Middlesex

  I stared up at the ring light on the ceiling. Luce had another light on a stand, which he angled to suit his purposes. I could feel its heat between my legs as he pressed and prodded me.

  For the first few minutes I concentrated on the circular light, but finally, drawing in my chin, I looked down to see that Luce was holding the crocus between his thumb and forefinger. He was stretching it out with one hand while measuring it with the other. Then he let go of the ruler and made notes. He didn’t look shocked or appalled. In fact he examined me with great curiosity, almost connoisseurship. There was an element of awe or appreciation in his face. He took notes as he proceeded but made no small talk. His concentration was intense.

  After a while, still crouching between my legs, Luce turned his head to search for another instrument. Between the sight lines of my raised knees his ear appeared, an amazing organ all its own, whorled and flanged, translucent in the bright lights. His ear was very close to me. It seemed for a moment as though Luce were listening at my source. As though some riddle were being imparted to him from between my legs. But then he found what he had been looking for and turned back.

  He began to probe inside.

  “Relax,” he said.

  He applied a lubricant, huddled in closer.

  “Relax.”

  There was a hint of annoyance, of command in his voice. I took a deep breath and did the best I could. Luce poked inside. For a moment it felt merely strange, as he’d suggested. But then a sharp pain shot through me. I jerked back, crying out.

  “Sorry.”

  Nevertheless, he kept on. He placed one hand on my pelvis to steady me. He probed in farther, though he avoided the painful area. My eyes were welling with tears.

  “Almost finished,” he said.

  But he was only getting started.

  The chief imperative in cases like mine was to show no doubt as to the gender of the child in question. You did not tell the parents of a newborn, “Your baby is a hermaphrodite.” Instead, you said, “Your daughter was born with a clitoris that is a little larger than a normal girl’s. We’ll need to do surgery to make it the right size.” Luce felt that parents weren’t able to cope with an ambiguous gender assignment. You had to tell them if they had a boy or a girl. Which meant that, before you said anything, you had to be sure what the prevailing gender was.

  Luce could not do this with me yet. He had received the results of the endocrinological tests performed at Henry Ford Hospital, and so knew of my XY karyotype, my high plasma testosterone levels, and the absence in my blood of dihydrotestosterone. In other words, before even seeing me, Luce was able to make an educated guess that I was a male pseudohermaphrodite—genetically male but appearing otherwise, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. But that, according to Luce’s thinking, did not mean that I had a male gender identity.

  My being a teenager complicated things. In addition to chromosomal and hormonal factors, Luce had to consider my sex of rearing, which had been female. He suspected that the tissue mass he had palpated inside me was testicular. Still, he couldn’t be sure until he had looked at a sample under a microscope.

  All this must have been going through Luce’s mind as he brought me back to the waiting room. He told me he wanted to speak to my parents and that he would send them out when he was finished. His intensity had lessened and he was friendly again, smiling and patting me on the back.

  In his office Luce sat down in his Eames chair, looked up at Milton and Tessie, and adjusted his glasses.

  “Mr. Stephanides, Mrs. Stephanides, I’ll be frank. This is a complicated case. By complicated I don’t mean irremediable. We have a range of effective treatments for cases of this kind. But before I’m ready to begin treatment there are a number of questions I have to answer.”

  My mother and father were sitting only a foot apart during this speech, but each heard something different. Milton heard the words that were there. He heard “treatment” and “effective.” Tessie, on the other hand, heard the words that weren’t there. The doctor hadn’t said my name, for instance. He hadn’t said “Calliope” or “Callie.” He hadn’t said “daughter,” either. He didn’t use any pronouns at all.

  “I’ll need to run further tests,” Luce was continuing. “I’ll need to perform a complete psychological assessment. Once I have the necessary information, then we can discuss in detail the proper course of treatment.”

  Milton was already nodding. “What kind of time line are we talking about, Doctor?”

  Luce jutted out a thoughtful lower lip. “I want to redo the lab tests, just to be sure. Those results will be back tomorrow. The psychological evaluation will take longer. I’ll need to see your child every day for at least a week, maybe two. Also it would be helpful if you could give me any childhood photographs or family movies you might have.”

