived in a small, unheated stone house. Outside, the village women spread blankets under olive trees, beating the branches until the olives fell. “Can’t they stop that damn racket!” Zoë had complained. In five years, to the incessant sound of trees being clubbed to death, she bore four children. She sent letters to my mother detailing her hardships: no washing machine, no car, no television, a backyard full of boulders and goats. She signed her letters, “St. Zoë, Church martyr.”
   Father Mike had liked Greece better. His years there represented the best period of his priesthood. In that tiny Peloponnesian village the old superstitions survived. People still believed in the evil eye. Nobody pitied him for being a priest, whereas later on in America his parishioners always treated him with a slight but unmistakable condescension, like a crazy person whose delusions had to be humored. The humiliation of being a priest in a market economy didn’t plague Father Mike while he was in Greece. In Greece he could forget about my mother, who had jilted him, and he could escape comparison with my father, who made so much more money. His wife’s nagging complaints hadn’t begun to make Father Mike think about leaving the priesthood yet, and hadn’t led him to his desperate act…
   In 1956 Father Mike was reappointed stateside to a church in Cleveland. In 1958 he became a priest at Assumption. Zoë was happy to be back home, but she never got used to her position as presvytera. She didn’t like being a role model. She found it difficult to keep her children looking neat and well dressed. “On what money?” she shouted at her husband. “Maybe if they paid you halfway decent the kids would look better.” My cousins—Aristotle, Socrates, Cleopatra, and Plato—had the thwarted, overbrushed look of ministers’ children. The boys wore cheap, garishly colored double-breasted suits. They had Afros. Cleo, who was as beautiful and almond-eyed as her namesake, made do with dresses from Montgomery Ward. She rarely spoke, and played cat’s cradle with Plato during the service.
   I always liked Aunt Zo. I liked her big, grandstanding voice. I liked her sense of humor. She was louder than most men; she could make my mother laugh like nobody else.
   That Sunday, for instance, during one of the many lulls, Aunt Zo turned around and dared to joke. “I have to be here, Tessie. What’s your excuse?”
   “Callie and I just felt like coming to church,” my mother answered.
   Plato, who was small like his father, sang out with mock censure, “Shame on you, Callie. What did you do?” He rubbed his right index finger repeatedly over his left.
   “Nothing,” I said.
   “Hey, Soc,” Plato whispered to his brother. “Is cousin Callie blushing?”
   “She must have done something she doesn’t want to tell us.”
   “Shush up now, you,” said Aunt Zo. For Father Mike was approaching with the censer. My cousins turned around. My mother bowed her head to pray. I did, too. Tessie prayed for Chapter Eleven to come to his senses. And me? That’s easy. I prayed for my period to come. I prayed to receive the womanly stigmata.
   Summer sped on. Milton brought our suitcases up from the basement and told my mother and me to start packing. I tanned with the Object at the Little Club. Dr. Bauer haunted my mind, judging the proportions of my legs. The appointment was a week away, then half a week, then two days…
   And so we come to the preceding Saturday night, July 20, 1974. A night full of departures and secret plans. In the early hours of Sunday morning (which was still Saturday night back in Michigan), Turkish jets took off from bases on the mainland. They headed southeast over the Mediterranean Sea toward the island of Cyprus. In the ancient myths, gods favoring mortals often hid them away. Aphrodite blotted out Paris once, saving him from certain death at the hands of Menelaus. She wrapped Aeneas in a coat to sneak him off the battlefield. Likewise, as the Turkish jets roared over the sea, they were also hidden. That night, Cypriot military personnel reported a mysterious malfunctioning of their radar screens. The screens filled with thousands of white blips: an electromagnetic cloud. Invisible inside this, the Turkish jets reached the island and began dropping their bombs.
   Meanwhile, back in Grosse Pointe, Fred and Phyllis Mooney were also leaving home base, heading to Chicago. On the front porch, waving goodbye, stood their children, Woody and Jane, who had secret plans of their own. Flying toward the Mooneys’ house at that moment were the silver bombers of beer kegs and the tight formations of six-packs. Cars full of teenagers were on their way. And so were the Object and I. Powdered and glossed, our hair hot-combed into wings, we had set off for the party ourselves. In thin corduroy skirts and clogs we came up the front lawn. But the Object stopped me on the porch before we went in. She was biting her lip.
   “You’re my best friend, right?”
   “Right.”
   “Okay. Sometimes I think I have bad breath.” She stopped. “The thing is, you can never tell if you have bad breath or not. So the thing is”—she paused—“I want you to check it for me.”
   I didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.
   “Is that too disgusting?”
   “No,” I said, finally.
   “Okay, here goes.” She leaned toward me and huffed a single breath into my face.
   “It’s okay,” I said.
   “Good. Now you.”
   I leaned down and exhaled in her face.
   “It’s fine,” she said, decisively. “Okay. Now we can go to the party.”
   I’d never been to a party before. I felt for the parents. As we squeezed by the throngs in the throbbing house, I cringed at the destruction under way. Cigarette ashes were dropping on Pierre Deux upholstery. Beer cans were spilling onto heirloom carpets. In the den I saw two laughing boys urinating into a tennis trophy. It was mostly older kids. A few couples climbed the stairs, disappearing into bedrooms.
   The Object was trying to act older herself. She was copying the superior, bored expressions of the high school girls. She crossed to the back porch ahead of me and got in the line for the keg.
   “What are you doing?” I asked.
   “I’m getting a beer. What do you think?”
   It was fairly dark outside. As in most social situations, I let my hair fall into my face. I was standing behind the Object, looking like Cousin It, when someone put his hands over my eyes.
   “Guess who?”
   “Jerome.”
   I pulled his hands off my face and turned around.
   “How did you know it was me?”
   “The curious smell.”
   “Ouch,” said a voice behind Jerome. I looked over and received a shock. Standing with Jerome was Rex Reese, the guy who had driven Carol Henkel to her watery death. Rex Reese, our local Teddy Kennedy. He didn’t look particularly sober now, either. His dark hair covered his ears and he wore a piece of blue coral on a leather thong around his throat. I searched his face for signs of remorse or repentance. Rex wasn’t searching my face, however. He was eyeing the Object, his hair falling into his eyes above the curl of a smile.
   Deftly, the two boys moved in between us, turning their backs to each other. I had a final glimpse of the Obscure Object. She had her hands in the back pockets of her corduroy skirt. This looked casual but had the effect of pushing out her chest. She was looking up at Rex and smiling.
   “I start filming tomorrow,” Jerome said.
   I looked blank.
   “My movie. My vampire movie. You sure you don’t want to be in it?”
   “We’re going on vacation this week.”
   “That sucks,” said Jerome. “It’s going to be genius.”
   We stood silent. After a moment I said, “Real geniuses never think they’re geniuses.”
   “Who says?”
   “Me.”
   “Because why?”
   “Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven’t you ever heard that? As soon as you think you’re a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything.”
   “I just want to make scary movies,” Jerome replied. “With occasional nudity.”
   “Just don’t try to be a genius and maybe you’ll end up being one by accident,” I said.
   He was looking at me in a funny way, intense, but also grinning.
   “What?”
   “Nothing.”
   “Why are you looking at me like that?”
   “Looking at you like what?”
   In the dark, Jerome’s resemblance to the Obscure Object was even more pronounced. The tawny eyebrows, the butterscotch complexion—here they were again, in permissible form.
   “You’re a lot smarter than most of my sister’s friends.”
   “You’re a lot smarter than most of my friends’ brothers.”
   He leaned toward me. He was taller than I was. That was the big difference between him and his sister. It was enough to wake me from my trance. I turned away. I circled around him back to the Object. She was still staring up bright-faced at Rex.
   “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to go to that thing.”
   “What thing?”
   “You know. That thing.”
   Finally I managed to pull her away. She left trailing smiles and significant looks. As soon as we got off the porch she was frowning at me.
   “Where are you taking me?” she said angrily.
   “Away from that creep.”
   “Can’t you leave me alone for a minute?”
   “You want me to leave you alone?” I said. “Okay, I’ll leave you alone.” I didn’t move.
   “Can’t I even talk to a boy at a party?” the Object asked.
   “I was taking you away before it was too late.”
   “What do you mean?”
   “You’ve got bad breath.”
   This checked the Object. This struck her to her core. She wilted. “I do?” she asked.
   “It’s just a little oniony,” I said.
   We were on the back lawn now. Kids were sitting on the stone porch rail, their cigarette tips glowing in the darkness.
   “What do you think of Rex?” the Object whispered.
   “What? Don’t tell me you like him.”
   “I didn’t say I like him.”
   I scoped her face, seeking the answer. She noticed this and walked farther away over the lawn. I followed. I said earlier that most of my emotions are hybrids. But not all. Some are pure and unadulterated. Jealousy, for instance.
   “Rex is okay,” I said when I had caught up to her. “If you like manslaughterers.”
   “That was an accident,” said the Object.
   The moon was three-quarters full. It silvered the fat leaves of the trees. The grass was wet. We both kicked off our clogs to stand in it. After a moment, sighing, the Object laid her head on my shoulder.
   “It’s good you’re going away,” she said.
   “Why?”
   “Because this is too weird.” I looked back to see if anyone could see us. No one could. So I put my arm around her.
   For the next few minutes we stood under the moon-blanched trees, listening to the music blaring from the house. The cops would come soon. The cops always came. That was something you could depend on in Grosse Pointe.
   The next morning, I went to church with Tessie. As usual, Aunt Zo was down in front, setting an example. Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato were wearing their gangster suits. Cleo was sunk into her black mane, about to doze off.
   The rear and sides of the church were dark. Icons gloomed from the porticoes or raised stiff fingers in the glinting chapels. Beneath the dome, light fell in a chalky beam. The air was already thick with incense. Moving back and forth, the priests looked like men at a hammam.
   Then it was showtime. One priest flicked a switch. The bottom tier of the enormous chandelier blazed on. From behind the iconostasis Father Mike entered. He was wearing a bright turquoise robe with a red heart embroidered on his back. He crossed the solea and came down among the parishioners. The smoke from his censer rose and curled, fragrant with antiquity. “ Kyrie eleison,” Father Mike sang. “ Kyrie eleison.” And though the words meant nothing to me, or almost nothing, I felt their weight, the deep groove they made in the air of time. Tessie crossed herself, thinking about Chapter Eleven.
