Middlesex

  “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, 2 p.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 geniu
ses 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.