SYG 4060

1. Compare and contrast D’Emilio’s Capitalism and Gay Identity with the From Mary to Modern Woman reading. What patterns do you see that are similar to the modern American society? What can be said about global notions of gender in the modern age? Feel free to invoke Foucault.

2. How is the writer’s experience important in the story being told in Middlesex? Describe your reaction to the reading and invoke some of the concepts discussed in the Queer Theory reading to try to make sense of sexuality when it does not match your own conventions. Compare both readings, but go deeper to explore your own stereotypes and socialization.

Responses should be at LEAST 250 words each.

From Mary to Modern Woman: The Material Basis of Marianismo and Its Transformation
in a Spanish Village
Author(s): Jane F. Collier
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 100-107
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/644588
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from Mary to modern woman:
the material basis of Marianismo

and its transformation in a Spanish village

JANE F. COLLIER-Stanford University

In 1963-64, the married women of Los Olivos (pseudonym), a small village in the mountains
of Huelva, southwestern Spain, seemed typical representatives of Mediterranean culture. When
housewives gathered at the public fountain to wash clothes, they wore drab, shapeless outfits,
and many wore mourning. Most were overweight. Washing clothes and attending funerals
were their most public activities. In the evenings married women stayed home or visited the
sick. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1984, the new generation of married women pre-
sented a very different picture. Instead of wearing drab, shapeless clothes, most wore outfits
that showed off their figures. And most had shapely figures. They worried about gaining weight,

although some were notably more successful at dieting than others. Married women no longer
stayed home every evening. Rather, they spent weekend evenings with their husbands in the
local bars, where they sat around tables dressed in their most fashionable outfits, with heavy
makeup and elaborate hairdos.

How do we understand such a radical shift in married women’s presentation of self? The

explanation offered by many ethnographers of Spanish villages-and echoed by residents of
Los Olivos-is that rural Spain has “opened up” (see Aceves and Douglass 1976). Massive
emigration from the countryside and the spread of television into remote villages have exposed
the present generation of rural Spaniards to ideas and choices not available to their parents and

grandparents. Villagers in Los Olivos, for example, say that 20 years ago their village was atra-
sado (backward). People followed outmoded customs, they say, because they did not know
any others. But now everyone has city relatives and a television set, and many people have

cars. Today’s adults have been exposed to city ways. Now everyone below the age of 60 wants
to be “modern.” Married women want to dress nicely and go out with their husbands. And

young adults think that former village customs, such as delaying marriage until age 30, or wear-

ing heavy mourning for 10 years after the death of a parent, are tonterias (stupidities). Such
“backward” village customs are to be discarded.

The “opening up” explanation is not wrong. But it is not very illuminating either. To begin,
the village was not isolated in 1963-64. There may have been only two television sets in town,
but everyone had radios. Women also had excellent knowledge of how urban fashion setters

In one generation, married women in an Andalusian village appeared to have
turned from emulating the Virgin Mary to emulating the modern woman of Spanish
advertisements and TV. Drawing on the notion that gender conceptions are aspects
of cultural systems through which people negotiate relations of inequality within
complex social wholes, I suggest that a concern for female chastity gave way to a
concern for personal capacities and preferences when inequalities in income and
life-style among villagers no longer appeared to rest on inheritance, but on the
urban, salaried jobs people obtained. [Mediterranean society, gender, political
economy, honor code, ideology]

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lived and dressed. Many girls worked as servants for wealthy families before returning to marry

in the village. And glossy magazines depicting royalty and movie stars circulated among village
women. Local dressmakers and hairdressers were, in fact, so successful at copying city fashions
for unmarried women that I had difficulty distinguishing dressed up village maidens from stylish

urban dwellers (see also Martinez-Alier 1971:208).

Given that villagers knew a great deal about the customs and life-styles of middle- and upper-
class urban dwellers in 1963-64, the “opening up” hypothesis cannot explain why married
women’s presentation of self changed drastically in 20 years. Rather, what is needed is an ex-
planation of why city ways became attractive to today’s adults when they had not been so for
their parents. In addition, the “opening up” hypothesis does not explain the content of the
“traditional” and the “modern.” Why should married women in 1963-64 have worn drab
clothes, cultivated plump figures, and stayed home in the evenings? And why should today’s
generation of married women wear bright clothes, try to stay thin, and join their husbands at
bars on weekends? Similarly, why should young people today think it “unnatural” to delay
marriage until age 30, and why should they call village mourning customs “stupidities”?

In this paper, I shall suggest answers to both the content and the change questions. As to
content, I will argue that cultural conceptions of gender must be interpreted as aspects of cul-
tural systems through which people manipulate, interpret, rationalize, resist, and reproduce
relations of inequality within complex social wholes (see Collier and Rosaldo 1981). To un-
derstand conceptions of gender, we cannot look at what men and women are or do, but rather
must ask what people want and fear, what privileges they seek to claim, rationalize, and defend.
To understand gender, we must understand social inequality. And, if gender conceptions are
idioms for interpreting and manipulating social inequality, then we should expect notions of
femininity and masculinity to change when one organization of inequality gives way to an-
other.

Twenty years ago, Los Olivos seemed indistinguishable from the Andalusian village Pitt-
Rivers described in his 1954 book, The People of the Sierra. Their gender system was a typical
example of the Mediterranean values of “honor and shame.” A man’s honor was a function of
his mother’s, sisters’, and wife’s sexual chastity. A family’s reputation depended on the sexual
shame of its women and on the readiness of its men to defend, with violence if need be, its
women’s purity.

A cultural concern for female chastity is not unique to Mediterranean peoples. Rather, all
complex agrarian societies, including India and China, have forms of the “virginity complex”
(Ortner 1976). The association of virginity with agrarian systems thus suggests a first-level ex-
planation for its occurrence: in stratified societies where rights and privileges are vested in sta-

tus groups, female chastity becomes a cultural concern because legitimate birth is the primary
idiom people use to claim, rationalize, and defend status privileges.’ Legitimate birth is, of
course, not the basis of status inequalities. Such inequalities result from unequal access to the
means of production as maintained by coercive force. But individuals living within such soci-
eties rarely have occasion to contemplate the wider structure of inequality. Rather, people en-
gaged in everyday, practical action are concerned with asserting their own rights and privileges
against the challenges of particular others. As a result, people talk and act as if inheritance were
the basis of status inequalities.

In a world where people claim, defend, and justify privileges on the basis of legitimate birth,
illegitimacy is the idiom people use to challenge or deny others’ claims to precedence.2 To
question the chastity of a man’s mother is to question his right to the status he claims as his. In
such a world, women’s bodies appear as gateways to all privileges. But women’s bodies are
gateways any man may enter. Women’s penetrability is their most significant feature. The status

and reputation of a family thus rest on the degree to which its women are protected from pen-
etration-by women’s own sense of sexual shame, by being locked away, and/or by the cour-
age of family men in repelling seducers.

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While an understanding of stratified agrarian societies may provide a first-level explanation

for “virginity complexes,” any particular instance of the complex must be understood within
its specific historical context. Women’s chastity may be a primary idiom used by people in
stratified agrarian societies for negotiating claims to unequal privileges, but it is not the only
idiom. Such societies are complex. They contain many status and ethnic groups. Women’s
chastity may not matter to some. And, as Mediterraneanists realize, the “values of honor and
shame” are not uniform throughout the area (Peristiany 1966; Herzfeld 1980). In order to un-
derstand how “honor and shame” are lived in any particular time and place, therefore, we need

to examine the specific privileges people seek to claim, rationalize, and defend.
In 1963-64, Los Olivos was a small village of less than 800 people where inheritance ap-

peared to determine people’s occupations, incomes, and life-chances. Although the commu-
nity appeared egalitarian (the wealthiest landowners lived outside in nearby, more significant
towns, and beggars rarely stayed overnight), the village was nevertheless divided into three
status groups: (1) a small number of resident landowners who hired workers and did not do
manual labor themselves, (2) a larger number of landowners who worked their own land but
did not have to work for others, and (3) many people with little or no land who worked for
others as day laborers. Long before 1963-64, Los Olivos was integrated into the capitalist world
system. The larger landowners produced for the market, and half the villagers worked for
wages. But inheritance still appeared to be the major determinant of people’s life-chances be-
cause, in a labor-intensive system of mixed-crop agriculture, workers knew as much or more
about the entire agricultural process as their employers.3 As a result, villagers lived in a world
where the most obvious explanation for differences in occupation, income, and life-style was
that some people had inherited capital (land or small industries) while others had not.

Although Los Olivos appeared to be a “traditional” Spanish village, the “tranquil” com-
munity we observed in 1963-64 was, in fact, only one moment in an ongoing historical pro-
cess. As Perez Diaz (1976) notes, change in Spain has been continuous. In Andalusia, a process
of class polarization, begun during the last century and intensifying as the accumulation of land
by entrepreneurial landlords created an increasingly large and impoverished class of landless
rural laborers, was contained by various mechanisms, including naked force (see Martinez-
Alier 1971). For a brief period in the early 1930s class warfare erupted in Los Olivos. An active

union of agrarian socialists wrested control of wages and working conditions from landowners
(Collier n.d.). But during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, all vocal socialists were killed or
exiled and Franco’s victorious troops gave control of village government to the town’s wealth-
iest landowners, who thereafter ruled with the aid of a resident contingent of Civil Guards.

Before the Civil War, working-class women married at a younger age than women of the
propertied class, and many were pregnant at marriage. But after the war, these differences in
behavior by class disappeared (Collier 1983). Not only were many working-class women
forced to delay their marriages by the war and subsequent famine, but the town’s elites, who
enjoyed uncontested control of economic resources, focused on a woman’s virtue when con-
sidering her, or her family’s, requests for aid.4 It was also true that, even for working-class fam-
ilies whose estate consisted of labor power rather than capital, the wealth parents accumulated
determined children’s dowries and the spouses they could attract (see Price and Price 1966b).
In 1963-64, landowners’ uncontested control of village affairs ensured that all people, whether

from propertied families or not, lived in a world where the resources and reputations of parents
appeared to determine the status of their children.

Given the apparent role of inheritance in determining people’s occupations, incomes, and
life-chances, people’s actions, whatever their ostensible purpose, were always open to being
interpreted as statements about a man’s courage or a woman’s sexual modesty. Whatever prac-
tical reasons, for example, a couple may have had to delay marriage until the bride’s 29th or
30th year, such a delay offered visible proof of the bride’s ability to deny and control her sexual
impulses. Similarly, the woman who dutifully observed 10 years of mourning after the death of

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a parent demonstrated-by wearing heavy black wool summer and winter-her ability to mor-
tify the flesh. And the married woman who never spent a perra on herself demonstrated both
her capacity for self-sacrifice and her lack of interest in being sexually attractive to men. On
the other side, of course, the pregnant bride, the mourning woman who laid aside her shawl
while working in the sun, and the wife who bought herself a new dress were all appropriate
targets of gossip.

Although a woman’s sexual modesty was never without significance, maidens enjoyed a
freedom apparently denied to married women.5 Marriage marked a major turning point in peo-
ple’s lives. Due to the system of equal, partible inheritance, family estates were not maintained
through time, but rather constituted anew each generation with the birth of children who united

the separate inheritances of their parents. As a result, marriage, with its possibility for producing

legitimate heirs, marked the point at which a man and woman passed from dependence on
parental estates to responsibility for the future estate their children would divide. Unmarried

young adults, as people without responsibilities, were expected to divertirse (enjoy them-
selves). Maidens were thus encouraged to seek amusement and to follow the latest fashions-
as long as they did not violate community norms of modesty. Married people, in contrast, had

obligaciones (obligations). A married woman was expected to sacrifice herself to build the es-
tate her children would inherit. Divertirse and obligaciones stood in stark contrast. For a mar-
ried woman to “enjoy herself” was, by definition, to squander her children’s inheritance.

By 1984, Los Olivos was a different world. Heavy outmigration has reduced the permanent
population to under 300 and overturned the class structure. The migration of landless workers
to city jobs left landowners with the choice of farming their own land or migrating too. The
poorest and most overworked people in the village are now the landowners who stayed, while

poor workers who migrated first, and so participated in the industrial boom of the 1 960s, enjoy
month-long vacations in village houses they have renovated with cash from city jobs.6

The decisive break occurred in the mid-1 960s. 1963-64 was, in fact, the end of an era. Dur-

ing the 1960s, ongoing developments in Spain became “so acute that the point [was] reached
where the traditional framework, maintained for about a century, [lost] its fundamental char-
acteristics and [disappeared]” (Perez Diaz 1976:123). In Los Olivos, the labor-intensive agri-
cultural system finally collapsed, due to rising wages and competition from capital-intensive
agricultural enterprises elsewhere in Spain. Records beginning at the turn of the century indi-
cate a steady rate of emigration from Los Olivos before 1963-64, but the people who left were
either members of the wealthiest class-who were regionally, rather than locally, based any-
way-or landless laborers, many of whom had, in one way or another, lost their “honor.”
Given high rates of unemployment throughout Andalusia, and the general suspicion of
strangers, most people who could make a living in Los Olivos stayed there. In the mid-1 960s,
however, when the agricultural system collapsed, children of landed and honorable families
began migrating to city jobs. The generation of people who came of age in the 1960s, whether
they emigrated or remained in Los Olivos, thus entered a different world.

For members of this generation and their children, inheritance no longer appears to be the
major determinant of occupation, income, and life-style. Rather, people experience their oc-
cupations and incomes as determined by their personal choices and abilities. Schoolteachers,
nurses, postmen, policemen, and banktellers talk about how hard they studied and how well
they did on national or firm exams. Bus and truck drivers talk of learning to drive and acquiring
licenses. And villagers who inherited small enterprises talk of the skills they acquired and the
capital improvements they made. On the other side, people blame the poor and unemployed
for their failure. Everyone recognizes that Spain has a very high rate of unemployment, espe-
cially among young people, but when explaining why a particular youth has been unable to
find a job, people talk of his poor school record or his lack of initiative.

In short, the people of Los Olivos, both its migrants and those who are still in the village, now
live in a world where personal choice and ability is the primary idiom people use to claim,

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rationalize, and defend inequalities in working conditions, income, and life-style.7 Personal
ability is, of course, not the basis of inequality. The distribution of income and jobs in Spain,
as in most of the developed world, is organized through a market shaped by the fiscal policies

of core state governments, maintained by coercive force. But, just as people living in stratified

agrarian societies talk about legitimate birth, so people facing an array of possible jobs talk
about personal desires and qualifications. And, just as in agrarian societies, a woman’s penetra-
bility is her most important feature, so in industrial societies, a woman’s most important feature

is the “womanliness” that differentiates her from, and makes her attractive to, men.

In a world where people’s inward capacities and preferences appear to determine their oc-
cupations, a woman’s biological capacity to bear children seems to determine her apparently
primary occupation of housewife and mother.8 And, in a world where a homemaker’s life-style

is largely determined by her husband’s income, a woman’s status and life-chances appear to
depend on the kind of man she can attract. As a result, a woman’s physical appearance is al-
ways open to being interpreted as a statement about her moral and social worth. A woman’s
appearance also provides evidence for assessing the judgment and character of the man who

is her husband or lover, although a man’s job tends to be the primary standard by which his
worth is assessed. Whatever a woman’s appearance, therefore, it is never without significance.

The woman who takes care of her body and dresses attractively, particularly as she grows older,

displays her “womanliness” and testifies to the good judgment of her man. The woman of slov-

enly appearance, on the other hand, suggests both inward and outward failure. Among Los
Olivos natives under 60, for example, a fat, uncared-for body and drab clothes are the sign of

a country hick. They proclaim a family’s status as unskilled laborers on the bottom of the social

hierarchy.

Today’s parents are concerned-as their own parents were-to provide their children with
the resources children need for succeeding as adults. But today, education, not property, ap-
pears to be the most important determinant of a child’s future income and status-at least for

this population of working-, and lower-middle-class families. Many parents thus sacrifice them-

selves to enroll their children in private schools, and/or to provide music lessons, English les-

sons, typing lessons, and so forth. “Sacrifice,” however, has a very different meaning to modern

parents. Divertirse and obligaciones are no longer cultural opposites. Because investment in a
child’s education, unlike investment in family property, may or may not pay off, parents who

have done all they can for children see no reason not to spend leftover money on themselves.

More importantly, today’s adults are expected to spend their money and leisure time in ways

that enhance their enjoyment and enrich their experience. The consumer products people buy,

and the uses they make of leisure time, testify to their sense of taste and knowledge of modern

ways.

In this paper, I have focused on gender conceptions, arguing that notions of masculinity and

femininity must be understood with reference to the idioms people use in negotiating practical

social relations within complex social wholes. I suggested that the married women of Los Oli-
vos in 1963-64 wore drab clothes and ran to fat because they lived within a system of inequal-

ity where legitimate birth was the primary idiom people used to claim, rationalize, and defend
unequal privileges. In such a system, a married woman’s drab clothes and sexual unattractive-
ness testified to the legitimacy of her children and to her concern for building their future prop-

erty. As of 1984, in contrast, the people of Los Olivos, both migrants and those still in the vil-
lage, live within a system of inequality where a person’s capacities and desires appear to de-
termine the job or spouse he or she acquires. Today, the woman who keeps her figure and
dresses fashionably testifies to her own worth and to her capacity for attracting and keeping a
desirable man, even as the married woman who visits a bar with her husband demonstrates,
not a lack of interest in her children’s future, but rather her sophistication. Twenty years ago,

the women of Los Olivos were judged according to how well they emulated the Virgin Mary.

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Today they are judged according to how well they emulate the Modern Woman of advertise-
ments and TV.

Although I have used implicit models of “agrarian” and “industrial” societies to analyze the
content of gender conceptions in Los Olivos, I have also argued that the gender conceptions of
particular peoples can be understood only in relation to their specific historical experiences.
The Modern Woman of Spanish advertisements and TV may look a great deal like her North
American counterpart, but the lived experiences of Los Olivos women are not those of their
North American age mates. As Southern Europeans, the modern women of Los Olivos draw on

a different cultural heritage. They seem more concerned with dressing and decorating their
bodies than with their bodies themselves. They also seem-to me, at least-more self-confident
and less dependent on men than American women. Spanish mothers of young children, who
have difficulty finding and keeping jobs, are, like their American counterparts, only one man
away from destitution, but divorces among Los Olivos couples are still infrequent, and the few
women whose husbands left them are not blamed for having failed to keep their men. Even the
enemies of a woman whose husband left her with four small children blame the husband rather

than the wife. Similarly, mothers are pitied, not blamed, when their children turn out badly.
More importantly, the women of Los Olivos have lived, and are living, through a different

history. Today’s adults have, in their lifetimes, experienced a radical cultural break. The women

who came of age in the early 1960s grew up, courted, and perhaps married within the value
system of “honor and shame” (see Price and Price 1966a). They lived out the cultural require-
ment to enjoy themselves, expecting to assume later the obligaciones of marriage and parent-
hood. But their lives turned out differently. As the labor-intensive agricultural system collapsed,
many migrated to cities as workers and/or wives of migrating men, while those who remained

in the village found that farming shifted from a way of life to a way of making a living (see
Harding 1984). The generation of people who came of age in the early 1960s, who grew up
within a cultural system of “honor and shame,” have thus been living their adult lives within a
cultural system that emphasizes personal initiative and abilities.

Not only have today’s adults lived through a cultural break, they continue to live it each day.

Given that Los Olivos was never isolated from outside ideas, I expected to find evidence of a
gradual shift from one cultural system to the other. I thought that people who lived through the
1960s would embrace aspects of both systems, or at least understand them both. But I was
mistaken. Instead, individuals seem to live within one system, and to misunderstand the other.

The cultural break appears gradual because members of both generations act in ways they
hope will please the other. Elderly widows, for example, often exchange their mourning cos-
tumes for dark print dresses in order to please their children, even as younger women whose
parents have died will don black dresses to please elderly relatives, particularly when visiting
the village. But even as young and old act to please others they care about, they seem to lack
a deep understanding of why those others care.

When elderly widows explain why younger women have abandoned mourning costume,
they say that young women fear adverse gossip from urban dwellers who look down on those

who wear black. Young women, however, never mention gossip. Instead, they talk of grief as
an inward feeling. They see no reason to display personal grief publicly by wearing black. And
they actively condemn the “hypocrisy” of those who continue to wear mourning long after
grief could be deeply felt. I have often heard younger women explain their reasons to elderly
mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, but I have never heard an older woman who advanced the

“gossip” explanation either suggest she understood the younger woman or spontaneously pro-
duce the “feeling” explanation herself.

Similarly, young women seem to misunderstand their elders. Even those who came of age in
the 1960s, and so grew up within a cultural system of “honor and shame,” seem to misunder-

stand that system today. When explaining why elders adhere to traditional mourning customs,
young people say elders have otra mentalidad (another mentality). Elders, however, never men-

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tion “mentality.” They say that people must show “respect” for the dead. Following mourning

customs has nothing to do with an individual’s desires, feelings, or intentions. Instead, wearing
mourning testifies to a person’s or family’s reputation. Given elders’ statements, young people
are not wrong when they attribute elders’ actions to their mentalidad. Elders do have a different

“mentality.” But in interpreting elders’ actions as testifying to their inward desires and inten-

tions (their mentality), instead of to the reputations of their families, young people reveal how
thoroughly they live within the cultural system of personal initiative and abilities, and how
thoroughly they fail to comprehend the cultural system of honor and shame.

notes

Acknowledgments. George Collier’s and my 1963-64 research in Los Olivos was supported by a Ful-
bright fellowship, and our research 20 years later was supported by grant HD 17351 from the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development, titled “Late Marriage, Family Constellation, Kinship
Change.” This paper, written while I was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, is one piece of a
larger project to examine changing conceptions of the family in Los Olivos. It has benefitted from the com-
ments of George Collier, Louise Lamphere, Roger Rouse, Ann Swidler and Sylvia Yanagisako.

‘ n this paper I suggest that female chastity is an idiom people use to talk about (and fight over) social
inequality in complex agrarian societies with private property where status appears inherited-whether
such societies have effective central governments or appear anarchic. Others have, of course, advanced
different explanations for the “honor and shame” complex in Mediterranean societies (for example,
Schneider 1971; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Pitt-Rivers 1977), and for “virginity complexes” else-
where (for example, Ortner 1976). This paper is too short, however, to compare explanations.

2Female chastity is not a single, coherent idiom with a single cause. Rather, it is a complex, multiply-
determined symbol. In a world where legitimate heirs are distinguished from illegitimate non-heirs, a moth-
er’s chastity guarantees her children’s right to inherit. Where only virgins are eligible to become mothers
of legitimate children, a daughter’s virginity may represent her family’s hopes of upward mobility and po-
litical patronage (see Ortner 1976). Men, as managers of inherited estates, whose life work is to guard such
estates for their children, experience the begetting of bastards on their wives as rendering their lives mean-
ingless. In areas of southern Europe where daughters inherit property, the man who seduces a maiden is,
in a real sense, “stealing” some of her family’s estate. In societies where the presence of a “state” or “civil
society” creates “the family” as a symbolic category, women, as representatives of the “family,” may come
to stand for the family’s status. Their inviolability may then represent the inviolability of the family estate,
in a world where net downward mobility-caused by the fact that rich people produce more living off-
spring than the poor-ensures that most people spend their lives trying to “hang on” to what they have.
And so forth…

3Martinez-Alier, for example, attributes Andalusian laborers’ persisting belief in reparto (agrarian re-
form)-and hence their view of the existing system of land distribution as illegitimate-to their belief that
they are technically competent to manage the estates on which they work, due to their good understanding
of the productive process and the ease with which they become tenants (1971:117).

4Maddox (n.d.:Ch. 7) writes that regional elites before the Civil War glorified the virtues of working-class
women even as they denigrated the honor and moral capacities of working-class males. Elite authors, in
the regional newspaper, represented poor women as guardians of family virtue and piety, whose natural
verguenza (sense of shame) inclined them toward raising patient, humble children who would uphold the
existing order instead of seeking to overthrow it out of “selfish” motives.

5Maidens, in fact, had far less freedom and power than married women. In Los Olivos, the woman who
lacked obligaciones had no culturally valid reason for refusing to do what others requested. Maidens were
thus always at others’ beck and call.

6Outmigration did not completely overturn the class structure of Los Olivos. The most privileged families
in 1963-64 remain the most privileged today, because elites took advantage of their wealth and personal
connections to educate their children for professional positions before the labor-intensive agricultural sys-
tem collapsed. Landowners just below this elite stratum, however, who stayed in the community, are now
among its poorest and most overworked members.

7The idiom of personal choice and ability is, of course, as complex and multiply-determined as the idiom
of inheritance. Individualism, voluntarism, rationalism, and so forth are intersecting discourses whose
usages and consequences vary widely according to historical circumstances. Female chastity also figures
in voluntarist idioms, but with a different significance than in the idiom of inheritance. Within the idiom
of personal choice and ability, a woman’s chastity testifies to her inner capacities and desires, not to her
family’s reputation. So, chaste women may appear “naturally” asexual, within a set of gender conceptions
that casts men as active/rational and women as passive/emotional, or as rationally withholding their sex-
uality in order to trap a man into marriage.

8The casting of housework and childcare as an “occupation” is, of course, also a result of an industrial

106 american ethnologist

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system of inequality. Caring for her casa (house) was, and remains, a major preoccupation of Los Olivos
women, but the meaning of casa has changed drastically. In 1963-64 the woman who cared for her casa
was co-manager of the estate her children would inherit. If her husband abandoned her, she kept the estate.
Today, the woman who cares for her casa is an unpaid homemaker, as economically dependent as her
children on the wage her husband brings home.

references cited

Aceves, Joseph B., and William A. Douglass, eds.
1976 The Changing Faces of Rural Spain. New York: Wiley.

Collier, George A.
1983 Late Marriage and the Uncontested Reign of Property. Paper read at the 1983 meetings of the

American Anthropological Association.
n.d. Socialists of Rural Andalusia, 1930-1950: The Unacknowledged Revolutionaries. Unpublished

ms.

Collier, Jane F., and Michelle Z. Rosaldo
1981 Politics and Gender in Simple Societies. In Sexual Meanings. S. Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds.

pp. 275-329. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harding, Susan F.

1984 Remaking Ibieca: Rural Life in Aragon Under Franco. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.

Herzfeld, Michael
1980 Honour and Shame: Problems in the Analysis of Moral Systems. Man (NS) 15:339-351.

Maddox, Richard
n.d. Religion, Honor, Patronage: A Study of Culture and Power in an Andalusian Town. Doctoral dis-

sertation in preparation, Stanford University.
Martinez-Alier, Juan

1971 Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Ortner, Sherry

1976 The Virgin and the State. Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 2:1-16; reprinted 1978 in Fem-
inist Studies 4:19-37.

Perez Diaz, Victor M.
1976 Process of Change in Rural Castilian Communities. In The Changing Faces of Rural Spain. Joseph

Aceves and William Douglass, eds. pp. 123-141. New York: Wiley.
Peristiany, J. G., ed.

1966 Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian

1954 The People of the Sierra. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
1977 The Fate of Schechem or the Politics of Sex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, Richard, and Sally Price
1966a Noviazgo in an Andalusian Pueblo. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 22(3):302-322.
1966b Stratification and Courtship in an Andalusian Village. Man (NS) 1(4):526-533.

Schneider, Jane
1971 Of Vigilance and Virgins. Ethnology 10:1-24.

Schneider, Jane, and Peter Schneider
1976 Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press.

Submitted 3 September 1985
Accepted 23 September 1985

from Mary to modern woman 107

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

American Ethnologist, Vol. 13, No. 1, Feb., 1986
Front Matter
Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa [pp. 1 – 22]
Batak Tape Cassette Kinship: Constructing Kinship Through the Indonesian National Mass Media [pp. 23 – 42]
Let the Evidence Fit the Crime: Evidence, Law, and “Sociological Truth” among the Dou Donggo [pp. 43 – 61]
“Eat This, It’ll Do You a Power of Good”: Food and Commensality among Durrani Pashtuns [pp. 62 – 79]
The Varieties of Fertility Cultism in New Guinea: Part I [pp. 80 – 99]
From Mary to Modern Woman: The Material Basis of Marianismo and Its Transformation in a Spanish Village [pp. 100 – 107]
Political Activity among Working-Class Women in a U. S. City [pp. 108 – 117]
From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Production and Reproduction in an Industrial Community [pp. 118 – 130]
Review Articles
Agency and Social Theory: A Review of Anthony Giddens [pp. 131 – 137]
The Politics of Representation: Anthropological Discourse and Australian Aborigines [pp. 138 – 153]
Comments and Reflections
Reply to Rosemary Firth [pp. 154 – 155]
The Anthropologist’s Rorschach [pp. 155 – 157]
On “Inalienable Wealth” [pp. 157 – 158]
Further Comments on “Inalienable Wealth” [pp. 158 – 159]
Reviews
untitled [pp. 160 – 161]
untitled [pp. 161 – 162]
untitled [pp. 162 – 163]
untitled [pp. 163 – 164]
untitled [pp. 164 – 166]
untitled [pp. 166 – 167]
untitled [p. 167]
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untitled [pp. 169 – 170]
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untitled [pp. 186 – 187]
Back Matter [pp. 188 – 190]

Middllesex – J
Pulitzer
Jeffery

r Prize Wi
Eugeni
inner
ides

Ajaytao

JEFFREYEUGENIDES
Middlesex
FARRAR,STRAUSANDGIROUX
NEWYORK

Farrar, Straus andGiroux
19UnionSquareWest,NewYork10003

Copyright©2002by JeffreyEugenides
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously inCanada byAlfredA.KnopfCanada,
a division ofRandomHouse ofCanadaLimited, Toronto
Printed in theUnited States ofAmerica
First edition, 2002

Portions of this novel appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker and Granta.
       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eugenides, Jeffrey.
Middlesex / JeffreyEugenides.—1st ed.
       p.  cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-19969-2 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-19969-8 (alk. paper)
1. Greek Americans—Fiction.  2. Gender identity—Fiction. 3. Hermaphroditism—Fiction.  4.
Teenagers—Fiction.  5.Grosse Pointe (Mich.)—Fiction.  6.Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction.  I. Title.

