Middlesex (63 page)

   At that moment, Milton began to cry. All of a sudden his face was wet and he touched it, sniffling and weeping. He slumped back, and because no one was there to see, he opened his mouth to give outlet to his overpowering grief. He hadn’t cried since he was a boy. The sound of his deep voice crying surprised him. It was the sound of a bear, wounded or dying. Milton bellowed in the Cadillac as the car began, once again, to descend. He was crying not because he was about to die but because I, Calliope, was still gone, because he had failed to save me, because he had done everything he could to get me back and still I was missing.
   As the car tipped its nose down, the river appeared again. Milton Stephanides, an old navy man, prepared to meet it. Right at the end he was no longer thinking about me. I have to be honest and record Milton’s thoughts as they occurred to him. At the very end he wasn’t thinking about me or Tessie or any of us. There was no time. As the car plunged, Milton only had time to be astonished by the way things had turned out. All his life he had lectured everybody about the right way to do things and now he had done this, the stupidest thing ever. He could hardly believe he had loused things up quite so badly. His last word, therefore, was spoken softly, without anger or fear, only with bewilderment and a measure of bravery. “Birdbrain,” Milton said, to himself, in his last Cadillac. And then the water claimed him.
   A real Greek might end on this tragic note. But an American is inclined to stay upbeat. These days, whenever we talk about Milton, my mother and I come to the conclusion that he got out just in time. He got out before Chapter Eleven, taking over the family business, ran it into the ground in less than five years. Before Chapter Eleven, in a reprise of Desdemona’s gender prognostications, began wearing a tiny silver spoon around his neck. He got out before the draining of bank accounts and the jacking up of credit cards. Before Tessie was forced to sell Middlesex and move down to Florida with Aunt Zo. And he got out three months before Cadillac, in April 1975, introduced the Seville, a fuel-efficient model that looked as though it had lost its pants, after which Cadillacs were never the same. Milton got out before many of the things that I will not include in this story, because they are the common tragedies of American life, and as such do not fit into this singular and uncommon record. He got out before the Cold War ended, before missile shields and global warming and September 11 and a second President with only one vowel in his name.
   Most important, Milton got out without ever seeing me again. That would not have been easy. I like to think that my father’s love for me was strong enough that he could have accepted me. But in some ways it’s better that we never had to work that out, he and I. With respect to my father I will always remain a girl. There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

