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 th
e 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.)
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