PS3555.U4M532002
813′.54—dc21
2002019921
Designed by JonathanD.Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

4   6   8   10   12   13   11   9   7   5

The author would like to thank the Whiting Younger Writers’ Awards, the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst, the American Academy in Berlin, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Helen
Papanikolas, and Milton Karafilis, for their help and support. In addition, the author would like
to cite the following works from which he drew information crucial in the writing of Middlesex:
The Smyrna Affair by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin; “Wrestling with Death: Greek Immigrant
Funeral Customs inUtah” byHelenZ. Papanikolas; An Original Man byClaudeAndrewClegg
III; The Black Muslims in America byC. Eric Lincoln; VenusesPenuses: Sexology, Sexosophy,
and Exigency Theory by Dr. John Money; Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt; Hermaphrodites and the Medical
Invention of Sex by Alice Domurat Dreger; “Androgens and the Evolution of Male Gender
Identity Among Male Pseudo-hermaphrodites with 5-alpha-reductase Deficiency” by Julianne
Imperato-McGinley, M.D., Ralph E. Peterson, M.D., Teofilo Gautier, M.D., and Erasmo Sturla,
M.D.; and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, the newspaper published by the Intersex Society of
NorthAmerica.

http://www.fsgbooks.com

FORYAMA,WHOCOMESFROMA
DIFFERENTGENEPOOLENTIRELY

CONTENTS

BOOKONE
TheSilver Spoon
Matchmaking
An Immodest Proposal
TheSilkRoad

BOOKTWO
HenryFord’sEnglish-LanguageMelting Pot
Minotaurs
Marriage on Ice
Tricknology
Clarinet Serenade
News of theWorld
ExOvoOmnia

BOOKTHREE
HomeMovies
Opa!
Middlesex
TheMediterraneanDiet
TheWolverette
WaxingLyrical
TheObscureObject
Tiresias inLove
Flesh andBlood
TheGunon theWall

BOOKFOUR
TheOracularVulva
LookingMyselfUp inWebster’s
GoWest,YoungMan
GenderDysphoria in SanFrancisco

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Hermaphroditus
Air-Ride
TheLast Stop

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BOOKONE

THESILVERSPOON

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smoglessDetroit day in January of 1960;
and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of
1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity
in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric
Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now
sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height
chartwith a black box coveringmy eyes.
My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s
license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I’m a
former field hockey goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare
attendant at the Greek Orthodox liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S.
State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I’ve been ridiculed by
classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of
Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her
brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me
into myth; I’ve left my body in order to occupy others—and all this happened before I turned
sixteen.
But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on.
After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-aunts and -uncles, long-
lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or, in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those
things in one.And so before it’s too late Iwant to get it down for good: this roller-coaster ride of
a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth
chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount
Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine
generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing
how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed
across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the
fertile soil ofmymother’s ownmidwesternwomb.
Sorry if I get a littleHomeric at times. That’s genetic, too.

Three months before I was born, in the aftermath of one of our elaborate Sunday dinners, my
grandmother Desdemona Stephanides ordered my brother to get her silkworm box. Chapter
Eleven had been heading toward the kitchen for a second helping of rice pudding when she
blocked his way. At fifty-seven, with her short, squat figure and intimidating hairnet, my
grandmother was perfectly designed for blocking people’s paths. Behind her in the kitchen, the
day’s large female contingent had congregated, laughing and whispering. Intrigued, Chapter
Eleven leaned sideways to see what was going on, but Desdemona reached out and firmly
pinched his cheek. Having regained his attention, she sketched a rectangle in the air and pointed

at the ceiling. Then, through her ill-fitting dentures, she said, “Go for yia yia, dolly mou.”
Chapter Eleven knew what to do. He ran across the hall into the living room. On all fours he
scrambled up the formal staircase to the second floor. He raced past the bedrooms along the
upstairs corridor.At the far endwas a nearly invisible door,wallpapered over like the entrance to
a secret passageway. Chapter Eleven located the tiny doorknob level with his head and, using all
his strength, pulled it open. Another set of stairs lay behind it. For a long moment my brother
stared hesitantly into the darkness above, before climbing, very slowly now, up to the atticwhere
mygrandparents lived.
In sneakers he passed beneath the twelve damply newspapered birdcages suspended from the
rafters. With a brave face he immersed himself in the sour odor of the parakeets, and in my
grandparents’ own particular aroma, a mixture of mothballs and hashish. He negotiated his way
past my grandfather’s book-piled desk and his collection of rebetika records. Finally, bumping
into the leather ottoman and the circular coffee table made of brass, he found my grandparents’
bed and, under it, the silkwormbox.
Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had a tin lid perforated by tiny
airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizable saint. The saint’s face had been rubbed off,
but the fingers of his right hand were raised to bless a short, purple, terrifically self-confident-
looking mulberry tree. After gazing awhile at this vivid botanical presence, Chapter Eleven
pulled the box from under the bed and opened it. Inside were the two wedding crowns made
from rope and, coiled like snakes, the two long braids of hair, each tied with a crumbling black
ribbon. He poked one of the braids with his index finger. Just then a parakeet squawked, making
my brother jump, and he closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and carried it downstairs to
Desdemona.
She was still waiting in the doorway. Taking the silkworm box out of his hands, she turned
back into the kitchen.At this point Chapter Elevenwas granted a viewof the room,where all the
women now fell silent. They moved aside to let Desdemona pass and there, in the middle of the
linoleum, was my mother. Tessie Stephanides was leaning back in a kitchen chair, pinned
beneath the immense, drum-tight globe of her pregnant belly. She had a happy, helpless
expression on her face, which was flushed and hot. Desdemona set the silkworm box on the
kitchen table and opened the lid. She reached under the wedding crowns and the hair braids to
come up with something Chapter Eleven hadn’t seen: a silver spoon. She tied a piece of string to
the spoon’s handle. Then, stooping forward, she dangled the spoon over my mother’s swollen
belly.And, by extension, overme.
Up until nowDesdemona had had a perfect record: twenty-three correct guesses. She’d known
that Tessie was going to be Tessie. She’d predicted the sex of my brother and of all the babies of
her friends at church. The only children whose genders she hadn’t divined were her own,
because itwas bad luck for amother to plumb
the mysteries of her own womb. Fearlessly, however, she plumbed my mother’s. After some
initial hesitation, the spoon swungnorth to south,whichmeant that Iwas going to be a boy.
Splay-legged in the chair, my mother tried to smile. She didn’t want a boy. She had one
already. In fact, she was so certain I was going to be a girl that she’d picked out only one name
forme: Calliope. Butwhenmygrandmother shouted inGreek, “Aboy!” the crywent around the
room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into the living room where the men were arguing
politics.Andmymother, hearing it repeated somany times, began to believe itmight be true.
As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched into the kitchen to tell his mother
that, this time at least, her spoon was wrong. “And how you know so much?” Desdemona asked
him.Towhich he repliedwhatmanyAmericans of his generationwould have:
“It’s science,Ma.”

Ever since they had decided to have another child—the dinerwas doingwell andChapter Eleven
was long out of diapers—Milton and Tessie had been in agreement that they wanted a daughter.
Chapter Eleven had just turned five years old. He’d recently found a dead bird in the yard,

bringing it into the house to show his mother. He liked shooting things, hammering things,
smashing things, and wrestling with his father. In such a masculine household, Tessie had begun
to feel like the odd woman out and saw herself in ten years’ time imprisoned in a world of
hubcaps and hernias. My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of
lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In the spring of 1959, when
discussions of my fertilization got under way, my mother couldn’t foresee that women would
soon be burning their brassieres by the thousand. Hers were padded, stiff, fire-retardant. As
much as Tessie loved her son, she knew there were certain things she’d be able to share only
with a daughter.
On hismorning drive towork,my father had been seeing visions of an irresistibly sweet, dark-
eyed little girl. She sat on the seat beside him—mostly during stoplights—directing questions at
his patient, all-knowing ear. “What do you call that thing, Daddy?” “That? That’s the Cadillac
seal.” “What’s theCadillac seal?” “Well, a long time ago,
there was a French explorer named Cadillac, and he was the one who discovered Detroit. And
that seal was his family seal, from France.” “What’s France?” “France is a country in Europe.”
“What’s Europe?” “It’s a continent, which is like a great big piece of land, way, way bigger than
a country. But Cadillacs don’t come fromEurope anymore, kukla. They come from right here in
the good old U.S.A.” The light turned green and he drove on. But my prototype lingered. She
was there at the next light and the next. So pleasant was her company that my father, a man
loadedwith initiative, decided to seewhat he could do to turn his vision into reality.
Thus: for some time now, in the living room where the men discussed politics, they had also
been discussing the velocity of sperm. Peter Tatakis, “Uncle Pete,” as we called him, was a
leading member of the debating society that formed every week on our black love seats. A
lifelong bachelor, he had no family in America and so had become attached to ours. Every
Sunday he arrived in his wine-dark Buick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an
incongruously vital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponent of the
Great Books series—which he had read twice—Uncle Pete was engaged with serious thought
and Italian opera. He had a passion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for the
journals of Madame de Staël. He liked to quote that witty lady’s opinion on the German
language, which held that German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the
end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. Uncle Pete had wanted to become a
doctor, but the “catastrophe” had ended that dream. In the United States, he’d put himself
through two years of chiropractic school, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a
human skeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractors had a
somewhat dubious reputation. People didn’t come to Uncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He
cracked necks, straightened spines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, he
was the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sunday afternoons. As a young
man he’d had half his stomach surgically removed, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-
Cola to help digest his meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzyme pepsin, he
sagely told us, and sowas suited to the task.
Itwas this kind of knowledge that ledmy father to trustwhatUncle
Pete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head on a throw pillow, his shoes
off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on my parents’ stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under
the microscope, sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim faster than those
carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generated immediate merriment among the
restaurant owners and fur finishers assembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted
the pose of his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker, aminiature ofwhich sat across the room
on the telephone table. Though the topic had been brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of
those postprandial Sundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal tone of the
discussion, the sperm they were talking about was my father’s. Uncle Pete made it clear: to have
a girl baby, a couple should “have sexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.” That
way, the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more

reliable,would arrive just as the egg dropped.

My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with the scheme. Tessie Zizmo had
been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement,
which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of
the way she’d managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father’s flame, keeping him at a
low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm. This hadn’t been all that difficult, however,
since shewas inDetroit andMiltonwas inAnnapolis at theU.S.NavalAcademy. Formore than
a year Tessie lit candles at the Greek church for her fiancé, while Milton gazed at her
photographs pinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of the movie
magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step, an expanse of black stocking
visible. My mother looks surprisingly pliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing
better than to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches and lampposts of their
humble neighborhood.
She didn’t surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their wedding night onward (according
to what my brother told my covered ears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When
it came to having children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was her belief that an
embryo could sense the amount of lovewithwhich it
had been created. For this reason,my father’s suggestion didn’t sitwellwith her.
“What do you think this is,Milt, theOlympics?”
“Wewere just speaking theoretically,” saidmy father.
“What doesUncle Pete knowabout having babies?”
“He read this particular article in Scientific American,” Milton said. And to bolster his case:
“He’s a subscriber.”
“Listen, if my back went out, I’d go to Uncle Pete. If I had flat feet like you do, I’d go. But
that’s it.”
“This has all been verified.Under themicroscope. Themale sperms are faster.”
“I bet they’re stupider, too.”
“Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don’t want a male sperm. What
wewant is a good old, slow, reliable female sperm.”
“Even if it’s true, it’s still ridiculous. I can’t just do it like clockwork,Milt.”
“It’ll be harder onme than you.”
“I don’twant to hear it.”
“I thought youwanted a daughter.”
“I do.”
“Well,” saidmy father, “this is howwe can get one.”
Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was a serious moral reservation. To
tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.
In the first place, Tessie didn’t believe you could do it. Even if you could, she didn’t believe you
should try.

Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this.
I can only explain the scientific mania that overtook my father during that spring of ’59 as a
symptom of the belief in progress that was infecting everyone back then. Remember, Sputnik
had been launched only two years earlier. Polio, which had kept my parents quarantined indoors
during the summers of their childhood, had been conquered by the Salk vaccine. People had no
idea that viruses were cleverer than human beings, and thought they’d soon be a thing of the
past. In that optimistic, postwar America, which I caught the tail end of, everybody was the
master of his
owndestiny, so it only followed thatmy fatherwould try to be themaster of his.
A few days after he had broached his plan to Tessie, Milton came home one evening with a
present. Itwas a jewelry box tiedwith a ribbon.

“What’s this for?”Tessie asked suspiciously.
“What do youmean,what is it for?”
“It’s notmybirthday. It’s not our anniversary. Sowhy are you givingme a present?”
“Do I have to have a reason to give you a present?Goon.Open it.”
Tessie crumpled up one corner of her mouth, unconvinced. But it was difficult to hold a
jewelry box in your hand without opening it. So finally she slipped off the ribbon and snapped
the box open.
Inside, on black velvet,was a thermometer.
“A thermometer,” saidmymother.
“That’s not just any thermometer,” said Milton. “I had to go to three different pharmacies to
find one of these.”
“A luxurymodel, huh?”
“That’s right,” said Milton. “That’s what you call a basal thermometer. It reads the
temperature down to a tenth of a degree.” He raised his eyebrows. “Normal thermometers only
read every two tenths. This one does it every tenth. Try it out. Put it in yourmouth.”
“I don’t have a fever,” saidTessie.
“This isn’t about a fever. You use it to find out what your base temperature is. It’s more
accurate and precise than a regular fever-type thermometer.”
“Next time bringme a necklace.”
But Milton persisted: “Your body temperature’s changing all the time, Tess. You may not
notice, but it is. You’re in constant flux, temperature-wise. Say, for instance”—a little
cough—“you happen to be ovulating. Then your temperature goes up. Six tenths of a degree, in
most case scenarios. Now,” my father went on, gaining steam, not noticing that his wife was
frowning, “if we were to implement the system we talked about the other day—just for instance,
say—what you’d do is, first, establish your base temperature. It might not be ninety-eight point
six. Everybody’s a little different. That’s another thing I learned from Uncle Pete. Anyway, once
you established your base temperature, then you’d look for that six-tenths-degree rise.And
that’s when, if we were to go through with this, that’s when we’d know to, you know, mix the
cocktail.”
My mother said nothing. She only put the thermometer into the box, closed it, and handed it
back to her husband.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Suit yourself. We may get another boy. Number two. If that’s the way
youwant it, that’s theway it’ll be.”
“I’mnot so surewe’re going to have anything at themoment,” repliedmymother.

Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. Not even a gleam in my father’s eye yet (he
was staring gloomily at the thermometer case in his lap). Now my mother gets up from the so-
called love seat. She heads for the stairway, holding a hand to her forehead, and the likelihood of
my ever coming to be seems more and more remote. Now my father gets up to make his rounds,
turning out lights, locking doors. As he climbs the stairway, there’s hope for me again. The
timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by
an hour and you change the gene selection. My conception was still weeks away, but already my
parents had begun their slow collision into each other. In our upstairs hallway, the Acropolis
night-light is burning, a gift from Jackie Halas, who owns a souvenir shop. My mother is at her
vanity when my father enters the bedroom. With two fingers she rubs Noxzema into her face,
wiping it off with a tissue. My father had only to say an affectionate word and she would have
forgiven him. Not me but somebody like me might have been made that night. An infinite
number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket,
the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming
into it, too, because my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cuddled against my
father had it rained that night. But, no, clear skies held out, as did my parents’ stubbornness. The
bedroom light went out. They stayed on their own sides of the bed. At last, from my mother,

“Night.” And frommy father, “See you in themorning.” Themoments that led up tome fell into
place as though decreed.Which, I guess, iswhy I think about them somuch.

The following Sunday, my mother took Desdemona and my brother to church. My father never
went along, having become an apostate at
the age of eight over the exorbitant price of votive candles. Likewise, my grandfather preferred
to spend his mornings working on a modern Greek translation of the “restored” poems of
Sappho. For the next seven years, despite repeated strokes, my grandfather worked at a small
desk, piecing together the legendary fragments into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda
there, soldering an anapest or an iamb. In the evenings he played his bordello music and smoked
a hookah pipe.
In 1959, Assumption Greek Orthodox Church was located on Charlevoix. It was there that I
would be baptized less than a year later and would be brought up in the Orthodox faith.
Assumption, with its revolving chief priests, each sent to us via the Patriarchate in
Constantinople, each arriving in the full beard of his authority, the embroidered vestments of his
sanctity, but each wearying after a time—six months was the rule—because of the squabbling of
the congregation, the personal attacks on the way he sang, the constant need to shush the
parishionerswho treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium, and, finally, the effort of
delivering a sermon each week twice, first in Greek and then again in English. Assumption, with
its spirited coffee hours, its bad foundation and roof leaks, its strenuous ethnic festivals, its
catechism classes where our heritage was briefly kept alive in us before being allowed to die in
the great diaspora. Tessie and company advanced down the central aisle, past the sand-filled
trays of votive candles. Above, as big as a float in theMacy’s ThanksgivingDayParade,was the
Christ Pantocrator. He curved across the dome like space itself. Unlike the suffering, earthbound
Christs depicted at eye level on the church walls, our Christ Pantocrator was clearly
transcendent, all-powerful, heaven-bestriding. He was reaching down to the apostles above the
altar to present the four rolled-up sheepskins of the Gospels. And my mother, who tried all her
life to believe inGodwithout ever quite succeeding, looked up at him for guidance.
The Christ Pantocrator’s eyes flickered in the dim light. They seemed to suck Tessie upward.
Through the swirling incense, the Savior’s eyes glowed like televisions flashing scenes of recent
events . . .
First there was Desdemona the week before, giving advice to her daughter-in-law. “Why you
want more children, Tessie?” she had asked with studied nonchalance. Bending to look in the
oven, hiding the alarmonher face (an alarm thatwould go unexplained for
another sixteen years),Desdemonawaved the idea away. “More children,more trouble . . .”
Next there was Dr. Philobosian, our elderly family physician. With ancient diplomas behind
him, the old doctor gave his verdict. “Nonsense. Male sperm swim faster? Listen. The first
person who saw sperm under a microscope was Leeuwenhoek. Do you know what they looked
like to him?Likeworms . . .”
And then Desdemona was back, taking a different angle: “God decides what baby is. Not you
. . .”
These scenes ran through my mother’s mind during the interminable Sunday service. The
congregation stood and sat. In the front pew, my cousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and
Cleopatra, fidgeted. FatherMike emerged frombehind the icon screen and swung his censer.My
mother tried to pray, but itwas no use. She barely survived until coffee hour.
From the tender age of twelve, my mother had been unable to start her day without the aid of
at least two cups of immoderately strong, tar-black, unsweetened coffee, a taste for which she
had picked up from the tugboat captains and zooty bachelorswho filled the boardinghousewhere
she had grown up. As a high school girl, standing five foot one inch tall, she had sat next to auto
workers at the corner diner, having coffee before her first class. While they scanned the racing
forms, Tessie finished her civics homework. Now, in the church basement, she told Chapter
Eleven to run off and playwith the other childrenwhile she got a cup of coffee to restore herself.

She was on her second cup when a soft, womanly voice sighed in her ear. “Good morning,
Tessie.” Itwas her brother-in-law, FatherMichaelAntoniou.
“Hi, Father Mike. Beautiful service today,” Tessie said, and immediately regretted it. Father
Mike was the assistant priest at Assumption. When the last priest had left, harangued back to
Athens after a mere three months, the family had hoped that Father Mike might be promoted.
But in the end another new, foreign-born priest, Father Gregorios, had been given the post. Aunt
Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne’s
voice, “Myhusband.Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.”
By complimenting the service, Tessie hadn’t intended to compliment
Father Greg. The situation was made still more delicate by the fact that, years ago, Tessie and
Michael Antoniou had been engaged to be married. Now she was married to Milton and Father
Mike was married to Milton’s sister. Tessie had come down to clear her head and have her
coffee and already the daywas getting out of hand.
Father Mike didn’t appear to notice the slight, however. He stood smiling, his eyes gentle
above the roaring waterfall of his beard. A sweet-natured man, Father Mike was popular with
churchwidows. They liked to crowd around him, offering himcookies and bathing in his beatific
essence. Part of this essence came from Father Mike’s perfect contentment at being only five
foot four. His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height. He
seemed to have forgiven Tessie for breaking off their engagement years ago, but it was always
there in the air between them, like the talcum powder that sometimes puffed out of his clerical
collar.
Smiling, carefully holding his coffee cup and saucer, Father Mike asked, “So, Tessie, how are
things at home?”
My mother knew, of course, that as a weekly Sunday guest at our house, Father Mike was
fully informed about the thermometer scheme. Looking in his eyes, she thought she detected a
glint of amusement.
“You’recoming over to the house today,” she said carelessly. “Youcan see for yourself.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” said FatherMike. “We always have such interesting discussions at
your house.”
Tessie examined Father Mike’s eyes again but now they seemed full of genuine warmth. And
then something happened to take her attention away fromFatherMike completely.
Across the room, Chapter Eleven had stood on a chair to reach the tap of the coffee urn. He
was trying to fill a coffee cup, but once he got the tap open he couldn’t get it closed. Scalding
coffee poured out across the table. The hot liquid splattered a girl who was standing nearby. The
girl jumped back. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. With great speed my mother ran
across the roomandwhisked the girl into the ladies’ room.
No one remembers the girl’s name. She didn’t belong to any of the regular parishioners. She
wasn’t evenGreek. She appeared at
church that one day and never again, and seems to have existed for the sole purpose of
changing my mother’s mind. In the bathroom the girl held her steaming shirt away from her
bodywhile Tessie brought damp towels. “Are you okay, honey?Did you get burned?”
“He’s very clumsy, that boy,” the girl said.
“He can be.He gets into everything.”
“Boys can be very obstreperous.”
Tessie smiled. “Youhave quite a vocabulary.”
At this compliment the girl broke into a big smile. “ ‘Obstreperous’ is my favorite word. My
brother is very obstreperous. Last month my favorite word was ‘turgid.’ But you can’t use
‘turgid’ thatmuch.Not thatmany things are turgid,when you think about it.”
“You’reright about that,” saidTessie, laughing. “But obstreperous is all over the place.”
“I couldn’t agreewith youmore,” said the girl.

Two weeks later. Easter Sunday, 1959. Our religion’s adherence to the Julian calendar has once

again left us out of sync with the neighborhood. Two Sundays ago, my brother watched as the
other kids on the block hunted multicolored eggs in nearby bushes. He saw his friends eating the
heads off chocolate bunnies and tossing handfuls of jelly beans into cavity-rich mouths.
(Standing at the window, my brother wanted more than anything to believe in an American God
who got resurrected on the right day.) Only yesterday was Chapter Eleven finally allowed to dye
his own eggs, and then only in one color: red. All over the house red eggs gleam in lengthening,
solstice rays. Red eggs fill bowls on the dining room table. They hang from string pouches over
doorways. They crowd themantel and are baked into loaves of cruciform tsoureki.
But now it is late afternoon; dinner is over. And my brother is smiling. Because now comes
the one part of Greek Easter he prefers to egg hunts and jelly beans: the egg-cracking game.
Everyone gathers around the dining table. Biting his lip, Chapter Eleven selects an egg from the
bowl, studies it, returns it. He selects another. “This looks like a good one,” Milton says,
choosing his own egg. “Built like a Brinks truck.” Milton holds his egg up. Chapter Eleven
prepares to attack.When suddenlymymother tapsmy father on the back.
“Just aminute, Tessie.We’re cracking eggs here.”
She taps himharder.
“What?”
“My temperature.” She pauses. “It’s up six tenths.”
She has been using the thermometer. This is the firstmy father has heard of it.
“Now?”my fatherwhispers. “Jesus, Tessie, are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure. You told me to watch for any rise in my temperature and I’m telling you
I’m up six tenths of a degree.” And, lowering her voice, “Plus it’s been thirteen days since my
last you knowwhat.”
“Comeon,Dad,”Chapter Eleven pleads.
“Time out,”Milton says.He puts his egg in the ashtray. “That’smy egg.Nobody touch it until
I comeback.”
Upstairs, in the master bedroom, my parents accomplish the act. A child’s natural decorum
makes me refrain from imagining the scene in much detail. Only this: when they’re done, as if
topping off the tank, my father says, “That should do it.” It turns out he’s right. In May, Tessie
learns she’s pregnant, and thewaiting begins.

By six weeks, I have eyes and ears. By seven, nostrils, even lips. My genitals begin to form.
Fetal hormones, taking chromosomal cues, inhibit Müllerian structures, promote Wolffian ducts.
My twenty-three paired chromosomes have linked up and crossed over, spinning their roulette
wheel, as my papou puts his hand on my mother’s belly and says, “Lucky two!” Arrayed in
their regiments, my genes carry out their orders. All except two, a pair of miscreants—or
revolutionaries, depending on your view—hiding out on chromosome number 5. Together, they
siphon off an enzyme, which stops the production of a certain hormone, which complicates my
life.
In the living room, themen have stopped talking about politics and instead lay bets onwhether
Milt’s new kid will be a boy or a girl. My father is confident. Twenty-four hours after the deed,
my mother’s body temperature rose another two tenths, confirming ovulation. By then the male
sperm had given up, exhausted. The female sperm, like tortoises, won the race. (At which point
Tessie handedMilton the thermometer and told him she neverwanted to see it again.)
All this led up to the dayDesdemona dangled a utensil overmy
mother’s belly. The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.
Desdemona crouched. The kitchen grew silent. The other women bit their lower lips, watching,
waiting. For the first minute, the spoon didn’t move at all. Desdemona’s hand shook and, after
long seconds had passed, Aunt Lina steadied it. The spoon twirled; I kicked; my mother cried
out. And then, slowly,moved by awind no one felt, in that unearthlyOuija-boardway, the silver
spoon began to move, to swing, at first in a small circle but each orbit growing gradually more
elliptical until the path flattened into a straight line pointing from oven to banquette. North to

south, in other words. Desdemona cried, “Koros!” And the room erupted with shouts of
“Koros, koros.”
That night, my father said, “Twenty-three in a row means she’s bound for a fall. This time,
she’swrong. Trustme.”
“I don’t mind if it’s a boy,” my mother said. “I really don’t. As long as it’s healthy, ten
fingers, ten toes.”
“What’s this ‘it.’ That’smydaughter you’re talking about.”

Iwas born aweek afterNewYear’s,on January 8, 1960. In thewaiting room, supplied onlywith
pink-ribboned cigars, my father cried out, “Bingo!” I was a girl. Nineteen inches long. Seven
pounds four ounces.
That same January 8, my grandfather suffered the first of his thirteen strokes. Awakened by
my parents rushing off to the hospital, he’d gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to make
himself a cup of coffee. An hour later, Desdemona found him lying on the kitchen floor. Though
his mental faculties remained intact, that morning, as I let out my first cry at Women’s Hospital,
my papou lost the ability to speak. According to Desdemona, my grandfather collapsed right
after overturning his coffee cup to read his fortune in the grounds.

When he heard the news of my sex, Uncle Pete refused to accept any congratulations. There was
no magic involved. “Besides,” he joked, “Milt did all the work.” Desdemona became grim. Her
American-born son had been proven right and, with this fresh defeat, the old country, in which
she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded
onemore notch.Myarrivalmarked the end of her baby-guessing and the start of her husband’s
long decline. Though the silkworm box reappeared now and then, the spoon was no longer
among its treasures.
I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put
me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly
tagged. This can’t be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen.
Someone had switched onmyeyes.

MATCHMAKING

When this story goes out into the world, I may become the most famous hermaphrodite in
history. There have been others before me. Alexina Barbin attended a girls’ boarding school in
France before becoming Abel. She left behind an autobiography, which Michel Foucault
discovered in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene. (Her memoirs, which
end shortly before her suicide, make unsatisfactory reading, and it was after finishing them years
ago that I first got the idea to write my own.) Gottlieb Göttlich, born in 1798, lived as Marie
Rosine until the age of thirty-three. One day abdominal pains sent Marie to the doctor. The
physician checked for a hernia and found undescended testicles instead. From then on, Marie
donned men’s clothes, took the name of Gottlieb, and made a fortune traveling around Europe,
exhibiting himself tomedicalmen.
As far as the doctors are concerned, I’m even better than Gottlieb. To the extent that fetal
hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I’ve got a male brain. But I was raised as a girl.
If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus
nurture, you couldn’t come up with anything better than my life. During my time at the Clinic
nearly three decades ago, Dr. Luce ran me through a barrage of tests. I was given the Benton
Visual Retention Test and the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test. My verbal IQ was measured,
and lots of other things, too. Luce even analyzed
myprose style to see if Iwrote in a linear,masculineway, or in a circular, feminine one.
All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the
story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that
sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning
to get to the end,which ismy arrival.
And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off,
my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I’m sucked back
between my mother’s legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops
swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back
to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There’s a quick shot of my father as a twenty-
year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he’s in church, age
eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first
U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we’re out of America completely; we’re in the
middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on
deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, andwe’re up on dry land
again,where the filmunspools, back at the beginning . . .