   First Father Mike did the left side of the church. In blue waves, incense rolled over the gathered heads. It dimmed the circular lights of the chandelier. It aggravated the widows’ lung conditions. It subdued the brightness of my cousins’ suits. As it wrapped me in its dry-ice blanket, I breathed it in and began to pray myself. Please God let Dr. Bauer not find anything wrong with me. And let me be just friends with the Object. And don’t let her forget about me while we’re in Turkey. And help my mother not to be so worried about my brother. And make Chapter Eleven go back to college.
   Incense serves a variety of purposes in the Orthodox church. Symbolically, it’s an offering to God. Like the burnt sacrifices in pagan times, the fragrance drifts upward to heaven. Before the days of modern embalming, incense had a practical application. It covered the smell of corpses during funerals. It can also, when inhaled in sufficient amounts, create a lightheadedness that feels like religious reverie. And if you breathe in enough of it, it can make you sick.
   “What’s the matter?” Tessie’s voice in my ear. “You look pale.”
   I stopped praying and opened my eyes.
   “I do?”
   “Do you feel okay?”
   I began to answer in the affirmative. But then I stopped myself.
   “You look really pale, Callie,” Tessie said again. She touched her hand to my forehead.
   Sickness, reverie, devotion, deceit—they all came together. If God doesn’t help you, you have to help yourself.
   “It’s my stomach,” I said.
   “What have you been eating?”
   “Or not exactly my stomach. It’s lower down.”
   “Do you feel faint?”
   Father Mike passed by again. He swung the censer so high it nearly touched the tip of my nose. And I widened my nostrils and breathed in as much smoke as possible to make myself even paler than I already was.
   “It’s like somebody’s twisting something inside me,” I hazarded.
   Which must have been more or less right. Because Tessie was now smiling. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, thank God.”
   “You’re happy I’m sick? Thanks a lot.”
   “You’re not sick, honey.”
   “Then what am I? I don’t feel good. It hurts.”
   My mother took my hand, still beaming. “Hurry, hurry,” she said. “We don’t want an accident.”
   By the time I closed myself into a church bathroom stall, news of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had reached the United States. When Tessie and I arrived back home, the living room was filled with shouting men.
   “Our battleships are sitting off the coast to intimidate the Greeks,” Jimmy Fioretos was yelling.
   “Sure they’re sitting off the coast,” Milton now, “what do you expect? The Junta comes in and throws Makarios out. So the Turks are getting anxious. It’s a volatile situation.”
   “Yeah, but to help the Turks—“
   “The U.S. isn’t helping the Turks,” Milton went on. “They just don’t want the Junta to get out of hand.”
   In 1922, while Smyrna burned, American warships sat idly by. Fifty-two years later, off the coast of Cyprus, they also did nothing. At least ostensibly.
   “Don’t be so naïve, Milt,” Jimmy Fioretos again. “Who do you think’s jamming the radar? It’s the Americans, Milt. It’s us.”
   “How do you know?” my father challenged.
   And now Gus Panos through the hole in his throat: “It’s that goddamned—sssss—Kissinger. He must have—ssssss—made a deal with the Turks.”
   “Of course he did.” Peter Tatakis nodded, sipping his Pepsi. “Now that the Vietnam crisis is over, Herr Doktor Kissinger can get back to playing Bismarck. He would like to see NATO bases in Turkey? This is his way to get them.”
   Were these accusations true? I can’t say for sure. All I know is this: on that morning, somebody jammed the Cypriot radar, guaranteeing the success of the Turkish invasion. Did the Turks possess such technology? No. Did the U.S. warships? Yes. But this isn’t something you can prove…
   Plus, it didn’t matter to me, anyway. The men cursed, and shook their fingers at the television and pounded the radio, until Aunt Zo unplugged them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t unplug the men. All through dinner the men shouted at each other. Knives and forks waved in the air. The argument over Cyprus lasted for weeks and would finally put an end to those Sunday dinners once and for all. But as for myself, the invasion had only one meaning.
   As soon as I could, I excused myself and ran off to call the Object. “Guess what?” I cried out with excitement. “We’re not going on vacation. There’s a war!”
   Then I told her I had cramps and that I’d be right over.

Flesh and Blood

   I’m quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn’t know; and the discovery by poor, half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he’d failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they’d given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time, waiting for Atatürk to attack, for Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, coming together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led up to me, here, writing in Berlin.
   That summer—while the President’s lies were also getting more elaborate—I started faking my period. With Nixonian cunning, Calliope unwrapped and flushed away a flotilla of unused Tampax. I feigned symptoms from headache to fatigue. I did cramps the way Meryl Streep did accents. There was the twinge, the dull ache, the sucker punch that made me curl up on my bed. My cycle, though imaginary, was rigorously charted on my desk calendar. I used the catacomb fish symbol
   to mark the days. I scheduled my periods right through December, by which time I was certain my real menarche would have finally arrived.
   My deception worked. It calmed my mother’s anxieties and somehow even my own. I felt I’d taken charge of things. I wasn’t at the mercy of nature anymore. Even better, with our trip to Bursa canceled—as well as my appointment with Dr. Bauer—I was free to accept the Object’s invitation to visit her family’s summer house. In preparation I bought a sun hat, sandals, and a pair of rustic overalls.
   I wasn’t particularly tuned in to the political events unfolding in the nation that summer. But it was impossible to miss what was going on. My father’s identification with Nixon only grew stronger as the President’s troubles mounted. In the long-haired war protesters Milton saw his own shaggy, condemnatory son. Now, in the Watergate scandal, my father recognized his own dubious behavior during the riots. He thought the break-in was a mistake, but also believed that it was no big deal. “You don’t think the Democrats aren’t doing the same thing?” Milton asked the Sunday debaters. “The liberals just want to stick it to him. So they’re playing pious.” Watching the evening news, Milton delivered a running commentary to the screen. “Oh yeah?” he’d say. “Bullshit.” Or: “This guy Proxmire’s a total zero.” Or: “What these pointy-headed intellectuals should be worrying about is foreign policy. What to do about the goddamn Russians and the Red Chinese. Not pissing and moaning about a robbery at a lousy campaign office.” Hunkered down behind his TV tray, Milton scowled at the left-wing press, and his growing resemblance to the President couldn’t be ignored.
   On weeknights he argued with the television, but on Sundays he faced a live audience. Uncle Pete, who was usually as dormant as a snake while digesting, was now animated and jovial. “Even from a chiropractic standpoint, Nixon is a questionable character. He has the skeleton of a chimpanzee.”
   Father Mike joined the needling. “So what do you think about your friend Tricky Dicky now, Milt?”
   “I think it’s a lot of hoo-ha.”
   Things got worse when the conversation turned to Cyprus. In domestic affairs Milton had Jimmy Fioretos on his side. But when it came to the Cyprus situation they parted company. A month after the invasion, just as the UN was about to conclude a peace negotiation, the Turkish Army had launched another attack. This time the Turks claimed a large portion of the island. Now barbed wire was going up. Guard towers were being erected. Cyprus was being cut in half like Berlin, like Korea, like all the other places in the world that were no longer one thing or the other.
   “Now they’re showing their true stripes,” Jimmy Fioretos said. “The Turks wanted to invade all along. That malarkey about ‘protecting the Constitution’ was just a pretext.”
   “They hit us … sssss … while our backs were turned,” croaked Gus Panos.
   Milton snorted. “What do you mean ‘us’? Where were you born, Gus, Cyprus?”
   “You know … sssss … what I mean.”
   “America betrayed the Greeks!” Jimmy Fioretos jabbed a finger in the air. “It’s that two-faced son of a bitch Kissinger. Shakes your hand while he pisses in your pocket!”
   Milton shook his head. He lowered his chin aggressively and made a little sound, a bark of disapproval, deep in his throat. “We have to do whatever’s in our national interest.”
   And then Milton lifted his chin and said it: “To hell with the Greeks.”
   In 1974, instead of reclaiming his roots by visiting Bursa, my father renounced them. Forced to choose between his native land and his ancestral one, he didn’t hesitate. Meanwhile, we could hear it all the way from the kitchen: shouting; and a coffee cup breaking; swear words in both English and Greek; feet stomping out of the house.
   “Get your coat, Phyllis, we’re leaving,” Jimmy Fioretos said.
   “It’s summer,” said Phyllis. “I don’t have a coat.”
   “Then get whatever the hell it is you have to get.”
   “We’re going, too … sssss … I’ve lost my … sssss … appetite.”
   Even Uncle Pete, the self-educated opera buff, drew the line. “Maybe Gus didn’t grow up in Greece,” he said, “but I’m sure you remember that I did. You are talking about my native land, Milton. And your parents’ own true home.”
   The guests left. They didn’t come back. Jimmy and Phyllis Fioretos. Gus and Helen Panos. Peter Tatakis. The Buicks pulled away from Middlesex, leaving behind a negative space in our living room. After that, there were no more Sunday dinners. No more large-nosed men blowing their noses like muted trumpets. No more cheek-pinching women who resembled Melina Mercouri in her later years. Most of all, no more living room debates. No more arguing and citing examples and quoting the famous dead and castigating the infamous living. No more running the government from our love seats. No more revamping of the tax code or philosophical fights about the role of government, the welfare state, the Swedish health system (designed by a Dr. Fioretos, no relation). The end of an era. Never again. Never on Sunday.
   The only people who stayed were Aunt Zo, Father Mike, and our cousins, because they were related to us. Tessie was angry with Milton for causing a fight. She told him so, he exploded at her, and she gave him the silent treatment for the rest of the day. Father Mike took advantage of this to lead Tessie up to the sun deck. Milton got in his car and drove off. I was with Aunt Zo when we later brought refreshments up to the deck. I had just stepped out onto the gravel between the thick redwood railings when I saw Tessie and Father Mike sitting on the black iron patio furniture. Father Mike was holding my mother’s hand, leaning his bearded face close to her and looking into her eyes as he spoke softly. My mother had been crying, apparently. She had a tissue balled in one hand. “Callie’s got iced tea,” Aunt Zo announced as she came out, “and I’ve got the booze.” But then she saw how Father Mike was looking at my mother and she went silent. My mother stood up, blushing. “I’ll take the booze, Zo.” Everyone laughed nervously. Aunt Zo poured the glasses. “Don’t look, Mike,” she said. “The presvytera ’s getting drunk on Sunday.”