  Milton turned to Tessie. “When does Callie start school?”

  Tessie didn’t hear him. She was distracted by Luce’s phrase: “your child.”

  “What kind of information are you trying to get, Doctor?” Tessie asked.

  “The blood tests will tell us hormone levels. The psychological assessment is routine in cases like this.”

  “You think it’s some kind of hormone thing?” Milton asked. “A hormone imbalance?”

  “We’ll know after I’ve had time to do what I need to do,” said Luce.

  Milton stood up and shook hands with the doctor. The consultation was over.

  Keep in mind: neither Milton nor Tessie had seen me undressed for years. How were they to know? And not knowing, how could they imagine? The information available to them was all secondary stuff—my husky voice, my flat chest—but these things were far from persuasive. A hormonal thing. It could have been no more serious than that. So my father believed, or wanted to believe, and so he tried to convince Tessie.

  I had my own resistance. “Why does he have to do a psychological evaluation?” I asked. “It’s not like I’m crazy.”

  “The doctor said it was routine.”

  “But why?”

  With this question I had hit upon the crux of the matter. My mother has since told me that she intuited the real reason for the psychological assessment, but chose not to dwell on it. Or, rather, didn’t choose. Let Milton choose for her. Milton preferred to treat the problem pragmatically. There was no sense in worrying about a psychological assessment that could only confirm what was obvious: that I was a normal, well-adjusted girl. “He probably bills the insurance extra for the psychological stuff,” Milton said. “Sorry, Cal, but you’ll have to put up with it. Maybe he can cure your neuroses. Got any neuroses? Now’s your time to let ’em out.” He put his arms around me, squeezed hard, and roughly kissed the side of my head.

  Milton was so convinced that everything was going to be okay that on Tuesday morning he flew down to Florida on business. “No sense cooling my heels in this hotel,” he told us.

  “You just want to get out of this pit,” I said.

  “I’ll make it up to you. Why don’t you and your mother go out for a fancy dinner tonight. Anyplace you want. We’re saving a couple bucks on this room, so you gals can splurge. Why don’t you take Callie to Delmonico’s, Tess.”

  “What’s Delmonico’s?” I asked.

  “It’s a steak joint.”

  “I want lobster. And baked Alaska,” I said.

  “Baked Alaska! Maybe they have that, too.”

  Milton left, and my mother and I tried to spend his money. We went shopping at Bloomingdale’s. We had high tea at the Plaza. We never made it to Delmonico’s, preferring a moderately priced Italian restaurant near the Lochmoor, where we felt more comfortable. We ate there every night, doing our best to pretend we were on a real trip, a vacation. Tessie drank more wine than usual and got tipsy, and when she went to the bathroom I drank her wine myself.

  Normally the most expressive thing about my mother’s face was the gap between her front teeth. When she was listening to me, Tessie’s tongue oft
en pressed against that divot, that gate. This was the signal of her attention. My mother always paid great attention to whatever I said. And if I told her something funny, then her tongue dropped away, her head fell back, her mouth opened wide, and there were her front teeth, riven and ascendant.

  Every night at the Italian restaurant I tried to make this happen.

  In the mornings, Tessie took me to the Clinic for my appointments.

  “What are your hobbies, Callie?”

  “Hobbies?”

  “Is there anything you especially like to do?”

  “I’m not really a hobby-type person.”

  “What about sports? Do you like any sports?”

  “Does Ping-Pong count?”

  “I’ll put it down.” Luce smiled from behind his desk. I was on the Le Corbusier daybed across the room, lounging on the cowhide.

  “What about boys?”

  “What about them?”

  “Is there a boy at school you like?”

  “I guess you’ve never been to my school, Doctor.”

  He checked his file. “Oh, it’s a girls’ school, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you sexually attracted to girls?” Luce said this quickly. It was like a tap from a rubber hammer. But I stifled my reflex.