In the late summer of 1922, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides wasn’t predicting births

but deaths, specifically, her own. She was in her silkworm cocoonery, high on the slope of
Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, when her heart, without warning, missed a beat. It was a distinct
sensation: she felt her heart stop and squeeze into a ball. Then, as she stiffened, it began to race,
thumping against her ribs. She let out a small, astonished cry. Her twenty thousand silkworms,
sensitive to human emotion, stopped spinning cocoons. Squinting in the dim light, my
grandmother looked down to see the front of her tunic visibly fluttering; and in that instant, as
she recognized the insurrection inside her, Desdemona became what she’d remain for the rest of
her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body. Nevertheless, unable to believe in her own
endurance, despite
her already quieting heart, she stepped out of the cocoonery to take a last look at the world she
wouldn’t be leaving for another fifty-eight years.
The view was impressive. A thousand feet below lay the old Ottoman capital of Bursa, like a
backgammon board spread out across the valley’s green felt. Red diamonds of roof tile fit into
diamonds of whitewash. Here and there, the sultans’ tombs were stacked up like bright chips.
Back in 1922, automobile traffic didn’t clog the streets. Ski lifts didn’t cut swaths into the
mountain’s pine forests. Metallurgic and textile plants didn’t ring the city, filling the air with
smog. Bursa looked—at least from a thousand feet up—pretty much as it had for the past six
centuries, a holy city, necropolis of the Ottomans and center of the silk trade, its quiet, declining
streets abloom with minarets and cypress trees. The tiles of the Green Mosque had turned blue
with age, but that was about it. Desdemona Stephanides, however, kibitzing from afar, gazed
downon the board and sawwhat the players hadmissed.
To psychoanalyze my grandmother’s heart palpitations: they were the manifestations of grief.
Her parentswere dead—killed in the recentwarwith theTurks. TheGreekArmy, encouraged by
the Allied Nations, had invaded western Turkey in 1919, reclaiming the ancient Greek territory
in Asia Minor. After years of living apart up on the mountain, the people of Bithynios, my
grandmother’s village, had emerged into the safety of the Megale Idea—theBig Idea, the dream
of Greater Greece. It was now Greek troops who occupied Bursa. A Greek flag flew over the
former Ottoman palace. The Turks and their leader, Mustafa Kemal, had retreated to Angora in
the east. For the first time in their lives the Greeks of Asia Minor were out from under Turkish
rule. No longer were the giaours (“infidel dogs”) forbidden to wear bright clothing or ride horses
or use saddles. Never again, as in the last centuries, would Ottoman officials arrive in the village
every year, carting off the strongest boys to serve in the Janissaries. Now, when the village men
took silk tomarket inBursa, theywere freeGreeks, in a freeGreek city.
Desdemona, however, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she
stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her inability to
feel happy like everybody else.Years later, in herwidowhood,when she’d spend a
decade in bed trying with great vitality to die, she would finally agree that those two years
between wars a half century earlier had been the only decent time in her life; but by then
everyone she’d knownwould be dead and she could only tell it to the television.
For the greater part of an hour Desdemona had been trying to ignore her foreboding by
working in the cocoonery. She’d come out the back door of the house, through the sweet-
smelling grape arbor, and across the terraced yard into the low, thatch-roofed hut. The acrid,
larval smell inside didn’t bother her. The silkworm cocoonery was my grandmother’s own
personal, reeking oasis. All around her, in a firmament, soft white silkworms clung to bundled
mulberry twigs. Desdemona watched them spinning cocoons, moving their heads as though to
music. As she watched, she forgot about the world outside, its changes and convulsions, its
terrible new music (which is about to be sung in a moment). Instead she heard her mother,
Euphrosyne Stephanides, speaking in this very cocoonery years ago, elucidating the mysteries of
silkworms—“To have good silk, you have to be pure,” she used to tell her daughter. “The
silkworms know everything. You can always tell what somebody is up to by the way their silk
looks”—and so on, Euphrosyne giving examples—“Maria Poulos, who’s always lifting her skirt
for everyone? Have you seen her cocoons? A stain for every man. You should look next

time”—Desdemona only eleven or twelve and believing every word, so that now, as a young
woman of twenty-one, she still couldn’t entirely disbelieve her mother’s morality tales, and
examined the cocoon constellations for a sign of her own impurity (the dreams she’d been
having!). She looked for other things, too, because her mother also maintained that silkworms
reacted to historical atrocities. After every massacre, even in a village fifty miles away, the
silkworms’ filaments turned the color of blood—“I’ve seen them bleed like the feet of Christos
Himself,” Euphrosyne again, and her daughter, years later, remembering, squinting in the weak
light to see if any cocoons had turned red. She pulled out a tray and shook it; she pulled out
another; and it was right then that she felt her heart stop, squeeze into a ball, and begin punching
her from inside. She dropped the tray, saw her tunic flutter from interior force, and understood
that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, over
anything else.
So my yia yia, suffering the first of her imaginary diseases, stood looking down at Bursa, as
though shemight spot a visible confirmation of her invisible dread.And then it came from inside
the house, by means of sound: her brother, Eleutherios (“Lefty”) Stephanides, had begun to sing.
In badly pronounced,meaningless English:
“Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun,” Lefty sang, standing before their bedroom
mirror as he did every afternoon about this time, fastening the new celluloid collar to the new
white shirt, squeezing a dollop of hair pomade (smelling of limes) into his palm and rubbing it
into his new Valentinohaircut. And continuing: “In the meantime, in-between time, ain’t we got
fun.” The lyrics meant nothing to him, either, but the melody was enough. It spoke to Lefty of
jazz-age frivolity, gin cocktails, cigarette girls; it made him slick his hair back with panache . . .
while, out in the yard, Desdemona heard the singing and reacted differently. For her, the song
conjured only the disreputable bars her brother went to down in the city, those hash dens where
they played rebetika and American music and where there were loose women who sang . . . as
Lefty put on his new striped suit and folded the red pocket handkerchief that matched his red
necktie . . . and she felt funny inside, especially her stomach, which was roiled by complicated
emotions, sadness, anger, and something else she couldn’t name that hurtmost of all. “The rent’s
unpaid, dear, we haven’t a car,” Lefty crooned in the sweet tenor I would later inherit; and
beneath the music Desdemona now heard her mother’s voice again, Euphrosyne Stephanides’
last words spoken just before she died from a bullet wound, “Take care of Lefty. Promise me.
Find him a wife!” . . . and Desdemona, through her tears, replying, “I promise. I promise!” . . .
these voices all speaking at once in Desdemona’s head as she crossed the yard to go into the
house. She came through the small kitchen where she had dinner cooking (for one) and marched
straight into the bedroom she shared with her brother. He was still singing—“Not much money,
Oh! but honey”—fixing his cuff links, parting his hair; but then he looked up and saw his
sister—“Ain’twe got”—andpianissimonow—“fun”—fell silent.
For a moment, the mirror held their two faces. At twenty-one, long before ill-fitting dentures
and self-imposed invalidism, my grandmother was something of a beauty. She wore her black
hair in
long braids pinned up under her kerchief. These braids were not delicate like a little girl’s but
heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver’s tail. Years, seasons, and various
weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. At
present, black silk ribbons were tied around the braids, too, making them even more imposing, if
you got to see them, which few people did. What was on view for general consumption was
Desdemona’s face: her large, sorrowful eyes, her pale, candlelit complexion. I should also
mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona’s voluptuous figure. Her
body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn’t
sanction. In church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when
she picked fruit, Desdemona’s feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab,
confining clothes. Above the jiggling of her body, her kerchief-framed face remained apart,
looking slightly scandalized atwhat her breasts and hipswere up to.

Eleutherios was taller and skinnier. In photographs from the time he looks like the underworld
figures he idolized, the thin mustachioed thieves and gamblers who filled the seaside bars of
Athens and Constantinople. His nose was aquiline, his eyes sharp, the overall impression of his
face hawk-like. When he smiled, however, you saw the softness in his eyes, which made it clear
that Leftywas in fact no gangster but the pampered, bookish son of comfortablywell-off parents.
That summer afternoon in 1922, Desdemona wasn’t looking at her brother’s face. Instead her
eyesmoved to the suit coat, to the gleaming hair, to the striped trousers, as she tried to figure out
what had happened to him these past fewmonths.
Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often wondered how she’d survived
those first twelve months without him. For as long as she could remember he’d always been on
the other side of the goat’s-hair blanket that separated their beds. Behind the kelimi he
performed puppet shows, turning his hands into the clever, hunchbacked Karaghiozis who
always outwitted the Turks. In the dark he made up rhymes and sang songs, and one of the
reasons she hated his new American music was that he sang it exclusively to himself.
Desdemona had always loved her brother as only a sister growing up on
a mountain could love a brother: he was the whole entertainment, her best friend and
confidant, her co-discoverer of short cuts and monks’ cells. Early on, the emotional sympathy
she’d felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she’d sometimes forgotten they were separate
people. As kids they’d scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed
creature. She was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed
house at evening, andwhenever she encountered her solitary outline, it seemed cut in half.
Peacetime seemed to be changing everything. Lefty had taken advantage of the new freedoms.
In the last month he’d gone down to Bursa a total of seventeen times. On three occasions he’d
stayed overnight in the Cocoon Inn across from the Mosque of Sultan Ouhan. He’d left one
morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas, and vest and come back the
following evening in a striped suit, with a silk scarf tucked into his collar like an opera singer
and a black derby on his head. There were other changes. He’d begun to teach himself French
from a small, plum-colored phrase book. He’d picked up affected gestures, putting his hands in
his pockets and rattling change, for instance, or doffing his cap. When Desdemona did the
laundry, she found scraps of paper in Lefty’s pockets, covered with mathematical figures. His
clothes smelledmusky, smoky, and sometimes sweet.
Now, in the mirror, their joined faces couldn’t hide the fact of their growing separation. And
my grandmother, whose constitutional gloom had broken out into full cardiac thunder, looked at
her brother, as she once had her own shadow, and felt that somethingwasmissing.
“Sowhere are you going all dressed up?”
“Where do you think I’mgoing?To theKozaHan. To sell cocoons.”
“Youwent yesterday.”
“It’s the season.”
With a tortoiseshell comb Lefty parted his hair on the right, adding pomade to an unruly curl
that refused to stay flat.
Desdemona came closer. She picked up the pomade and sniffed it. It wasn’t the smell on his
clothes. “What else do you do down there?”
“Nothing.”
“Youstay all night sometimes.”
“It’s a long trip. By the time Iwalk there, it’s late.”
“What are you smoking in those bars?”
“Whatever’s in the hookah. It’s not polite to ask.”
“IfMother andFather knewyouwere smoking and drinking like this . . .” She trailed off.
“They don’t know, do they?” said Lefty. “So I’m safe.” His light tone was unconvincing.
Lefty acted as though he had recovered from their parents’ deaths, but Desdemona saw through
this. She smiled grimly at her brother and, without comment, held out her fist. Automatically,
while still admiring himself in the mirror, Lefty made a fist, too. They counted, “One, two, three

. . . shoot!”
“Rock crushes snake. Iwin,” saidDesdemona. “So tellme.”
“Tell youwhat?”
“Tellmewhat’s so interesting inBursa.”
Lefty combed his hair forward again and parted it on the left. He swiveled his head back and
forth in themirror. “Which looks better? Left or right?”
“Letme see.”Desdemona raised her hand delicately toLefty’s hair—andmussed it.
“Hey!”
“What do youwant inBursa?”
“Leaveme alone.”
“Tellme!”
“Youwant to know?”Lefty said, exasperatedwith his sister now. “What do you think Iwant?”
He spokewith pent-up force. “Iwant awoman.”
Desdemona gripped her belly, patted her heart. She took two steps backward and from this
vantage point examined her brother anew. The idea that Lefty, who shared her eyes and
eyebrows, who slept in the bed beside hers, could be possessed by such a desire had never
occurred to Desdemona before. Though physically mature, Desdemona’s body was still a
stranger to its owner.At night, in their bedroom, she’d seen her sleeping brother press against his
rope mattress as though angry with it. As a child she’d come upon him in the cocoonery,
innocently rubbing against a wooden post. But none of this had made an impression. “What are
you doing?” she’d askedLefty, eight or nine at the time, and gripping the post,moving his
knees up and down. With a steady, determined voice, he’d answered, “I’m trying to get that
feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“Youknow”—grunting, puffing, pumping knees—“that feeling.”
But she didn’t know. It was still years before Desdemona, cutting cucumbers, would lean
against the corner of the kitchen table and, without realizing it, would lean in a little harder, and
after that would find herself taking up that position every day, the table corner snug between her
legs. Now, preparing her brother’s meals, she sometimes struck up her old acquaintance with the
dining table, but she wasn’t conscious of it. It was her body that did it, with the cunning and
silence of bodies everywhere.
Her brother’s trips to the city were different. He knew what he was looking for, apparently; he
was in full communication with his body. His mind and body had become one entity, thinking
one thought, bent on one obsession, and for the first time ever Desdemona couldn’t read that
thought.All she knewwas that it had nothing to dowith her.
It made her mad. Also, I suspect, a little jealous. Wasn’t she his best friend? Hadn’t they
always told each other everything? Didn’t she do everything for him, cook, sew, and keep house
as their mother used to? Wasn’t she the one who had been taking care of the silkworms single-
handedly so that he, her smart little brother, could take lessons from the priest, learning ancient
Greek? Hadn’t she been the one to say, “You take care of the books, I’ll take care of the
cocoonery. All you have to do is sell the cocoons at the market.” And when he had started
lingering down in the city, had she complained? Had she mentioned the scraps of paper, or his
red eyes, or the musky-sweet smell on his clothes? Desdemona had a suspicion that her dreamy
brother had become a hashish smoker. Where there was rebetika music there was always
hashish. Lefty was dealing with the loss of their parents in the only way he could, by
disappearing in a cloud of hash smoke while listening to the absolutely saddest music in the
world. Desdemona understood all this and so had said nothing. But now she saw that her brother
was trying to escape his grief in a way she hadn’t expected; and she was no longer content to be
quiet.
“Youwant a woman?” Desdemona asked in an incredulous voice. “What kind of woman? A
Turkishwoman?”
Lefty said nothing.After his outburst he had resumed combing his hair.

“Maybe you want a harem girl. Is that right? You think I don’t know about those types of
loose girls, those poutanes? Yes, I do. I’m not so stupid. You like a fat girl shaking her belly in
your face? With a jewel in her fat belly? Youwant one of those? Let me tell you something. Do
you know why those Turkish girls cover their faces? You think it’s because of religion? No. It’s
because otherwise no one can stand to look at them!”
And now she shouted, “Shame on you, Eleutherios! What’s the matter with you? Why don’t
you get a girl from the village?”
Itwas at this point that Lefty,whowas nowbrushing off his jacket, called his sister’s attention
to something she was overlooking. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” he said, “but there aren’t any
girls in this village.”
Which, in fact,was prettymuch the case. Bithynios had never been a big village, but in 1922 it
was smaller than ever. People had begun leaving in 1913, when the phylloxera blight ruined the
currants. They had continued to leave during the Balkan Wars. Lefty and Desdemona’s cousin,
Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built along a
gentle slope of the mountain, Bithynios wasn’t a precarious, cliffside sort of place. It was an
elegant, or at least harmonious, cluster of yellow stucco houses with red roofs. The grandest
houses, of which there were two, had çikma, enclosed bay windows that hung out over the
street. The poorest houses, of which there were many, were essentially one-room kitchens. And
then there were houses like Desdemona and Lefty’s, with an overstuffed parlor, two bedrooms, a
kitchen, and a backyard privy with a European toilet. There were no shops in Bithynios, no post
office or bank, only a church and one taverna. For shopping you had to go into Bursa, walking
first and then taking the horse-drawn streetcar.
In 1922 therewere barely a hundred people living in the village. Fewer than half of thosewere
women. Of forty-seven women, twenty-one were old ladies. Another twenty were middle-aged
wives. Three were young mothers, each with a daughter in diapers. One was his sister. That left
twomarriageable girls.WhomDesdemona now rushed to nominate.
“What do you mean there aren’t any girls? What about Lucille Kafkalis? She’s a nice girl. Or
Victoria Pappas?”
“Lucille smells,” Lefty answered reasonably. “She bathes maybe once a year. On her name
day. And Victoria?” He ran a finger over his upper lip. “Victoria has a mustache bigger than
mine. I don’t want to share a razor with my wife.” With that, he put down his clothing brush and
put on his jacket. “Don’twait up,” he said, and left the bedroom.
“Go!” Desdemona called after him. “See what I care. Just remember. When your Turkish wife
takes off hermask, don’t come running back to the village!”
But Lefty was gone.His footsteps faded away. Desdemona felt the mysterious poison rising in
her blood again. She paid no attention. “I don’t like eating alone!” she shouted, to no one.
The wind from the valley had picked up, as it did every afternoon. It blew through the open
windows of the house. It rattled the latch on her hope chest and her father’s old worry beads
lying on top. Desdemona picked the beads up. She began to slip them one by one through her
fingers, exactly as her father had done, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather,
performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying. As the beads clicked
together, Desdemona gave herself up to them. What was the matter with God? Why had He
taken her parents and left her to worry about her brother? What was she supposed to do with
him? “Smoking, drinking, and now worse! And where does he get the money for all his
foolishness? From my cocoons, that’s how!” Each bead slipping through her fingers was another
resentment recorded and released. Desdemona, with her sad eyes, her face of a girl forced to
grow up too fast, worried with her beads like all the Stephanides men before and after her (right
down tome, if I count).
She went to the window and put her head out, heard the wind rustling in the pine trees and the
white birch. She kept counting her worry beads and, little by little, they did their job. She felt
better. She decided to go on with her life. Lefty wouldn’t come back tonight. Who cared? Who
needed him anyway? It would be easier for her if he never came back. But she owed it to her

mother to see that he didn’t catch some shameful disease or, worse, run off with a Turkish girl.
The beads continued to drop, one by one, throughDesdemona’s
hands. But she was no longer counting her pains. Instead, the beads now summoned to her
mind images in a magazine hidden in their father’s old desk. One bead was a hairstyle. The next
beadwas a silk slip. The nextwas a black brassiere.Mygrandmother had begun tomatchmake.

Lefty, meanwhile, carrying a sack of cocoons, was on his way down the mountain. When he
reached the city, he came down Kapali Carsi Caddesi, turned at Borsa Sokak, and soon was
passing through the arch into the courtyard of the Koza Han. Inside, around the aquamarine
fountain, hundreds of stiff, waist-high sacks foamed over with silkworm cocoons. Men crowded
everywhere, either selling or buying. They had been shouting since the opening bell at ten that
morning and their voices were hoarse. “Good price! Good quality!” Lefty squeezed through the
narrow paths between the cocoons, holding his own sack. He had never had any interest in the
family livelihood. He couldn’t judge silkworm cocoons by feeling or sniffing them as his sister
could. The only reason he brought the cocoons to market was that women were not allowed. The
jostling, the bumping of porters and sidestepping of sacks made him tense. He thought how nice
it would be if everyone would just stop moving a moment, if they would stand still to admire the
luminosity of the cocoons in the evening light; but of course no one ever did. They went on
yelling and thrusting cocoons in one another’s faces and lying and haggling. Lefty’s father had
lovedmarket season at theKozaHan, but themercantile impulse hadn’t been passed down to his
son.
Near the covered portico Lefty saw a merchant he knew. He presented his sack. The merchant
reached deep into it and brought out a cocoon. He dipped it into a bowl of water and then
examined it. Then he dipped it into a cup ofwine.
“I need tomake organzine from these. They’re not strong enough.”
Lefty didn’t believe this. Desdemona’s silk was always the best. He knew that he was
supposed to shout, to act offended, to pretend to take his business elsewhere. But he had gotten
such a late start; the closing bell was about to sound. His father had always told him not to bring
cocoons late in the day because then you had to sell them at a discount. Lefty’s skin prickled
under his new suit.Hewanted the
transaction to be over. He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race,
its preoccupation with money, its love of swindle. Without protest he accepted the man’s price.
As soon as the deal was completed he hurried out of the Koza Han to attend to his real business
in town.
It wasn’t what Desdemona thought. Watch closely: Lefty, setting his derby at a rakish angle,
walks down the sloping streets of Bursa. When he passes a coffee kiosk, however, he doesn’t go
in. The proprietor hails him, but Lefty only waves. In the next street he passes a window behind
whose shutters female voices call out, but he pays no attention, following the meandering streets
past fruit sellers and restaurants until he reaches another street where he enters a church. More
precisely: a former mosque, with minaret torn down and Koranic inscriptions plastered over to
provide a fresh canvas for the Christian saints that are, even now, being painted on the interior.
Lefty hands a coin to the old lady selling candles, lights one, stands it upright in sand.He takes a
seat in a back pew. And in the same way my mother will later pray for guidance over my
conception, Lefty Stephanides, my great-uncle (among other things) gazes up at the unfinished
Christ Pantocrator on the ceiling. His prayer begins with words he learned as a child, Kyrie
eleison, Kyrie eleison, I am not worthy to come before Thy throne, but soon it veers off,
becoming personal with I don’tknow why I feel this way, it’snot natural . . . and then turning a
little accusatory, praying Youmade me this way, I didn’task to think things like . . . but getting
abject finally with Give me strength, Christos, don’t let me be this way, if she even knew . . .
eyes squeezed shut, hands bending the derby’s brim, the words drifting up with the incense
toward aChrist-in-progress.
He prayed for five minutes. Then came out, replaced his hat on his head, and rattled the

change in his pockets. He climbed back up the sloping streets and, this time (his heart
unburdened), stopped at all the places he’d resisted on hisway down.He stepped into a kiosk for
coffee and a smoke. He went to a café for a glass of ouzo. The backgammon players shouted,
“Hey, Valentino, how about a game?” He let himself get cajoled into playing, just one, then lost
and had to go double or nothing. (The calculations Desdemona found in Lefty’s pants pockets
were gambling debts.) The night wore on. The ouzo kept flowing. The musicians arrived and the
rebetika began. They
played songs about lust, death, prison, and life on the street. “At the hash den on the seashore,
where I’d go every day,” Lefty sang along, “Every morning, bright and early, to chase the blues
away; I ran into two harem girls sitting on the sand; Quite stoned the poor things were, and they
were really looking grand.” Meanwhile, the hookah was being filled. By midnight, Lefty came
floating back onto the streets.
An alley descends, turns, dead-ends. A door opens. A face smiles, beckoning. The next thing
Lefty knows, he’s sharing a sofa with three Greek soldiers, looking across at seven plump,
perfumed women sharing two sofas opposite. (A phonograph plays the hit song that’s playing
everywhere: “Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening . . .”) And now his recent prayer is forgotten
completely because as the madam says, “Anyone you like, sweetheart,” Lefty’s eyes pass over
the blond, blue-eyed Circassian, and the Armenian girl suggestively eating a peach, and the
Mongolian with the bangs; his eyes keep scanning to fix on a quiet girl at the end of the far
couch, a sad-eyed girl with perfect skin and black hair in braids. (“There’s a scabbard for every
dagger,” the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.) Unconscious of the workings of his
attraction, Lefty stands up, smooths his jacket, holds out his hand toward his choice . . . and only
as she leads himup the stairs does a voice in his head point out how this girl comes up to exactly
where . . . and isn’t her profile just like . . . but now they’ve reached the room with its unclean
sheets, its blood-colored oil lamp, its smell of rose water and dirty feet. In the intoxication of his
young senses Lefty doesn’t pay attention to the growing similarities the girl’s disrobing reveals.
His eyes take in the large breasts, the slim waist, the hair cascading down to the defenseless
coccyx; but Lefty doesn’t make connections. The girl fills a hookah for him. Soon he drifts off,
no longer hearing the voice in his head. In the soft hashish dream of the ensuing hours, he loses
sense of who he is and who he’s with. The limbs of the prostitute become those of another
woman. A few times he calls out a name, but by then he is too stoned to notice. Only later,
showing himout, does the girl bring himback to reality. “By theway, I’m Irini.We don’t have a
Desdemona here.”
The next morning he awoke at the Cocoon Inn, awash in recriminations. He left the city and
climbed back up themountain toBithynios.His pockets (empty)made no sound.Hungover and
feverish, Lefty told himself that his sister was right: it was time for him to get married. He
would marry Lucille, or Victoria. He would have children and stop going down to Bursa and
little by little he’d change; he’d get older; everything he felt now would fade into memory and
then into nothing.He nodded his head; he fixed his hat.

Back in Bithynios, Desdemona was giving those two beginners finishing lessons. While Lefty
was still sleeping it off at the Cocoon Inn, she invited Lucille Kafkalis and Victoria Pappas over
to the house. The girls were even younger than Desdemona, still living at home with their
parents. They looked up to Desdemona as the mistress of her own home. Envious of her beauty,
they gazed admiringly at her; flattered by her attentions, they confided in her; and when she
began to give them advice on their looks, they listened. She told Lucille to wash more regularly
and suggested she use vinegar under her arms as an antiperspirant. She sentVictoria to a Turkish
woman who specialized in removing unwanted hair. Over the next week, Desdemona taught the
girls everything she’d learned from the only beauty magazine she’d ever seen, a tattered
catalogue called Lingerie Parisienne. The catalogue had belonged to her father. It contained
thirty-two pages of photographs showing models wearing brassieres, corsets, garter belts, and
stockings. At night, when everyone was sleeping, her father used to take it out of the bottom

drawer of his desk. Now Desdemona studied the catalogue in secret, memorizing the pictures so
that she could re-create them later.
She told Lucille and Victoria to stop by every afternoon. They walked into the house, swaying
their hips as instructed, and passed through the grape arbor where Lefty liked to read. They wore
a different dress each time. They also changed their hairstyles, walks, jewelry, and mannerisms.
Under Desdemona’s direction, the two drab girls multiplied themselves into a small city of
women, each with a signature laugh, a personal gemstone, a favorite song she hummed. After
two weeks, Desdemona went out to the grape arbor one afternoon and asked her brother, “What
are you doing here? Why aren’t you down in Bursa? I thought you’d have found a nice Turkish
girl tomarry by now.Or do they all havemustaches likeVictoria’s?”
“Funny you should mention that,” Lefty said. “Have you noticed? Vicky doesn’t have a
mustache anymore.Anddoyouknowwhat
else?”—getting up now, smiling—“even Lucille’s starting to smell okay. Every time she
comes over, I smell flowers.” (He was lying, of course. Neither girl looked or smelled more
appealing to him than before. His enthusiasm was only his way of giving in to the inevitable: an
arranged marriage, domesticity, children—the complete disaster.) He came up close to
Desdemona. “Youwere right,” he said. “The most beautiful girls in the world are right here in
this village.”
She looked shyly back up into his eyes. “Youthink so?”
“Sometimes you don’t even noticewhat’s right under your nose.”
They stood gazing at each other, as Desdemona’s stomach began to feel funny again. And to
explain the sensation I have to tell you another story. In his presidential address at the annual
convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality in 1968 (held that year in
Mazatlán among lots of suggestive piñatas), Dr. Luce introduced the concept of “periphescence.”
The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The
state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding.
It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope
of the beloved’s hair. Periphescence denotes the initial drugged and happy bedtime where you
sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It lasts, Luce explained, up to two
years—tops.) The ancients would have explained what Desdemona was feeling as the workings
of Eros. Now expert opinion would put it down to brain chemistry and evolution. Still, I have to
insist: toDesdemona periphescence felt like a lake ofwarmth flooding up fromher abdomen and
across her chest. It spread like the 180-proof, fiery flood of a mint-green Finnish liqueur. With
the pumping of two efficient glands in her neck, it heated her face. And then the warmth got
other ideas and started spreading into places a girl like Desdemona didn’t allow it to go, and she
broke off the stare and turned away. She walked to the window, leaving the periphescence
behind, and the breeze from the valley cooled her down. “I will speak to the girls’ parents,” she
said, trying to sound like hermother. “Then youmust go pay court.”

The next night, the moon, like Turkey’s future flag, was a crescent. Down in Bursa the Greek
troops scrounged for food, caroused, and shot up another mosque. In Angora, Mustafa Kemal let
it be printed
in the newspaper that he would be holding a tea at Chankaya while in actuality he’d left for his
headquarters in the field. With his men, he drank the last raki he’d take until the battle was over.
Under cover of night, Turkish troops moved not north toward Eski ehir, as everyone expected,
but to the heavily fortified city of Afyon in the south. At Eski ehir, Turkish troops lit campfires
to exaggerate their strength. A small diversionary force feinted northward toward Bursa. And,
amid these deployments, Lefty Stephanides, carrying two corsages, stepped out the front door of
his house and beganwalking to the housewhereVictoria Pappas lived.
It was an event on the level of a birth or a death. Each of the nearly hundred citizens of
Bithynios had heard about Lefty’s upcoming visits, and the oldwidows, themarriedwomen, and
the young mothers, as well as the old men, were waiting to see which girl he would choose.

Because of the small population, the old courting rituals had nearly ceased. This lack of romantic
possibility had created a vicious cycle. No one to love: no love. No love: no babies. No babies:
no one to love.
Victoria Pappas stood half in and half out of the light, the shading across her body exactly that
of the photograph on page 8 of Lingerie Parisienne. Desdemona (costume lady, stage manager,
and director all in one) had pinned up Victoria’s hair, letting ringlets fall over her forehead and
warning her to keep her biggish nose in shadow. Perfumed, depilated, moist with emollients,
wearing kohl around her eyes, Victoria let Lefty look upon her. She felt the heat of his gaze,
heard his heavy breathing, heard him try to speak twice—small squeaks from a dry throat—and
then she heard his feet coming toward her, and she turned, making the face Desdemona had
taught her; but she was so distracted by the effort to pout her lips like the French lingerie model
that she didn’t realize the footsteps weren’t approaching but retreating; and she turned to see that
Lefty Stephanides, the only eligible bachelor in town, had taken off . . .
. . . Meanwhile, back at home, Desdemona opened her hope chest. She reached in and pulled
out her own corset. Hermother had given it to her years ago in expectation of herwedding night,
saying, “I hope you fill this out someday.”Now, before the bedroommirror,Desdemona held the
strange, complicated garment against herself. Down went her knee socks, her gray underwear.
Off cameher high-waisted
skirt, her high-collared tunic. She shook off her kerchief and unbraided her hair so that it fell
over her bare shoulders. The corset was made of white silk. As she put it on, Desdemona felt as
though shewere spinning her own cocoon, awaitingmetamorphosis.
But when she looked in the mirror again, she caught herself. It was no use. She would never
get married. Lefty would come back tonight having chosen a bride, and then he would bring her
home to live with them. Desdemona would stay where she was, clicking her beads and growing
even older than she already felt. A dog howled. Someone in the village kicked over a bundle of
sticks and cursed. And my grandmother wept silently because she was going to spend the rest of
her days countingworries that neverwent away . . .
. . . While in the meantime Lucille Kafkalis was standing exactly as she’d been told, half in
and half out of the light, wearing a white hat sashed with glass cherries, a mantilla over bare
shoulders, a bright green, décolleté dress, and high heels, in which she didn’t move for fear of
falling. Her fat mother waddled in, grinning and shouting, “Here he comes! Even one minute he
couldn’t staywithVictoria!” . . .
. . . Already he could smell the vinegar. Lefty had just entered the lowdoorway of theKafkalis
house. Lucille’s father welcomed him, then said, “We’ll leave you two alone. To get
acquainted.” The parents left. It was dim in the room. Lefty turned . . . and dropped another
corsage.
What Desdemona hadn’t anticipated: her brother, too, had pored over the pages of Lingerie
Parisienne. In fact, he’d done it from the time he turned twelve to the time he turned fourteen,
when he discovered the real loot: ten postcard-sized photographs, hidden in an old suitcase,
showing “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” in which a bored, pear-shaped twenty-five-year-
old assumed a variety of positions on the tasseled pillows of a staged seraglio. Finding her in the
toiletries pocket was like rubbing a genie’s lamp. Up she swirled in a plume of shining dust:
wearing nothing but a pair of Arabian Nights slippers and a sash around her waist (flash); lying
languidly on a tiger skin, fondling a scimitar (flash); and bathing, lattice-lit, at a marble
hammam. Those ten sepia-toned photographs were what had started Lefty’s fascination with the
city. But he had never entirely forgotten his first loves in Lingerie Parisienne. He could
summon them in his
imagination at will. When he had seen Victoria Pappas looking like page 8, what had struck
Lefty most acutely was the distance between her and his boyhood ideal. He tried to imagine
himself married to Victoria, living with her, but every image that came to mind had a gaping
emptiness at the center, the lack of the person he loved more and knew better than any other.
And so he had fled from Victoria Pappas to come down the street and find Lucille Kafkalis, just

as disappointingly, failing to live up to page 22 . . .
. . . And now it happens. Desdemona, weeping, takes off the corset, folds it back up, and
returns it to the hope chest. She throws herself on the bed, Lefty’s bed, to continue crying. The
pillow smells of his lime pomade and she breathes it in, sobbing . . .
. . . until, drugged by weeping’s opiates, she falls asleep. She dreams the dream she’s been
having lately. In the dream everything’s the way it used to be. She and Lefty are children again
(except they have adult bodies). They’re lying in the same bed (except now it’s their parents’
bed). They shift their limbs in sleep (and it feels extremely nice, how they shift, and the bed is
wet) . . . at which pointDesdemonawakes up, as usual. Her face is hot. Her stomach feels funny,
way deep down, and she can almost name the feeling now . . .
. . . As I sit here in my Aeron chair, thinking E. O. Wilson thoughts. Was it love or
reproduction? Chance or destiny? Crime or nature at work? Maybe the gene contained an
override, ensuring its expression, which would explain Desdemona’s tears and Lefty’s taste in
prostitutes; not fondness, not emotional sympathy; only the need for this new thing to enter the
world and hence the heart’s rigged game. But I can’t explain it, any more than Desdemona or
Lefty could have, any more than each one of us, falling in love, can separate the hormonal from
what feels divine, and maybe I cling to the God business out of some altruism hard-wired to
preserve the species; I can’t say. I try to go back in my mind to a time before genetics, before
everyone was in the habit of saying about everything, “It’s in the genes.” A time before our
present freedom, and so much freer! Desdemona had no idea what was happening. She didn’t
envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of
which might contain a bug. Now we know we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we
stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the samewrinkles and
age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes
embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have that same way of
blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing
with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and voice boxes, formed
from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be
extrapolated backward in time, so thatwhen I speak,Desdemona speaks, too. She’swriting these
words now. Desdemona, who had no idea of the army inside her, carrying out its million orders,
or of the one soldierwhodisobeyed, goingAWOL . . .
. . . Running like Lefty away from Lucille Kafkalis and back to his sister. She heard his feet
hurrying as she was refastening her skirt. She wiped her eyes with her kerchief and put a smile
on as he came through the door.
“So,which one did you choose?”
Lefty said nothing, inspecting his sister. He hadn’t shared a bedroomwith her all his life not to
be able to tell when she’d been crying. Her hair was loose, covering most of her face, but the
eyes that looked up at himwere brimmingwith feeling. “Neither one,” he said.
At thatDesdemona felt tremendous happiness. But she said, “What’s thematterwith you?You
have to choose.”
“Those girls look like a couple ofwhores.”
“Lefty!”
“It’s true.”
“Youdon’twant tomarry them?”
“No.”
“Youhave to.” She held out her fist. “If Iwin, youmarryLucille.”
Lefty,who could never resist a bet,made a fist himself. “One, two, three . . . shoot!
“Axbreaks rock,”Lefty said. “Iwin.”
“Again,” saidDesdemona. “This time, if Iwin, youmarryVicky.One, two, three . . .”
“Snake swallows ax. Iwin again! So long toVicky.”
“Thenwhowill youmarry?”
“I don’t know”—taking her hands and looking down at her. “Howabout you?”