   The following Friday I drove up with the Object’s father to their summer house near Petoskey. It was a grand Victorian, covered with gingerbread, and painted the color of pistachio saltwater taffy. I was dazzled by the sight of the house as we drove up. It sat on a rise above Little Traverse Bay, guarded by tall pines, all its windows blazing.
   I was good with parents. Parents were my specialty. In the car on the way up I had carried on a lively and wide-ranging conversation with the Object’s father. It was from him that she had gotten her coloring. Mr. Object had the Celtic tints. He was in his late fifties, however, and his reddish hair had been bleached almost colorless now, like a dandelion gone to seed. His freckled skin looked blown out, too. He wore a khaki poplin suit and bow tie. After he picked me up, we stopped at a party store near the highway, where Mr. Object bought a six-pack of Smirnoff cocktails.
   “Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders.”
   Five hours later, not at all sober, he turned up the unpaved road that led to the summer house. It was ten o’clock by this time. In moonlight we carried our bags up to the back porch. Mushrooms dotted the pine-needled path between the thin gray pines. Next to the house an artesian well chimed among mossy rocks.
   When we came in the kitchen door, we found Jerome. He was sitting at the table, reading the Weekly World News. The pallor of his face suggested that he had been there pretty much all month. His lusterless black hair looked particularly inert. He had on a Frankenstein T-shirt, seersucker shorts, white canvas Top-Siders without socks.
   “I present to you Miss Stephanides,” Mr. Object said.
   “Welcome to the hinterland.” Jerome stood up and shook his father’s hand. They attempted a hug.
   “Where’s your mother?”
   “She’s upstairs getting dressed for the party you’re incredibly late for. Her mood reflects that.”
   “Why don’t you take Callie up to her room? Show her around.”
   “Check,” said Jerome.
   We went up the back stairs off the kitchen. “The guest room’s being painted,” Jerome told me. “So you’re staying in my sister’s room.”
   “Where is she?”
   “She’s out on the back porch with Rex.”
   My blood stopped. “Rex Reese?”
   “His ‘rents have a place up here, too.”
   Jerome then showed me the essentials, guest towels, bathroom location, how to work the lights. But his manners were lost on me. I was wondering why the Object hadn’t mentioned anything about Rex on the phone. She had been up here three weeks and said nothing.
   We came back into her bedroom. Her rumpled clothes lay on the unmade bed. There was a dirty ashtray on one pillow.
   “My little sister is a creature of slovenly habits,” Jerome said, looking around. “Are you neat?”
   I nodded.
   “Me too. Only way to be. Hey.” He came around to face me now. “What happened to your trip to Turkey?”
   “It got canceled.”
   “Excellent. Now you can be in my film. I’m shooting it up here. Are you up for that?”
   “I thought it took place in a boarding school.”
   “I decided to make it a boarding school in the boonies.” Jerome was standing somewhat close to me. His hands flopped around in his pockets as he squinted at me and rocked on his heels.
   “Should we go downstairs?” I finally asked.
   “What? Oh, right. Yeah. Let’s go.” Jerome turned and bolted. I followed him back down and through the kitchen. As we were crossing the living room I heard voices out on the porch.
   “So Selfridge, that lightweight, pukes,” Rex Reese was saying. “Doesn’t even make it to the bathroom. Pukes right on the bar.”
   “I can’t believe it! Selfridge!” It was the Object now, crying out with amusement.
   “He blew chunks. Right into his stinger. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the Niagara Falls of puke. Selfridge woofs on the bar and everybody jumps off their stools, right? Selfridge is facedown in his own puke. For a minute there’s total silence. Then this one girl starts gagging … and it’s like a chain reaction. The whole place starts gagging, puke’s dripping everywhere, and the bartender is—pissed. He’s huge, too. He’s fucking huge. He comes over and looks down at Selfridge. I’m going like I don’t know this guy. Never saw him before. And then guess what?”
   “What?”
   “The bartender reaches out and grabs hold of Selfridge. He’s got him by the collar and the belt, right? And he lifts Selfridge like a foot up in the air—and Zambonis the bar with him!”
   “No way!”
   “I’m not kidding. Zambonied the Fridge right in his own barf!”
   At that point we stepped out onto the porch. The Object and Rex Reese were sitting together on a white wicker couch. It was dark out, coolish, but the Object was still in her swimsuit, a shamrock bikini. She had a beach towel wrapped around her legs.
   “Hi,” I called out.
   The Object turned. She looked at me blankly. “Hey,” she said.
   “She’s here,” said Jerome. “Safe and sound. Dad didn’t run off the road.”
   “Daddy’s not that bad a driver,” said the Object.
   “When he’s not drinking he’s not. But tonight I’d wager he had the old martini thermos on the front seat.”
   “Your old man likes to party!” Rex called out hoarsely.
   “Did my dad have occasion to quench his thirst on the drive up?” Jerome asked.
   “More than one occasion,” I said.
   Now Jerome laughed, going loose in the body and slapping his hands together.
   Meanwhile Rex was saying to the Object, “Okay. She’s here. So let’s party.”
   “Where should we go?” the Object said.
   “Hey, Jeroman, didn’t you say there was some old hunting lodge out in the woods?”
   “Yeah. It’s about half a mile in.”
   “Think you could find it in the dark?”
   “With a flashlight maybe.”
   “Let’s go.” Rex stood up. “Let’s take some beers and hike on in there.”
   The Object got up, too. “Let me put on some pants.” She crossed the porch in her swimsuit. Rex watched. “Come on, Callie,” she said. “You’re staying in my room.”
   I followed the Object inside. She went quickly, almost running, and didn’t look back at me. As she climbed the stairs ahead of me, I whacked her from behind.
   “I hate you,” I said.
   “What?”
   “You’re so tan!”
   She flashed a smile over her shoulder.
   As the Object dressed, I snooped around the bedroom. The furniture was white wicker up here, too. There were amateur sailing prints on the walls and on the shelves Petoskey stones, pinecones, musty paperbacks.
   “What are we going to do in the woods?” I said, with a note of complaint.
   The Object didn’t answer.
   “What are we going to do in the woods?” I repeated.
   “We’re going for a walk,” she said.
   “You just want Rex to molest you.”
   “You have such a dirty mind, Callie.”
   “Don’t deny it.”
   She turned around and smiled. “I know who wants to molest you,” she said.
   For a second, an irrepressible happiness flooded me.
   “Jerome,” she finished.
   “I don’t want to go out in the woods,” I said. “There’s bugs and stuff.”
   “Don’t be a such a wuss,” she said. I had never heard her say “wuss” before. It was a word boys used; boys like Rex. Finished dressing, the Object stood before the mirror, picking at some dry skin on her cheek. She ran a brush through her hair and put on lip gloss. Then she came over to me. She came up very close. She opened her mouth and blew her breath into my face.
   “It’s fine,” I said, and moved away.
   “Don’t you want me to check yours?”
   “No biggie,” I said.
   I decided that if the Object was going to ignore me and flirt with Rex, I would ignore her and flirt with Jerome. After she left, I combed my hair. From the collection of atomizers on the dresser, I chose one and squeezed the bulb, but no perfume came out. I went into the bathroom and undid the straps of my overalls. Lifting my shirt, I stuffed a few tissues in my brassiere. Then I shook my hair back, hitched up my overalls, and hurried outside for our walk in the woods.
   They were waiting for me under a yellow bug light on the porch. Jerome held a silver flashlight. Slung over Rex’s shoulder was an army surplus backpack, filled with Stroh’s. We came down the steps onto the lawn. The ground was uneven, treacherous with roots, but the pine needles were soft underfoot. For a moment, despite my foul mood, I felt it: the crisp northern Michigan delight. A slight chill to the air, even in August, something almost Russian. The indigo sky above the black bay. The smell of cedar and pine.
   At the edge of the woods the Object stopped. “Is it going to be wet?” she said. “I only have my Tretorns on.”
   “Come on,” said Rex Reese, pulling her by the hand. “Get wet.”
   She screamed, theatrically. Leaning back like someone on a rope tow, she was pulled unsteadily into the trees. I paused, too, peering in, waiting for Jerome to do the same. He didn’t, though. Instead he stepped straight into the swamp and then slowly melted below the knees. “Quicksand!” he cried. “Help me! I’m sinking! Please somebody help … glub glub glub glub glub.” Up ahead, already invisible, Rex and the Object were laughing.
   The cedar swamp was an ancient place. No logging had ever been done here. The ground wasn’t suitable for houses. The trees had been alive for hundreds of years and when they fell over they fell over for good. Here in the cedar swamp verticality wasn’t an essential property of trees. Many cedars were standing straight up but many were leaning over. Still others had fallen against nearby trees, or crashed to the ground, popping up root systems. There was a graveyard feeling: everywhere the gray skeletons of trees. The moonlight filtering in lit up silver puddles and sprays of cobweb. It glanced off the Object’s red hair as she moved and darted ahead of me.
   We made a clumsy, yahoo progress through the swamp. Rex imitated animal sounds that sounded like no animal. Beer cans dinged in his backpack. Our deracinated feet stomped along in the mud.
   After twenty minutes we found it: a one-room shack made of unpainted boards. The roof wasn’t much taller than I was. The circular flashlight beam showed tar paper covering the narrow door.
   “It’s locked. Fuck,” said Rex.
   “Let’s try the window,” Jerome suggested. They disappeared, leaving the Object and me alone. I looked at her. For the first time since I’d arrived she really looked at me. There was just enough moonlight to accomplish this silent exchange between our eyes.
   “It’s dark out here,” I said.
   “I know it,” said the Object.
   There was a crash behind the shack, followed by laughter. The Object took a step closer to me. “What are they doing in there?”
   “I don’t know.”