  He put down his pen and knit his fingers together. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “I want you to know that this is all between us, Callie. I’m not going to tell your parents anything that you tell me here.”

  I was torn. Luce in his leather chair, with his longish hair and ankle boots, was the kind of adult a kid might open up to. He was as old as my father but in league with the younger generation. I longed to tell him about the Object. I longed to tell somebody, anybody. My feelings for her were still so strong they rushed up my throat. But I held them back, wary. I didn’t believe this was all private.

  “Your mother says you have a close relationship with a friend of yours,” Luce began again. He said the Object’s name. “Do you feel sexually attracted to her? Or have you had sexual relations with her?”

  “We’re just friends,” I insisted, a little too loudly. I tried again in a quieter voice. “She’s my best friend.” In response Luce’s right eyebrow rose from behind his glasses. It came out of hiding as though it, too, wanted to get a good look at me. And then I found a way out:

  “I had sex with her brother,” I confessed. “He’s a junior.”

  Again Luce showed neither surprise, disapproval, or interest. He made a note on his pad, nodding once. “And did you enjoy it?”

  Here I could tell the truth. “It hurt,” I said. “Plus I was scared about getting pregnant.”

  Luce smiled to himself, jotting in his notebook. “Not to worry,” he said.

  That was how it went. Every day for an hour I sat in Luce’s office and talked about my life, my feelings, my likes and dislikes. Luce asked all kinds of questions. The answers I gave were sometimes not as important as the way I answered them. He watched my facial expressions; he noted my style of argument. Females tend to smile at their interlocutors more than males do. Females pause and look for signs of agreement before continuing. Males just look into the middle distance and hold forth. Women prefer the anecdotal, men the deductive. It was impossible to be in Luce’s line of work without falling back on such stereotypes. He knew their limitations. But they were clinically useful.

  When I wasn’t being questioned about my life and feelings, I was writing about them. Most days I sat typing up what Luce called my “Psychological Narrative.” That early autobiography didn’t begin: “I was born twice.” Flashy, rhetorical openings were something I had to get the hang of. It started simply, with the words “My name is Calliope Stephanides. I am fourteen years old. Going on fifteen.” I began with the facts and followed them as long as I could.

  Sing, Muse, how cunning Calliope wrote on that battered Smith Corona! Sing how the typewriter hummed and trembled at her psychiatric revelations! Sing of its two cartridges, one for typing and one for correcting, that so eloquently represented her predicament, poised between the print of genetics and the Wite-Out of surgery. Sing of the weird smell the typewriter gave off, like WD-40 and salami, and of the Day-Glo flower decal the last person who’d used it had applied, and of the broken F key, which stuck. On that newfangled but soon-to-be obsolete machine I wrote not so much like a kid from the Midwest as a minister’s daughter from Shropshire. I still have a copy of my psychological narrative somewhere. Luce published it in his collected works, omitting my name. “I would like to tell of my life,” it runs at one point, “and of the experiences that make myriad my joys and sorrows upon this planet we call Earth.” In describing my mother, I say, “Her beauty is the kind which seems to be thrown into relief by grief.” A few pages on there comes the subheading “Calumnies Caustic and Catty by Callie.” Half the time I wrote like bad George Eliot, the other half like bad Salinger. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s television.” Not true: I loved television! But on that Smith Corona I quickly discovered that telling the truth wasn’t nearly as much fun as making things up. I also knew that I was writing for an audience—Dr. Luce—and that if I seemed normal enough, he might send me back home. This explains the passages about my love of cats (“feline affection”), the pie recipes, and my deep feelings for nature.

  Luce ate it all up. It’s true; I have to give credit where credit’s due. Luce was the first person to encourage my writing. Every night he read through what I had typed up during the day. He didn’t know, of course, that I was making up most of what I wrote, pretending to be the all-American daughter my parents wanted me to be. I fictionalized early “sex play” and later crushes on boys; I transferred my feeling for the Object onto Jerome and it was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

  Luce was interested in the gender giveaways of my prose, of course. He measured my jouissance against my linearity. He picked up on my Victorian flourishes, my antique diction, my girls’ school propriety. These all weighed heavily in his final assessment.

