Middlesex (36 page)

   “What’s the matter, Cal?” asked Milton, eating while reading the evening newspaper. “Don’t you want to live to be a hundred?”
   “Not if I have to eat this stuff the whole time.”
   But now Tessie was the one tearing up. Tessie who for almost two years now had taken care of an old lady who wouldn’t get out of bed. Tessie who had a husband more in love with hot dogs than her. Tessie who secretly monitored her children’s bowel movements and so of course knew exactly how greasy American foods could disrupt their digestion. “You don’t do the shopping,” she said, tearfully. “You don’t see what I see. When’s the last time you’ve been to the drugstore, Little Miss Normal Food? You know what the shelves are full of? Laxatives! Every time I go to the drugstore the person in front of me is buying Ex-Lax. And not just one box. They buy it by the bushel.”
   “That’s just old people.”
   “It’s not just old people. I see young mothers buying it. I see teenagers buying it. You want to know the truth? This entire country can’t do number two!”
   “Oh, now I really want to eat.”
   “Is this about the bra, Callie? Because if it is, I told you—“
   “Mo-om!”
   But it was too late. “What bra?” Chapter Eleven asked. And now, smiling: “Does the Great Salt Lake think she needs a bra?”
   “Shut up.”
   “Here. My glasses must be dirty. Let me clean them. Ah, that’s better. Now let’s have a look—“
   “Shut
up
!”
   “No, I wouldn’t say the Great Salt Lake has undergone any kind of geological—“
   “Well, your face has, zithead!”
   “Still as flat as ever. Perfect for time trials.”
   But then Milton shouted, “Goddamn it!”—drowning us both out.
   We thought he was tired of our bickering.
   “That goddamn judge!”
   He wasn’t looking at us. He was staring at the front page of
The Detroit News
. He was turning red and then—that high blood pressure we hadn’t mentioned—almost purple.
   That morning, at U.S. District Court, Judge Roth had devised a clever way to desegregate the schools. If there weren’t enough white students left in Detroit to go around, he would get them from somewhere else. Judge Roth had claimed jurisdiction over the entire “metropolitan area.” Jurisdiction over the city of Detroit and the surrounding fifty-three suburbs. Including Grosse Pointe.
   “Just when we get you kids out of that hellhole,” Milton was shouting, “that goddamn Roth wants to send you back!”

The Wolverette

   If you’ve just tuned in, we have one humdinger of a field hockey game on our hands! Final seconds of the last game of the season between those two archrivals, the BCDS Hornets and the B&I Wolverettes. Score tied 4 to 4. Face off at midfield and … the Hornets have it! Chamberlain stick-handling, passes to O’Rourke on the wing. O’Rourke faking left, going right … she’s by one Wolverette, by another … and now she passes crossfield to Amigliato! Here comes Becky Amigliato down the sideline! Ten seconds left, nine seconds! In goal for the Wolverettes it’s Stephanides and—oh my, my, she doesn’t see Amigliato coming! What in the devil? … She’s looking at a leaf, folks! Callie Stephanides is admiring a gorgeous, fire-red autumn leaf, but what a time to do it! Here comes Amigliato. Five seconds! Four seconds! This is it, folks, the championship of the Middle School Junior Varsity season is on the line—but hold on … Stephanides hears footsteps. Now she looks up … and Amigliato takes a slap shot! Ooowhee, it’s a bullet! You can feel that one all the way up here in the booth. The ball’s heading straight for Stephanides’ head! She drops the leaf! She’s watching it … watching it … gosh, you hate to see this, folks …”
   Is it true that right before death (by field hockey ball or otherwise) your life flashes before your eyes? Maybe not your whole life, but parts of it. As Becky Amigliato’s slap shot made for my face that fall day, the events of the last half year flickered in my possibly-soon-to-be-extinguished consciousness.
   First of all, our Cadillac—by then the golden Fleetwood—wending its way the previous summer up the long driveway of the Baker & Inglis School for Girls. In the backseat, one very unhappy twelve-year-old, me, arriving under duress for an interview. “I don’t want to go to a girls’ school,” I’m complaining. “I’d rather be bused.”
   And next another car picking me up, the following September, for my first day of seventh grade. Previously, I’d always walked to Trombley Elementary; but prep school has brought with it a host of changes: my new school uniform, for instance, crested and tartaned. Also: this carpool itself, a light green station wagon driven by a lady named Mrs. Drexel. Her hair is greasy, thinning. Above her upper lip, in an example of the foreshadowing I will learn to identify in the coming year’s English class, is a mustache.
   And now the station wagon is driving along a few weeks later. I’m looking out the window while Mrs. Drexel’s cigarette uncoils a rope of smoke. We head into the heart of Grosse Pointe. We pass long, gated driveways, the kind that always fill my family with wonder and awe. But now Mrs. Drexel is turning up these drives. (It is my new classmates who live at the end of them.) We rumble past privet hedges and under topiary arches to arrive at secluded lakefront homes where girls wait with satchels, standing very straight. They wear the same uniform I do, but somehow it looks different on them, neater, more stylish. Occasionally there is also a well-coifed mother in the picture, clipping a rose from the garden.