   Suddenly the small window of the shack lit up. The boys had lit a Coleman lantern inside. Next the front door opened and Rex stepped out. He was smiling like a salesman. “Got a guy here wants to meet you.” At which point he held up a mousetrap dangling the jellied mouse.
   The Object screamed. “Rex!” She jumped back and held on to me. “Take it away!”
   Rex dangled it some more, laughing, and then tossed it into the woods. “Okay, okay. Don’t have a shit fit.” He went back inside.
   The Object was still clinging to me.
   “Maybe we should go back,” I ventured.
   “Do you think you know the way? I’m totally lost.”
   “I can find it.”
   She turned and looked into the black woods. She was thinking about it. But then Rex reappeared in the doorway. “Come on in,” he said. “Check it out.”
   And now it was too late. The Object let go of me. Throwing the red scarf of her hair over her shoulder, she ducked through the low threshold into the hunting shack.
   Inside were two cots with Hudson’s Bay blankets. They stood at either end of the small space separated by a crude kitchen with a camp stove. Empty bourbon bottles lined the windowsill. The walls were covered with yellowed clippings from the local paper, angling competitions, soap box derbies. There was also a taxidermied pike, jaws agape. Low on kerosene, the lantern sputtered. The light was butter-colored, the ripple of smoke greasing the air. It was opium den light, which was appropriate, because already Rex had plucked a joint from his pocket and was lighting it with a safety match.
   Rex was on one cot, Jerome on the other. Casually the Object sat down next to Rex. I stood in the middle of the floor, hunching. I could feel Jerome watching me. I pretended to examine the shack but then turned, expecting to meet his gaze. This didn’t happen, however. Jerome’s eyes were focused on my chest. On my falsies. He liked me already. Now here was an added attraction, like a bonus for good intentions.
   Maybe I should have been pleased by the trance he was in. But my revenge fantasy had already gone bust. My heart wasn’t in it. Still, having no alternative, I went ahead and sat beside Jerome. Across the shack Rex Reese had the joint in his mouth.
   Rex was wearing shorts and a monogrammed shirt, ripped at the shoulder, showing tanned skin. There was a red mark on his flamenco dancer’s neck: a bug bite, a fading hickey. He closed his eyes to inhale deeply, his long eyelashes coming together. The hair on his head was as thick and oiled as an otter’s pelt. Finally he opened his eyes and passed the joint to the Object.
   To my surprise she took it. As though it were one of her beloved Tareytons, she put it between her lips and inhaled.
   “Won’t that make you paranoid?” I said.
   “No.”
   “I thought you told me pot always makes you paranoid.”
   “Not when I’m out in nature,” said the Object. She gave me a hard look. Then she took another toke.
   “Don’t bogart it,” said Jerome. He got up to take the joint from her. He smoked half-standing, and then turned and held it out to me. I looked at the joint. One end burned; the other was mashed and wet. I had an idea that this was all part of the boys’ plan, the woods, the shack, the cots, the drugs, the sharing of saliva. Here’s a question I still can’t answer: Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?
   For one second I thought of Chapter Eleven. He was living in a shack in the woods like this. I asked myself if I missed my brother. I couldn’t tell if I did or not. I never know what I feel until it’s too late. Chapter Eleven had smoked his first joint at college. I was four years ahead of him.
   “Hold it in,” Rex coached me.
   “You have to let the THC build up in your bloodstream,” said Jerome.
   There was a sound out in the woods, twigs snapping. The Object grabbed Rex’s arm. “What was that?”
   “Maybe a bear,” Jerome said.
   “Neither of you girls are on the rag, I hope,” said Rex.
   “Rex!” the Object protested.
   “Hey, I’m serious. Bears can smell it. I was out camping in Yellowstone one time and there was this woman out there who got killed. Grizzly could smell the blood.”
   “That is not true!”
   “I swear. This guy I know told me. He was an Outward Bound guide.”
   “Well, I don’t know about Callie, but I’m not,” said the Object.
   They all looked at me. “I’m not either,” I said.
   “I guess we’re safe, then, Roman,” said Rex, and laughed.
   The Object was still holding on to him for protection. “You want to do a shotgun?” he asked her.
   “What’s that?”
   “Here.” He turned to face her. “What you do is one person opens their mouth and the other person blows the smoke into it. You get totally fucked up. It’s excellent.”
   Rex put the lit end of the joint in his mouth. He leaned toward the Object. She leaned forward too. She opened her mouth. And Rex began to blow. The Obscure Object’s lips were a perfect ripe oval and into that target, that bull’s-eye, Rex Reese directed the stream of musky smoke. I could see the column rush into the Object’s mouth. It disappeared down her throat like whitewater over falls. Finally she coughed and he stopped.
   “Good hit. Now do me.”
   The Object’s green eyes were watering. But she took the joint and inserted it between her lips. She leaned toward Rex Reese, who opened his own mouth wide.
   When they were finished, Jerome took the joint from his sister. “Let me see if I can master the technical difficulties here,” he said. The next thing I knew, his face was close to mine. So finally I did it, too. Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke.
   Smoke filled my lungs, which began to burn. I coughed and let it out. When I opened my eyes again, Rex had his arm around the Object’s shoulder. She was trying to act casual about it. Rex finished his beer. He opened two more, one for him and one for her. He turned toward the Object. He smiled. He said something I couldn’t hear. And then while I was still blinking he covered the Object’s lips with his sour, handsome, pot-smoking mouth.
   Across the flickering shack Jerome and I were left pretending not to notice. The joint was ours now to bogart as we wished. We passed it back and forth in silence and sipped our beers.
   “I’m having this weird thing where my feet look extremely far away,” Jerome said after a while. “Do your feet look extremely far away to you?”
   “I can’t see my feet,” I said. “It’s dark in here.”
   He passed me the joint again and I took it. I inhaled and held the smoke in. I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart. Rex and the Object were still kissing. I looked away, out the dark, grimy window.
   “Everything looks really blue,” I said. “Did you notice that?”
   “Oh yeah,” said Jerome. “All kinds of strange epiphenomena.”
   The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age. All day long she sat over a hole in the ground, the omphalos, the navel of the earth, breathing petrochemical fumes escaping from underneath. A teenage virgin, the Oracle told the future, speaking the first metered verse in history. Why do I bring this up? Because Calliope was also a virgin that night (for a little while longer at least). And she, too, had been inhaling hallucinogens. Ethylene was escaping from the cedar swamp outside the shack. Dressed not in a diaphanous robe but a pair of overalls, Calliope began to feel very funny indeed.
   “Want another beer?” Jerome asked.
   “Okay.”
   He handed me a golden can of Stroh’s. I put the sweating can to my lips and drank. Then I drank some more. Jerome and I both felt the weight of the obligation. We smiled at each other nervously. I looked down and rubbed my knee through my overalls. And when I looked up again Jerome’s face was close. His eyes were shut, like the eyes of a boy jumping feet first off the high dive. Before I knew what was happening he was kissing me. Kissing the girl who had never been kissed. (Not since Clementine Stark, anyway.) I didn’t stop him. I remained completely still while he did his thing. Despite my lightheadedness, I could feel everything. The shocking wetness of his mouth. The whiskery feel of his lips. His barging tongue. Certain flavors, too, the beer, the dope, a lingering breath mint, and beneath all that the actual, animal taste of a boy’s mouth. I could taste the gamy tang of Jerome’s hormones and the metal of his fillings. I opened one eye. Here was the fine hair I’d spent so much time admiring on another head. Here were the freckles on the forehead, on the bridge of the nose, along the ears. But it wasn’t the right face; they weren’t the right freckles, and the hair was dyed black. Behind my impassive face my soul curled up into a ball, waiting until the unpleasantness was over.
   Jerome and I were still sitting up. He was pressing his face against mine. By maneuvering a little, I could see across the room to where Rex and the Object were. They were lying down now. The tails of Rex’s blue shirt seemed to flap in the wavering light. Beneath him one of the Object’s legs dangled off the bed, the cuff of her pants muddy. I heard them whispering and laughing, then silence again. I watched the Object’s mud-stained leg dancing. I concentrated on that leg, so that I hardly noticed when Jerome began to pull me down on our cot. I let him; I gave in to our slow collapse, all the while watching Rex Reese and the Object out of one eye. Rex’s hands were moving over the Object’s body now. They were pulling up her shirt, moving under it. Then their bodies shifted so that I saw their faces in profile. The Object’s face, as still as a death mask, waited with eyes closed. Rex’s profile was rampant, flushed. Meanwhile Jerome’s hands were moving over me. He was rubbing my overalls, but I was no longer in them exactly. My focus on the Object was too intense.
   Ecstasy. From the Greek Ekstasis. Meaning not what you think. Meaning not euphoria or sexual climax or even happiness. Meaning, literally: a state of displacement, of being driven out of one’s senses. Three thousand years ago in Delphi the Oracle became ecstatic every single working hour. That night in a hunting cabin in northern Michigan, so did Calliope. High for my first time, drunk for my first time, I felt myself dissolving, turning to vapor. Like the incense at church my soul rose toward the dome of my skull—and then broke through. I drifted over the plank floor. I floated above the little camp stove. Passing by the bourbon bottles, I hovered over the other cot, looking down at the Object. And then, because I suddenly knew that I could, I slipped into the body of Rex Reese. I entered him like a god so that it was me, and not Rex, who kissed her.
   An owl hooted in a tree somewhere. Bugs assailed the windows, attracted by the light. In my Delphic state I was simultaneously aware of both make-out sessions. By way of Rex’s body I was hugging the Obscure Object, nuzzling her ear … while at the same time I was also aware of Jerome’s hands ranging over my body, the one I’d left on the other cot. He was on top of me, crushing one of my legs, so I moved it, spread my legs apart, and he fell between them. He made little sounds. I put my arms around him, appalled and moved by his thinness. He was even skinnier than I was. Now Jerome was kissing my neck. Now, advised by some magazine column, he was paying attention to my earlobe. His hands moved up. They were heading for my chest. “Don’t,” I said, scared he’d find my tissues. And Jerome obeyed…
   …while on the other cot Rex was meeting with no such resistance. With consummate skill he had undone the Object’s brassiere with one hand. Because he was more experienced than me I let him deal with the shirt buttons, but it was my hands that took hold of her bra and, as if snapping up a windowshade, let into the room the pale light of the Object’s breasts. I saw them; I touched them; and since it wasn’t me who did this but Rex Reese I didn’t have to feel guilty, didn’t have to ask myself if I was having unnatural desires. How could I be when I was on the other cot fooling around with Jerome? … and so, just to be safe, I returned my attention to him. He was now in some kind of agony. He was rubbing against me and then he stopped and reached down to adjust himself. There was the sound of a zipper. I peeked at him through the corner of my eyes. I saw him thinking, concentrating on the puzzle of the overalls.