“Too bad I’myour sister.”
“You’renot onlymy sister.You’remy third cousin, too. Third cousins canmarry.”
“You’recrazy, Lefty.”
“Thiswaywill be easier.Wewon’t have to rearrange the house.”
Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the
standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and
strokings of the fingers weren’t the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things
constituted a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room. Lefty
beganwaltzingDesdemona around, European-style; hewaltzed her outside, across the yard, over
to the cocoonery, and back under the grape arbor, and she laughed and covered her mouth with
her hand. “You’re a good dancer, cousin,” she said, and her heart jumped again, making her
think shemight die right then and there inLefty’s arms, but of course she didn’t; they danced on.
And let’s not forget where they were dancing, in Bithynios, that mountain village where cousins
sometimes married third cousins and everyone was somehow related; so that as they danced,
they started holding each other more tightly, stopped joking, and then just danced together, as a
man and awoman, in lonely and pressing circumstances,might sometimes do.
And in the middle of this, before anything had been said outright or any decisions made
(before fire would make those decisions for them), right then, mid-waltz, they heard explosions
in the distance, and looked down to see, in firelight, theGreekArmy in full retreat.

ANIMMODESTPROPOSAL

Descended from Asia Minor Greeks, born in America, I live in Europe now. Specifically, in
the Schöneberg district of Berlin. The Foreign Service is split into two parts, the diplomatic
corps and the cultural staff. The ambassador and his aides conduct foreign policy from the newly
opened, extensively barricaded embassy on Neustädtische Kirchstrasse. Our department (in
charge of readings, lectures, and concerts) operates out of the colorful concrete box of Amerika
Haus.
This morning I took the train to work as usual. The U-Bahn carried me gently west from
Kleistpark to Berliner Strasse and then, after a switch, northward toward Zoologischer Garten.
Stations of the former West Berlin passed one after another. Most were last remodeled in the
seventies and have the colors of suburban kitchens from my childhood: avocado, cinnamon,
sunflower yellow. At Spichernstrasse the train halted to conduct an exchange of bodies. Out on
the platform a street musician played a teary Slavic melody on an accordion. Wing tips
gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she
rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.
Youused to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that.Next you
discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies,
those German flounders—you don’t see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch,
onSiberian feet.
The bicyclist was Asian, at least genetically. Her black hair was cut in a shag. She was
wearing a short olive green windbreaker, flared black ski pants, and a pair of maroon Campers
resembling bowling shoes. The basket of her bike contained a camera bag.
I had a hunch shewasAmerican. It was the retro bike. Chrome and turquoise, it had fenders as
wide as aChevrolet’s, tires as thick as awheelbarrow’s, and appeared toweigh at least a hundred
pounds. An expatriate’s whim, that bike. I was about to use it as a pretext for starting a
conversation when the train stopped again. The bicyclist looked up. Her hair fell away from her
beautiful, hooded face and, for a moment, our eyes met. The placidity of her countenance along
with the smoothness of her skin made her face appear like a mask, with living, human eyes
behind it. These eyes now darted away from mine as she grasped the handlebars of her bike and
pushed her great two-wheeler off the train and toward the elevators. The U-Bahn resumed, but I
was no longer reading. I sat in my seat, in a state of voluptuous agitation, of agitated
voluptuousness, untilmy stop. Then I staggered out.
Unbuttoning my suit jacket, I took a cigar from the inner pocket of my coat. From a still
smaller pocket I took out my cigar cutter and matches. Though it wasn’t after dinner, I lit the
cigar—a Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3—and stood smoking, trying to calm myself. The cigars, the
double-breasted suits—they’re a little too much. I’m well aware of that. But I need them. They
make me feel better. After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected. In
my bespoke suit, my checked shirt, I smoked my medium-fat cigar until the fire in my blood
subsided.

Something you should understand: I’m not androgynous in the least. 5-alpha-reductase
deficiency syndrome allows for normal biosynthesis and peripheral action of testosterone, in
utero, neonatally, and at puberty. In other words, I operate in society as a man. I use the men’s
room. Never the urinals, always the stalls. In the men’s locker room at my gym I even shower,
albeit discreetly. I possess all the secondary sex characteristics of a normal man except one: my
inability to synthesize dihydrotestosterone has made me immune to baldness. I’ve lived more
than halfmy life as amale, and by noweverything comes naturally.WhenCalliope surfaces, she
does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or
checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed.Callie
rises up insideme,wearingmy skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy
sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. On the
sidewalk I’ll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a
desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school. This continues for a
few more steps. Calliope’s hair tickles the back of my throat. I feel her press tentatively on my
chest—that old nervous habit of hers—to see if anything is happening there. The sick fluid of
adolescent despair that runs through her veins overflows again into mine. But then, just as
suddenly, she is leaving, shrinking and melting away inside me, and when I turn to see my
reflection in a window there’s this: a forty-one-year-old man with longish, wavy hair, a thin
mustache, and a goatee.Akind ofmodernMusketeer.
But that’s enough about me for now. I have to pick up where explosions interrupted me
yesterday. After all, neither Cal nor Calliope could have come into existence without what
happened next.

“I told you!” Desdemona cried at the top of her lungs. “I told you all this good luck would be
bad!This is how they liberate us?Only theGreeks could be so stupid!”
By the morning after the waltz, you see, Desdemona’s forebodings had been borne out. The
Megale Idea had come to an end. The Turks had captured Afyon. The Greek Army, beaten, was
fleeing toward the sea. In retreat, it was setting fire to everything in its path. Desdemona and
Lefty, in dawn’s light, stood on the mountainside and surveyed the devastation. Black smoke
rose formiles across the valley. Every village, every field, every treewas aflame.
“We can’t stay here,” Lefty said. “TheTurkswillwant revenge.”
“Sincewhen did they need a reason?”
“We’ll go toAmerica.We can livewith Sourmelina.”
“It won’t be nice in America,” Desdemona insisted, shaking her head. “Youshouldn’t believe
Lina’s letters. She exaggerates.”
“As long aswe’re togetherwe’ll be okay.”
He looked at her, in the way of the night before, and Desdemona blushed. He tried to put his
armaround her, but she stopped him. “Look.”
Down below, the smoke had thinned momentarily. They could see the roads now, clogged
with refugees: a river of carts,wagons,water buffalo,mules, and people hurrying out of the city.
“Where canweget a boat? InConstantinople?”
“We’ll go to Smyrna,” said Lefty. “Everyone says Smyrna’s the safest way.” Desdemona was
quiet for a moment, trying to fathom this new reality. Voices rumbled in the other houses as
people cursed the Greeks, the Turks, and started packing. Suddenly, with resolve: “I’ll bring my
silkwormbox.And some eggs. Sowe canmakemoney.”
Lefty took hold of her elbowand shook her armplayfully. “They don’t farm silk inAmerica.”
“They wear clothes, don’t they? Or do they go around naked? If they wear clothes, they need
silk.And they can buy it fromme.”
“Okay,whatever youwant. Just hurry.”

Eleutherios and Desdemona Stephanides left Bithynios on August 31, 1922. They left on foot,
carrying two suitcases packed with clothes, toiletries, Desdemona’s dream book and worry
beads, and two of Lefty’s texts of Ancient Greek. Under her arm Desdemona also carried her
silkworm box containing a few hundred silkworm eggs wrapped in a white cloth. The scraps of
paper in Lefty’s pockets now recorded not gambling debts but forwarding addresses inAthens or
Astoria. Over a single week, the hundred or so remaining citizens of Bithynios packed their
belongings and set out formainlandGreece,most en route toAmerica. (Adiasporawhich should
have preventedmy existence, but didn’t.)
Before leaving, Desdemona walked out into the yard and crossed herself in the Orthodox
fashion, leading with the thumb. She said her goodbyes: to the powdery, rotting smell of the
cocoonery and to the mulberry trees lined along the wall, to the steps she’d never have to climb
again and to this feeling of living above the world, too. She went inside the cocoonery to look at
her silkworms for the last time. They had all stopped spinning. She reached up, plucked a cocoon
fromamulberry twig, and put it in her tunic pocket.

On September 6, 1922, General Hajienestis, Commander in Chief of the Greek forces in Asia
Minor, awoke with the impression that his legs were made of glass. Afraid to get out of bed, he
sent the barber away, forgoing hismorning shave. In the afternoon he declined to go
ashore to enjoy his usual lemon ice on the Smyrna waterfront. Instead he lay on his back, still
and alert, ordering his aides—who came and went with dispatches from the front—not to slam
the door or stomp their feet. This was one of the commander’s more lucid, productive days.
When the Turkish Army had attacked Afyon two weeks earlier, Hajienestis had believed that he
was dead and that the ripples of light reflecting on his cabin walls were the pyrotechnics of
heaven.
At two o’clock, his second-in-command tiptoed into the general’s cabin to speak in a whisper:
“Sir, I amawaiting your orders for a counterattack, sir.”
“Doyouhear how they squeak?”
“Sir?”
“My legs.My thin, vitreous legs.”
“Sir, I am aware the general is having trouble with his legs, but I submit, with all due respect,
sir”—a little louder than awhisper now—“this is not a time to concentrate on suchmatters.”
“You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you, lieutenant? But if your legs were made of
glass, you’d understand. I can’t go into shore. That’s exactlywhatKemal is banking on! To have
me stand up and shattermy legs to pieces.”
“These are the latest reports, General.” His second-in-command held a sheet of paper over
Hajienestis’ face. “ ‘The Turkish cavalry has been sighted one hundred miles east of Smyrna,’ ”
he read. “ ‘The refugee population is now 180,000.’ That’s an increase of 30,000 people since
yesterday.”
“I didn’t know death would be like this, lieutenant. I feel close to you. I’m gone. I’ve taken
that trip to Hades, yet I can still see you. Listen to me. Death is not the end. This is what I’ve
discovered. We remain, we persist. The dead see that I’m one of them. They’re all around me.
Youcan’t see them, but they’re here. Mothers with children, old women—everyone’s here. Tell
the cook to bringmemy lunch.”
Outside, the famous harbor was full of ships. Merchant vessels were tied up to a long quay
alongside barges and wooden caiques. Farther out, the Allied warships lay at anchor. The sight
of them, for the Greek and Armenian citizens of Smyrna (and the thousands and thousands of
Greek refugees), was reassuring, and whenever a rumor circulated—yesterday an Armenian
newspaper had claimed that the
Allies, eager to make amends for their support of the Greek invasion, were planning to hand
the city over to the victorious Turks—the citizens looked out at the French destroyers andBritish
battleships, still on hand to protect European commercial interests in Smyrna, and their fears
were calmed.

Dr. Nishan Philobosian had set off for the harbor that afternoon seeking just such reassurance.
He kissed his wife, Toukhie, and his daughters, Rose and Anita, goodbye; he slapped his sons,
Karekin and Stepan, on the back, pointing at the chessboard and saying with mock gravity,
“Don’tmove those pieces.”He locked the front door behind him, testing itwith his shoulder, and
started down Suyane Street, past the closed shops and shuttered windows of the Armenian
Quarter.He stopped outsideBerberian’s bakery,wonderingwhetherCharlesBerberian had taken
his family out of the city or whether they were hiding upstairs like the Philobosians. For five
days now they’d been under self-imprisonment, Dr. Philobosian and his sons playing endless
games of chess, Rose and Anita looking at a copy of Photoplay he’d picked up for them on a
recent visit to the American suburb of Paradise, Toukhie cooking day and night because eating
was the only thing that relieved the anxiety. The bakery door showed only a sign that said OPEN
SOON and a portrait—which made Philobosian wince—of Kemal, the Turkish leader resolute in
astrakhan cap and fur collar, his blue eyes piercing beneath the crossed sabers of his eyebrows.
Dr. Philobosian turned away from the face and moved on, rehearsing all the arguments against
putting up Kemal’s portrait like that. For one thing—as he’d been telling his wife all week—the
European powers would never let the Turks enter the city. Second, if they did, the presence of
the warships in the harbor would restrain the Turks from looting. Even during the massacres of
1915 the Armenians of Smyrna had been safe. And finally—for his own family, at least—there
was the letter hewas on hisway to retrieve fromhis office. So reasoning, he continued down the
hill, reaching theEuropeanQuarter. Here the houses grewmore prosperous.On either side of the
street rose two-story villas with flowering balconies and high, armored walls. Dr. Philobosian
had never been invited into these villas socially, but he often made house calls to attend the
Levantine girls living inside; girls of eighteen or nineteen who awaited him in the “water
palaces” of the courtyards, lying languidly on daybeds
amid a profusion of fruit trees; girls whose desperate need to find European husbands gave
them a scandalous amount of freedom, cause itself for Smyrna’s reputation as being
exceptionally kind tomilitary officers, and responsible for the fever blushes the girls betrayed on
the mornings of Dr. Philobosian’s visits, as well as for the nature of their complaints, which ran
from the ankle twisted on the dance floor to more intimate scrapes higher up. All of which the
girls showed no modesty about, throwing open silk peignoirs to say, “It’s all red, Doctor. Do
something. I have to be at the Casin by eleven.” These girls all gone now, taken out of the city
by their parents after the first fighting weeks ago, off in Paris and London—where the Season
was beginning—the houses quiet as Dr. Philobosian passed by, the crisis receding from his mind
at the thought of all those loosened robes. But then he turned the corner, reaching the quay, and
the emergency cameback to him.
From one end of the harbor to the other, Greek soldiers, exhausted, cadaverous, unclean,
limped toward the embarkation point at Chesme, southwest of the city, awaiting evacuation.
Their tattered uniforms were black with soot from the villages they’d burned in retreat. Only a
week before, the waterfront’s elegant open-air cafés had been filled with naval officers and
diplomats; now the quay was a holding pen. The first refugees had come with carpets and
armchairs, radios, Victrolas, lampstands, dressers, spreading them out before the harbor, under
the open sky. The more recent arrivals turned up with only a sack or a suitcase. Amid this
confusion, porters darted everywhere, loading boats with tobacco, figs, frankincense, silk, and
mohair. Thewarehouseswere being emptied before theTurks arrived.
Dr. Philobosian spotted a refugee picking through chicken bones and potato peels in a heap of
garbage. It was a young man in a well-tailored but dirty suit. Even from a distance, Dr.
Philobosian’s medical eye noticed the cut on the young man’s hand and the pallor of
malnutrition. But when the refugee looked up, the doctor saw only a blank for a face; he was
indistinguishable from any of the refugees swarming the quay. Nevertheless, staring into this
blankness, the doctor called, “Are you sick?”
“I haven’t eaten for three days,” said the youngman.
The doctor sighed. “Comewithme.”

He led the refugee downback streets to his office.He ushered
him inside and brought gauze, antiseptic, and tape from a medical cabinet, and examined the
hand.
Thewoundwas on theman’s thumb,where the nailwasmissing.
“Howdid this happen?”
“First the Greeks invaded,” the refugee said. “Then the Turks invaded back. My hand got in
theway.”
Dr. Philobosian said nothing as he cleaned the wound. “I’ll have to pay you with a check,
Doctor,” the refugee said. “I hope you don’t mind. I don’t have a lot of money on me at the
moment.”
Dr. Philobosian reached into his pocket. “I have a little.Goon. Take it.”
The refugee hesitated only a moment. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll repay you as soon as I get to
theUnited States. Please givemeyour address.”
“Be carefulwhat you drink,”Dr. Philobosian ignored the request. “Boil water, if you can.God
willing, some shipsmay come soon.”
The refugee nodded. “You’reArmenian,Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Andyou’re not leaving?”
“Smyrna ismyhome.”
“Good luck, then.AndGodbless you.”
“You too.” And with that Dr. Philobosian led him out. He watched the refugee walk off. It’s
hopeless, he thought. He’ll be dead in a week. If not typhus, something else. But it wasn’t his
concern. Reaching inside a typewriter, he extracted a thick wad of money from beneath the
ribbon. He rummaged through drawers until he found, inside his medical diploma, a faded
typewritten letter: “This letter is to certify that Nishan Philobosian, M.D., did, on April 3, 1919,
treat Mustafa Kemal Pasha for diverticulitis. Dr. Philobosian is respectfully recommended by
Kemal Pasha to the esteem, confidence, and protection of all persons to whom he may present
this letter.” The bearer of this letter now folded it and tucked it into his pocket.
By then the refugee was buying bread at a bakery on the quay. Where now, as he turns away,
hiding the warm loaf under his grimy suit, the sunlight off the water brightens his face and his
identity fills itself in: the aquiline nose, the hawk-like expression, the softness appearing in the
brown eyes.
For the first time since reachingSmyrna, Lefty Stephanideswas
smiling. On his previous forays he’d brought back only a single rotten peach and six olives,
which he’d encouraged Desdemona to swallow, pits and all, to fill herself up. Now, carrying the
sesame-seeded chureki, he squeezed back into the crowd.He skirted the edges of open-air living
rooms (where families sat listening to silent radios) and stepped over bodies he hoped were
sleeping. He was feeling encouraged by another development, too. Just that morning word had
spread that Greece was sending a fleet of ships to evacuate refugees. Lefty looked out at the
Aegean. Having lived on a mountain for twenty years, he’d never seen the sea before.
Somewhere over the water was America and their cousin Sourmelina. He smelled the sea air, the
warm bread, the antiseptic from his bandaged thumb, and then he saw her—Desdemona, sitting
on the suitcasewhere he’d left her—and felt even happier.
Lefty couldn’t pinpoint the moment he’d begun to have thoughts about his sister. At first he’d
just been curious to see what a real woman’s breasts looked like. It didn’t matter that they were
his sister’s. He tried to forget that they were his sister’s. Behind the hanging kelimi that
separated their beds, he saw Desdemona’s silhouette as she undressed. It was just a body; it
could have been anyone’s, or Lefty liked to pretend so. “What are you doing over there?”
Desdemona asked, undressing. “Why are you so quiet?”
“I’m reading.”
“What are you reading?”
“TheBible.”

“Oh, sure.Younever read theBible.”
Soon he’d found himself picturing his sister after the lights went out. She’d invaded his
fantasies, but Lefty resisted. He went down to the city instead, in search of naked women he
wasn’t related to.
But since the night of their waltz, he’d stopped resisting. Because of the messages of
Desdemona’s fingers, because their parents were dead and their village destroyed, because no
one in Smyrna knew who they were, and because of the way Desdemona looked right now,
sitting on a suitcase.
And Desdemona? What did she feel? Fear foremost, and worry, punctuated by unprecedented
explosions of joy. She had never rested her head in a man’s lap before while riding in an oxcart.
She’d never slept like spoons, encircled by a man’s arms; she’d never experienced a man getting
hard against her spinewhile trying to talk as though
nothing were happening. “Only fifty more miles,” Lefty had said one night on the arduous
journey to Smyrna. “Maybe we’ll be lucky tomorrow and get a ride. And when we get to
Smyrna, we’ll get a boat to Athens”—his voice tight, funny-sounding, a few tones higher than
normal—“and fromAthenswe’ll get a boat toAmerica. Sound good?Okay. I think that’s good.”

What am I doing? Desdemona thought. He’s my brother! She looked at the other refugees on the
quay, expecting to see them shaking their fingers, saying, “Shame on you!” But they only
showed her lifeless faces, empty eyes. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. Then she heard her
brother’s excited voice, as he lowered the bread before her face. “Behold.Manna fromheaven.”
Desdemona glanced up at him. Her mouth filled with saliva as Lefty broke the chureki in
two.But her face remained sad. “I don’t see any boats coming,” she said.
“They’re coming. Don’t worry. Eat.” Lefty sat down on the suitcase beside her. Their
shoulders touched.Desdemonamoved away.
“What’s thematter?”
“Nothing.”
“Every time I sit down you move away.” He looked at Desdemona, puzzled, but then his
expression softened and he put his armaround her. She stiffened.
“Okay, have it yourway.”He stood up again.
“Where are you going?”
“To findmore food.”
“Don’t go,”Desdemona pleaded. “I’m sorry. I don’t like sitting here all alone.”
But Lefty had stormed off. He left the quay and wandered the city streets, muttering to
himself. He was angry with Desdemona for rebuffing him and he was angry at himself for being
angry at her, because he knew she was right. But he didn’t stay angry long. It wasn’t in his
nature. He was tired, half-starved, he had a sore throat, a wounded hand, but for all that Lefty
was still twenty years old, on his first real trip away from home, and alert to the newness of
things. When you got away from the quay you could almost forget that there was a crisis on.
Back here there were fancy shops and high-toned bars, still operating. He came down the Rue de
France and found himself at the SportingClub.Despite the emergency, two foreign consulswere
playing
tennis on the grass courts out back. In fading light they moved back and forth, swatting the
ball while a dark-skinned boy in a white jacket held a tray of gin and tonics courtside. Lefty kept
walking. He came to a square with a fountain and washed his face. A breeze came up, bringing
the smell of jasmine all the way in from Bournabat. And while Lefty stops to breathe it in, I’d
like to take this opportunity to resuscitate—for purely elegiac reasons and only for a
paragraph—that citywhich disappeared, once and for all, in 1922.
Smyrna endures today in a few rebetika songs and a stanza from The WasteLand:
                Mr.Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
                Unshaven, with a pocketful of currants
                C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

                Asked me in demotic French
                Toluncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
                Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
Everything you need to know about Smyrna is contained in that. The merchant is rich, and so
was Smyrna. His proposal was seductive, and so was Smyrna, the most cosmopolitan city in the
Near East. Among its reputed founders were, first, the Amazons (which goes nicely with my
theme), and second, Tantalus himself. Homer was born there, and Aristotle Onassis. In Smyrna,
East and West, opera and politakia, violin and zourna, piano and daouli blended as tastefully
as did the rose petals and honey in the local pastries.
Lefty startedwalking again and soon came to the Smyrna Casin. Potted palms flanked a grand
entrance, but the doors stood wide open. He stepped inside. No one stopped him. There was no
one around. He followed a red carpet to the second floor and into the gaming room. The craps
table was unoccupied. Nobody was at the roulette wheel. In the far corner, however, a group of
men were playing cards. They glanced up at Lefty but then returned to their game, ignoring his
dirty clothes. That was when he realized that the gamblers weren’t regular club members; they
were refugees like him. Each hadwandered through the open door in hopes ofwinningmoney to
buy passage out of Smyrna. Lefty approached the table.A card player asked, “Youin?”
“I’m in.”
He didn’t understand the rules. He’d never played poker before, only backgammon, and for
the first half hour he lost again and again. Eventually, though, Lefty began to understand the
difference between five-card draw and seven-card stud, and gradually the balance of payments
around the table began to shift. “Three of these,” Lefty said, showing three aces, and the men
started to grumble. They watched his dealing more closely, mistaking his clumsiness for a
cardsharp’s sleight of hand. Lefty began to enjoy himself, and after winning a big pot cried,
“Ouzo all around!” But when nothing happened, he looked up and saw again how truly deserted
the Casin was, and the sight brought home to him the high stakes they were playing for. Life.
They were playing for their lives, and now, as he examined his fellow gamblers, and saw
perspiration beading their brows and smelled their sour breath, Lefty Stephanides, showing far
more restraint than he would four decades later when he played the Detroit numbers, stood up
and said, “I’m folding.”
They nearly killed him. Lefty’s pockets bulged with winnings, and the men insisted he
couldn’t leave without giving them a chance to win some of it back. He bent over to scratch his
leg, insisting, “I can go out any time I want.” One of the men grabbed him by his soiled lapels,
and Lefty added, “And I don’t want to yet.” He sat down, scratching his other leg, and thereafter
started losing again and again. When all his money was gone, Lefty got up and said with
disgusted anger, “Can I leave now?” The men said sure, leave, laughing as they dealt the next
hand. Lefty walked stiffly, dejectedly, out of the Casin. In the entrance, between the potted
palms, he bent down to collect themoney he’d stashed in his ripe-smelling socks.
Back at the quay, he sought out Desdemona. “Look what I found,” he said, flashing his
money. “Somebodymust have dropped it.Nowwe can get a ship.”
Desdemona screamed and hugged him. She kissed him right on the lips. Then she pulled back,
blushing, and turned to thewater. “Listen,” she said, “thoseBritish are playingmusic again.”

She was referring to the service band on the Iron Duke. Every night, as officers dined, the band
began playing on the ship’s deck. Strains ofVivaldi andBrahms floated out over thewater. Over
brandy,Major
Arthur Maxwell of His Majesty’s Marines and his subordinates passed around binoculars to
observe the situation ashore.
“Jolly crowded,what?”
“Looks likeVictoria Station onChristmasEve, sir.”
“Look at those poor wretches. Left to fend for themselves. When word gets out about the
Greek commissioner’s leaving, it’s going to be pandemonium.”

“Willwe be evacuating refugees, sir?”
“Our orders are to protectBritish property and citizens.”
“But, surely, sir, if theTurks arrive and there’s amassacre . . .”
“There’s nothingwe can do about it, Phillips. I’ve spent years in theNear East. The one lesson
I’ve learned is that there is nothing you can do with these people. Nothing at all! The Turks are
the best of the lot. The Armenian I liken to the Jew. Deficient moral and intellectual character.
As for the Greeks, well, look at them. They’ve burned down the whole country and now they
swarm in here crying for help.Nice cigar,what?”
“Awfullygood, sir.”
“Smyrna tobacco. Finest in theworld. Brings a tear tomy eyes, Phillips, the thought of all that
tobacco lying in thosewarehouses out there.”
“Perhapswe could send a detail to save the tobacco, sir.”
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Phillips?”
“Faintly, sir, faintly.”
“Good Lord, Phillips, I’m not heartless. I wish we could help these people. But we can’t. It’s
not ourwar.”
“Are you certain of that, sir?”
“What do youmean?”
“Wemight have supported theGreek forces. Seeing aswe sent them in.”
“They were dying to be sent in! Venizelos and his bunch. I don’t think you fathom the
complexity of the situation. We have interests here in Turkey. We must proceed with the utmost
care.We cannot let ourselves get caught up in theseByzantine struggles.”
“I see, sir.More cognac, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“It’s a beautiful city, though, isn’t it?”
“Quite.Youare aware ofwhat Strabo said of Smyrna, are you
not? He called Smyrna the finest city in Asia. That was back in the time of Augustus. It’s
lasted that long. Take a good look, Phillips. Take a good long look.”

By September 7, 1922, every Greek in Smyrna, including Lefty Stephanides, is wearing a fez in
order to pass as a Turk. The last Greek soldiers are being evacuated at Chesme. The Turkish
Army is only thirtymiles away—andno ships arrive fromAthens to evacuate the refugees.
Lefty, newly moneyed and befezzed, makes his way through the maroon-capped crowd at the
quay. He crosses tram tracks and heads uphill. He finds a steamship office. Inside, a clerk is
bending over passenger lists. Lefty takes out hiswinnings and says, “Two seats toAthens!”
The head remains down. “Deck or cabin?”
“Deck.”
“Fifteen hundred drachmas.”
“No, not cabin,” Lefty says, “deckwill be fine.”
“That is deck.”
“Fifteen hundred? I don’t have fifteen hundred. Itwas five hundred yesterday.”
“Thatwas yesterday.”