   And next it is two months later, near the end of the fall term, and the station wagon is climbing the hill to my no-longer-brand-new school. The car is full of girls. Mrs. Drexel is lighting another cigarette. She’s pulling up to the curb and getting ready to lay a curse on us. Shaking her head at the view—of the hilly, green campus, the lake in the distance—she says, “Youse girls better enjoy it now. Best time of life is when you’re young.” (At twelve, I hated her for saying that. I couldn’t imagine a worse thing to tell a kid. But maybe also, due to certain other changes that began that year, I suspected that the happy period of my childhood was coming to an end.)
   What else came back to me, as the hockey ball zeroed in? Just about everything a field hockey ball could symbolize. Field hockey, that New England game, handed down from
old
England, just like everything else in our school. The building with its long echoing hallways and churchy smell, its leaded windows, its Gothic gloom. The Latin primers the color of gruel. The afternoon teas. The curtsying of our tennis team. The tweediness of our faculty, and the curriculum itself, which began, Hellenically, Byronically, with Homer, and then skipped straight to Chaucer, moving on to Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, and E. M. Forster. Only connect.
   Miss Baker and Miss Inglis had founded the school back in 1911, in the words of the charter, “to educate girls in the humanities and sciences and to cultivate in them a love of learning, a modest comportment, an amiable grace, and an interest in civic duty above all.” The two women had lived together on the far side of the campus in “The Cottage,” a shingled bower that occupied a place in school mythology akin to Lincoln’s log cabin in national legend. Fifth graders were given a tour every spring. They filed by the two single bedrooms (which fooled them maybe), the founders’ writing desks still laid with fountain pens and licorice drops, and the gramophone on which they’d listened to Sousa marches. Miss Baker’s and Miss Inglis’s ghosts haunted the school, along with actual busts and portraits. A statue in the courtyard showed the bespectacled educators in a fanciful, springtime mood, Miss Baker gesturing, Pope-like, to bless the air, while Miss Inglis (forever the bottom) turned to see what her colleague was bringing to her attention. Miss Inglis’s floppy hat obscured her plain features. In the work’s only avant-garde touch, a thick wire extended from Miss Baker’s head, at the top of which hovered the object of wonder: a hummingbird.
   …All this was suggested by the spinning hockey ball. But there was something else, something more personal, that explained why I was its target. What was Calliope doing playing goalie? Why was she encumbered by mask and pads? Why was Coach Stork hollering at her to make the save?
   To answer simply: I wasn’t very good at sports. Softball, basketball, tennis: I was hopeless in every one. Field hockey was even worse. I couldn’t get used to the funny little sticks or the nebulous, European strategies. Short on players, Coach Stork put me in goal and hoped for the best. It rarely happened. With a lack of team spirit, some Wolverettes maintained that I possessed no coordination whatsoever. Did this charge have merit? Is there any connection between my present desk job and a lack of physical grace? I’m not going to answer that. But in my defense I will say that none of my more athletic teammates ever inhabited such a problematic body. They didn’t have, as I did, two testicles squatting illegally in their inguinal canals. Unknown to me, those anarchists had taken up residence in my abdomen, and were even hooked up to the utilities. If I crossed my leg the wrong way or moved too quickly, a spasm shot across my groin. On the hockey field I often doubled over, my eyes tearing up, while Coach Stork swatted me on the rump. “It’s just a
cramp
, Stephanides. Run it off.” (And now, as I moved to block the slap shot, just such a pain hit me. My insides twisted, erupting with a lava flow of pain. I bent forward, tripping on my goalie stick. And then I was tumbling, falling …)
   But there’s still time to record a few other physical changes. At the beginning of seventh grade I got braces, a full set. Rubber bands now hooked my upper and lower palates together. My jaw felt springy, like a ventriloquist dummy’s. Every night before going to sleep I dutifully fit my medieval headgear on. But in the darkness, while my teeth were slowly coerced into straightness, the rest of my face had begun to give in to a stronger, genetic predisposition toward crookedness. To paraphrase Nietzsche, there are two types of Greek: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I’d been born Apollonian, a sun-kissed girl with a face ringed with curls. But as I approached thirteen a Dionysian element stole over my features. My nose, at first delicately, then not so delicately, began to arch. My eyebrows, growing shaggier, arched, too. Something sinister, wily, literally “satyrical” entered my expression.
   And so the last thing the hockey ball (coming closer now, unwilling to endure any more exposition)—the last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we’re chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
   The hockey ball rocketed forward. It hit the side of my mask, which deflected it into the center of the net. We lost. The Hornets celebrated.