   He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so once again I floated back across the room and entered the body of Rex Reese. For a minute I could feel the Object responding to my touch, the startled, eager wakefulness in her skin and muscles. And now I felt something else, Rex, or me, lengthening, expanding. I felt that for only a second and then something was pulling me back…
   Jerome had his hand on my bare stomach. While I’d been off inhabiting Rex’s body Jerome had taken the opportunity to undo my shoulder straps. He had flicked open the silver buttons at my waist. Now he was pulling down my overalls and I was trying to wake up. Now he was tugging on my underpants and I was realizing how drunk I was. Now he was inside my underpants and now he was … inside me!
   And then: pain. Pain like a knife, pain like fire. It ripped into me. It spread up my belly all the way to my nipples. I gasped; I opened my eyes; I looked up and saw Jerome looking down at me. We gaped at each other and I knew he knew. Jerome knew what I was, as suddenly I did, too, for the first time clearly understood that I wasn’t a girl but something in between. I knew this from how natural it had felt to enter Rex Reese’s body, how right it felt, and I knew this from the shocked expression on Jerome’s face. All this was conveyed in an instant. Then I pushed Jerome away. He pulled back, pulled out, and slid off the bed onto the floor.
   Silence. Only the two of us, catching our breath. I lay on my back on the camp bed. Beneath the newspaper clippings. With only a mounted pike as witness. I pulled up my overalls and felt very sober indeed.
   It was all over now. There was nothing I could do. Jerome would tell Rex. Rex would tell the Object. She would stop being my friend. By the time school started, everyone at Baker & Inglis would know that Calliope Stephanides was a freak. I was waiting for Jerome to jump up and run. I felt panicked and, at the same time, strangely calm. I was putting things together in my head. Clementine Stark and kissing lessons; and spinning together in a hot tub; an amphibian heart and a crocus blooming; blood and breasts that didn’t come; and a crush on the Object that did, that had, that looked as if it was here to stay.
   A few moments of clarity and then panic again whined in my ears. I wanted to run myself. Before Jerome had a chance to say anything. Before anyone found out. I could leave tonight. I could find my way back through the cedar swamp to the house. I could steal the Object’s parents’ car. I could drive north, through the Upper Peninsula to Canada, where Chapter Eleven had once thought of going to escape the draft. As I contemplated my life on the run I peeked over the edge of the cot to see what Jerome was doing.
   He was flat on his back, eyes closed. And he was smiling to himself.
   Smiling? Smiling how? In ridicule? No. In shock? Wrong again. How then? In contentment. Jerome had the smile of a boy who, on a summer night, had gone all the way. He had the smile of a guy who couldn’t wait to tell his friends.
   Reader, believe this if you can: he hadn’t noticed a thing.

The Gun on the Wall

   Iwoke up back at the house. I had a vague memory of how I got there, of trudging back through the bog. My overalls were still on. My crotch felt hot and spongy. The Object was already out of bed or had slept somewhere else. I reached down and unstuck my underpants from my skin. Something about this act, the little puff of air, the rising aroma, reiterated the brand-new fact about myself. But it wasn’t a fact exactly. It was nothing as solid as a fact right then. It was just an intuition I’d had about myself, to which the coming of morning brought no clarity. It was just an idea that was already beginning to fade, to become part of the drunkenness in the woods of the night before.
   When the Oracle awoke after one of her wild, prophesying nights, she probably had no memory of the things she’d said. Whatever truths she’d hit on were secondary to the immediate sensations: the headache, the singed throat. It was the same for Calliope. I had a sense of having been dirtied and initiated. I felt all grown up. But mostly I felt sick and didn’t want to think about what had happened at all.
   In the shower I tried to rinse the experience away, scrubbing methodically, lifting my face to the slanting water. Steam filled the air. The mirrors and the windows dripped. The towels grew damp. I used every kind of soap within reach, Lifebuoy, Ivory, plus a local, rustic brand that felt like sandpaper. I got dressed and came down the stairs quietly. As I crossed the living room I noticed an old hunting rifle over the mantel. Another gun on the wall. I tiptoed by it. In the kitchen, the Object was eating cereal and reading a magazine. She didn’t look up when I entered. I got a bowl myself and sat down across from her. Maybe I grimaced in doing so.
   “What’s the matter?” sneered the Object. “Sore?” Her sarcastic face rested on one palm. She didn’t look so hot herself. She was puffy under the eyes. There were times when her freckles were not sunny but like corrosion or rust.
   “You’re the one that should be sore,” I replied.
   “I’m not sore at all,” said the Object, “if you want to know.”
   “I forgot,” I said; “you’re used to it.”
   Suddenly her face was full of anger, shaking. Cords stretched and pulled beneath her skin, making lines. “You were a total slut last night,” she charged.
   “Me? What about you? You were throwing yourself at Rex the whole time.”
   “I was not. We didn’t even do that much.”
   “You could have fooled me.”
   “At least he’s not your brother.” She got to her feet, glaring. She looked like she might cry. She hadn’t wiped her mouth. There was jam on it, crumbs. I was struck dumb by the sight of this beloved face working itself up into what looked like hatred. My own face must have been reacting, too. I could feel my eyes going wide and scared. The Object was waiting for me to say something but nothing came to mind. So finally she shoved her chair away and said, “Jerome’s upstairs. Why don’t you go climb in bed with him.” And she stormed off.
   A low moment followed. Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart. On top of panic that I’d lost my friend, I was suddenly beset by worries about my reputation. Was I really a slut? I hadn’t even liked it. But I had done it, hadn’t I? I had let him do it. Fear of retribution came next. What if I got pregnant? What then? My face at the breakfast table was the face of all mathematical girls, counting days, measuring liquids. It was at least a minute before I remembered that I couldn’t be pregnant. That was one good thing about being a late bloomer. Still, I was upset. I was certain that the Object would never talk to me again.
   I climbed the stairs and got back into bed, pulling a pillow over my face to block out the summer light. But there was no hiding from reality that morning. No more than five minutes later the bedsprings sagged under new weight. Peeking out, I saw that Jerome had come to visit.
   He was lying on his back, looking cozy, already installed. Instead of a robe he had on a duck hunting coat. The ends of his frayed boxer shorts were visible below. He had a mug of coffee in one hand and I noticed that his fingernails were painted black. The morning light coming from the side window showed stubble on his chin and above his upper lip. Against the flat, wasted, dyed hair these orange shoots were like life returning to a scorched landscape.
   “Good morning, dahling,” he said.
   “Hi.”
   “Feeling a little under the weather, are we?”
   “Yeah,” I said. “I was pretty drunk last night.”
   “You didn’t seem that drunk to me, dahling.”
   “Well, I was.”
   Jerome now dropped the bit. He flopped back into the pillows and sipped his coffee and sighed. With one finger he tapped his forehead for a while. Then he spoke. “Just in case you were having any of the hackneyed worries, you should know that I still respect you and all that shit.”
   I didn’t respond. Responding would only confirm the facts of what had happened, whereas I wanted to cast them in doubt. After a while Jerome set the coffee mug down and turned onto his side. He wriggled over toward me and rested his head against my shoulder. He lay there breathing. Then, with closed eyes, he moved his head and tunneled under the pillow with me. He started to nuzzle me. He brought his hair across the skin of my neck and after that came the sensitive organs. His eyelashes made butterfly kisses on my chin. His nose snuffled in the hollow of my throat. And then his lips arrived, avid, clumsy. I wanted him off me. At the same time I asked myself if I had brushed my teeth. Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
   For a minute it was tolerable. But soon the duck coat rode up and Jerome’s urgency was pressing itself upon me. He was trying to reach up under my shirt again. I didn’t have a bra on. After my shower I had gone without it, flushing away the Kleenex. I was done with them. Jerome’s hands moved higher. I didn’t care. I let him feel me up. For what it was worth. But if I was hoping to disappoint him, it didn’t work. He stroked and squeezed while his lower half swished like a crocodile’s tail. And then he said an unironic thing. Fervently he whispered, “I’m really into you.”
   His lips closed, seeking mine. His tongue entered. The first penetration that augured the next. But not now, not this time.
   “Stop,” I said.
   “What?”
   “Stop.”
   “Why stop?”
   “Because.”
   “Because why?”
   “Because I don’t like you like that.”
   He sat up. Like the guy in the old vaudeville skit, the guy in the folding cot that won’t stay folded, Jerome flipped straight up, wide awake. Then he jumped off the bed.
   “Don’t be mad at me,” I said.
   “Who says I’m mad?” said Jerome, and left.
   The rest of the day went slowly. I stayed in my room until I saw Jerome leave the house, carrying his movie camera. I guessed that I was no longer in the cast. The Object’s parents returned from their morning tennis foursome. Mrs. Object came up the stairs to the master bathroom. From my window I saw Mr. Object climb into the backyard hammock with a book. I waited for the shower to turn on and then came down the back stairs and out the kitchen door. I walked down to the bay, feeling melancholy.