On September 8, 1922, General Hajienestis, in his cabin, sits up in bed, rubs first his right leg
and then his left, raps his knuckles against them, and stands up. He goes above deck, walking
with great dignity, much as he will later proceed to his death in Athens when he is executed for
losing thewar.
On the quay, the Greek civil governor, Aristedes Sterghiades, boards a launch to take him out
of the city. The crowd hoots and jeers, shaking fists. General Hajienestis takes the scene in
calmly. The crowdobscures thewaterfront, his favorite café.All he can see is themarquee of the
movie theater at which, ten days earlier, he’d been to see Le Tango de la Mort. Briefly—and
possibly this is another hallucination—he smells the fresh jasmine ofBournabat.He breathes this

in. The launch reaches the ship andSterghiades, ashen-faced, climbs aboard.
And thenGeneralHajienestis gives his onlymilitary order of
the past fewweeks: “Up anchors. Reverse engines. Full steamahead.”
On shore, Lefty and Desdemona watched the Greek fleet leaving. The crowd surged toward
the water, raised its four hundred thousand hands, and shouted. And then it fell silent. Not one
mouth uttered a sound as the realization came home that their own country had deserted them,
that Smyrna now had no government, that there was nothing between them and the advancing
Turks.
(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose
petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and
Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto
the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt
water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the
fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how
everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want
to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was
part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you’ll see
modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATOheadquarters, and a sign
that says Izmir . . .)

Five cars, bedecked with olive branches, burst the city gates. Cavalry gallop fender to fender.
The cars roar past the covered bazaar, through cheering throngs in the Turkish Quarter where
every streetlamp, door, and window streams red cloth. By Ottoman law, Turks must occupy a
city’s highest ground, so the convoy is high above the city now, heading down. Soon the five
cars pass through the deserted sections where houses have been abandoned or where families
hide. Anita Philobosian peeks out to see the beautiful, leaf-covered vehicles approaching, the
sight so arresting she starts to unfasten the shutters before her mother pulls her away . . . and
there are other faces pressed to slats, Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek eyes peeking out of
hideaways and attics to get a look at the conqueror and divine his intentions; but the cars move
too fast, and the sun on the cavalry’s raised sabers blinds the eyes, and then the cars are gone,
reaching the
quay,where horses charge into the crowd and refugees screamand scatter.
In the backseat of the last car sits Mustafa Kemal. He is lean from battle. His blue eyes flash.
He hasn’t had a drink in over two weeks. (The “diverticulitis” Dr. Philobosian had treated the
pasha for was just a cover-up. Kemal, champion of Westernization and the secular Turkish state,
would remain true to those principles to the end, dying at fifty-seven of cirrhosis of the liver.)
And as he passes he turns and looks into the crowd, as a young woman stands up from a
suitcase. Blue eyes pierce brown. Two seconds. Not even two. Then Kemal looks away; the
convoy is gone.

And now it is all a matter of wind. 1 a.m., Wednesday, September 13, 1922. Lefty and
Desdemona have been in the city seven nights now. The smell of jasmine has turned to kerosene.
Around the Armenian Quarter barricades have been erected. Turkish troops block the exits from
the quay. But the wind remains blowing in the wrong direction. Around midnight, however, it
shifts. It begins blowing southwesterly, that is, away from the Turkish heights and toward the
harbor.
In the blackness, torches gather. Three Turkish soldiers stand in a tailor shop. Their torches
illuminate bolts of cloth and suits on hangers. Then, as the light grows, the tailor himself
becomes visible. He is sitting at his sewingmachine, right shoe still on the foot treadle. The light
grows brighter still to reveal his face, the gaping eye sockets, the beard torn out in bloody
patches.
All over the Armenian Quarter fires bloom. Like a million fireflies, sparks fly across the dark

city, inseminating every place they land with a germ of fire. At his house on Suyane Street, Dr.
Philobosian hangs a wet carpet over the balcony, then hurries back inside the dark house and
closes the shutters. But the blaze penetrates the room, lighting it up in stripes: Toukhie’s
panicked eyes; Anita’s forehead, wrapped with a silver ribbon like Clara Bow’s in Photoplay;
Rose’s bare neck; Stepan’s andKarekin’s dark, downcast heads.
By firelight Dr. Philobosian reads for the fifth time that night “ ‘. . . is respectfully
recommended . . . to the esteem, confidence, and protection . . .’ Youhear that? ‘Protection . . .’
”
Across the streetMrs.Bidzikian sings the climactic three notes of
the “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute. The music sounds so strange amid the
other noises—of doors crashing in, people screaming, girls crying out—that they all look up.
Mrs. Bidzikian repeats the B flat, D, and F two more times, as though practicing the aria, and
then her voice hits a note none of them has ever heard before, and they realize that Mrs.
Bidzikian hasn’t been singing an aria at all.
“Rose, getmybag.”
“Nishan, no,” hiswife objects. “If they see you comeout, they’ll knowwe’re hiding.”
“Noonewill see.”

The flames first registered to Desdemona as lights on the ships’ hulls. Orange brushstrokes
flickered above the waterline of the U.S.S. Litchfield and the French steamer Pierre Loti. Then
thewater brightened, as though a school of phosphorescent fish had entered the harbor.
Lefty’s head rested on her shoulder. She checked to see if he was asleep. “Lefty. Lefty?”
Whenhe didn’t respond, she kissed the top of his head. Then the sirenswent off.
She sees not one fire but many. There are twenty orange dots on the hill above. And they have
an unnatural persistence, these fires. As soon as the fire department puts out one blaze, another
erupts somewhere else. They start in hay carts and trash bins; they follow kerosene trails down
the center of streets; they turn corners; they enter bashed-in doorways. One fire penetrates
Berberian’s bakery, making quick work of the bread racks and pastry carts. It burns through to
the living quarters and climbs the front staircase where, halfway up, it meets Charles Berberian
himself, who tries to smother it with a blanket. But the fire dodges him and races up into the
house. From there it sweeps across an Oriental rug, marches out to the back porch, leaps nimbly
up onto a laundry line, and tightrope-walks across to the house behind. It climbs in the window
and pauses, as if shocked by its good fortune: because everything in this house is just made to
burn, too—the damask sofawith its long fringe, themahogany end tables and chintz lampshades.
The heat pulls down wallpaper in sheets; and this is happening not only in this apartment but in
ten or fifteen others, then twenty or twenty-five, each house setting fire to
its neighbor until entire blocks are burning. The smell of things burning that aren’t meant to
burn wafts across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby
cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin. By this time, hair and skin. On the quay, Lefty and
Desdemona stand up along with everyone else, with people too stunned to react, or still half-
asleep, or sick with typhus and cholera, or exhausted beyond caring. And then, suddenly, all the
fires on the hillside form one great wall of fire stretching across the city and—it’s inevitable
now—startmoving down toward them.
(And now I remember something else: my father, Milton Stephanides, in robe and slippers,
bending over to light a fire on Christmas morning. Only once a year did the need to dispose of a
mountain of wrapping paper and cardboard packaging overrule Desdemona’s objections to using
our fireplace. “Ma,” Milton would warn her, “I’m going to burn up some of this garbage now.”
To which Desdemona would cry, “Mana!” and grab her cane. At the hearth, my father would
pull a long match from the hexagonal box. But Desdemona would already be moving away,
heading for the safety of the kitchen, where the oven was electric. “Your yia yia doesn’t like
fires,” my father would tell us. And, lighting the match, he would hold it to paper covered with
elves and Santas as flames leapt up, and we ignorant, American children went crazy throwing

paper, boxes, and ribbons into the blaze.)

Dr. Philobosian stepped out into the street, looked both ways, and ran straight across through the
door opposite. He climbed to the landing, where he could see the top of Mrs. Bidzikian’s head
from behind as she sat in the living room. He ran to her, telling her not to worry, it was Dr.
Philobosian from across the street. Mrs. Bidzikian seemed to nod, but her head didn’t come back
up. Dr. Philobosian knelt beside her. Touching her neck, he felt a weak pulse. Gently he pulled
her out of the chair and laid her on the floor.As he did so, he heard footsteps on the stairway.He
hurried across the roomandhid behind the drapes just as the soldiers stormed in.
For fifteen minutes, they ransacked the apartment, taking whatever the first band had left.
They dumped out drawers and slit open sofas and clothing, looking for jewelry or money hidden
inside.After theywere gone,Dr. Philobosianwaited a full fiveminutes before
stepping out from behind the drapes. Mrs. Bidzikian’s pulse had stopped. He spread his
handkerchief over her face and made the sign of the cross over her body. Then he picked up his
doctor’s bag and hurried down the stairs again.

The heat precedes the fire. Figs heaped along the quay, not loaded in time, begin to bake,
bubbling and oozing juice. The sweetness mixes with the smell of smoke. Desdemona and Lefty
stand as close to the water as possible, along with everyone else. There is no escape. Turkish
soldiers remain at the barricades. People pray, raise their arms, pleading to ships in the harbor.
Searchlights sweep across thewater, lighting up people swimming, drowning.
“We’re going to die, Lefty.”
“No we’re not. We’re going to get out of here.” But Lefty doesn’t believe this. As he looks up
at the flames, he is certain, too, that they are going to die. And this certainty inspires him to say
something he would never have said otherwise, something he would never even have thought.
“We’re going to get out of here.And then you’re going tomarryme.”
“We should never have left.We should have stayed inBithynios.”
As the fire approaches, the doors of the French consulate open. A marine garrison forms two
lines stretching across the quay to the harbor. The Tricolor descends. From the consulate’s doors
people emerge, men in cream-colored suits and women in straw hats, walking arm in arm to a
waiting launch. Over the Marines’ crossed rifles, Lefty sees fresh powder on the women’s faces,
lit cigars in the men’s mouths. One woman holds a small poodle under her arm. Another woman
trips, breaking her heel, and is consoled by her husband. After the launch has motored away, an
official turns to the crowd.
“French citizens onlywill be evacuated.Wewill begin processing visas immediately.”

When they hear knocking, they jump. Stepan goes to the window and looks down. “It must be
Father.”
“Go. Let him in!Quick!”Toukhie says.
Karekin vaults down the stairs two at a time.At the door he stops, collects himself, and quietly
unbolts the door. At first, when he pulls it open, he sees nothing. Then there’s a soft hiss,
followed by a ripping
noise. The noise sounds as though it has nothing to do with him until suddenly a shirt button
pops off and clatters against the door. Karekin looks down as all at once his mouth fills with a
warm fluid. He feels himself being lifted off his feet, the sensation bringing back to him
childhood memories of being whisked into the air by his father, and he says, “Dad, my button,”
before he is lifted high enough to make out the steel bayonet puncturing his sternum. The fire’s
reflection leads along the gun barrel, over the sight and hammer, to the soldier’s ecstatic face.

The fire bore downon the crowd at the quay. The roof of theAmerican consulate caught. Flames
climbed the movie theater, scorching the marquee. The crowd inched back from the heat. But
Lefty, sensing his opportunity,was undeterred.

“Nobodywill know,” he said. “Who’s to know?There’s nobody left but us.”
“It’s not right.”
Roofs crashed, people screamed, as Lefty put his lips to his sister’s ear. “Youpromised you’d
findme a niceGreek girl.Well.You’reit.”
On one side a man jumped into the water, trying to drown himself; on the other, a woman was
giving birth, as her husband shielded her with his coat. “Kaymaste! Kaymaste!” people
shouted. “We’re burning! We’re burning!” Desdemona pointed, at the fire, at everything. “It’s
too late, Lefty. It doesn’tmatter now.”
“But ifwe lived?You’dmarryme then?”
Anod. Thatwas all. AndLeftywas gone, running toward the flames.

On a black screen, a binocular-shaped template of vision sweeps back and forth, taking in the
distant refugees. They screamwithout sound. They hold out their arms, beseeching.
“They’re going to cook the poorwretches alive.”
“Permission to retrieve a swimmer, sir.”
“Negative, Phillips.Oncewe take one aboardwe’ll have to take themall.”
“It’s a girl, sir.”
“Howold?”
“Looks to be about ten or eleven.”
MajorArthurMaxwell lowers his binoculars.A triangular knot ofmuscle tenses in his jaw and
disappears.
“Have a look at her, sir.”
“Wemustn’t be swayed by emotions here, Phillips. There are greater things at stake.”
“Have a look at her, sir.”
The wings of Major Maxwell’s nose flare as he looks at Captain Phillips. Then, slapping one
hand against his thigh, hemoves to the side of the ship.
The searchlight sweeps across the water, lighting up its own circle of vision. The water looks
odd under the beam, a colorless broth littered with a variety of objects: a bright orange; a man’s
fedora with a brim of excrement; bits of paper like torn letters. And then, amid this inert matter,
she appears, holding on to the ship’s line, a girl in a pink dress the water darkens to red, hair
plastered to her small skull. Her eyes make no appeal, staring up. Her sharp feet kick every so
often, like fins.
Rifle fire from shore hits thewater around her. She pays no attention.
“Turn off the searchlight.”
The light goes off and the firing stops. Major Maxwell looks at his watch. “It is now 2115
hours. I am going to my cabin, Phillips. I will stay there until 0700 hours. Should a refugee be
taken aboard during that period, itwould not come tomy attention. Is that understood?”
“Understood, sir.”

It didn’t occur to Dr. Philobosian that the twisted body he stepped over in the street belonged to
his younger son. He noticed only that his front door was open. In the foyer, he stopped to listen.
There was only silence. Slowly, still holding his doctor’s bag, he climbed the stairs. All the
lamps were on now. The living room was bright. Toukhie was sitting on the sofa, waiting for
him. Her head had fallen backward as though in hilarity, the angle opening the wound so that a
section of windpipe gleamed. Stepan sat slumped at the dining table, his right hand, which held
the letter of protection, nailed down with a steak knife. Dr. Philobosian took a step and slipped,
then noticed a trail of blood leading down the hallway. He followed the trail into the master
bedroom,where he found his twodaughters. They
were both naked, lying on their backs. Three of their four breasts had been cut off. Rose’s hand
reached out toward her sister as though to adjust the silver ribbon across her forehead.

The line was long and moved slowly. Lefty had time to go over his vocabulary. He reviewed his

grammar, taking quick peeks at the phrase book. He studied “Lesson 1: Greetings,” and by the
time he reached the official at the table, hewas ready.
“Name?”
“Eleutherios Stephanides.”
“Place of birth?”
“Paris.”
The official looked up. “Passport.”
“Everything was destroyed in the fire! I lost all my papers!” Lefty puckered his lips and
expelled air, as he’d seenFrenchmendo. “Look atwhat I’mwearing. I lost allmygood suits.”
The official smiledwryly and stamped the papers. “Pass.”
“I havemywifewithme.”
“I suppose shewas born in Paris, too.”
“Of course.”
“Her name?”
“Desdemona.”
“DesdemonaStephanides?”
“That’s right. Same asmine.”
When he returned with the visas, Desdemona wasn’t alone. A man sat beside her on the
suitcase. “He tried to throw himself in the water. I caught him just in time.” Dazed, bloody, a
shining bandage wrapping one hand, the man kept repeating, “They couldn’t read. They were
illiterate!” Lefty checked to see where the man was bleeding but couldn’t find a wound. He
unwrapped the man’s bandage, a silver ribbon, and tossed it away. “They couldn’t read my
letter,” theman said, looking at Lefty,who recognized his face.

“Youagain?” the French official said.
“Mycousin,” saidLefty, in execrable French. Theman stamped a visa and handed it to him.
A motor launch took them out to the ship. Lefty kept hold of Dr. Philobosian, who was still
threatening to drownhimself.Desdemona
opened her silkworm box and unwrapped the white cloth to check on her eggs. In the hideous
water, bodies floated past. Somewere alive, calling out. A searchlight revealed a boy halfway up
the anchor chain of a battleship. Sailors dumped oil on himand he slipped back into thewater.
On the deck of the Jean Bart, the three new French citizens looked back at the burning city,
ablaze from end to end. The fire would continue for the next three days, the flames visible for
fifty miles. At sea, sailors would mistake the rising smoke for a gigantic mountain range. In the
country they were heading for, America, the burning of Smyrna made the front pages for a day
or two, before being bumped off by the Hall-Mills murder case (the body of Hall, a Protestant
minister, had been found with that of Miss Mills, an attractive choir member) and the opening of
theWorld Series.AdmiralMarkBristol of theU.S.Navy, concerned about damage toAmerican-
Turkish relations, cabled a press release in which he stated that “it is impossible to estimate the
number of deaths due to killings, fire, and execution, but the total probably does not exceed
2,000.” The American consul, George Horton, had a larger estimate. Of the 400,000 Ottoman
Christians in Smyrna before the fire, 190,000 were unaccounted for by October 1. Horton halved
that number and estimated the dead at 100,000.
The anchors surged up out of the water. The deck rumbled underfoot as the destroyer’s
engineswere thrown into reverse.Desdemona andLeftywatchedAsiaMinor recede.
As they passed the Iron Duke, theBritishmilitary service band started into awaltz.

THESILKROAD

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 2640 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi
was sitting under amulberry treewhen a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup.When she tried to
remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the
loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess’s
chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden
City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this
legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an
apple. Eitherway, themeanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are
alwayswindfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)
I feel a little like that Chinese princess, whose discovery gave Desdemona her livelihood. Like
her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell. Retrace the filament
and you go back to the cocoon’s beginning in a tiny knot, a first tentative loop. And following
my story’s thread back to where I left off, I see the Jean Bart dock in Athens. I see my
grandparents on land again, making preparations for another voyage. Passports are placed into
hands, vaccinations administered to upper arms. Another ship materializes at the dock, the
Giulia. A foghorn sounds.
And look: from the deck of the Giulia something else unwinds
now. Somethingmulticolored, spinning itself out over thewaters of Piraeus.
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on
deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away
from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted
farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn’t remember. Propellers
churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow,
blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds,
then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible,
maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls
ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.
From two separate locations on the Giulia’s deck, Lefty and Desdemona—and I can say it
now, finally, my grandparents—watched the airy blanket float away. Desdemona was standing
between two air manifolds shaped like giant tubas. At midships Lefty slouched in a brace of
bachelors. In the last three hours they hadn’t seen each other. That morning, they’d had coffee
together in a café near the harbor after which, like professional spies, they’d picked up their
separate suitcases—Desdemona keeping her silkworm box—and had departed in different
directions. My grandmother was carrying falsified documents. Her passport, which the Greek
government had granted under the condition that she leave the country immediately, bore her
mother’s maiden name, Aristos, instead of Stephanides. She’d presented this passport along with
her boarding card at the top of the Giulia’s gangway. Then she’d gone aft, as planned, for the
send-off.

At the shipping channel, the foghorn sounded again, as the boat came around to the west and
picked up more speed. Dirndls, kerchiefs, and suit coats flapped in the breeze. A few hats flew
off heads, to shouts and laughter. Yarn drift-netted the sky, barely visible now. People watched
as long as they could. Desdemona was one of the first to go below. Lefty lingered on deck for
another half hour. This, too,was part of the plan.
For the first day at sea, they didn’t speak to each other. They came up on deck at the appointed
mealtimes and stood in separate lines. After eating, Lefty joined the men smoking at the rail
whileDesdemona
hunched on deck with the women and children, staying out of the wind. “Youhave someone
meeting you?” thewomen asked. “A fiancé?”
“No. Justmy cousin inDetroit.”
“Traveling all by yourself?” themen askedLefty.
“That’s right. Free and easy.”
At night, they descended to their respective compartments. In separate bunks of seaweed
wrapped in burlap, with life vests doubling as pillows, they tried to sleep, to get used to the
motion of the ship, and to tolerate the smells. Passengers had brought on board all manner of
spices and sweetmeats, tinned sardines, octopus inwine sauce, legs of lambpreservedwith garlic
cloves. In those days you could identify a person’s nationality by smell. Lying on her back with
eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her
right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg
Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.) Lefty’s annoyances were auditory
as well as olfactory. To one side was a man named Callas with a snore like a miniature foghorn
itself; on the other was Dr. Philobosian, who wept in his sleep. Ever since leaving Smyrna the
doctor had been beside himself with grief. Racked, gut-socked, he lay curled up in his coat, blue
around the eye sockets. He ate almost nothing. He refused to go up on deck to get fresh air. On
the fewoccasions he did go, he threatened to throwhimself overboard.
InAthens,Dr. Philobosian had told them to leave him alone.He refused to discuss plans about
the future and said that he had no family anywhere. “My family’s gone. Theymurdered them.”
“Poorman,”Desdemona said. “He doesn’twant to live.”
“We have to help him,” Lefty insisted. “He gave me money. He bandaged my hand. Nobody
else cared about us. We’ll take him with us.” While they waited for their cousin to wire money,
Lefty tried to console the doctor and finally convinced him to come with them to Detroit.
“Wherever’s far away,” saidDr. Philobosian.But nowon the boat he talked only of death.
The voyage was supposed to take from twelve to fourteen days. Lefty and Desdemona had the
schedule all worked out. On the second day at sea, directly after dinner, Lefty made a tour of the
ship.He picked hisway among the bodies sprawled across the steerage deck.
He passed the stairway to the pilothouse and squeezed past the extra cargo, crates of Kalamata
olives and olive oil, sea sponges from Kos. He proceeded forward, running his hand along the
green tarps of the lifeboats, until he met the chain separating steerage from third class. In its
heyday, the Giulia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Line. Boasting modern conveniences
(“lumina electrica, ventilatie et comfortu cel mai mare”), it had traveled once a month between
Trieste and New York. Now the electric lights worked only in first class, and even then
sporadically. The iron rails were rusted. Smoke from the stack had soiled the Greek flag. The
boat smelled of old mop buckets and a history of nausea. Lefty didn’t have his sea legs yet. He
kept falling against the railing. He stood at the chain for an appropriate amount of time, then
crossed to port and returned aft. Desdemona, as arranged,was standing alone at the rail. AsLefty
passed, he smiled and nodded. She nodded coldly and looked back out to sea.
On the third day, Lefty took another after-dinner stroll. He walked forward, crossed to port,
and headed aft. He smiled at Desdemona and nodded again. This time, Desdemona smiled back.
Rejoining his fellow smokers, Lefty inquired if any of them might happen to know the name of
that youngwoman traveling alone.
On the fourth day out, Lefty stopped and introduced himself.

“So far theweather’s been good.”
“I hope it stays thatway.”
“You’retraveling alone?”
“Yes.”
“I am, too.Where are you going to inAmerica?”
“Detroit.”
“What a coincidence! I’mgoing toDetroit, too.”
They stood chatting for another few minutes. Then Desdemona excused herself and went
downbelow.
Rumors of the budding romance spread quickly through the ship. To pass the time, everybody
was soon discussing how the tall youngGreek with the elegant bearing had become enamored of
the dark beauty who was never seen anywhere without her carved olivewood box. “They’re both
traveling alone,” people said. “And they both have relatives inDetroit.”
“I don’t think they’re right for each other.”
“Whynot?”
“He’s a higher class than she is. It’ll neverwork.”
“He seems to like her, though.”
“He’s on a boat in themiddle of the ocean!What else does he have to do?”
On the fifth day, Lefty and Desdemona took a stroll on deck together. On the sixth day, he
presented his armand she took it.
“I introduced them!” one man boasted. City girls sniffed. “She wears her hair in braids. She
looks like a peasant.”
My grandfather, on the whole, came in for better treatment. He was said to have been a silk
merchant from Smyrna who’d lost his fortune in the fire; a son of King Constantine I by a
French mistress; a spy for the Kaiser during the Great War. Lefty never discouraged any
speculation. He seized the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself. He wrapped a
ratty blanket over his shoulders like an opera cape. Aware that whatever happened now would
become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was—already an
American, in other words—he waited for Desdemona to come up on deck. When she did, he
adjusted hiswrap, nodded to his shipmates, and sauntered across the deck to pay his respects.
“He’s smitten!”
“I don’t think so. Type like that, he’s just out for a little fun. That girl better watch it or she’ll
havemore than that box to carry around.”
My grandparents enjoyed their simulated courtship. When people were within earshot, they
engaged in first- or second-date conversations, making up past histories for themselves. “So,”
Leftywould ask, “do you have any siblings?”
“I had a brother,” Desdemona replied wistfully. “He ran off with a Turkish girl. My father
disowned him.”
“That’s very strict. I think love breaks all taboos.Don’t you?”
Alone, they told each other, “I think it’sworking.Noone suspects.”
Each timeLefty encounteredDesdemona on deck, he pretended he’d only recentlymet her.He
walked up, made small talk, commented on the beauty of the sunset, and then, gallantly, segued
into the beauty of her face. Desdemona played her part, too. She was standoffish at first. She
withdrew her arm whenever he made an off-color joke. She told him that her mother had warned
her aboutmen
like him. They passed the voyage playing out this imaginary flirtation and, little by little, they
began to believe it. They fabricated memories, improvised fate. (Why did they do it? Why did
they go to all that trouble? Couldn’t they have said they were already engaged? Or that their
marriage had been arranged years earlier? Yes,of course they could have. But it wasn’t the other
travelers theywere trying to fool; itwas themselves.)
Traveling made it easier. Sailing across the ocean among half a thousand perfect strangers
conveyed an anonymity in which my grandparents could re-create themselves. The driving spirit

on the Giulia was self-transformation. Staring out to sea, tobacco farmers imagined themselves
as race car drivers, silk dyers as Wall Street tycoons, millinery girls as fan dancers in the
Ziegfeld Follies. Gray ocean stretched in all directions. Europe andAsiaMinorwere dead behind
them.Ahead layAmerica and newhorizons.
On the eighth day at sea, Lefty Stephanides, grandly, on one knee, in full view of six hundred
and sixty-three steerage passengers, proposed to Desdemona Aristos while she sat on a docking
cleat. Youngwomen held their breath. Married men nudged bachelors: “Pay attention and you’ll
learn something.” My grandmother, displaying a theatrical flair akin to her hypochondria,
registered complex emotions: surprise; initial delight; second thoughts; prudent near refusal; and
then, to the applause already starting up, dizzy acceptance.

The ceremony took place on deck. In lieu of a wedding dress, Desdemona wore a borrowed silk
shawl over her head. Captain Kontoulis loaned Lefty a necktie spotted with gravy stains. “Keep
your coat buttoned and nobody will notice,” he said. For stephana, my grandparents had
wedding crownswovenwith rope. Flowersweren’t available at sea and so the koumbaros, a guy
named Pelos serving as best man, switched the king’s hempen crown to the queen’s head, the
queen’s to the king’s, and back again.
Bride and bridegroom performed the Dance of Isaiah. Hip to hip, arms interwoven to hold
hands,Desdemona andLefty circumambulated the captain, once, twice, and then again, spinning
the cocoon of their life together. No patriarchal linearity here. We Greeks get married in circles,
to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find
variety in repetition; that to
go forward you have to comebackwhere you began.
Or, in my grandparents’ case, the circling worked like this: as they paced around the deck the
first time, Lefty and Desdemona were still brother and sister. The second time, they were bride
and bridegroom.And the third, theywere husband andwife.

The night of my grandparents’ wedding, the sun set directly before the ship’s bow, pointing the
way to New York.The moon rose, casting a silver stripe over the ocean. On his nightly tour of
the deck, Captain Kontoulis descended from the pilothouse and marched forward. The wind had
picked up. The Giulia pitched in high seas.As the deck tilted back and forth, CaptainKontoulis
didn’t stumble once, and was even able to light one of the Indonesian cigarettes he favored,
dipping his cap’s braided brim to cut the wind. In his not terribly clean uniform, wearing knee-
high Cretan boots, Captain Kontoulis scrutinized running lights, stacked deck chairs, lifeboats.
The Giulia was alone on the vast Atlantic, hatches battened down against swells crashing over
the side. The decks were empty except for two first-class passengers, American businessmen
sharing a nightcap under lap blankets. “Fromwhat I hear, Tilden doesn’t just play tenniswith his
protégés, if you get my drift.” “You’rekidding.” “Lets them drink from the loving cup.” Captain
Kontoulis, understanding none of this, nodded as he passed . . .
Inside one of the lifeboats, Desdemona was saying, “Don’t look.” She was lying on her back.
There was no goat’s-hair blanket between them, so Lefty covered his eyes with his hands,
peeking through his fingers. A single pinhole in the tarp leaked moonlight, which slowly filled
the lifeboat. Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a
shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to
take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck
by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white
light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his
eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she’d
brought along: thewhite cloth enfolding her silkworm eggswas nothing other thanDesdemona’s
wedding corset. She thought she’d neverwear it, but here itwas.Brassiere cups
pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset’s skirt dropped
garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the

corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona’s face, head, and
arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a
conqueror’smuseum.All thatwasmissingwas thewings.
Lefty took off his shoes and socks, as grit rained down. When he removed his underwear, the
lifeboat filled with a mushroomy smell. He was ashamed momentarily, but Desdemona didn’t
seem tomind.
She was distracted by her own mixed feelings. The corset, of course, reminded Desdemona of
hermother, and suddenly thewrongness ofwhat theywere doing assailed her.Until now she had
been keeping it at bay. She had had no time to dwell on it in the chaos of the last days.
Lefty, too, was conflicted. Though he had been tortured by thoughts of Desdemona, he was
glad for the darkness of the lifeboat, glad, in particular, that he couldn’t see her face. For months
Lefty had slept with whores who resembled Desdemona, but now he found it easier to pretend
that shewas a stranger.
The corset seemed to possess its own sets of hands. One was softly rubbing her between the
legs. Two more cupped her breasts, one, two, three hands pressing and caressing her; and in the
lingerie Desdemona saw herself through new eyes, her thin waist, her plump thighs; she felt
beautiful, desirable, most of all: not herself. She lifted her feet, rested her calves on the oarlocks.
She spread her legs. She opened her arms for Lefty, who twisted around, chafing his knees and
elbows, dislodging oars, nearly setting off a flare, until finally he fell into her softness,
swooning. For the first time Desdemona tasted the flavor of his mouth, and the only sisterly
thing she did during their lovemaking was to come up for air, once, to say, “Bad boy. You’ve
done this before.”But Lefty only kept repeating, “Not like this, not like this . . .”
And I was wrong before, I take it back. Underneath Desdemona, beating time against the
boards and lifting her up: a pair ofwings.
“Lefty!”Desdemona now, breathlessly. “I think I felt it.”
“Feltwhat?”
“Youknow.That feeling.”
“Newlyweds,”CaptainKontoulis said,watching the lifeboat rock.
“Oh, to be young again.”