The Last Stop

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

* * *

   Chapter Eleven flew to San Francisco to collect me from jail. My mother had to sign a letter requesting that the police release me into my brother’s custody. A trial date would be set in the near future but, as a juvenile and first-time offender, I was likely to receive only probation. (The offense came off my record, never interfering with my subsequent job prospects at the State Department. Not that I concerned myself with these details at the time. I was too stunned, sick with grief poisons, and wanted to go home.)
   When I came out into the outer police station, my brother was sitting alone on a long wooden bench. He looked up at me with no expression, blinking. That was Chapter Eleven’s way. Everything went on in him internally. Inside his braincase sensations were being reviewed, evaluated, before any official reaction was given. I was used to this, of course. What is more natural than the tics and habits of one’s close relatives? Years ago, Chapter Eleven had made me pull down my underpants so that he could look at me. Now his eyes were raised but no less riveted. He was taking in my deforested head. He was getting a load of the funereal suit. It was a lucky thing that my brother had taken as much LSD as he had. Chapter Eleven had gone in early for mind expansion. He contemplated the veil of Maya, the existence of various planes of being. For a personality thus prepared, it was somewhat easier to deal with your sister becoming your brother. There have been hermaphrodites like me since the world began. But as I came out from my holding pen it was possible that no generation other than my brother’s was as well disposed to accept me. Still, it was not nothing to witness me so changed. Chapter Eleven’s eyes widened.
   We hadn’t seen each other for over a year. Chapter Eleven had changed, too. His hair was shorter. It had receded farther. His friend’s girlfriend had given him a home perm. Chapter Eleven’s previously lank hair was now leonine in back, while the front retreated. He didn’t look like John Lennon anymore. Gone were his faded bell-bottoms, his granny glasses. Now he wore brown hip-huggers. His wide-lapel shirt shimmered under the fluorescent lights. The sixties have never really come to an end. They’re still going on right now in Goa. But by 1975 the sixties had finally ended for my brother.
   At any other time, we would have lingered over these details. But we didn’t have the luxury for that. I came across the room. Chapter Eleven stood up and then we were hugging, swaying. “Dad’s dead,” my brother repeated in my ear. “He’s dead.”
   I asked him what had happened and he told me. Milton had charged through customs. Father Mike had also been on the bridge. He was now in the hospital. Milton’s old briefcase had been found in the wreckage of the Gremlin, full of money. Father Mike had confessed everything to the police, the kidnapping ruse, the ransom.
   When this had sunk in, I asked, “How’s Mom?”
   “She’s all right. She’s holding up. She’s pissed at Milt.”
   “Pissed?”
   “For going out there. For not telling her. She’s glad you’re coming home. That’s what she’s focusing on. You coming back for the funeral. So that’s good.”
   We were scheduled to take the red-eye out that night. The funeral was the next morning. Chapter Eleven had been dealing with the bureaucratic side of things, getting the death certificates and placing the obituaries. He asked me nothing about my time in San Francisco or at Sixty-Niners. Only when we were on the plane and Chapter Eleven had had a few beers did he allude to my condition. “So, I guess I can’t call you Callie anymore.”
   “Call me whatever you want.”
   “How about ‘bro’?”
   “Fine with me.”
   He was quiet, blinking. There was the usual lag time while he thought. “I never heard much about what happened out there at that clinic. I was up in Marquette. I wasn’t talking to Mom and Dad that much.”
   “I ran away.”
   “Why?
   “They were going to cut me up.”
   I could feel him staring at me, with that outer glaze that concealed considerable mental activity. “It’s a little bit weird for me,” he said.
   “It’s weird for me, too.”
   A moment later he let out a laugh. “Hah! Weird! Pretty fucking weird.”
   I was shaking my head in comic despair. “You can say that again. Bro.”
   Confronted with the impossible, there was no option but to treat it as normal. We didn’t have an upper register, so to speak, but only the middle range of our shared experience and ways of behaving, of joking around. But it got us through.
   “One good thing about this gene I have, though,” I said.
   “What?”
   “I’ll never go bald.”
   “Why not?”
   “You have to have DHT to go bald.”
   “Huh,” said Chapter Eleven, feeling his scalp. “I guess I’m a little heavy on the DHT. I guess I’m what they’d call DHT-rich.”
   We reached Detroit a little after six in the morning. The smashed-up Eldorado had been towed to a police yard. Waiting in the airport parking lot was our mother’s car, the “Florida Special.” The lemon-colored Cadillac was all we had left of Milton. It was already beginning to take on the attributes of a relic. The driver’s seat was sunken from the weight of his body. You could see the impression of Milton’s cloven backside in the leather upholstery. Tessie filled this hollow with throw pillows in order to see over the steering wheel. Chapter Eleven had tossed the pillows into the backseat.
   In the unseasonal car, with its powerful air-conditioning switched off and sunroof closed, we started for home. We passed the giant Uniroyal tire and the thready woods of Inkster.
   “What time’s the funeral?” I asked.
   “Eleven.”
   It was just getting light. The sun was rising from wherever it rose, behind the distant factories maybe, or over the blind river. The growing light was like a leakage or flood, seeping into the ground.
   “Go through downtown,” I told my brother.
   “It’ll take too long.”
   “We’ve got time. I want to see it.”
   Chapter Eleven obliged me. We took I-94 past River Rouge and Olympia Stadium and then curled in toward the river on the Lodge Freeway and entered the city from the north.
   Grow up in Detroit and you understand the way of all things. Early on, you are put on close relations with entropy. As we rose out of the highway trough, we could see the condemned houses, many burned, as well as the stark beauty of all the vacant lots, gray and frozen. Once-elegant apartment buildings stood next to scrapyards, and where there had been furriers and movie palaces there were now blood banks and methadone clinics and Mother Waddles Perpetual Mission. Returning to Detroit from bright climes usually depressed me. But now I welcomed it. The blight eased the pain of my father’s death, making it seem like a general state of affairs. At least the city didn’t mock my grief by being sparkling or winsome.