   The cedar swamp lay on one side of the house. On the other was a dirt and gravel road that led through an open field, treeless, with high yellow grass. The absence of trees was noticeable, and poking around out there I came upon a historical marker, nearly overgrown. It marked the site of a fort or a massacre, I don’t remember which. Moss encroached upon the raised letters and I didn’t read the whole plaque. I stood there for a while thinking about the first settlers and how they had killed one another over beaver and fox pelts. I put my foot on the plaque, kicking off the moss with my sneaker, until I got tired of that. It was almost noon by now. The bay was bright blue. Over the rise I could sense the city of Petoskey, the smoke of stoves and chimneys down there. The grass got marshy near the water. I climbed up on the breakwall and walked back and forth, keeping my balance. I held my arms out and pranced, Olga Korbut style. But my heart wasn’t in it. And I was way too tall to be Olga Korbut. Sometime later the whir of an outboard engine reached me. I shaded my eyes with my hand to look out over the shimmering water. A speedboat was shooting past. At the wheel was Rex Reese. Bare-chested, drinking a beer and wearing sunglasses, he gunned the throttle, towing a water-skier. It was the Object, of course, in her shamrock bikini. She looked almost naked against the expanse of water, only those two little strips, one above, one below, separating her from Eden. Her red hair flapped like a gale warning. She wasn’t a beautiful skier. She leaned too far forward, bowlegged on the pontoons. But she didn’t fall. Rex kept turning around to check on her while he sipped his beer. Finally the boat made a sharp turn and the Object crossed her wake, whipping along past the shore.
   A terrible thing happens when you water-ski. After you release the rope, you keep skimming over the water for a while, free. But there comes an inevitable moment when your speed fails to sustain your forward progress. The surface of the water breaks like glass. The depths open up to claim you. That was how I felt on land, watching the Object ski past. That same plunging, hopeless feeling, that emotional physics.
   When I got back at dinnertime the Object was still not there. Her mother was angry, thinking it rude of the Object to leave me alone. Jerome, too, was out with friends. So I ate dinner with the Object’s parents. I felt too desolate to charm the grownups that night. I ate in silence and afterward sat in the living room pretending to read. The clock ticked on. The night labored and creaked. When I felt I might fall apart I went into the bathroom and threw water on my face. I held a warm washcloth over my eyes and pressed my hands against my temples. I wondered what the Object and Rex were doing. I pictured her socks in the air, her little tennis socks with the balls at the heels, those ensanguined balls, bouncing.
   It was obvious that Mr. and Mrs. Object were staying up just to keep me company. So finally I said good night and went up to bed myself. I got in and immediately started crying. I cried for a long time, trying not to make any noise. While I sobbed I said things in an aggrieved whisper. I cried, “Why don’t you like me?” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I didn’t care what I sounded like. There was a poison in my system and I needed to purge it. While I was carrying on like that, I heard the screen door bang shut downstairs. I wiped my nose on the sheets and tried to settle down and listen. Footsteps climbed the stairs, and in another moment the door of the bedroom opened and closed. The Object entered and stood there in darkness. She might have been waiting for her eyes to adjust. I lay on my side, pretending to be asleep. The floorboards creaked as she came over to my side of the bed. I felt her standing over me, looking down. Then she went to the other side of the bed, took off her shoes and shorts, put on a T-shirt, and got in.
   The Object slept on her back. She told me once that back-sleepers were the leaders in life, born performers or exhibitionists. Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This theory applied in our case. I lay prone, my nose and eyes sore from crying. The Object, supine, yawned and (like a born performer, perhaps) soon fell asleep.
   I waited ten or so minutes, just to be safe. Then, as though tossing in my sleep, I rolled over so that I was looking at the Object. The moon was gibbous and filled the room with blue light. There upon the wicker bed the Obscure Object slept. The top of her Groton T-shirt was visible. It was an old one of her father’s, with a few holes. She had one arm crossed over her face, like a slash on a sign that meant “No Touching.” So I looked instead. Over the pillow her hair was spread out. Her lips were parted. Something glinted inside her ear, grains of sand from the beach maybe. Beyond, the atomizers glowed on the dresser. The ceiling was up above somewhere. I could feel the spiders working in the corners. The sheets were cool. The fat duvet rolled up at our feet was leaking feathers. I’d grown up around the smell of new carpeting, of polyester shirts hot from the dryer. Here the Egyptian sheets smelled like hedges, the pillows like water fowl. Thirteen inches away, the Object was part of all this. Her colors seemed to agree with the American landscape, her pumpkin hair, her apple cider skin. She made a sound and went still again.
   Gently, I pulled the covers off her. In the dimness her outline appeared, the rise of her breasts beneath the T-shirt, the soft hill of her belly, and then the brightness of her underpants, converging in their V shape. She didn’t stir at all. Her chest rose and fell with her breath. Slowly, trying not to make a sound, I moved closer to her. Tiny muscles in my flank, muscles I hadn’t known I possessed, suddenly made themselves available. They propelled me millimeter by millimeter across the sheets. The old bedsprings gave me trouble. As I tried nonchalantly to advance, they called out ribald encouragement. They cheered, they sang. I kept stopping and starting. It was hard work. I breathed through my mouth, quieter that way.
   Over the course of ten minutes I slid nearer and nearer to her. Finally I felt the heat of her body along my entire length. We were still not touching, only radiating against each other. She was breathing deeply. So was I. We breathed together. Finally, gathering courage, I flung my arm across her waist.
   Then nothing more for a long while. Having achieved this much, I was scared to go further. So I remained frozen, half hugging her. My arm grew stiff. It began to throb and finally went numb. The Object might have been drugged or comatose. Still, I sensed an alertness in her skin, in her muscles. After another long while I plunged ahead. I took hold of her T-shirt and lifted it up. I gazed at her naked belly for a long while and, finally, with a kind of woefulness, bowed my head. I bowed my head to the god of desperate longing. I kissed the Object’s belly and then slowly, gathering confidence, worked my way up.
   Do you remember my frog heart? In Clementine Stark’s bedroom it had kicked off from a muddy bank, moving between two elements. Now it did something even more amazing—it crept up onto land. Squeezing millennia into thirty seconds, it developed consciousness. While kissing the Object’s belly, I wasn’t just reacting to pleasurable stimuli, as I had been with Clementine. I didn’t vacate my body, as I had with Jerome. Now I was aware of what was happening. I was thinking about it.
   I was thinking that this was what I’d always wanted. I was realizing that I wasn’t the only faker around. I was wondering what would happen if someone discovered what we were doing. I was thinking that it was all very complicated and would only get more so.
   I reached down and touched her hips. I hooked my fingers in the waistband of her underpants. I began to slip them off. Just then, the Object lifted her hips, very slightly, to make it easier for me. This was her only contribution.
   The next day we didn’t mention it. When I got up, the Object was already out of bed. She was in the kitchen, observing her father’s preparation of scrapple. Making scrapple was Mr. Object’s Sunday morning ritual. He presided over the bubbling fat and grease while the Object periodically looked into the frying pan and said, “That is so disgusting.” Soon she was working on a plate of it, and made me have one, too. “I’m going to have the worst heartburn,” she said.
   I understood the unspoken message immediately. The Object wanted no dramatics, no guilt. No show of romance, either. She was going on about the scrapple to separate night from day, to make it clear that what happened at night, what we did at night, had nothing to do with daylight hours. She was a good actress, too, and at times I wondered if maybe she really had been sleeping through the whole thing. Or maybe I had only been dreaming it.
   She gave only two signs during the day that anything had changed between us. In the afternoon Jerome’s film crew arrived. This consisted of two friends of his, carrying boxes and cables and a long, fuzzy microphone like a dirty, rolled-up bathmat. Jerome was by this time pointedly not speaking to me. They set up in a small equipment shed on the property. The Object and I decided to see what they were doing. Jerome had told us to stay away, so we couldn’t resist. We crept up, moving from tree to tree. We had to stop often to fight off laugh attacks, slapping at each other, avoiding each other’s eyes until we could control ourselves. At the back window of the equipment shed we peeked in. Not much was happening. One of Jerome’s friends was taping a light to the wall. It was hard for us both to see through the small window at once, so the Object got in front of me. She placed my hands on her belly and held my wrists. Still, her attention was officially given over to what was going on inside the shed.
   Jerome appeared, dressed as the preppy vampire. Inside the traditional Dracula waistcoat, he wore a pink Lacoste shirt. Instead of a bow tie he had an ascot. His black hair was slicked back, his face whitened with a cosmetic, and he carried a cocktail shaker. One of his friends held a broomstick dangling a rubber bat. Another operated the camera. “Action,” said Jerome. He lifted the cocktail shaker. He shook it with both hands. Meanwhile the bat swooped and fluttered above his head. Jerome removed the lid and poured the blood into the martini glasses. He held one up for his friend the bat, who promptly plopped into it. Jerome sipped his blood cocktail. “Just how you like it, Muffie,” he said to the bat. “ Very dry.”
   Under my hands the Object’s stomach jiggled as she laughed. She leaned back into me and her flesh captured in my arms shook and yielded. I pressed my pelvis against her. All this went on secretly behind the shed, like a game of footsie. But then the cameraman lowered his camera. He pointed at us and Jerome turned around. His eyes fixed on my hands and then rose to my eyes. He bared his fangs, burning me with a look. And then shouted in his regular voice, “Get the hell out of here, you fuckers! We’re shooting.” He came up to the window and struck it, but we were already running away.
   Later, around evening, the phone rang. The Object’s mother answered it. “It’s Rex,” she said. The Object got up from the sofa where we were playing backgammon. I restacked my chips to have something to do. I tidied them up, over and over, while the Object talked to Rex. She had her back to me. She moved around as she talked, playing with the cord. I kept looking down at the chips, moving them. Meanwhile I paid close attention to the conversation. “Nothing much, just playing backgammon … with Callie … He’s making his stupid film … I can’t, we’re supposed to have dinner soon … I don’t know, maybe later … I’m sort of tired, actually.” Suddenly she wheeled around to face me. With effort I looked up. The Object pointed at the phone and then, opening her mouth wide, stuck her finger down her throat. My heart brimmed.
   Night came again. In bed we went through the preliminaries, plumping our pillows, yawning. We tossed around to get comfortable. And then after an appropriate time of silence the Object made a noise. It was a murmur, a cry caught in the throat, as if she were talking in her sleep. After this, her breathing became deeper. And taking this as the okay, Calliope began the long trek across the bed.