After Princess Si Ling-chi—whom I findmyself picturing as the imperial version of the bicyclist
I saw on the U-Bahn the other day; I can’t stop thinking about her for some reason, I keep
looking for her every morning—after Princess Si Ling-chi discovered silk, her nation kept it a
secret for three thousand one hundred and ninety years. Anyone who attempted to smuggle
silkwormeggs out ofChina faced punishment of death.My familymight never have become silk
farmers if it hadn’t been for the Emperor Justinian, who, according to Procopius, persuaded two
missionaries to risk it. In A.D. 550, the missionaries snuck silkworm eggs out of China in the
swallowed condom of the time: a hollow staff. They also brought the seeds of the mulberry tree.
As a result, Byzantium became a center for sericulture. Mulberry trees flourished on Turkish
hillsides. Silkworms ate the leaves. Fourteen hundred years later, the descendants of those first
stolen eggs filledmygrandmother’s silkwormboxon the Giulia.
I’m the descendant of a smuggling operation, too.Without their knowing,mygrandparents, on
their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome. It
wasn’t a recent mutation. According to Dr. Luce, the gene first appeared in my bloodline
sometime around 1750, in the body of one Penelope Evangelatos, my great-grandmother to the
ninth power. She passed it on to her son Petras, who passed it on to his two daughters, who
passed it on to three of their five children, and so on and so on. Being recessive, its expression
would have been fitful. Sporadic heredity is what the geneticists call it. A trait that goes
underground for decades only to reappear when everyone has forgotten about it. That was how it
went in Bithynios. Every so often a hermaphrodite was born, a seeming girl who, in growing up,
proved otherwise.

For the next six nights, under various meteorological conditions, my grandparents trysted in the
lifeboat. Desdemona’s guilt flared up during the day, when she sat on deck wondering if she and
Lefty were to blame for everything, but by nighttime she felt lonely and wanted to escape the
cabin and so stole back to the lifeboat and her newhusband.
Their honeymoon proceeded in reverse. Instead of getting to know each other, becoming
familiarwith likes and dislikes, ticklish
spots, pet peeves, Desdemona and Lefty tried to defamiliarize themselves with each other. In
the spirit of their shipboard con game, they continued to spin out false histories for themselves,
inventing brothers and sisters with plausible names, cousins with moral shortcomings, in-laws
with facial tics. They took turns reciting Homeric genealogies, full of falsifications and
borrowings from real life, and sometimes they fought over this or that favorite real uncle or aunt,
and had to bargain like casting directors. Gradually, as the nights passed, these fictional relatives
began to crystallize in their minds. They’d quiz each other on obscure connections, Lefty asking,
“Who’s your second cousin Yiannis married to?” And Desdemona replying, “That’s easy.
Athena. With the limp.” (And am I wrong to think that my obsession with family relations
started right there in the lifeboat? Didn’t my mother quiz me on uncles and aunts and cousins,
too? She never quizzed my brother, because he was in charge of snow shovels and tractors,
whereas I was supposed to provide the feminine glue that keeps families together, writing thank-
you notes and remembering everybody’s birthdays and name days. Listen, I’ve heard the
following genealogy come out of my mother’s mouth: “That’s your cousin Melia. She’s Uncle
Mike’s sister Lucille’s brother-in-law Stathis’s daughter. Youknow Stathis the mailman, who’s
not too swift? Melia’s his third child, after his boys Mike and Johnny. You should know her.
Melia! She’s your cousin-in-lawbymarriage!”)
And here I amnow, sketching it all out for you, dutifully oozing feminine glue, but alsowith a
dull pain in my chest, because I realize that genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was
related towhombut she had no ideawho her ownhusbandwas, orwhat her in-lawswere to each
other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their
lives.
Sexually, things were simple for them. Dr. Peter Luce, the great sexologist, can cite
astonishing statistics asserting that oral sex didn’t exist between married couples prior to 1950.
My grandparents’ lovemaking was pleasurable but unvarying. Every night Desdemona would
disrobe down to her corset and Lefty would press its clasps and hooks, searching for the secret
combination that sprung the locked garment open. The corset was all they needed in terms of an
aphrodisiac, and it remained formygrandfather the singular erotic emblemof his life. The corset
madeDesdemona newagain.As I said,
Lefty had glimpsed his sister naked before, but the corset had the odd power of making her
seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidding, armored creature with a soft inside
he had to hunt for. When the tumblers clicked, it popped open; Lefty crawled on top of
Desdemona and the twoof themhardly evenmoved; the ocean swells did thework for them.
Their periphescence existed simultaneously with a less passionate stage of pair bonding. Sex
could give way, at any moment, to coziness. So, after making love, they lay staring up through
the pulled-back tarp at the night sky passing overhead and got down to the business of life.
“MaybeLina’s husband can giveme a job,”Lefty said. “He’s got his ownbusiness, right?”
“I don’t knowwhat he does. Lina never givesme a straight answer.”
“After we save some money, I can open a casino. Some gambling, a bar, maybe a floor show.
Andpotted palms everywhere.”
“Youshould go to college. Become a professor like Mother and Father wanted. And we have
to build a cocoonery, remember.”
“Forget the silkworms. I’m talking roulette, rebetika, drinking, dancing. Maybe I’ll sell some
hash on the side.”
“Theywon’t let you smoke hashish inAmerica.”
“Who says?”

AndDesdemona announcedwith certitude:
“It’s not that kind of country.”

They spent what remained of their honeymoon on deck, learning how to finagle their way
through Ellis Island. It wasn’t so easy anymore. The Immigration Restriction League had been
formed in 1894. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge thumped a copy of On the
Origin of Species, warning that the influx of inferior peoples from southern and eastern Europe
threatened “the very fabric of our race.” The Immigration Act of 1917 barred thirty-three kinds
of undesirables from entering the United States, and so, in 1922, on the deck of the Giulia,
passengers discussed how to escape the categories. In nervous cram sessions, illiterates learned
to pretend to read; bigamists to admit to only onewife; anarchists to deny having read Proudhon;
heart patients to simulate vigor; epileptics to deny their fits; and carriers of hereditary diseases to
neglectmentioning
them. My grandparents, unaware of their genetic mutation, concentrated on the more blatant
disqualifications. Another category of restriction: “persons convicted of a crime or misdemeanor
involvingmoral turpitude.”And a subset of this group: “Incestuous relations.”
They avoided passengers who seemed to be suffering from trachoma or favus. They fled
anyone with a hacking cough. Occasionally, for reassurance, Lefty took out the certificate that
declared:

ELEUTHERIOSSTEPHANIDES
HASBEENVACCINATEDAND
UNLOUSED
ANDISPASSEDASVERMIN -FREETHISDATE
SEPT. 23, 1922
DISINFECTIONMARITIMEPIRAEUS

Literate, married to only one person (albeit a sibling), democratically inclined, mentally stable,
and authoritatively deloused, my grandparents saw no reason why they would have trouble
getting through. They each had the requisite twenty-five dollars apiece. They also had a sponsor:
their cousin Sourmelina. Just the year before, the Quota Act had reduced the annual numbers of
southern and eastern European immigrants from 783,000 to 155,000. It was nearly impossible to
get into the country without either a sponsor or stunning professional recommendations. To help
their own chances, Lefty put away his French phrase book and began memorizing four lines of
the King James New Testament. The Giulia was full of inside sources familiar with the English
literacy test. Different nationalitieswere asked to translate different bits of Scripture. ForGreeks,
it was Matthew 19:12: “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s
womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs,
which havemade themselves eunuchs for the kingdomof heaven’s sake.”
“Eunuchs?”Desdemona quailed. “Who told you this?”
“This is a passage from theBible.”
“WhatBible?Not theGreekBible.Go ask somebody elsewhat’s on that test.”
But Lefty showed her the Greek at the top of the card and the English below. He repeated the
passageword byword,making her
memorize it, whether or not she understood it.
“Wedidn’t have enough eunuchs inTurkey?Nowwehave to talk about thematEllis Island?”
“TheAmericans let in everyone,” Lefty joked. “Eunuchs included.”
“They should let us speakGreek if they’re so accepting,”Desdemona grumbled.
Summer was abandoning the ocean. One night it grew too cold in the lifeboat to crack the
corset’s combination. Instead they huddled under blankets, talking.
“Is Sourmelinameeting us inNewYork?”Desdemona asked.
“No.Wehave to take a train toDetroit.”

“Why can’t shemeet us?”
“It’s too far.”
“Just aswell. Shewouldn’t be on time anyway.”
The ceaseless sea wind made the tarp’s edges flap. Frost formed on the lifeboat’s gunwales.
They could see the top of the Giulia’s smokestack, the smoke itself discernible only as a starless
patch of night sky. (Though they didn’t know it, that striped, canted smokestack was already
informing them about their new home; it was whispering about River Rouge and the Uniroyal
plant, and the Seven Sisters and Two Brothers, but they didn’t listen; they wrinkled up their
noses and ducked down in the lifeboat away from the smoke.)
And if the smell of industry didn’t insist on entering my story already, if Desdemona and
Lefty, who grew up on a pine-scented mountain and who could never get used to the polluted air
of Detroit, hadn’t ducked down in the lifeboat, then they might have detected a new aroma
wafting in on the brisk sea air: a humid odor ofmud andwet bark. Land.NewYork.America.
“What arewegoing to tell Sourmelina about us?”
“She’ll understand.”
“Will she keep quiet?”
“There are a few things she’d rather her husband didn’t knowabout her.”
“YoumeanHelen?”
“I didn’t say a thing,” saidLefty.
They fell asleep after that,waking to sunlight, and a face staring down at them.
“Did you have a good sleep?”CaptainKontoulis said. “Maybe I
could get you a blanket?”
“I’m sorry,” Lefty said. “Wewon’t do it again.”
“Youwon’t get the chance,” said the captain and, to prove his point, pulled the lifeboat’s tarp
completely away. Desdemona and Lefty sat up. In the distance, lit by the rising sun, was the
skyline of New York. It wasn’t the right shape for a city—no domes, no minarets—and it took
them a minute to process the tall geometric forms. Mist curled off the bay. A million pink
windowpanes glittered. Closer, crownedwith her own sunrays and dressed like a classicalGreek,
the Statue ofLibertywelcomed them.
“Howdoyou like that?”CaptainKontoulis asked.
“I’ve seen enough torches to last the rest ofmy life,” saidLefty.
But Desdemona, for once, was more optimistic. “At least it’s a woman,” she said. “Maybe
here peoplewon’t be killing each other every single day.”

BOOKTWO

HENRYFORD’SENGLISH -LANGUAGE
MELTINGPOT

Everyonewhobuilds a factory builds a temple.
—CalvinCoolidge

Detroit was always made of wheels. Long before the Big Three and the nickname “Motor
City”; before the auto factories and the freighters and the pink, chemical nights; before anyone
had necked in a Thunderbird or spooned in a Model T; previous to the day a young Henry Ford
knocked down his workshop wall because, in devising his “quadricycle,” he’d thought of
everything but how to get the damn thing out; and nearly a century prior to the coldMarch night,
in 1896, when Charles King tiller-steered his horseless carriage down St. Antoine, along
Jefferson, and up Woodward Avenue (where the two-stroke engine promptly quit); way, way
back, when the city was just a piece of stolen Indian land located on the strait from which it got
its name, a fort fought over by the British and French until, wearing them out, it fell into the
hands of the Americans; way back then, before cars and cloverleaves, Detroit was made of
wheels.
I amnine years old and holdingmy father’s meaty, sweaty hand.We are standing at awindow
on the top floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel. I have come downtown for our annual lunch date. I
am wearing a miniskirt and fuchsia tights. A white patent leather purse hangs on a long strap
frommy shoulder.
The fogged window has spots on it. We are way up high. I’m going to order shrimp scampi in
aminute.
The reason for my father’s hand perspiration: he’s afraid of heights. Two days ago, when he
offered to takemewherever Iwanted, I called out inmypiping voice, “Top of the Pontch!”High
above the city, amid the business lunchers and power brokers, was where I wanted to be. And
Milton has been true to his promise. Despite racing pulse he has allowed the maître d’ to give us
a table next to the window; so that now here we are—as a tuxedoed waiter pulls out my
chair—andmy father, too frightened to sit, begins a history lesson instead.
What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it? Milton, olive
complexion turning a shade pale, only says, “Look. See thewheel?”
And now I squint. Oblivious, at nine, to the prospect of crow’s-feet, I gaze out over
downtown, down to the streets where my father is indicating (though not looking). And there it
is: half a hubcap of city plaza, with the spokes of Bagley, Washington, Woodward, Broadway,
andMadison radiating from it.
That’s all that remains of the famousWoodward Plan.Drawn up in 1807 by the hard-drinking,
eponymous judge. (Two years earlier, in 1805, the city had burned to the ground, the timber
houses and ribbon farms of the settlement founded by Cadillac in 1701 going up in the span of
three hours. And, in 1969, with my sharp vision, I can read the traces of that fire on the city’s
flag a half mile away in Grand Circus Park: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. “We hope
for better things; itwill rise from the ashes.”)

Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons.
Each wheel was to be separate yet united, in accordance with the young nation’s federalism, as
well as classically symmetrical, in accordance with Jeffersonian aesthetics. This dream never
quite came to be. Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities
dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and
therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. Since 1818, the city
had spread out along the river, warehouse by warehouse, factory by factory. Judge Woodward’s
wheels had been squashed, bisected, pressed into the usual rectangles.
Or seen anotherway (from a rooftop restaurant): thewheels hadn’t vanished at all, they’d only
changed form. By 1900 Detroit was the leading manufacturer of carriages and wagons. By 1922,
when my grandparents arrived, Detroit made other spinning things, too: marine engines,
bicycles, hand-rolled cigars.Andyes, finally: cars.
All thiswas visible from the train.Approaching along the shore of theDetroit River, Lefty and
Desdemona watched their new home take shape. They saw farmland give way to fenced lots and
cobblestone streets. The sky darkened with smoke. Buildings flew by, brick warehouses painted
in pragmatic Bookman white: WRIGHT AND KAY CO. . . . J. H. BLACK & SONS . . .
DETROIT STOVE WORKS. Out on the water, squat, tar-colored barges dragged along, and
people popped up on the streets, workmen in grimy overalls, clerks thumbing suspenders, the
signs of eateries and boardinghouses appearing next: We Serve Stroh’s Temperance
Beer . . .MakeThisYourHomeMeals 15 cents . . .
. . . As these new sights flooded my grandparents’ brains, they jostled with images from the
day before. Ellis Island, rising like a Doge’s Palace on the water. The Baggage Room stacked to
the ceiling with luggage. They’d been herded up a stairway to the Registry Room. Pinned with
numbers from the Giulia’smanifest, they’d filed past a line of health inspectorswho’d looked in
their eyes and ears, rubbed their scalps, and flipped their eyelids inside out with buttonhooks.
One doctor, noticing inflammation under Dr. Philobosian’s eyelids, had stopped the examination
and chalked an X on his coat. He was led out of line. My grandparents hadn’t seen him again.
“He must have caught something on the boat,” Desdemona said. “Or his eyes were red from all
that crying.” Meanwhile, chalk continued to do its work all around them. It marked a Pg on the
belly of a pregnant woman. It scrawled an H over an old man’s failing heart. It diagnosed the
C of conjunctivitis, the F of favus, and the T of trachoma. But, no matter how well trained,
medical eyes couldn’t spot a recessive mutation hiding out on a fifth chromosome. Fingers
couldn’t feel it. Buttonhooks couldn’t bring it to light . . .
Now, on the train, my grandparents were tagged not with manifest numbers but with
destination cards: “To theConductor: Please
show bearer where to change and where to get off, as this person does not speak English.
Bearer is bound to: Grand Trunk Sta. Detroit.” They sat next to each other in unreserved seats.
Lefty faced the window, looking out with excitement. Desdemona stared down at her silkworm
box, her cheeks crimson with the shame and fury she’d been suffering for the last thirty-six
hours.
“That’s the last time anyone cutsmyhair,” she said.
“Youlook fine,” saidLefty, not looking. “Youlook like an Amerikanidha.”
“I don’twant to look like an Amerikanidha.”
In the concessions area at Ellis Island, Lefty had cajoled Desdemona to step into a tent run by
the YWCA. She’d gone in, shawled and kerchiefed, and had emerged fifteen minutes later in a
drop-waisted dress and a floppy hat shaped like a chamber pot. Rage flamed beneath her new
face powder. As part of the makeover, the YWCA ladies had cut off Desdemona’s immigrant
braids.
Obsessively, in the way a person worries a rip deep in a pocket, she now reached up under the
floppy hat to feel her denuded scalp for the thirtieth or fortieth time. “That’s the last haircut,” she
said again. (She was true to this vow. From that day on, Desdemona grew her hair out like Lady
Godiva, keeping it under a net in an enormous mass and washing it every Friday; and only after

Lefty died did she ever cut it, giving it to Sophie Sassoon, who sold it for two hundred and fifty
dollars to a wigmaker who made five separate wigs out of it, one of which, she claimed, was
later bought by Betty Ford, post White House and rehab, so that we got to see it on television
once, during Richard Nixon’s funeral, my grandmother’s hair, sitting on the ex-President’s
wife’s head.)
But there was another reason for my grandmother’s unhappiness. She opened the silkworm
box in her lap. Inside were her two braids, still tied with the ribbons of mourning, but otherwise
the box was empty. After carrying her silkworm eggs all the way from Bithynios, Desdemona
had been forced to dump themout at Ellis Island. Silkwormeggs appeared on a list of parasites.
Lefty remained glued to the window. All the way from Hoboken he’d gazed out at the
marvelous sights: electric trams pulling pink faces up Albany’s hills; factories glowing like
volcanoes in theBuffalo night.Once,waking as the train pulled through a city at dawn,Lefty
hadmistaken a pillared bank for the Parthenon, and thought hewas inAthens again.
Now theDetroit River sped past and the city loomed. Lefty stared out at themotor cars parked
like giant beetles at the curbsides. Smokestacks rose everywhere, cannons bombarding the
atmosphere. There were red brick stacks and tall silver ones, stacks in regimental rows or all
alone puffing meditatively away, a forest of smokestacks that dimmed the sunlight and then, all
of a sudden, blocked it out completely. Everythingwent black: they’d entered the train station.
GrandTrunkStation, nowa ruin of spectacular dimensions,was then the city’s attempt to one-
up New York. Its base was a mammoth marble neoclassical museum, complete with Corinthian
pillars and carved entablature. From this temple rose a thirteen-story office building. Lefty,
who’d been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at
where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it.
Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.
But just imagine it in those days! Grand Trunk! Telephones in a hundred shipping offices
ringing away, still a relatively new sound; and merchandise being sent east and west; passengers
arriving and departing, having coffee in the Palm Court or getting their shoes shined, the wing
tips of banking, the cap toes of parts supply, the saddle shoes of rum-running.GrandTrunk,with
its vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tilework, its chandeliers, its floors of Welsh quarry stone.
There was a six-chair barbershop, where civic leaders were mummified in hot towels; and
bathtubs for rent; and elevator banks lit by translucent egg-shapedmarble lamps.
Leaving Desdemona behind a pillar, Lefty searched through the mob in the station for the
cousin who was meeting their train. Sourmelina Zizmo, née Papadiamandopoulos, was my
grandparents’ cousin and hence my first cousin twice removed. I knew her as a colorful, older
woman. Sourmelina of the precarious cigarette ash. Sourmelina of the indigo bathwater.
Sourmelina of the Theosophical Society brunches. She wore satin gloves up to the elbow and
mothered a long line of smelly dachshunds with tearstained eyes. Footstools populated her
house, allowing the short-legged creatures access to sofas and chaise longues. In 1922, however,
Sourmelinawas only twenty-eight. Picking her out of this crowd atGrandTrunk
is as difficult for me as identifying guests in my parents’ wedding album, where all the faces
wear the disguise of youth. Lefty had a different problem. He paced the concourse, looking for
the cousin he’d grown up with, a sharp-nosed girl with the grinning mouth of a comedy mask.
Sun slanted in from the skylights above.He squinted, examining the passingwomen, until finally
she called out to him, “Over here, cousin.Don’t you recognizeme? I’m the irresistible one.”
“Lina, is that you?”
“I’mnot in the village anymore.”
In the five years since leaving Turkey, Sourmelina had managed to erase just about everything
identifiably Greek about her, from her hair, which she dyed to a rich chestnut and now wore
bobbed and marcelled, to her accent, which had migrated far enough west to sound vaguely
“European,” to her reading material (Collier’s, Harper’s), to her favorite foods (lobster
thermidor, peanut butter), and finally to her clothes. She wore a short green flapper dress fringed
at the hemline. Her shoes were a matching green satin with sequined toes and delicate ankle

straps. A black feather boa was wrapped around her shoulders, and on her head was a cloche hat
that dangled onyx pendants over her plucked eyebrows.
For the next few seconds she gave Lefty the full benefit of her sleek, American pose, but it
was still Lina inside there (under the cloche) and soon her Greek enthusiasm bubbled out. She
spread her armswide. “Kissmehello, cousin.”
They embraced. Lina pressed a rouged cheek against his neck. Then she pulled back to
examine him and, dissolving into laughter, cupped her hand over his nose. “It’s still you. I’d
know this nose anywhere.” Her laugh completed its follow-through, as her shoulders went up
and down, and then she was on to the next thing. “So, where is she? Where is this new bride of
yours?Yourtelegramdidn’t even give a name.What? Is she hiding?”
“She’s . . . in the bathroom.”
“She must be a beauty. You got married fast enough. Which did you do first, introduce
yourself or propose?”
“I think I proposed.”
“What does she look like?”
“She looks . . . like you.”
“Oh, darling, not that good surely.”
Sourmelina brought her cigarette holder to her lips and inhaled, scanning the crowd. “Poor
Desdemona!Her brother falls in love and leaves her behind inNewYork.How is she?”
“She’s fine.”
“Whydidn’t she comewith you?She’s not jealous of your newwife, is she?”
“No, nothing like that.”
She clutched his arm. “We read about the fire. Terrible! I was so worried until I got your
letter. TheTurks started it. I know it.Of course,myhusband doesn’t agree.”
“He doesn’t?”
“One suggestion, since you’ll be livingwith us?Don’t talk politicswithmyhusband.”
“All right.”
“And the village?” Sourmelina inquired.
“Everybody left the horeo, Lina. There’s nothing now.”
“If I didn’t hate that place,maybe I’d shed two tears.”
“Lina, there’s something I have to explain to you . . .”
But Sourmelinawas looking away, tapping her foot. “Maybe she fell in.”
“. . . Something aboutDesdemona andme . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . .Mywife . . . Desdemona . . .”
“Was I right?They don’t get along?”
“No . . . Desdemona . . .mywife . . .”
“Yes?”
“Sameperson.”He gave the signal.Desdemona stepped frombehind the pillar.
“Hello, Lina,”mygrandmother said. “We’remarried.Don’t tell.”
And thatwas how it came out, for the next-to-last time.Blurted out bymy yia yia, beneath the
echoing roof of Grand Trunk, toward Sourmelina’s cloche-covered ears. The confession hovered
in the air a moment, before floating away with the smoke rising from her cigarette. Desdemona
took her husband’s arm.
My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d
come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until
Sourmelina
died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified, so that
people began to speak of “Sourmelina’s girlfriends.” A secret kept, in other words, only by the
loosest definition, so that now—as I get ready to leak the information myself—I feel only a
slight twinge of filial guilt.
Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island

after.”
As a girl in the horeo, Sourmelina had been caught in compromising circumstances with a
few female friends. “Not many,” she told me herself, years later, “two or three. People think if
you like girls, you like every single one. I was always picky. And there wasn’t much to pick
from.” For awhile she’d struggled against her predisposition. “Iwent to church. It didn’t help. In
those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be
different.” When Sourmelina was caught not with another girl but with a full-grown woman, a
mother of two children, a scandal arose. Sourmelina’s parents tried to arrange her marriage but
found no takers. Husbands were hard enough to come by in Bithynios without the added liability
of an uninterested, defective bride.
Her father had then done what Greek fathers of unmarriageable girls did in those days: he
wrote toAmerica. TheUnited States aboundedwith dollar bills, baseball sluggers, raccoon coats,
diamond jewelry—and lonely, immigrant bachelors. With a photograph of the prospective bride
and a considerable dowry, her father had comeupwith one.
Jimmy Zizmo (shortened from Zisimopoulos) had come to America in 1907 at the age of
thirty. The family didn’t knowmuch about him except that hewas a hard bargainer. In a series of
letters to Sourmelina’s father, Zizmo had negotiated the amount of the dowry in the formal
language of a barrister, even going so far as to demand a bank check before the wedding day.
The photograph Sourmelina received showed a tall, handsome man with a virile mustache,
holding a pistol in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. When she stepped off the train at
Grand Trunk two months later, however, the short man who greeted her was clean-shaven, with
a sour expression and a laborer’s dark complexion. Such a discrepancy might have disappointed
a normal bride, but Sourmelina didn’t care onewayor another.
Sourmelina had written often, describing her new life in America, but she concentrated on the
new fashions, or her Aeriola Jr., the radio she spent hours each day listening to, wearing
earphones and manipulating the dial, stopping every so often to clean off the carbon dust that
built up on the crystal. She never mentioned anything connected to what Desdemona referred to
as “the bed,” and so her cousins were forced to read between the lines of those aerograms, trying
to see, in a description of a Sunday drive through Belle Isle, whether the face of the husband at
the wheel was happy or unsatisfied; or inferring, from a passage about Sourmelina’s latest
hairstyle—something called “cootie garages”—whether Zizmowas ever allowed tomuss it up.
This same Sourmelina, full of her own secrets, now took in her new co-conspirators.
“Married?Youmean sleeping-togethermarried?”
Leftymanaged, “Yes.”
Sourmelina noticed her ash for the first time, and flicked it. “Just my luck. Soon as I leave the
village, things get interesting.”
But Desdemona couldn’t abide such irony. She grabbed Sourmelina’s hands and pleaded,
“Youhave to promise never to tell.We’ll live,we’ll die, and thatwill be the end of it.”
“Iwon’t tell.”
“People can’t even know I’myour cousin.”
“Iwon’t tell anyone.”
“What about your husband?”
“He thinks I’mpicking upmycousin and his newwife.”
“Youwon’t say anything to him?”
“That’ll be easy.” Lina laughed. “He doesn’t listen tome.”

Sourmelina insisted on getting a porter to carry their suitcases to the car, a black-and-tan
Packard. She tipped him and climbed behind the wheel, attracting looks. A woman driving was
still a scandalous sight in 1922. After resting her cigarette holder on the dashboard, she pulled
out the choke, waited the requisite five seconds, and pressed the ignition button. The car’s tin
bonnet shuddered to life. The leather seats began to vibrate and Desdemona took hold of her
husband’s arm. Up front, Sourmelina took off her satin-strap high heels to drive barefoot. She

put the car into gear and,without checking
traffic, lurched off down Michigan Avenue toward Cadillac Square. My grandparents’ eyes
glazed over at the sheer activity, streetcars rumbling, bells clanging, and the monochrome traffic
swerving in and out. In those days downtown Detroit was filled with shoppers and businessmen.
Outside Hudson’s Department Store the crowd was ten thick, jostling to get in the newfangled
revolving doors. Lina pointed out the sights: the Café Frontenac . . . the Family
Theatre . . . and the enormous electric signs: Ralston . . .Wait&BondBlackstone
Mild 10¢ Cigar. Above, a thirty-foot boy spread Meadow Gold Butter on a ten-foot
slice of bread. One building had a row of giant oil lamps over the entrance to promote a sale on
until October 31. It was all swirl and hubbub, Desdemona lying against the backseat, already
suffering the anxiety that modern conveniences would induce in her over the years, cars mainly,
but toasters, too, lawn sprinklers and escalators; while Lefty grinned and shook his head.
Skyscrapers were going up everywhere, and movie palaces and hotels. The twenties saw the
construction of nearly all Detroit’s great buildings, the Penobscot Building and the second Buhl
Building colored like an Indian belt, the New Union Trust Building, the Cadillac Tower, the
Fisher Building with its gilded roof. To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han
during cocoon season. What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of
the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east, a thirty-square-block area bounded by
Leland, Macomb, Hastings, and Brush streets, teeming with the city’s African Americans, who
weren’t allowed to live anywhere else. They didn’t see, in short, the seeds of the city’s
destruction—its second destruction—because they were part of it, too, all these people coming
fromeverywhere to cash in onHenryFord’s five-dollar-a-day promise.
The East Side of Detroit was a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes, shaded by
cathedral elms. The house on Hurlbut Street Lina drove them to was a modest, two-story
building of root-beer-colored brick. My grandparents gaped at it from the car, unable to move,
until suddenly the front door opened and someone stepped out.
Jimmy Zizmo was so many things I don’t know where to begin. Amateur herbalist;
antisuffragist; big-game hunter; ex-con; drug pusher; teetotaler—take your pick. He was forty-
five years old, nearly
twice as old as his wife. Standing on the dim porch, he wore an inexpensive suit and a shirt
with a pointy collar that had lost most of its starch. His frizzy black hair gave him the wild look
of the bachelor he’d been for so many years, and this impression was heightened by his face,
whichwas rumpled like an unmade bed.His eyebrows, however, were as seductively arched as a
nautch girl’s, his eyelashes so thick he might have been wearing mascara. But my grandmother
didn’t notice any of that. Shewas fixated on something else.
“AnArab?”Desdemona asked as soon as shewas alonewith her cousin in the kitchen. “Is that
whyyoudidn’t tell us about him in your letters?”
“He’s not anArab.He’s from theBlackSea.”
“This is the sala,” Zizmo was meanwhile explaining to Lefty as he showed him around the
house.
“Pontian!” Desdemona gasped with horror, while also examining the icebox. “He’s not
Muslim, is he?”
“Not everybody from the Pontus converted,” Lina scoffed. “What do you think, a Greek takes
a swim in theBlackSea and turns into aMuslim?”
“But does he haveTurkish blood?” She lowered her voice. “Is thatwhyhe’s so dark?”
“I don’t knowand I don’t care.”
“You’re free to stay as long as you like”—Zizmo was now leading Lefty upstairs—“but there
are a few house rules. First, I’m a vegetarian. If your wife wants to cook meat, she has to use
separate pots and dishes.Also, nowhiskey.Doyoudrink?”
“Sometimes.”
“No drinking.Go to a speakeasy if youwant to drink. I don’twant any troublewith the police.

