Middlesex (29 page)

   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And so the Zebra Room remained on the corner of Pingree and Dexter, the swing music on the jukebox growing increasingly out of date, the celebrities and sports figures on the walls more and more unrecognizable.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.