   So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. There were reasons on my side for this as well. Whatever it was that I was was best revealed slowly, in flattering light. Which meant not much light at all. Besides, that’s the way it goes in adolescence. You try things out in the dark. You get drunk or stoned and extemporize. Think back to your backseats, your pup tents, your beach bonfire parties. Did you ever find yourself, without admitting it, tangled up with your best friend? Or in a dorm room bed with two people instead of one, while Bach played on the chintzy stereo, orchestrating the fugue? It’s a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. Before the routine sets in, or the love. Back when the groping is largely anonymous. Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It’s all about learning to share. It’s about sharing your toys.
   Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move to accommodate me, spreading her legs or throwing an arm around my back. She swam up to the surface of consciousness before diving again. Her eyelids fluttered. A responsiveness entered her body, a flex of abdomen in rhythm with mine, her head thrown back to offer up her throat. I waited for more. I wanted her to acknowledge what we were doing, but I was scared, too. So the sleek dolphin rose, leapt through the ring of my legs, and disappeared again, leaving me bobbing, trying to keep my balance. Everything was wet down there. From me or her I didn’t know. I laid my head on her chest beneath the bunched-up T-shirt. Her underarms smelled like overripe fruit. The hair there was very sparse. “You luck,” I would have said, back in our daytime life. “You don’t even have to shave.” But the nighttime Calliope only stroked the hair, or tasted it. One night, as I was doing this and other things, I noticed a shadow on the wall. I thought it was a moth. But, looking closer, I saw that it was the Object’s hand, raised behind my head. Her hand was completely awake. It clenched and unclenched, siphoning all the ecstasy from her body into its secret flowerings.
   What the Object and I did together was played out under these loose rules. We weren’t too scrupulous about the details. What pressed on our attention was that it was happening, sex was happening. That was the great fact. How it happened exactly, what went where, was secondary. Plus, we didn’t have much to compare it to. Nothing but our night in the shack with Rex and Jerome.
   As far as the crocus was concerned, it wasn’t so much a piece of me as something we discovered and enjoyed together. Dr. Luce will tell you that female monkeys exhibit mounting behavior when administered male hormones. They seize, they thrust. Not me. Or at least not at first. The blooming of the crocus was an impersonal phenomenon. It was a kind of hook that fastened us together, more a stimulant to the Object’s outer parts than a penetration of her inner. But, apparently, effective enough. Because after the first few nights, she was eager for it. Eager, that is, while ostensibly remaining unconscious. As I hugged her, as we languorously shifted and knotted, the Object’s attitudes of insensibility included favorable positioning. Nothing was made ready or caressed. Nothing was aimed. But practice brought about a fluid gymnastics to our sleep couplings. The Object’s eyes remained closed throughout; her head was often turned slightly away. She moved under me as a sleeping girl might while being ravished by an incubus. She was like somebody having a dirty dream, confusing her pillow for a lover.
   Sometimes, before or afterward, I switched on the bedside lamp. I pulled her T-shirt up as far as it would go and slid her underpants down below her knees. And then I lay there, letting my eyes have their fill. What else compares? Gold filings shifted around the magnet of her navel. Her ribs were as thin as candy canes. The spread of her hips, so different from mine, looked like a bowl offering up red fruit. And then there was my favorite spot, the place where her ribcage softened into breast, the smooth, white dune there.
   I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands, adjusting her legs around my waist. I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope.
   Through all this I made no lasting conclusions about myself. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s the way it works. The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison. In the past year the crocus had lengthened considerably. At its most demonstrative it was now about two inches long. Most of this length, however, was concealed by the flaps of skin from which it issued. Then there was the hair. In its quiet state, the crocus was barely noticeable. What I saw looking down at myself was only the dark triangular badge of puberty. When I touched the crocus it expanded, swelling until with a kind of pop it slid free of the pouch it was in. It poked its head up into the air. Not too far, though. No more than an inch past the tree line. What did this mean? I knew from personal experience that the Object had a crocus of her own. It swelled, too, when touched. Mine was just bigger, more effusive in its feelings. My crocus wore its heart on its sleeve.
   The crucial feature was this: the crocus didn’t have a hole at the tip. This was certainly not what a boy had. Put yourself in my shoes, reader, and ask yourself what conclusion you would have come to about your sex, if you had what I had, if you looked the way I looked. To pee I had to sit. The stream issued from underneath. I had an interior like a girl. It was tender inside, almost painful if I inserted my finger. True, my chest was completely flat. But there were other ironing boards at my school. And Tessie insisted I took after her in that department. Muscles? Not much to speak of. No hips either, no waist. A dinner plate of a girl. The low-Cal special.
   Why should I have thought I was anything other than a girl? Because I was attracted to a girl? That happened all the time. It was happening more than ever in 1974. It was becoming a national pastime. My ecstatic intuition about myself was now deeply suppressed. How long I would have managed to keep it down is anybody’s guess. But in the end it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we’re born.
   The following Thursday morning was hot. It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water. The Object was draggy in any kind of heat. She claimed her ankles swelled. All morning she’d been a trying companion, demanding, sullen. While I was dressing she’d come back from the bathroom to accuse me from the doorway, “What did you do with the shampoo?”
   “I didn’t do anything with it.”
   “I left it right on the windowsill. You’re the only other person who uses it.”
   I squeezed past her and went down the hall. “It’s right here in the tub,” I said.
   The Object took it from me. “I feel totally gross and sticky!” she said, by way of apology. Then she got into the shower while I brushed my teeth. After a minute her oval face appeared, the shower curtain snug around it. She looked bald and big-eyed like an alien. “Sorry I’m such a bitch today,” she said.
   I kept brushing, wanting her to suffer a little.
   The Object’s forehead wrinkled and her eyes grew soft in appeal. “Do you hate me?”
   “I’m still deciding.”
   “You’re so mean!” she said, comically frowning, and snapped the curtain shut.
   After breakfast, we were on the porch swing, drinking lemonade and gliding back and forth to create a breeze. I had my feet up on the railing, pushing off from it. The Object was lying sideways, her legs spread over my lap, her head resting against the arm of the swing. She had on cutoffs, short enough to reveal the white lining of the pockets, and her bikini top. I was wearing khaki shorts and a white alligator shirt.
   Out in front of us, the bay flashed silver. The bay had scales, like the fish beneath.
   “Sometimes I get really sick of having a body,” the Object said.
   “Me too.”
   “You too?”
   “Especially when it’s hot like this. It’s like torture just moving around.”
   “Plus I hate sweating.”
   “I can’t stand to sweat,” I said. “I’d rather pant like a dog.”
   The Object laughed. She was smiling at me, marveling. “You understand everything I say,” she said. She shook her head. “Why can’t you be a guy?”
   I shrugged, indicating that I had no answer. I was aware of no irony in this. Neither was the Object.
   She was looking at me, low-lidded. Her eyes in the brightness of day with heat currents rising over the baking grass looked very green, even if they were only slits, crescents. Her head was bent forward against the arm of the swing; she had to look up to see me. This gave her a vixenish attitude. Without taking her eyes off mine, she adjusted her legs, spreading them slightly.
   “You have the most amazing eyes,” she said.
   “Your eyes are really green. They almost look fake.”
   “They are fake.”
   “You’ve got glass eyes?”
   “Yeah, I’m blind. I’m Tiresias.”
   This was a new way to do it. We’d just discovered it. Staring into each other’s eyes was another way of keeping them closed, or off the details at hand, anyway. We locked onto each other. Meanwhile the Object was very subtly flexing her legs. I was aware of the mound beneath her cutoffs rising toward me, just a little, rising and suggesting itself. I put my hand on the Object’s thigh, palm down. And as we continued to swing, looking at each other while crickets played their fiddles in the grass, I slid my hand sideways up toward the place where the Object’s legs joined. My thumb went under her cutoffs. Her face showed no reaction. Her green eyes under the heavy lids remained fastened on mine. I felt the fluffiness of her underpants and pressed down, sliding under the elastic. And then with our eyes wide open but confined in that way my thumb slipped inside her. She blinked, her eyes closed, her hips rose higher, and I did it again. And again after that. The boats in the bay were part of it, and the string section of crickets in the baking grass, and the ice melting in our lemonade glasses. The swing moved back and forth, creaking on its rusted chain, and it was like that old nursery rhyme, Little Jack Horner sat in the corner eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum … After the first roll of her eyes the Object resettled her gaze on mine, and then what she was feeling showed only there, in the green depths her eyes revealed. Otherwise she was motionless. Only my hand moved, and my feet on the rail, pushing the swing. This went on for three minutes, or five, or fifteen. I have no idea. Time disappeared. Somehow we were still not quite conscious of what we were doing. Sensation dissolved straight into forgetting.
   When the floor of the porch creaked behind us, I jumped. I withdrew my thumb from the Object’s pants and sat up straight. I saw something in the corner of my eyes and turned. Perched on the railing to our right was Jerome. He was in his vampire costume, despite the heat. The powder on his face was burning off in spots but he still looked very pale. He was gazing down on us with his best haunted expression. His Turn of the Screw expression. The young master led astray by the gardener. The boy in the frock coat who’d drowned in the well. Everything was dead except the eyes. His eyes fixed on us—on the Object’s bare legs lying in my lap—while his face remained embalmed.
   Then the apparition spoke:
   “Carpet munchers.”
   “Just ignore him,” the Object said.
   “Carrrrpet muncherrrrs,” Jerome repeated. It came out in a croak.
   “Shut up!”
   Jerome remained still and ghoul-like on the rail. His hair wasn’t slicked back but fell limp on either side of his face. He was very controlled and intent about what he was doing, as if following a time-honored procedure. “Carpet muncher,” he said again. “Carpet muncher, carpet muncher.” Singular now. This was between him and his sister.
   “I said quit it, Jerome.” The Object now tried to rise. She swung her legs off my lap and started to roll out of the swing. But Jerome moved first. He spread his jacket like wings and jumped off the railing. He swooped down on the Object. Still his face was completely impassive. No muscles moved except those of his mouth. Into the Object’s face, into her ears he kept hissing and croaking. “Carpet muncher, carpet muncher, carpet muncher, carpet muncher.”
   “Stop it!”
   She tried to hit him but he caught her arms. He held both of her wrists in one hand. With his other hand Jerome made a V with his fingers. He pressed this V to his mouth and between this suggestive triangle flicked his tongue back and forth. At the crudity of this gesture the Object’s calm began to crack. A sob rose in her. Jerome sensed its arrival. He had reduced his sister to tears for over a decade; he knew how to do it; he was like a kid burning an ant with a magnifying glass, focusing the beam in hotter and hotter.