Now, about the rent.Youjust gotmarried?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of dowry did you get?”
“Dowry?”
“Yes.Howmuch?”
“But did you know he was so old?” Desdemona whispered downstairs as she inspected the
oven.
“At least he’s notmybrother.”
“Quiet!Don’t even joke.”
“I didn’t get a dowry,” answeredLefty. “Wemet on the boat over.”
“No dowry!” Zizmo stopped on the stairs to look back at Lefty with astonishment. “Why did
you getmarried, then?”
“We fell in love,” Lefty said. He’d never announced it to a stranger before, and it made him
feel happy and frightened all at once.
“If you don’t get paid, don’t get married,” Zizmo said. “That’s why I waited so long. I was
holding out for the right price.”Hewinked.
“Linamentioned you have your ownbusiness now,”Lefty saidwith sudden interest, following
Zizmo into the bathroom. “What kind of business is it?”
“Me? I’man importer.”
“I don’t know of what,” Sourmelina answered in the kitchen. “An importer. All I know is he
brings homemoney.”
“But howcan youmarry somebody youdon’t knowanything about?”
“Toget out of that country,Des, Iwould havemarried a cripple.”
“I have some experience with importing,” Lefty managed to get in as Zizmo demonstrated the
plumbing. “Back inBursa. In the silk industry.”
“Your portion of the rent is twenty dollars.” Zizmo didn’t take the hint. He pulled the chain,
unleashing a flood ofwater.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Lina was continuing downstairs, “when it comes to husbands, the
older the better.” She opened the pantry door. “A young husband would be after me all the time.
Itwould be toomuch of a strain.”
“Shameon you, Lina.”ButDesdemonawas laughing now, despite herself. It waswonderful to
see her old cousin again, a little piece of Bithynios still intact. The dark pantry, full of figs,
almonds,walnuts, halvah, and dried apricots,made her feel better, too.
“But where can I get the rent?” Lefty finally blurted out as they headed back downstairs. “I
don’t have anymoney left.Where can Iwork?”
“Not a problem.” Zizmo waved his hand. “I’ll speak to a few people.” They came through the
sala again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. “Youhaven’t complimentedmy zebra
skin rug.”
“It’s very nice.”
“I brought it back fromAfrica. Shot itmyself.”
“You’vebeen toAfrica?”
“I’ve been all over.”

Like everybody else in town, they squeezed in together. Desdemona and Lefty slept in a
bedroom directly above Zizmo and Lina’s, and the first few nights my grandmother climbed out
of bed to put her ear to the floor. “Nothing,” she said, “I told you.”
“Comeback to bed,”Lefty scolded. “That’s their business.”
“What business?That’swhat I’m telling you. They aren’t having any business.”
While in the bedroom below, Zizmo was discussing the new boarders upstairs. “What a
romantic!Meets a girl on the boat andmarries her.Nodowry.”
“Somepeoplemarry for love.”
“Marriage is for housekeeping and for children.Which remindsme.”

“Please, Jimmy, not tonight.”
“Then when? Five years we’ve been married and no children. You’re always sick, tired, this,
that.Have you been taking the castor oil?”
“Yes.”
“And themagnesium?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We have to reduce your bile. If the mother has too much bile, the child will lack vigor
and disobey his parents.”
“Goodnight, kyrie.”
“Goodnight, kyria.”
Before the week was out, all my grandparents’ questions about Sourmelina’s marriage had
been answered. Because of his age, Jimmy Zizmo treated his young bride more like a daughter
than a wife. He was always telling her what she could and couldn’t do, howling over the price
and necklines of her outfits, telling her to go to bed, to get up, to speak, to keep silent.He refused
to give her the car keys until she cajoled him with kisses and caresses. His nutritional quackery
even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a
result of his interrogating Lina about her stools. As for sexual relations, they had happened, but
not recently. For the last fivemonthsLina had complained of imaginary ailments,
preferring her husband’s herbal cures to his amatory attentions. Zizmo, in turn, harbored
vaguely yogic beliefs about the mental benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait
until his wife’s vitality returned. The house was sex-segregated like the houses in the patridha,
the old country, men in the sala, women in the kitchen. Two spheres with separate concerns,
duties, even—the evolutionary biologists might say—thought patterns. Lefty and Desdemona,
accustomed to living in their own house, were forced to adapt to their new landlord’s ways.
Besides,mygrandfather needed a job.

In those days there were a lot of car companies to work for. There was Chalmers, Metzger,
Brush, Columbia, and Flanders. There was Hupp, Paige, Hudson, Krit, Saxon, Liberty,
Rickenbacker, andDodge. JimmyZizmo, however, had connections at Ford.
“I’m a supplier,” he said.
“Ofwhat?”
“Assorted fuels.”
Theywere in the Packard again, vibrating on thin tires.A lightmistwas falling. Lefty squinted
through the fogged windshield. Little by little, as they approached along Michigan Avenue, he
began to be aware of a monolith looming in the distance, a building like a gigantic church organ,
pipes running into the sky.
There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my
bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my
grandfather’s nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was
recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the
smell’s chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nosewith his handkerchief.
Zizmo laughed. “Don’tworry.You’llget used to it.”
“No, Iwon’t.”
“Doyouwant to know the secret?”
“What?”
“Don’t breathe.”
When they reached the factory, Zizmo took him into the PersonnelDepartment.
“How long has he lived inDetroit?” themanager asked.
“Sixmonths.”
“Can you verify that?”
Zizmonowspoke in a low tone. “I could drop the necessary documents by your house.”
The personnelmanager looked bothways. “OldLogCabin?”

“Only the best.”
The chief jutted out his lower lip, examiningmygrandfather. “How’s his English?”
“Not as good asmine.But he learns fast.”
“He’ll have to take the course and pass the test.Otherwise he’s out.”
“It’s a deal. Now, if you’ll write down your home address, we can schedule a delivery. Would
Monday evening, say around eight-thirty, be suitable?”
“Come around to the back door.”
My grandfather’s short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any
Stephanides has ever worked in the automobile industry. Instead of cars, we would become
manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled
cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana creampie.Our assembly linewas the
grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain. Still, those twenty-five weeks gave us a personal
connection to that massive, forbidding, awe-inspiring complex we saw from the highway, that
controlledVesuviusof chutes, tubes, ladders, catwalks, fire, and smoke known, like a plague or a
monarch, only by a color: “theRouge.”
On his first day ofwork, Lefty came into the kitchen modeling his newoveralls. He spread his
flannel-shirted arms and snapped his fingers, dancing in work boots, and Desdemona laughed
and shut the kitchen door so as not towake upLina. Lefty ate his breakfast of prunes and yogurt,
reading a Greek newspaper a few days old. Desdemona packed his Greek lunch of feta, olives,
and bread in a new American container: a brown paper bag. At the back door, when he turned to
kiss her she stepped back, anxious that people might see. But then she remembered that they
were married now. They lived in a place called Michigan, where the birds seemed to come in
only one color, and where no one knew them. Desdemona stepped forward again to meet her
husband’s lips. Their first kiss in the great American outdoors, on the back porch, near a cherry
tree losing its leaves.A
brief flare of happiness went off inside her and hung, raining sparks, until Lefty disappeared
around the front of the house.
My grandfather’s good mood accompanied him all the way to the trolley stop. Other workers
were already waiting, loose-kneed, smoking cigarettes and joking. Lefty noticed their metal
lunch pails and, embarrassed by his paper sack, held it behind him. The streetcar showed up first
as a hum in the soles of his boots. Then it appeared against the rising sun, Apollo’s own chariot,
only electrified. Inside, men stood in groups arranged by language. Faces scrubbed for work still
had soot inside the ears, deep black. The streetcar sped off again. Soon the jovial mood
dissipated and the languages fell silent. Near downtown, a few blacks boarded the car, standing
outside on the runners, holding on to the roof.
And then the Rouge appeared against the sky, rising out of the smoke it generated. At first all
that was visible was the tops of the eight main smokestacks. Each gave birth to its own dark
cloud. The clouds plumed upward and merged into a general pall that hung over the landscape,
sending a shadow that ran along the trolley tracks; and Lefty understood that the men’s silence
was a recognition of this shadow, of its inevitable approach each morning. As it came on, the
men turned their backs so that only Lefty saw the light leave the sky as the shadow enveloped
the streetcar and the men’s faces turned gray and one of the mavros on the runners spat blood
onto the roadside. The smell seeped into the streetcar next, first the bearable eggs and manure,
then the unbearable chemical taint, and Lefty looked at the other men to see if they registered it,
but they didn’t, though they continued to breathe. The doors opened and they all filed out.
Through the hanging smoke, Lefty saw other streetcars letting off other workers, hundreds and
hundreds of gray figures trudging across the paved courtyard toward the factory gates. Trucks
were driving past, andLefty let himself be taken alongwith the flowof the next shift, fifty, sixty,
seventy thousand men hurrying last cigarettes or getting in final words—because as they
approached the factory they’d begun to speak again, not because they had anything to say but
because beyond those doors language wasn’t allowed. The main building, a fortress of dark
brick, was seven stories high, the smokestacks seventeen. Running off it were two chutes topped

bywater towers. These led to observation decks and to adjoining refineries
studded with less impressive stacks. It was like a grove of trees, as if the Rouge’s eight main
smokestacks had sown seeds to the wind, and now ten or twenty or fifty smaller trunks were
sprouting up in the infertile soil around the plant. Lefty could see the train tracks now, the huge
silos along the river, the giant spice box of coal, coke, and iron ore, and the catwalks stretching
overhead like giant spiders. Before he was sucked in the door, he glimpsed a freighter and a bit
of the river French explorers named for its reddish color, long before the water turned orange
from runoff or ever caught on fire.
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his
cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers
rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since
then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so
thatwe plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitivemotions of a hundred kinds.
But in 1922 itwas still a new thing to be amachine.
On the factory floor, my grandfather was trained for his job in seventeen minutes. Part of the
new production method’s genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you
could hire anyone. And fire anyone. The foreman showed Lefty how to take a bearing from the
conveyor, grind it on a lathe, and replace it. Holding a stopwatch, he timed the new employee’s
attempts. Then, nodding once, he led Lefty to his position on the Line. On the left stood a man
named Wierzbicki; on the right, a man named O’Malley. For a moment, they are three men,
waiting together. Then thewhistle blows.
Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and
O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. This camshaft travels away on a conveyor, curling
around the factory, through its clouds ofmetal dust, its acid fogs, until anotherworker fifty yards
on reaches up and removes the camshaft, fitting it onto the engine block (twenty seconds).
Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors—the carburetor, the
distributor, the intake manifold—and connecting them to the engine block. Above their bent
heads, huge spindles pound steam-powered fists. No one says a word. Wierzbicki reams a
bearing andStephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to a
camshaft. The camshaft circles around the floor until a hand reaches up to take it down and
attach it to the engine block, growing increasingly eccentric now with swooshes of pipe and the
plumage of fan blades. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and
O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. While other workers screw in the air filter (seventeen
seconds) and attach the starter motor (twenty-six seconds) and put on the flywheel. At which
point the engine is finished and the lastman sends it soaring away . . .
Except that he isn’t the lastman. There are othermen belowhauling the engine in, as a chassis
rolls out to meet it. These men attach the engine to the transmission (twenty-five seconds).
Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to
a camshaft.Mygrandfather sees only the bearing in front of him, his hands removing it, grinding
it, and putting it back as another appears. The conveyor over his head extends back to the men
who stamp out the bearings and load ingots into the furnaces; it goes back to the Foundry where
the Negroes work, goggled against the infernal light and heat. They feed iron ore into the Blast
Oven and pour molten steel into core molds from ladles. They pour at just the right rate—too
quickly and the molds will explode; too slowly and the steel will harden. They can’t stop even to
pick the burning bits of metal from their arms. Sometimes the foreman does it; sometimes not.
The Foundry is the deepest recess of the Rouge, its molten core, but the Line goes back farther
than that. It extends outside to the hills of coal and coke; it goes to the river where freighters
dock to unload the ore, at which point the Line becomes the river itself, snaking up to the north
woods until it reaches its source, which is the earth itself, the limestone and sandstone therein;
and then theLine leads back again, out of substrata to river to freighters and finally to the cranes,
shovels, and furnaces where it is turned into molten steel and poured into molds, cooling and
hardening into car parts—the gears, drive shafts, and fuel tanks of 1922 Model T’s. Wierzbicki

reams a bearing andStephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft.
Above and behind, at various angles, workers pack sand into core molds, or hammer plugs into
molds, or put casting boxes into the cupola furnace. The Line isn’t a single line but many,
diverging and intersecting.Otherworkers stampout body parts (fifty seconds), bump them
(forty-two seconds), and weld the pieces together (one minute and ten seconds). Wierzbicki
reams a bearing andStephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft.
The camshaft flies around the factory until a man unhooks it, attaches it to the engine block,
growing eccentric now with fan blades, pipes, and spark plugs. And then the engine is finished.
A man sends it dropping down onto a chassis rolling out to meet it, as three other workers
remove a car body from the oven, its black finish baked to a shine in which they can see their
own faces, and they recognize themselves, momentarily, before they drop the body onto the
chassis rolling out to meet it. A man jumps into the front seat (three seconds), turns the ignition
(two seconds), and drives the automobile away.

By day, no words; by night, hundreds. Every evening at quitting time my exhausted grandfather
would come out of the factory and tramp across to an adjacent building housing the FordEnglish
School. He sat in a desk with his workbook open in front of him. The desk felt as though it were
vibrating across the floor at the Line’s 1.2 miles per hour. He looked up at the English alphabet
in a frieze on the classroom walls. In rows around him, men sat over identical workbooks. Hair
stiff from dried sweat, eyes red from metal dust, hands raw, they recited with the obedience of
choirboys:
“Employees should use plenty of soap andwater in the home.
“Nothingmakes for right living somuch as cleanliness.
“Donot spit on the floor of the home.
“Donot allow any flies in the house.
“Themost advanced people are the cleanest.”
Sometimes the English lessons continued on the job. One week, after a lecture by the foreman
on increasing productivity, Lefty speeded up his work, grinding a bearing every twelve seconds
instead of fourteen. Returning from the lavatory later, he found the word “RAT”written on the
side of his lathe. The belt was cut. By the time he found a new belt in the equipment bin, a horn
sounded. TheLine had stopped.
“What the hell’s thematterwith you?” the foreman shouted at him. “Every timewe shut down
the line,we losemoney. If it happens again, you’re out.Understand?”
“Yes,sir.”
“Okay!Let her go!”
And the Line started up again. After the foreman had gone, O’Malley looked both ways and
leaned over to whisper, “Don’t try to be a speed king. You understand? We all have to work
faster thatway.”

Desdemona stayed home and cooked. Without silkworms to tend or mulberry trees to pick,
without neighbors to gossip with or goats to milk, my grandmother filled her time with food.
While Lefty ground bearings nonstop, Desdemona built pastitsio, moussaka and galacto-
boureko. She coated the kitchen table with flour and, using a bleached broomstick, rolled out
paper-thin sheets of dough. The sheets came off her assembly line, one after another. They filled
the kitchen. They covered the living room, where she’d laid bedsheets over the furniture.
Desdemona went up and down the line, adding walnuts, butter, honey, spinach, cheese, adding
more layers of dough, then more butter, before forging the assembled concoctions in the oven.
At the Rouge, workers collapsed from heat and fatigue, while on Hurlbut my grandmother did a
double shift. She got up in the morning to fix breakfast and pack a lunch for her husband, then
marinated a leg of lamb with wine and garlic. In the afternoon she made her own sausages,
spiced with fennel, and hung them over the heating pipes in the basement. At three o’clock she
started dinner, and only when it was cooking did she take a break, sitting at the kitchen table to

consult her dream book on the meaning of her previous night’s dreams. No fewer than three pots
simmered on the stove at all times. Occasionally, Jimmy Zizmo brought home a few of his
business associates, hulking men with thick, ham-like heads stuffed into their fedoras.
Desdemona served them meals at all hours of the day. Then they were off again, into the city.
Desdemona cleaned up.
The only thing she refused to do was the shopping. American stores confused her. She found
the produce depressing. Even many years later, seeing a Kroger’s McIntosh in our suburban
kitchen, she would hold it up to ridicule, saying, “This is nothing. This we fed to goats.” To step
into a local market was to miss the savor of the peaches, figs, and winter chestnuts of Bursa.
Already, in her first months in America, Desdemona was suffering “the homesickness that has
no cure.” So, afterworking at the plant and attendingEnglish
class, Leftywas the one to pick up the lamb and vegetables, the spices and honey.
And so they lived . . . one month . . . three . . . five. They suffered through their first Michigan
winter. A January night, just past 1 a.m. Desdemona Stephanides asleep, wearing her hated
YWCA hat against the wind blowing through the thin walls. A radiator sighing, clanking. By
candlelight, Lefty finishes his homework, notebook propped on knees, pencil in hand. And from
the wall: rustling. He looks up to see a pair of red eyes shining out from a hole in the baseboard.
He writes R-A-T before throwing his pencil at the vermin. Desdemona sleeps on.He brushes her
hair. He says, in English, “Hello, sweetheart.” The new country and its language have helped to
push the past a little further behind. The sleeping formnext to him is less and less his sister every
night and more and more his wife. The statute of limitations ticks itself out, day by day, all
memory of the crime being washed away. (But what humans forget, cells remember. The body,
that elephant . . .)
Spring arrived, 1923. My grandfather, accustomed to the multifarious conjugations of ancient
Greek verbs, had found English, for all its incoherence, a relatively simple tongue to master.
Once he had swallowed a good portion of the English vocabulary, he began to taste the familiar
ingredients, the Greek seasoning in the roots, prefixes, and suffixes. A pageant was planned to
celebrate the FordEnglish School graduation.As a top student, Leftywas asked to take part.
“What kind of pageant?”Desdemona asked.
“I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise. But you have to sewme some clothes.”
“What kind?”
“Like from the patridha.”
It was a Wednesday evening. Lefty and Zizmo were in the sala when suddenly Lina came in
to listen to “The Ronnie Ronnette Hour.” Zizmo gave her a disapproving look, but she escaped
behind her headphones.
“She thinks she’s one of these Amerikanidhes,” Zizmo said to Lefty. “Look. See? She even
crosses her legs.”
“This isAmerica,” Lefty said. “We’re all Amerikanidhes now.”
“This is notAmerica,” Zizmo countered. “This ismyhouse.We
don’t live like the Amerikanidhes in here. Yourwife understands. Do you see her in the sala
showing her legs and listening to the radio?”
Someone knocked at the door. Zizmo, who had an inexplicable aversion to unannounced
guests, jumped up and reached under his coat. Hemotioned for Lefty not tomove. Lina, noticing
something, took off her earphones. The knock came again. “Kyrie,” Lina said, “if they were
going to kill you,would they knock?”
“Who’s going to kill!”Desdemona said, rushing in from the kitchen.
“Just a way of speaking,” said Lina, who knew more about her husband’s importing concern
that she’d been letting on. She glided to the door and opened it.
Two men stood on the welcome mat. They wore gray suits, striped ties, black brogues. They
had short sideburns. They carried matching briefcases. When they removed their hats, they
revealed identical chestnut hair, neatly parted in the center. Zizmo took his hand out of his coat.
“We’re from the Ford Sociological Department,” the tall one said. “Is Mr. Stephanides at

home?”
“Yes?”Lefty said.
“Mr. Stephanides, letme tell youwhywe’re here.”
“Management has foreseen,” the short one seamlessly continued, “that five dollars a day in the
hands of some men might work a tremendous handicap along the paths of rectitude and right
living andmightmake of themamenace to society in general.”
“So it was established by Mr. Ford”—the taller one again took over—“that no man is to
receive themoneywho cannot use it advisedly and conservatively.”
“Also”—the short one again—“that where a man seems to qualify under the plan and later
develops weaknesses, that it is within the province of the company to take away his share of the
profits until such time as he can rehabilitate himself.Maywe come in?”
Once across the threshold, they separated. The tall one took a pad from his briefcase. “I’m
going to ask you a fewquestions, if you don’tmind.Doyoudrink,Mr. Stephanides?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Zizmo answered for him.
“Andwho are you,may I ask?”
“Myname isZizmo.”
“Are you a boarder here?”
“This ismyhouse.”
“SoMr. andMrs. Stephanides are the boarders?”
“That’s right.”
“Won’t do.Won’t do,” said the tall one. “We encourage our employees to obtainmortgages.”
“He’sworking on it,” Zizmo said.
Meanwhile, the short one had entered the kitchen. He was lifting lids off pots, opening the
oven door, peering into the garbage can. Desdemona started to object, but Lina checked her with
a glance. (And notice how Desdemona’s nose has begun to twitch. For two days now, her sense
of smell has been incredibly acute. Foods are beginning to smell funny to her, feta cheese like
dirty socks, olives like goat droppings.)
“Howoften do you bathe,Mr. Stephanides?” the tall one asked.
“Every day, sir.”
“Howoften do you brush your teeth?”
“Every day, sir.”
“What do you use?”
“Baking soda.”
Now the short one was climbing the stairs. He invaded my grandparents’ bedroom and
inspected the linens.He stepped into the bathroomand examined the toilet seat.
“Fromnowon, use this,” the tall one said. “It’s a dentifrice.Here’s a new toothbrush.”
Disconcerted, my grandfather took the items. “We come fromBursa,” he explained. “It’s a big
city.”
“Brush along the gum lines. Up on the bottoms and down on the tops. Two minutes morning
and night. Let’s see.Give it a try.”
“We are civilized people.”
“Do I understand you to be refusing hygiene instruction?”
“Listen to me,” Zizmo said. “The Greeks built the Parthenon and the Egyptians built the
pyramids backwhen theAnglo-Saxonswere still dressing in animal skins.”
The tall one took a long look at Zizmo andmade a note on his pad.
“Like this?” my grandfather said. Grinning hideously, he moved the toothbrush up and down
in his drymouth.
“That’s right. Fine.”
The short one now reappeared from upstairs. He flipped open his pad and began: “Item one.
Garbage can in kitchen has no lid. Item two. Housefly on kitchen table. Item three. Too much
garlic in food.Causes indigestion.”
(And now Desdemona locates the culprit: the short man’s hair. The smell of brilliantine on it

makes her nauseous.)
“Veryconsiderate of you to come here and take an interest in your employee’s health,” Zizmo
said. “Wewouldn’twant anybody to get sick, now,wouldwe?Might slowdownproduction.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” said the tall one. “Seeing as you are not an official
employee of the Ford Motor Company. However”—turning back to my grandfather—“I should
advise you,Mr. Stephanides, that inmy report I amgoing tomake a note of your social relations.
I’m going to recommend that you and Mrs. Stephanides move into your own home as soon as it
is financially feasible.”
“Andmay I askwhat your occupation is, sir?” the short onewanted to know.
“I’m in shipping,”Zizmo said.
“Nice of you gentlemen to stop by,” Lina moved in. “But if you’ll excuse us, we’re just about
to have dinner.Wehave to go to church tonight.And, of course, Lefty has to be in bed by nine to
get rest.He likes to be fresh in themorning.”
“That’s fine. Fine.”
Together, they put on their hats and left.

And so we come to the weeks leading up to the graduation pageant. To Desdemona sewing a
palikari vest, embroidering it with red, white, and blue thread. To Lefty getting off work one
Friday evening and crossing overMiller Road to be paid from the armored truck. ToLefty again,
the night of the pageant, taking the streetcar to Cadillac Square and walking into Gold’s Clothes.
JimmyZizmomeets him there to help himpick out a suit.
“It’s almost summer.Howabout something cream-colored?With a yellow silk necktie?”
“No.TheEnglish teacher told us.Blue or gray only.”
“Theywant to turn you into a Protestant. Resist!”
“I’ll take the blue suit, please, thank you,”Lefty says in his best English.
(And here, too, the shop owner seems to owe Zizmo a favor. He gives them a 20 percent
discount.)
Meanwhile, on Hurlbut, Father Stylianopoulos, head priest of Assumption Greek Orthodox
Church, has finally come over to bless the house. Desdemona watches the priest nervously as he
drinks the glass of Metaxa she has offered him. When she and Lefty became members of his
congregation, the old priest had asked, as a formality, if they had received anOrthodoxwedding.
Desdemona had replied in the affirmative. She had grown up believing that priests could tell
whether someone was telling the truth or not, but Father Stylianopoulos had only nodded and
written their names into the church register. Now he sets down his glass. He stands and recites
the blessing, shaking holy water on the threshold. Before he’s finished, however, Desdemona’s
nose begins acting up again. She can smell what the priest had for lunch. She can detect the
aroma under his arms as he makes the sign of the cross. At the door, letting him out, she holds
her breath. “Thank you, Father. Thank you.” Stylianopoulos goes on his way. But it’s no use. As
soon as she inhales again, she can smell the fertilized flower beds and Mrs. Czeslawski boiling
cabbage next door and what she swears must be an open jar of mustard somewhere, all these
scents gonewayward on her, as she puts a hand to her stomach.
Right then the bedroom door swings open. Sourmelina steps out. Powder and rouge cover one
side of her face; the other side, bare, looks green. “Doyou smell something?” she asks.
“Yes.I smell everything.”
“OhmyGod.”
“What is it?”
“I didn’t think thiswould happen tome. To youmaybe.But not tome.”
And now we are in the Detroit Light Guard Armory, later that night, 7:00 p.m. An assembled
audience of two thousand settles down as the house lights dim. Prominent business leaders greet
each other with handshakes. Jimmy Zizmo, in a new cream-colored suit with yellow necktie,
crosses his legs, jiggling one saddle shoe. Lina and Desdemona hold hands, joined in a
mysterious union.

The curtain parts to gasps and scattered applause. A painted flat shows a steamship, two huge
smokestacks, and a swath of deck and railing. A gangway extends into the stage’s other focal
point: a giant gray cauldron emblazoned with the words FORD ENGLISH SCHOOL MELTING POT. A
European folk melody begins to play. Suddenly a lone figure appears on the gangway. Dressed
in a Balkan costume of vest, ballooning trousers, and high leather boots, the immigrant carries
his possessions bundled on a stick. He looks around with apprehension and then descends into
themelting pot.
“What propaganda,” Zizmomurmurs in his seat.
Lina shushes him.
Now SYRIA descends into the pot. Then ITALY.POLAND. NORWAY.PALESTINE. And
finally:GREECE.
“Look, it’s Lefty!”
Wearing embroidered palikari vest, puffy-sleeved poukamiso, and pleated foustanella skirt,
my grandfather bestrides the gangway. He pauses a moment to look out at the audience, but the
bright lights blind him. He can’t see my grandmother looking back, bursting with her secret.
GERMANY taps himon the back. “Macht schnell. Excuseme.Go fastly.”
In the front row, Henry Ford nods with approval, enjoying the show. Mrs. Ford tries to
whisper in his ear, but he waves her off. His blue seagull’s eyes dart from face to face as the
English instructors appear onstage next. They carry long spoons, which they insert into the pot.
The lights turn red and flicker as the instructors stir. Steam rises over the stage.
Inside the cauldron, men are packed together, throwing off immigrant costumes, putting on
suits. Limbs are tangling up, feet stepping on feet. Lefty says, “Pardon me, excuse me,” feeling
thoroughly American as he pulls on his blue wool trousers and jacket. In his mouth: thirty-two
teeth brushed in the American manner. His underarms: liberally sprinkled with American
deodorant. And now spoons are descending from above, men are churning around and around
. . .
. . . as twomen, short and tall, stand in thewings, holding a piece of paper . . .
. . . and out in the audiencemygrandmother has a stunned look on her face . . .
. . . and themelting pot boils over. Red lights brighten. The orchestra
launches into “YankeeDoodle.” One by one, the Ford English School graduates rise from the
cauldron. Dressed in blue and gray suits, they climb out, waving American flags, to thunderous
applause.

The curtain had barely come down before the men from the Sociological Department
approached.
“I pass the final exam,” my grandfather told them. “Ninety-three percent! And today I open
savings account.”
“That sounds fine,” the tall one said.
“But unfortunately, it’s too late,” said the short one. He took a slip from his pocket, a color
well known inDetroit: pink.
“We did some checking on your landlord. This so-called Jimmy Zizmo. He’s got a police
record.”
“I don’t knowanything,”mygrandfather said. “I’m sure is amistake.He is a niceman.Works
hard.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stephanides. But you can understand that Mr. Ford can’t have workers
maintaining such associations.Youdon’t need to comedown to the plant onMonday.”
As my grandfather struggled to absorb this news, the short one leaned in. “I hope you learn a
lesson from this. Mixing with the wrong crowd can sink you. You seem like a nice guy, Mr.
Stephanides.Youreally do.Wewish you the best of luck in the future.”
A few minutes later, Lefty came out to meet his wife. He was surprised when, in front of
everyone, she hugged him, refusing to let go.
“Youliked the pageant?”

“It’s not that.”
“What is it?”
Desdemona looked into her husband’s eyes. But it was Sourmelina who explained it all. “Your
wife and I?” she said in plainEnglish. “We’re both knocked up.”

MINOTAURS

Which is something I’ll never have much to do with. Like most hermaphrodites but by no
means all, I can’t have children. That’s one of the reasonswhy I’ve nevermarried. It’s one of the
reasons, aside from shame, why I decided to join the Foreign Service. I’ve never wanted to stay
in one place. After I started living as a male, my mother and I moved away from Michigan and
I’ve been moving ever since. In another year or two I’ll leave Berlin, to be posted somewhere
else. I’ll be sad to go. This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification,
for Einheit. Coming froma city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here inBerlin.
A word on my shame. I don’t condone it. I’m trying my best to get over it. The intersex
movement aims to put an end to infant genital reconfiguration surgery. The first step in that
struggle is to convince the world—and pediatric endocrinologists in particular—that
hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased. One out of every two thousand babies is born with
ambiguous genitalia. In the United States, with a population of two hundred and seventy-five
million, that comes to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand intersexuals alive today.
But we hermaphrodites are people like everybody else. And I happen not to be a political
person. I don’t like groups. Though I’m a member of the Intersex Society of North America, I
have never taken part in its demonstrations. I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s
not the bestway to live. But it’s theway I am.
The most famous hermaphrodite in history? Me? It felt good to write that, but I’ve got a long
way to go. I’m closeted at work, revealing myself only to a few friends. At cocktail receptions,
when I find myself standing next to the former ambassador (also a native of Detroit), we talk
about theTigers.Only a fewpeople here inBerlin knowmy secret. I tellmore people than I used
to, but I’m not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I’ve just met. In other cases I keep
silent forever.
That goes especially for women I’m attracted to. When I meet someone I like and who seems
to like me, I retreat. There are lots of nights out in Berlin when, emboldened by a good-value
Rioja, I forget my physical predicament and allow myself to hope. The tailored suit comes off.
The Thomas Pink shirt, too. My dates can’t fail to be impressed by my physical condition.
(Under the armor of my double-breasted suits is another of gym-built muscle.) But the final
protection, my roomy, my discreet boxer shorts, these I do not remove. Ever. Instead I leave,
making excuses. I leave and never call themagain. Just like a guy.
And soon enough I am at it again. I am trying once more, toeing the line. I saw my bicyclist
again this morning. This time I found out her name: Julie. Julie Kikuchi. Raised in northern
California, graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently in Berlin on a grant
from theKünstlerhausBethanien. Butmore important, right now:mydate for Friday night.
It’s just a first date. It won’t come to anything. No reason to mention my peculiarities, my
wandering in themaze thesemany years, shut away from sight.And from love, too.