  There was also the diagnostic tool of pornography. One afternoon when I arrived for my session with Dr. Luce, there was a movie projector in his office. A screen had been set up before the bookcase, and the blinds drawn. In syrupy light Luce was feeding the celluloid through the sprocket wheel.

  “Are you going to show me my dad’s movie again? From when I was little?”

  “Today I’ve got something a little different,” said Luce.

  I took up my customary position on the chaise, my arms folded behind me on the cowhide. Dr. Luce switched off the lights and soon the movie began.

  It was about a pizza delivery girl. The title was, in fact, Annie Delivers to Your Door. In the first scene, Annie, wearing cutoffs and a midriff-revealing, Ellie-May blouse, gets out of her car before an oceanside house. She rings the bell. No one is at home. Not wanting the pizza to go to waste, she sits down next to the pool and begins to eat.

  The production values were low. The pool boy, when he arrived, was badly lit. It was hard to hear what he was saying. But soon enough he was no longer saying anything. Annie had begun to remove her clothes. She was down on her knees. The pool boy was naked, too, and then they were on the steps, in the pool, on the diving board, pumping, writhing. I closed my eyes. I didn’t like the raw meat colors of the film. It wasn’t at all beautiful like the tiny paintings in Luce’s office.

  In a straightforward voice Luce asked from the darkness, “Which one turns you on?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Which one turns you on? The woman or the man?”

  The true answer was neither. But truth would not do.

  Sticking to my cover story, I managed to get out, very quietly, “The boy.”

  “The pool boy? That’s good. I dig the pizza girl myself. She’s got a great bod.” A sheltered child once, from a reserved Presbyterian home, Luce was now liberated, free of antisexualism. “She’s got incredible t
its,” he said. “You like her tits? Do they turn you on?”

  “No.”

  “The guy’s cock turns you on?”

  I nodded, barely, wishing it would be over. But it was not over for a while yet. Annie had other pizzas to deliver. Luce wanted to watch each one.

  Sometimes he brought other doctors to see me. A typical unveiling went as follows. I was summoned from my writing studio in the back of the Clinic. In Luce’s office two men in business suits were waiting. They stood when I came in. Luce made introductions. “Callie, I want you to meet Dr. Craig and Dr. Winters.”

  The doctors shook my hand. It was their first bit of data: my handshake. Dr. Craig squeezed hard, Winters less so. They were careful about not seeming too eager. Like men meeting a fashion model, they trained their eyes away from my body and pretended to be interested in me as a person. Luce said, “Callie’s been here at the Clinic for just about a week now.”

  “How do you like New York?” asked Dr. Craig.

  “I’ve hardly seen it.”

  The doctors gave me sightseeing suggestions. The atmosphere was light, friendly. Luce put his hand on the small of my back. Men have an annoying way of doing that. They touch your back as though there’s a handle there, and direct you where they want you to go. Or they place their hand on top of your head, paternally. Men and their hands. You’ve got to watch them every minute. Luce’s hand was now proclaiming: Here she is. My star attraction. The terrible thing was that I responded to it; I liked the feel of Luce’s hand on my back. I liked the attention. Here were all these people who wanted to meet me.

  Pretty soon Luce’s hand was escorting me down the hall into the examination room. I knew the drill. Behind the screen I undressed while the doctors waited. The green paper gown was folded on the chair.

  “The family comes from where, Peter?”

  “Turkey. Originally.”

  “I’m only acquainted with the Papua New Guinea study,” said Craig.

  “Among the Sambia, right?” asked Winters.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Luce answered. “There’s a high incidence of the mutation there as well. The Sambia are interesting from a sexological point of view, too. They practice ritualized homosexuality. Sambia males consider contact with females highly polluting. So they’ve organized social structures to limit exposure as much as possible. The men and boys sleep on one side of the village, the women and girls on the other side. The men go into the women’s longhouse only to procreate. In and out. In fact, the Sambia word for ‘vagina’ translates literally as ‘that thing which is truly no good.’ ”