   Downtown looked the same, only emptier. You couldn’t knock down the skyscrapers when the tenants left; so instead boards went over the windows and doors, and the great shells of commerce were put in cold storage. On the riverfront the Renaissance Center was being built, inaugurating a renaissance that has never arrived. “Let’s go through Greektown,” I said. Again my brother humored me. Soon we came down the block of restaurants and souvenir stores. Amid the ethnic kitsch, there were still a few authentic coffee houses, patronized by old men in their seventies and eighties. Some were already up this morning, drinking coffee, playing backgammon, and reading the Greek newspapers. When these old men died, the coffee houses would suffer and finally close. Little by little, the restaurants on the block would suffer, too, their awnings getting ripped, the big yellow lightbulbs on the Laikon marquee burning out, the Greek bakery on the corner being taken over by South Yemenis from Dearborn. But all that hadn’t happened yet. On Monroe Street, we passed the Grecian Gardens, where we had held Lefty’s
makaria
.
   “Are we having a
makaria
for Dad?” I asked.
   “Yeah. The whole deal.”
   “Where? At the Grecian Gardens?”
   Chapter Eleven laughed. “You kidding? Nobody wanted to come down here.”
   “I like it here,” I said. “I love Detroit.”
   “Yeah? Well, welcome home.”
   He had turned back onto Jefferson for the long miles through the blighted East Side. A wig shop. Vanity Dancing, the old club, now for rent. A used-record store with a hand-painted sign showing people grooving amid an explosion of musical notes. The old dime stores and sweet shops were closed, Kresge’s, Woolworth’s, Sanders Ice Cream. It was cold out. Not many people were on the streets. On one corner a man stood impervious, cutting a fine figure against the winter sky. His leather coat reached to his ankles. Space funk goggles wrapped around his dignified, long-jawed head, on top of which sat, or sailed really, the Spanish galleon of a velvet maroon hat. Not part of my suburban world, this figure; therefore exotic. But nevertheless familiar, and suggestive of the peculiar creative energies of my hometown. I was glad to see him anyway. I couldn’t take my eyes away.
   When I was little, street-corner dudes like that would sometimes lower their shades to wink, keen on getting a rise out of the white girl in the backseat passing by. But now the dude gave me a different look altogether. He didn’t lower his sunglasses, but his mouth, his flared nostrils, and the tilt of his head communicated defiance and even hate. That was when I realized a shocking thing. I couldn’t become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn’t want to.
   I made Chapter Eleven go through Indian Village, passing our old house. I wanted to take a nostalgia bath to calm my nerves before seeing my mother. The streets were still full of trees, bare in winter, so that we could see all the way to the frozen river. I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death. Seen this way, my bodily metamorphosis was a small event. Only the pimp might have been interested.
   Soon we reached Grosse Pointe. The naked elms reached across our street from both sides, touching fingertips, and snow lay crusted in the flower beds before the warm, hibernatory houses. My body was reacting to the sight of home. Happy sparks were shooting off inside me. It was a canine feeling, full of eager love, and dumb to tragedy. Here was my home, Middlesex. Up there in that window, on the tiled window seat, I used to read for hours, eating mulberries off the tree outside.
   The driveway hadn’t been shoveled. Nobody had had time to think about that. Chapter Eleven took the driveway a little fast and we bounced in our seats, the tailpipe hitting. After we got out of the car, he opened the trunk and began carrying my suitcase to the house. But halfway there he stopped. “Hey, bro,” he said. “You can carry this yourself.” He was smiling with mischief. You could see he was enjoying the paradigm shift. He was taking my metamorphosis as a brain teaser, like the ones in the back of his sci-fi magazines.
   “Let’s not get carried away,” I answered. “Feel free to carry my luggage anytime.”
   “Catch!” shouted Chapter Eleven, and hefted the suitcase. I caught it, staggering back. Right then the door of the house opened and my mother, in house slippers, stepped out into the frost-powdery air.
   Tessie Stephanides, who in a different lifetime when space travel was new had decided to go along with her husband and create a girl by devious means, now saw before her, in the snowy driveway, the fruit of that scheme. Not a daughter at all anymore but, at least by looks, a son. She was tired and heartsick and had no energy to deal with this new event. It was not acceptable that I was now living as a male person. Tessie didn’t think it should be up to me. She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else. Tessie didn’t know how this had happened. Though she could still see Calliope in my face, each feature seemed changed, thickened, and there were whiskers on my chin and above my upper lip. There was a criminal aspect to my appearance, in Tessie’s eyes. She couldn’t help herself thinking that my arrival was part of some settling of accounts, that Milton had been punished and that her punishment was just beginning. For all these reasons she stood still, red-eyed, in the doorway.
   “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I’m home.”
   I went forward to meet her. I set down my suitcase, and when I looked up again, Tessie’s face had altered. She had been preparing for this moment for months. Now her faint eyebrows lifted, the corners of her mouth rose, crinkling the wan cheeks. Her expression was that of a mother watching a doctor remove bandages from a severely burned child. An optimistic, dishonest, bedside face. Still, it told me all I needed to know. Tessie was going to try to accept things. She felt crushed by what had happened to me but she was going to endure it for my sake.
   We embraced. Tall as I was, I laid my head on my mother’s shoulder, and she stroked my hair while I sobbed.
   “Why?” she kept crying softly, shaking her head. “Why?” I thought she was talking about Milton. But then she clarified: “Why did you run away, honey?”
   “I had to.”