   In disgrace, as usual, I returned to the gymnasium. Carrying my mask, I climbed out of the green bowl of the hockey field, which was like an outdoor theater. Taking small steps, I walked along the gravel path back to the school. In the distance, down the hill and across the road, lay Lake St. Clair, where my grandfather Jimmy Zizmo had faked his death. The lake still froze in winter, but bootleggers didn’t drive over it anymore. Lake St. Clair had lost its sinister glamour and, like everything else, had become suburban. Freighters still plied the shipping channel, but now you mostly saw pleasure boats, Chris-Crafts, Santanas, Flying Dutchmen, 470s. On sunny days the lake still managed to look blue. Most of the time, however, it was the color of cold pea soup.
   But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was measuring my steps, trying to go as slowly as possible. I was looking at the gymnasium doors with an expression of wariness and anxiety.
   It was now, when the game was over for everyone else, that it began for me. While my teammates were catching their breath, I was psyching myself up. I had to act with grace, with swift, athletic timing. I had to shout from the sidelines of my being, “Heads up, Stephanides!” I had to be coach, star player, and cheerleader all in one.
   For despite the Dionysian revelry that had broken out in my body (in my throbbing teeth, in the wild abandon of my nose), not everything about me had changed. A year and a half after Carol Horning came to school with brand-new breasts, I was still without any. The brassiere I’d finally wheedled out of Tessie was still, like the higher physics, of only theoretical use. No breasts. No period, either. All through sixth grade I’d waited and then through the summer afterward. Now I was in seventh grade and still I was waiting. There were hopeful signs. From time to time my nipples became sore. Gingerly touching them, I felt a pebble beneath the pink, tender flesh. I always thought that this was the start of something. I thought I was budding. But time after time the swelling and soreness went away, and nothing came of it.
   Of all the things I had to get used to at my new school, the most difficult, therefore, was the locker room. Even now with the season over, Coach Stork was standing by the door, barking. “Okay, ladies, hit the showers! Come on. Hustle up!” She saw me coming and managed to smile. “Good effort,” she said, handing me a towel.
   Hierarchies exist everywhere, but especially in locker rooms. The swampiness, the nudity bring back original conditions. Let me perform a quick taxonomy of our locker room. Nearest the showers were the Charm Bracelets. As I passed by, I glanced down the steamy corridor to see them performing their serious, womanly movements. One Charm Bracelet was bending forward, wrapping a towel around her wet hair. She snapped upright, twisting it into a turban. Next to her another Bracelet was staring into space with empty blue eyes as she anointed herself with moisturizer. Still another Bracelet lifted a water bottle to her lips, exposing the long column of her neck. Not wanting to stare, I looked away, but I could still hear the sound they made getting dressed. Above the hiss of shower heads and the slap of feet on tiles, a high, thin tinkling reached my ears, a sound almost like the tapping of champagne flutes before a toast. What was it? Can’t you guess? From the slender wrists of these girls, tiny silver charms were chiming together. It was the ringing of tiny tennis rackets against tiny snow skis, of miniature Eiffel Towers against half-inch ballerinas on point. It was the sound of Tiffany frogs and whales chiming together; of puppies tinkling against cats, of seals with balls on their noses hitting monkeys with hand organs, of wedges of cheese ringing against clowns’ faces, of strawberries singing with inkwells, of valentine hearts striking the bells around the necks of Swiss cows. In the midst of all this soft chiming, one girl held out her wrist to her friends, like a lady recommending a perfume. Her father had just returned from a business trip, bringing her back this latest present.
   The Charm Bracelets: they were the rulers of my new school. They’d been going to Baker & Inglis since kindergarten. Since pre-kindergarten! They lived near the water and had grown up, like all Grosse Pointers, pretending that our shallow lake was no lake at all but actually the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean. Yes, that was the secret wish of the Charm Bracelets and their parents, to be not Midwesterners but Easterners, to affect their dress and lockjaw speech, to summer in Martha’s Vineyard, to say “back East” instead of “out East,” as though their time in Michigan represented only a brief sojourn away from home.
   What can I say about my well-bred, small-nosed, trust-funded schoolmates? Descended from hardworking, thrifty industrialists (there were two girls in my class who had the same last names as American car makers), did they show aptitudes for math or science? Did they display mechanical ingenuity? Or a commitment to the Protestant work ethic? In a word: no. There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich. The Charm Bracelets didn’t study. They never raised their hands in class. They sat in the back, slumping, and went home each day carrying the prop of a notebook. (But maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I’m dipping into principal, spending it all …)
   Passing by their lockers in seventh grade, I wasn’t aware of all this yet. I look back now (as Dr. Luce urged me to do) to see exactly what twelve-year-old Calliope was feeling, watching the Charm Bracelets undress in steamy light. Was there a shiver of arousal in her? Did flesh respond beneath goalie pads? I try to remember, but what comes back is only a bundle of emotions: envy, certainly, but also disdain. Inferiority and superiority at once. Above all, there was panic.