   “Carpet muncher, carpet muncher, carpet muncher …”
   And then it happened. The Object broke down. She began to bawl like a little girl. Her face turned red and she swung her fists wildly before finally running away into the house.
   At that point Jerome’s fierce activity ceased. He adjusted his jacket. He smoothed his hair and, leaning against the porch rail, stared peacefully out at the water.
   “Don’t worry,” he said to me. “I won’t tell anyone.”
   “Tell anyone what?”
   “You’re lucky I’m such a liberal and freethinking type of guy,” he continued. “Most guys wouldn’t be so happy to find out that they’d been two-timed by a lesbian with their own sister. It’s sort of embarrassing, don’t you think? But I’m such a freethinker that I’m willing to overlook your proclivities.”
   “Why don’t you shut up, Jerome?”
   “I’ll shut up when I want to,” he said. Then he turned his head and looked at me. “You know where you are now? Splitsville, Stephanides. Get out of here and don’t come back. And keep your hands off my sister.”
   I was already jumping up. My blood rocketed. It shot up my spine and rang a bell in my head, and I charged Jerome in a blaze of fury. He was bigger than me but unprepared. I hit him in the face. He tried to move away but I crashed into him, my momentum knocking him to the floor. I climbed on his chest, pinning his arms with my legs. Finally Jerome stopped resisting. He lay on his back and tried to look amused.
   “Any time you’re finished,” he said.
   It was an exhilarating feeling to be on top of him. Chapter Eleven had pinned me all my life. This was the first time I’d done it to somebody else, especially a boy older than me. My long hair was falling into Jerome’s face. I swept it back and forth, tormenting him. Then I remembered something else my brother used to do.
   “No,” Jerome cried. “Come on. Don’t!”
   I let it fall. Like a raindrop. Like a tear. But neither of those things. The spit plopped right between Jerome’s eyes. And then the earth opened up beneath us. With a roar Jerome rose up, sending me backward. My supremacy had been brief. Now it was time to run.
   I took off across the porch. I jumped down the steps and tore across the back lawn, barefoot. Jerome came after me in his Dracula getup. He stopped to fling off the coat and I increased the distance between us. Through the backyards of the neighboring houses I ran, ducking under pine branches. I dodged bushes and barbecues. The pine needles gave good traction under my feet. Finally I reached the open field beyond and fled into it. When I looked back Jerome was gaining on me.
   Through the high, yellow grass along the bayshore we flew. I jumped over the historical marker, grazing my foot, then hopped in pain and continued on. Jerome cleared it without a hitch. On the other side of the field was the road that led back to the house. If I could get over the rise, I could double back without Jerome seeing me. The Object and I could barricade ourselves in our room. I reached the hill and started up. Jerome came after me, scowling, still gaining.
   We were like runners in a frieze. In profile, with pumping thighs and knifing arms, we cut through the shin-whipping grass. By the time I reached the bottom of the hill Jerome seemed to be slowing down. He was waving his hand in defeat. He was waving it and shouting something I couldn’t hear…
   The tractor had just made a turn onto the road. High in his seat, the farmer didn’t see me. I was looking back to check on Jerome. When I finally turned forward it was too late. Right in front of me was the tractor tire. I hit it dead on. In the terracotta dust I was spun upward into the air. At the apex of my arc I saw the raised plow blades behind, the corkscrewing metal covered with mud, and then the race was over.
   I awoke later, in the backseat of a strange automobile. A rattletrap, with blankets covering the seats. A decal of a hooked, flapping trout was pasted to the rear window. The driver wore a red cap. The little space above the cap’s adjustable headband showed the buzzed hairline of his seamed neck.
   My head felt soft, as if covered in gauze. I was wrapped in an old blanket, stiff and spoked with hay. I turned my head and looked up and saw a beautiful sight. I saw the Object’s face from below. My head was in her lap. My right cheek was flush against the warm upholstery of her tummy. She was still in her bikini top and cutoffs. Her knees were spread and her red hair fell over me, darkening things. I gazed up through this maroon or oxblood space and saw what I could of her, the dark band of her swimsuit top, her clavicles set forward. She was chewing one cuticle. It was going to bleed if she kept it up. “Hurry,” she was saying, from the other side of the falling hair. “Hurry up, Mr. Burt.”
   It was the farmer who was driving. The farmer whose tractor I’d run into. I hoped he wasn’t listening. I didn’t want him to hurry. I wanted this ride to go on for as long as possible. The Object was stroking my head. She’d never done this in daylight before.
   “I beat up your brother,” I said out of the blue.
   With one hand the Object swept her hair away. The light knifed in.
   “Callie! Are you okay?”
   I smiled up at her. “I got him good.”
   “Oh God,” she said. “I was so scared. I thought you were dead. You were just ly—ly”—her voice broke—“ lying there in the road!”
   The tears came on, tears of gratitude now, not anger like before. The Object sobbed. With awe I beheld the storm of emotion racking her. She dipped her head. She pressed her snuffling, wet face against mine and, for the first and last time, we kissed. We were hidden by the backseat, by the wall of hair, and who was the farmer to tell anyway? The Object’s anguished lips met mine, and there was a sweet taste and a taste of salt.
   “I’m all snotty,” she said, lifting her face up again. She managed to laugh.
   But already the car was stopping. The farmer was jumping out, shouting things. He swung open the back door. Two orderlies appeared and lifted me onto a stretcher. They wheeled me across the sidewalk into the hospital doors. The Object remained at my side. She took my hand. For a moment she seemed to register her near nakedness. She looked down at herself when her bare feet hit the cold linoleum. But she shrugged this off. All the way down the hall, until the orderlies told her to stop, she held on to my hand. As though it were a string of Piraeus yarn. “You can’t come in, miss,” the orderlies said. “You have to wait here.” And so she did. But still she didn’t let go of my hand. Not for a while longer yet. The stretcher was wheeled down the corridor and my arm stretched out toward the Object. I had already left on my voyage. I was sailing across the sea to another country. Now my arm was twenty feet long, thirty, forty, fifty. I lifted my head from the stretcher to gaze at the Object. To gaze at the Obscure Object. For once more she was becoming a mystery to me. What ever happened to her? Where is she now? She stood at the end of the hall, holding my unraveling arm. She looked cold, skinny, out of place, lost. It was almost as if she knew we would never see each other again. The stretcher was picking up speed. My arm was only a thin ribbon now, curling through the air. Finally the inevitable moment came. The Object let go. My hand flew up, free, empty.
   Lights overhead, bright and round, as at my birth. The same squeaking of white shoes. But Dr. Philobosian was nowhere to be found. The doctor who smiled down at me was young and sandy-haired. He had a country accent. “I’m gonna ask you a few questions, okay?”
   “Okay.”
   “Start off with your name.”
   “Callie.”
   “How old are you, Callie?”
   “Fourteen.”
   “How many fingers am I holding out?”
   “Two.”
   “I want you to count backward for me. Start from ten.”
   “Ten, nine, eight …”
   And all the while, he was pressing me, feeling for breaks. “Does this hurt?”
   “No.”
   “This?”
   “Uh-uh.”
   “How about here?”
   Suddenly it did hurt. A bolt, a cobra bite, beneath my navel. The cry I let out was answer enough.
   “Okay, okay, we’re gonna go easy here. I just need to take a look. Lie still now.”
   The doctor signaled the intern with his eyes. From either side they began to undress me. The intern pulled my shirt over my head. There was my chest, green and bleak. They paid no notice. Neither did I. Meanwhile the doctor had unfastened my belt. He was undoing the clasp of my khakis: I let him. Down came the pants. I watched as if from far away. I was thinking about something else. I was remembering how the Object would lift her hips to help me get her underpants off. That little signal of compliance, of desire. I was thinking how much I loved it when she did that. Now the intern was reaching under me. And so I lifted my hips.
   They took hold of my underpants. They tugged them down. The elastic caught on my skin, then gave.
   The doctor bent closer, mumbling to himself. The intern, rather unprofessionally, raised one hand to her throat and then pretended to fix her collar.
   Chekhov was right. If there’s a gun on the wall, it’s got to go off. In real life, however, you never know where the gun is hanging. The gun my father kept under his pillow never fired a shot. The rifle over the Object’s mantel never did either. But in the emergency room things were different. There was no smoke, no gunpowder smell, absolutely no sound at all. Only the way the doctor and nurse reacted made it clear that my body had lived up to the narrative requirements.
   One scene remains to be described in this portion of my life. It took place a week later, back on Middlesex, and featured me, a suitcase, and a tree. I was in my bedroom, sitting on the window seat. It was just before noon. I was dressed in traveling clothes, a gray pantsuit with a white blouse. I was reaching out my window, picking berries off the mulberry tree that grew outside. For the last hour I’d been eating the berries to distract myself from the sound coming from my parents’ bedroom.
   The mulberries had ripened in the last week. They were fat and juicy. The berries stained my hands. Outside, the sidewalk was splotched purple, as was the grass itself, and the rocks in the flower beds. The sound in my parents’ bedroom was my mother weeping.
   I got up. I went over to the open suitcase and checked again to see if I’d packed everything. My parents and I were leaving in an hour. We were going to New York City to see a famous doctor. I didn’t know how long we’d be gone or what was wrong with me. I didn’t pay much attention to the details. I only knew I was no longer a girl like other girls.
   Orthodox monks smuggled silk out of China in the sixth century. They brought it to Asia Minor. From there it spread to Europe, and finally traveled across the sea to North America. Benjamin Franklin fostered the silk industry in Pennsylvania before the American Revolution. Mulberry trees were planted all over the United States. As I picked those berries out my bedroom window, however, I had no idea that our mulberry tree had anything to do with the silk trade, or that my grandmother had had trees just like it behind her house in Turkey. That mulberry tree had stood outside my bedroom on Middlesex, never divulging its significance to me. But now things are different. Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough. So I can’t possibly finish up this section of my life without mentioning the following fact:
   The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the Bombyx mori, no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: “The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults do not fly.”