The Simultaneous Fertilization had occurred in the early morning hours of March 24, 1923, in
separate, vertical bedrooms, after a night out at the theater. My grandfather, not knowing he was
soon to be fired, had splurged on four tickets to The Minotaur, playing at the Family. At first
Desdemona had refused to go. She disapproved of theater in general, especially vaudeville, but
in the end, unable to resist the Hellenic theme, she had put on a new pair of stockings, and a
black dress and overcoat, and made her way with the others down the sidewalk and into the
terrifyingPackard.
When the curtain rose at the Family Theater, my relatives expected to get the whole story.
How Minos, King of Crete, failed to sacrifice a white bull to Poseidon. How Poseidon, enraged,
caused Minos’s wife Pasiphaë to be smitten with love for a bull. How the child of that union,
Asterius, came out with a bull’s head attached to a human body. And then Daedalus, the maze,
etc. As soon as the footlights came on, however, the production’s nontraditional emphasis
became clear. Because now they pranced onstage: the chorus girls. Dressed in silver halters,
robed in see-through shifts, they danced, reciting strophes that didn’t scan to the eerie piping of
flutes. The Minotaur appeared, an actor wearing a papier-mâché bull’s head. Lacking any sense
of classical psychology, the actor played his half-human character as pure movie monster. He
growled; drums pounded; chorus girls screamed and fled. The Minotaur pursued, and of course
he caught them, each one, and devoured her bloodily, and dragged her pale, defenseless body
deeper into themaze.And the curtain camedown.
In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. “It’s like the paintings in the
museum,” she said. “Just an excuse to showpeoplewith no clothes.”
She insisted on leaving before Act II. At home, getting ready for bed, the four theatergoers
went about their nightly routines. Desdemona washed out her stockings, lit the vigil lamp in the
hallway. Zizmo drank a glass of the papaya juice he touted as beneficial for the digestion. Lefty
neatly hung up his suit, pinching each trouser crease, while Sourmelina removed her makeup
with cold cream and went to bed. The four of them, moving in their individual orbits, pretended
that the play had had no effect on them. But now Jimmy Zizmo was turning off his bedroom
light. Now he was climbing into his single bed—to find it occupied! Sourmelina, dreaming of
chorus girls, had sleepwalked across the throw rug. Murmuring strophes, she climbed on top of
her stand-in husband. (“You see?” Zizmo said in the dark. “No more bile. It’s the castor oil.”)
Upstairs, Desdemona might have heard something through the floor if she hadn’t been
pretending to be asleep. Against her will, the play had aroused her, too. The Minotaur’s savage,
muscular thighs. The suggestive sprawl of his victims. Ashamed of her excitement, she gave no
outward sign. She switched off the lamp. She told her husband good night. She yawned (also
theatrical) and turned her back.While Lefty stole up frombehind.
Freeze the action. A momentous night, this, for all involved (including me). I want to record
the positions (Lefty dorsal, Lina couchant) and the circumstances (night’s amnesty) and the
direct cause (a play about a hybridmonster). Parents are supposed to pass downphysical traits to
their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs,
scenarios, even fates. Wouldn’t I also sneak up on a girl pretending to be asleep? And wouldn’t
there also be a play involved, and somebody dying onstage?
Leaving these genealogical questions aside, I return to the biological facts. Like college girls
sharing a dorm room, Desdemona and Lina were both synchronized in their menstrual cycles.
That night was day fourteen. No thermometer verified this, but a few weeks later the symptoms
of nausea and hypersensitive noses did. “Whoever named it morning sickness was a man,” Lina
declared. “He was just home in the morning to notice.” The nausea kept no schedule; it owned
no watch. They were sick in the afternoon, in the middle of the night. Pregnancy was a boat in a
storm and they couldn’t get off. And so they lashed themselves to the masts of their beds and
rode out the squall. Everything they came in contact with, the bedsheets, the pillows, the air

itself, began to turn on them. Their husbands’ breath became intolerable, and when they weren’t
too sick tomove, theywerewaving their arms, gesturing to themen to keep away.
Pregnancy humbled the husbands. After an initial rush of male pride, they quickly recognized
the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction, and quietly withdrew
into a baffled reserve, catalysts to an explosion they couldn’t explain. While their wives grandly
suffered in the bedrooms, Zizmo and Lefty retreated to the sala to listen to music, or drove to a
coffee house in Greektown where no one would be offended by their smell. They played
backgammon and talked politics, and no one spoke about women because in the coffee house
everyonewas a bachelor, nomatter howold hewas or howmany children he’d given awifewho
preferred their company to his. The talk was always the same, of the Turks and their brutality, of
Venizelos and his mistakes, of King Constantine and his return, and of the unavenged crime of
Smyrna burned.
“Anddoes anybody care?No!”
“It’s likewhatBérenger said toClemenceau: ‘Hewhoowns the oil owns theworld.’ ”
“Those damnTurks!Murderers and rapists!”
“They desecrated theHagia Sophia and now they destroyedSmyrna!”
But hereZizmo spoke up: “Stop bellyaching. Thewarwas theGreeks’ fault.”
“What!”
“Who invadedwho?” askedZizmo.
“TheTurks invaded. In 1453.”
“TheGreeks can’t even run their own country.Whydo they need another?”
At this point, men stood up, chairs were knocked over. “Who the hell are you, Zizmo?
GoddamnedPontian! Turk-sympathizer!”
“I sympathize with the truth,” shouted Zizmo. “There’s no evidence the Turks started that fire.
TheGreeks did it to blame it on theTurks.”
Lefty stepped between the men, preventing a fight. After that, Zizmo kept his political
opinions to himself. He sat morosely drinking coffee, reading an odd assortment ofmagazines or
pamphlets speculating on space travel and ancient civilizations. He chewed his lemon peels and
told Lefty to do so, too. Together, they settled into the random camaraderie of men on the
outskirts of a birth. Like all expectant fathers, their thoughts turned tomoney.

My grandfather had never told Jimmy the reason for his dismissal from Ford, but Zizmo had a
good idea why it might have happened. And so, a few weeks later, he made what restitution he
could.
“Just act likewe’re going for a drive.”
“Okay.”
“Ifwe get stopped, don’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
“This is a better job than the Rouge. Believe me. Five dollars a day is nothing. And here you
can eat all the garlic youwant.”
They are in the Packard, passing the amusement grounds of Electric Park. It’s foggy out, and
late—just past 3 a.m. To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but,
formyownpurposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that
my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A
moment of cheap
symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they
can’t see a thing. Spring fog foams over the ramparts of the newly opened Belle Isle Bridge. The
yellowglobes of streetlamps glow, aureoled in themist.
“Lot of traffic for this late,” Leftymarvels.
“Yes,”saysZizmo. “It’s very popular at night.”
The bridge lifts them gently above the river and sets them back down on the other side. Belle
Isle, a paramecium-shaped island in the Detroit River, lies less than half a mile from the

Canadian shore. By day, the park is full of picnickers and strollers. Fishermen line its muddy
banks. Church groups hold tent meetings. Come dark, however, the island takes on an offshore
atmosphere of relaxed morals. Lovers park in secluded lookouts. Cars roll over the bridge on
shadowy missions. Zizmo drives through the gloom, past the octagonal gazebos and the
monument of the Civil War Hero, and into the woods where the Ottawa once held their summer
camp. Fogwipes thewindshield. Birch trees shed parchment beneath an ink-black sky.
Missing frommost cars in the 1920s: rearviewmirrors. “Steer,” Zizmokeeps saying, and turns
around to see if they’re being followed. In this fashion, trading the wheel, they weave along
Central Avenue and The Strand, circling the island three times, until Zizmo is satisfied. At the
northeastern end, he pulls the car over, facingCanada.
“Why arewe stopping?”
“Wait and see.”
Zizmo turns the headlights on and off three times. He gets out of the car. So does Lefty. They
stand in the darkness amid river sounds, waves lapping, freighters blowing foghorns. Then
there’s another sound: a distant hum. “You have an office?” my grandfather asks. “A
warehouse?” “This is my office.” Zizmo waves his hands through the air. He points to the
Packard. “And that’s my warehouse.” The hum is getting louder now; Lefty squints through the
fog. “I used to work for the railroad.” Zizmo takes a dried apricot out of his pocket and eats it.
“Out West in Utah. Broke my back. Then I got smart.” But the hum has almost reached them;
Zizmo is opening the trunk. And now, in the fog, an outboard appears, a sleek craft with two
men aboard. They cut the engine as the boat glides into the reeds. Zizmo hands an envelope to
oneman. The otherwhisks the tarp off the
boat’s stern. Inmoonlight, neatly stacked, twelvewooden crates gleam.
“Now I run a railroad ofmyown,” saysZizmo. “Start unloading.”
The precise nature of Jimmy Zizmo’s importing business was thus revealed. He didn’t deal in
dried apricots from Syria, halvah from Turkey, and honey from Lebanon. He imported Hiram
Walker’s whiskey from Ontario, beer from Quebec, and rum from Barbados by way of the St.
Lawrence River. A teetotaler himself, he made his living buying and selling liquor. “If these
Amerikani are all drunks,what can I do?” he justified, driving awayminutes later.
“You should have told me!” Lefty shouted, enraged. “If we get caught, I won’t get my
citizenship. They’ll sendmeback toGreece.”
“What choice do you have? You have a better job? And don’t forget. You and I, we have
babies on theway.”
So beganmygrandfather’s life of crime. For the next eightmonths heworked inZizmo’s rum-
running operation, observing its odd hours, getting up in the middle of the night and having
dinner at dawn. He adopted the slang of the illegal trade, increasing his English vocabulary
fourfold. He learned to call liquor “hooch,” “bingo,” “squirrel dew,” and “monkey swill.” He
referred to drinking establishments as “boozeries,” “doggeries,” “rumholes,” and “schooners.”
He learned the locations of blind pigs all over the city, the funeral parlors that filled bodies not
with embalming fluid but with gin, the churches that offered something more than sacramental
wine, and the barbershops whose Barbicide jars contained “blue ruin.” Lefty grew familiar with
the shoreline of theDetroit River, its screened inlets and secret landings.He could identify police
outboards at a distance of a quarter mile. Rum-running was a tricky business. The major
bootlegging was controlled by the Purple Gang and the Mafia. In their beneficence they allowed
a certain amount of amateur smuggling to go on—the day trips to Canada, the fishing boats out
for a midnight cruise. Women took the ferry to Windsor with gallon flasks under their dresses.
As long as such smuggling didn’t cut into the main business, the gangs allowed it. But Zizmo
was far exceeding the limit.
They went out five to six times a week. The Packard’s trunk could fit four cases of liquor, its
commodious, curtained backseat eight more. Zizmo respected neither rules nor territories. “As
soon as they
voted in Prohibition, I went to the library and looked at a map,” he said, explaining how he’d

gotten into the business. “There they were, Canada and Michigan, almost kissing. So I bought a
ticket to Detroit. When I got here, I was broke. I went to see a marriage broker in Greektown.
The reason I let Lina drive this car? She paid for it.” He smiled with satisfaction, but then
followed his thoughts a little further and his face darkened. “I don’t approve of women driving,
mind you. And now they get to vote!” He grumbled to himself. “Remember that play we saw?
Allwomen are like that.Given the chance, they’d all fornicatewith a bull.”
“Those are just stories, Jimmy,” saidLefty. “Youcan’t take them literally.”
“Why not?” Zizmo continued. “Women aren’t like us. They have carnal natures. The best
thing to dowith them is to shut themup in amaze.”
“What are you talking about?”
Zizmo smiled. “Pregnancy.”
It was like a maze. Desdemona kept turning this way and that, left side, right side, trying to
find a comfortable position. Without leaving her bed, she wandered the dark corridors of
pregnancy, stumbling over the bones ofwomenwho had passed thisway before her. For starters,
her mother, Euphrosyne (whom she was suddenly beginning to resemble), her grandmothers, her
great-aunts, and all the women before them stretching back into prehistory right back to Eve, on
whose womb the curse had been laid. Desdemona came into a physical knowledge of these
women, shared their pains and sighs, their fear and protectiveness, their outrage, their
expectation. Like them she put a hand to her belly, supporting theworld; she felt omnipotent and
proud; and then amuscle in her back spasmed.
I give you now the entire pregnancy in time lapse. Desdemona, at eight weeks, lies on her
back, bedcovers drawnup to her armpits. The light at thewindow flickerswith the change of day
and night. Her body jerks; she’s on her side, her belly; the covers change shape. A wool blanket
appears and disappears. Food trays fly to the bedside table, then jump away before returning. But
throughout the mad dance of inanimate objects the continuity of Desdemona’s shifting body
remains at center. Her breasts inflate. Her nipples darken. At fourteen weeks her face begins to
growplump, so that for the first
time I can recognize the yia yia of my childhood. At twenty weeks a mysterious line starts
drawing itself down from her navel. Her belly rises like Jiffy Pop. At thirty weeks her skin thins,
and her hair gets thicker. Her complexion, palewith nausea at first, grows less so until there it is:
a glow.The bigger she gets, themore stationary. She stops lying on her stomach.Motionless, she
swells toward the camera. Thewindow’s strobe effect continues.At thirty-sixweeks she cocoons
herself in bedsheets. The sheets go up and down, revealing her face, exhausted, euphoric,
resigned, impatient.Her eyes open. She cries out.
Lina wrapped her legs in putties to prevent varicose veins. Worried that her breath was bad,
she kept a tin of mints beside her bed. She weighed herself each morning, biting her lower lip.
She enjoyed her newbuxom figure but fretted about the consequences. “Mybreastswill never be
the same. I know it. After this, just flaps. Like in the National Geographic.” Pregnancy made
her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized. Her face felt
on fire during hormone surges. She perspired; hermakeup ran. The entire processwas a holdover
from more primitive stages of development. It linked her with the lower forms of life. She
thought of queen bees spewing eggs. She thought of the collie next door, digging its hole in the
backyard last spring.
The only escape was radio. She wore her earphones in bed, on the couch, in the bathtub.
During the summer she carried her Aeriola Jr. outside and sat under the cherry tree. Filling her
headwithmusic, she escaped her body.
On a third-trimester October morning, a cab pulled up outside 3467 Hurlbut Street and a tall,
slender figure climbed out. He checked the address against a piece of paper, collected his
things—umbrella and suitcase—and paid the driver. He took off his hat and stared into it as
though reading instructions along the lining. Then he put the hat back on and walked up onto the
porch.
Desdemona andLina both heard the knocking. Theymet at the front door.

When they opened it, theman looked frombelly to belly.
“I’m just in time,” he said.
It was Dr. Philobosian. Clear-eyed, clean-shaven, recovered from his grief. “I saved your
address.” They invited him in and he told his
story. He had indeed contracted the eye disease favus on the Giulia. But his medical license
had saved him from being sent back to Greece; America needed physicians. Dr. Philobosian had
stayed a month in the hospital at Ellis Island, after which, with sponsorship from the Armenian
Relief Agency, he had been admitted into the country. For the last eleven months he’d been
living inNew York,on the Lower East Side. “Grinding lenses for an optometrist.” Recently he’d
managed to retrieve some assets from Turkey and had come to the Midwest. “I’m going to open
a practice here.NewYorkhas toomanydoctors already.”
He stayed for dinner. The women’s delicate conditions didn’t excuse them from domestic
duties. On swollen legs they carried out dishes of lamb and rice, okra in tomato sauce, Greek
salad, rice pudding. Afterward, Desdemona brewed Greek coffee, serving it in demitasse cups
with the brown foam, the lakia, on top. Dr. Philobosian remarked to the seated husbands,
“Hundred-to-one odds.Are you sure it happened on the samenight?”
“Yes,”Sourmelina replied, smoking at the table. “Theremust have been a fullmoon.”
“It usually takes a woman five or six months to get pregnant,” the doctor went on. “To have
you twodo it on the samenight—a-hundred-to-one odds!”
“Hundred-to-one?”Zizmo looked across the table at Sourmelina,who looked away.
“Hundred-to-one at least,” assured the doctor.
“It’s all theMinotaur’s fault,” Lefty joked.
“Don’t talk about that play,”Desdemona scolded.
“Why are you looking atme like that?” askedLina.
“I can’t look at you?” asked her husband.
Sourmelina let out an exasperated sigh and wiped her mouth with her napkin. There was a
strained silence.Dr. Philobosian, pouring himself another glass ofwine, rushed in.
“Birth is a fascinating subject. Take deformities, for instance. People used to think they were
caused by maternal imagination. During the conjugal act, whatever the mother happened to look
at or think about would affect the child. There’s a story in Damascene about a woman who had a
picture of John the Baptist over her bed. Wearing the traditional hair shirt. In the throes of
passion, the poorwoman
happened to glance up at this portrait. Ninemonths later, her babywas born—furry as a bear!”
The doctor laughed, enjoying himself, sippingmorewine.
“That can’t happen, can it?”Desdemona, suddenly alarmed,wanted to know.
But Dr. Philobosian was on a roll. “There’s another story about a woman who touched a toad
whilemaking love.Her baby cameoutwith pop eyes and coveredwithwarts.”
“This is in a book you read?”Desdemona’s voicewas tight.
“Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels has most of this. The Church got into it, too. In his
Embryological Sacra, Cangiamilla recommended intra-uterine baptisms. Suppose you were
worried that youmight be carrying amonstrous baby.Well, therewas a cure for that.Yousimply
filled a syringewith holywater and baptized the infant before itwas born.”
“Don’t worry, Desdemona,” Lefty said, seeing how anxious she looked. “Doctors don’t think
that anymore.”
“Of course not,” said Dr. Philobosian. “All this nonsense comes from the Dark Ages. We
knownow thatmost birth deformities result from the consanguinity of the parents.”
“From thewhat?” askedDesdemona.
“From families intermarrying.”
Desdemonawentwhite.
“Causes all kinds of problems. Imbecility. Hemophilia. Look at the Romanovs. Look at any
royal family.Mutants, all of them.”

“I don’t remember what I was thinking that night,” Desdemona said later while washing the
dishes.
“I do,” saidLina. “Third one from the right.With the red hair.”
“I hadmyeyes closed.”
“Then don’tworry.”
Desdemona turned on the water to cover their voices. “And what about the other thing? The
con . . . the con . . .”
“The consanguinity?”
“Yes.Howdoyouknow if the baby has that?”
“Youdon’t knowuntil it’s born.”
“Mana!”
“Why do you think the Church doesn’t let brothers and sisters get married? Even first cousins
have to get permission fromabishop.”
“I thought itwas because . . .” and she trailed off, having no answer.
“Don’t worry,” Lina said. “These doctors exaggerate. If families marrying each other was so
bad,we’d all have six arms and no legs.”
But Desdemona did worry. She thought back to Bithynios, trying to remember how many
children had been born with something wrong with them. Melia Salakas had a daughter with a
piece missing from the middle of her face. Her brother, Yiorgos, had been eight years old his
whole life. Were there any babies with hair shirts? Any frog babies? Desdemona recalled her
mother telling stories about strange infants born in the village. They came every fewgenerations,
babies who were sick in some way, Desdemona couldn’t remember how exactly—her mother
had been vague. Every so often these babies appeared, and they always met with tragic ends:
they killed themselves, they ran off and became circus performers, they were seen years later in
Bursa, begging or prostituting themselves. Lying alone in bed at night, with Lefty out working,
Desdemona tried to recall the details of these stories, but it was too long ago and now
Euphrosyne Stephanides was dead and there was no one to ask. She thought back to the night
she’d gotten pregnant and tried to reconstruct events. She turned on her side. She made a pillow
stand in for Lefty, pressing it against her back. She looked around the room. There were no
pictures on the walls. She hadn’t been touching any toads. “What did I see?” she asked herself.
“Only thewall.”
But she wasn’t the only one tormented by anxieties. Recklessly now, and with an official
disclaimer as to the veracity of what I’m about to tell you—because, of all the actors in my
midwestern Epidaurus, the one wearing the biggest mask is Jimmy Zizmo—I’ll try to give you a
glimpse into his emotions that last trimester. Was he excited about becoming a father? Did he
bring home nutritive roots and brew homeopathic teas? No, he wasn’t, he didn’t. After Dr.
Philobosian came to dinner that night, Jimmy Zizmo began to change. Maybe it was what the
doctor had said regarding the synchronous pregnancies. A-hundred-to-one odds. Maybe it was
this stray bit of information that was responsible for Zizmo’s increasing moodiness, his
suspicious glances at his pregnant wife. Maybe he was doubting the likelihood that a single act
of intercourse in a five-month dry spell would result in a successful pregnancy. Was Zizmo
examining his youngwife and feeling old?Tricked?
In the late autumn of 1923, minotaurs haunted my family. To Desdemona they came in the
form of children who couldn’t stop bleeding, or who were covered with fur. Zizmo’s monster
was the well-known one with green eyes. It stared out of the river’s darkness while he waited
onshore for a shipment of liquor. It leapt up from the roadside to confront him through the
Packard’s windshield. It rolled over in bed when he got home before sunrise: a green-eyed
monster lying next to his young, inscrutable wife, but then Zizmo would blink and the monster
would disappear.

When the women were eight months pregnant, the first snow fell. Lefty and Zizmo wore gloves
and mufflers as they waited on the shore of Belle Isle. Nevertheless, despite his insulation, my

grandfather was shivering. Twice in the last month they’d had close calls with the police. Sick
with jealous suspicions, Zizmo had been erratic, forgetting to schedule rendezvous, choosing
drop-off points with insufficient preparation. Worse, the Purple Gang was consolidating its hold
on the city’s rum-running. Itwas only amatter of time before they ran afoul of it.
Meanwhile, back on Hurlbut, a spoon was swinging. Sourmelina, legs bandaged, lay back in
her boudoir as Desdemona performed the first of the many prognostications that would end with
me.
“Tellme it’s a girl.”
“Youdon’t want a girl. Girls are too much trouble. Youhave to worry about them going with
the boys.Youhave to get a dowry and find a husband—”
“They don’t have dowries inAmerica,Desdemona.”
The spoon began tomove.
“If it’s a boy, I’ll kill you.”
“Adaughter you’ll fightwith.”
“Adaughter I can talk to.”
“A son youwill love.”
The spoon’s arc increased.
“It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“What?”
“Start savingmoney.”
“Yes?”
“Lock thewindows.”
“Is it? Is it really?”
“Get ready to fight.”
“Youmean it’s a . . .”
“Yes.Agirl.Definitely.”
“Oh, thankGod.”
. . . And a walk-in closet being cleaned out. And the walls being painted white to serve as a
nursery. Two identical cribs arrive from Hudson’s. My grandmother sets them up in the nursery,
then hangs a blanket between them in case her child is a boy.Out in the hall, she stops before the
vigil light to pray to the All-Holy: “Please don’t let my baby be this thing a hemophiliac. Lefty
and I didn’t know what we were doing. Please, I swear I will never have another baby. Just this
one.”

Thirty-three weeks. Thirty-four. In uterine swimming pools, babies perform half-gainers,
flipping over headfirst. But Sourmelina and Desdemona, so synchronized in their pregnancies,
diverged at the end. On December 17, while listening to a radio play, Sourmelina removed her
earphones and announced that shewas having pains. Three hours later, Dr. Philobosian delivered
a girl, as Desdemona predicted. The baby weighed only four pounds three ounces and had to be
kept in an incubator for a week. “See?” Lina said to Desdemona, gazing at the baby through the
glass. “Dr. Philwaswrong. Look.Her hair’s black.Not red.”
Jimmy Zizmo approached the incubator next. He removed his hat and bent very close to
squint. And did he wince? Did the baby’s pale complexion confirm his doubts? Or provide
answers? As to why a wife might complain of aches and pains? Or why she might be
conveniently cured, in order to prove his paternity? (Whatever his doubts, the child was his.
Sourmelina’s complexion hadmerely stolen the show.Genetics, a crapshoot, entirely.)
All I know is this: shortly after Zizmo saw his daughter, he came up with his final scheme. A
week later, he toldLefty, “Get ready.Wehave business tonight.”

And now themansions along the lake are lit withChristmas lights. The great snow-covered lawn
of Rose Terrace, the Dodge mansion, boasts a forty-foot Christmas tree trucked in from the
Upper Peninsula.

Elves race around the pine in miniature Dodge sedans. Santa is chauffeured by a reindeer in a
cap. (Rudolph hasn’t been created yet, so the reindeer’s nose is black.) Outside the mansion’s
gates, a black-and-tan Packard passes by. The driver looks straight ahead. The passenger gazes
out at the enormous house.
Jimmy Zizmo is driving slowly because of the chains on the tires. They’ve come out along E.
Jefferson, past Electric Park and the Belle Isle Bridge. They’ve continued through Detroit’s East
Side, following Jefferson Avenue. (And now we’re here, my neck of the woods: Grosse Pointe.
Here’s the Starks’ house, where Clementine Stark and I will “practice” kissing the summer
before third grade. And there’s the Baker & Inglis School for Girls, high on its hill over the
lake.) My grandfather is well aware that Zizmo hasn’t come to Grosse Pointe to admire the big
houses. Anxiously, he waits to see what Zizmo has in mind. Not far from Rose Terrace, the
lakefront opens up, black, empty, and frozen solid. Near the bank the ice piles up in chunks.
Zizmo follows the shoreline until he comes to a gap in the road where boats launch in summer.
He turns in to it and stops.
“We’re going over the ice?”mygrandfather says.
“Easiestway toCanada at themoment.”
“Are you sure itwill hold?”
In response to my grandfather’s question, Zizmo only opens his door: to facilitate escape.
Lefty follows suit. The Packard’s front wheels drop onto ice. It feels as if the entire frozen lake
shifts. A high-pitched noise follows, as when teeth bear down on ice cubes. After a few seconds,
this stops. The rearwheels drop. The ice settles.
My grandfather, who hasn’t prayed since he was in Bursa, has the impulse to give it another
go. Lake St. Clair is controlled by the Purple Gang. It provides no trees to hide behind, no side
roads to sneak down.He bites his thumbwhere the nail ismissing.
Without a moon, they see only what the insectile headlamps illuminate: fifteen feet of
granular, ice-blue surface, crisscrossed by tire tracks. Vorticesof snow whirl up in front of them.
Zizmowipes the foggedwindshieldwith his shirt sleeve. “Keep a lookout for dark ice.”
“Why?”
“Thatmeans it’s thin.”
It’s not long before the first patch appears. Where shoals rise, lapping water weakens the ice.
Zizmo steers around it. Soon, however, another patch appears and he has to go in the other
direction.Right.
Left. Right. The Packard snakes along, following the tire tracks of other rumrunners.
Occasionally an ice house blocks their path and they have to back up, return the way they came.
Now to the right, now the left, nowbackward, now forward,moving into the darkness over ice as
smooth as marble. Zizmo leans over the wheel, squinting toward where the beams die out. My
grandfather holds his door open, listening for the sound of the ice groaning . . .
. . . But now, over the engine noise, another noise starts up. Across town on this very same
night, my grandmother is having a nightmare. She’s in a lifeboat aboard the Giulia. Captain
Kontoulis kneels between her legs, removing her wedding corset. He unlaces it, pulls it open,
while puffing on a clove cigarette. Desdemona, filled with embarrassment at her sudden
nakedness, looks down at the object of the captain’s fascination: a heavy ship’s rope disappears
inside her. “Heave ho!” Captain Kontoulis shouts, and Lefty appears, looking concerned. He
takes the end of the rope and begins pulling.And then:
Pain. Dream pain, real but not real, just the neurons firing. Deep inside Desdemona, a water
balloon explodes. Warmth gushes against her thighs as blood fills the lifeboat. Lefty gives a tug
on the rope, then another. Blood spatters the captain’s face, but he lowers his brim and weathers
it. Desdemona cries out, the lifeboat rocks, and then there’s a popping sound and she feels a sick
sensation, as if she’s being torn in two, and there, on the end of the rope, is her child, a little knot
of muscle, bruise-colored, and she looks to find the arms and cannot, and she looks to find the
legs and cannot, and then the tiny head lifts and she looks into her baby’s face, a single crescent
of teeth opening and closing, no eyes, nomouth, only teeth, flapping open and shut . . .

Desdemona bolts awake. It’s a moment before she realizes that her actual, real-life bed is
soaked through.Herwater has broken . . .
. . . while out on the ice the Packard’s headlamps brighten with each acceleration, as more
juice flows from the battery. They’re in the shipping lane now, equidistant fromboth shores. The
sky a great black bowl above them, pierced with celestial fires. They can’t remember the way
they came now, how many turns they took, where the bad ice is. The frozen terrain is scrawled
with tire tracks leading in every possible direction. They pass the carcasses of old jalopies, front
ends fallen through the ice, doors riddledwith bullet holes. There are
axles lying about, and hubcaps, and a few spare tires. In the darkness and whirling snow, my
grandfather’s eyes play tricks on him. Twice he thinks he sees a phalanx of cars approaching.
The cars toy with them, appearing now in front, now to the side, now behind, coming and going
so quickly he can’t be sure if he saw them at all. And there is another smell in the Packard now,
above leather andwhiskey, a stringent,metallic smell overpoweringmygrandfather’s deodorant:
fear. It’s right then that Zizmo, in a calmvoice, says, “Something I alwayswondered about.Why
don’t you ever tell anyone that Lina is your cousin?”
The question, coming out of the blue, takes my grandfather off guard. “We don’t keep it a
secret.”
“No?” saysZizmo. “I’ve never heard youmention it.”
“Where we come from, everybody is a cousin,” Lefty tries to joke. Then: “How much farther
dowehave to go?”
“Other side of the shipping lane.We’re still on theAmerican side.”
“Howare you going to find themout here?”
“We’ll find them. Youwant me to speed up?” Without waiting for a reply, Zizmo steps on the
accelerator.
“That’s okay.Go slow.”
“Something else I alwayswanted to know,”Zizmo says, accelerating.
“Jimmy, be safe.”
“WhydidLina have to leave the village to getmarried?”
“You’regoing too fast. I don’t have time to check the ice.”
“Answerme.”
“Whydid she leave?Therewas no one tomarry. Shewanted to come toAmerica.”
“Is thatwhat shewanted?”He accelerates again.
“Jimmy. Slowdown!”
ButZizmopushes the pedal to the floor.And shouts, “Is it you!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is it you!” Zizmo roars again, and now the engine is whining, the ice is whizzing by
underneath the car. “Who is it!” he demands to know. “Tellme!Who is it?” . . .
. . . But before my grandfather can come up with an answer, another memory comes careening
across the ice. It is a Sunday night duringmy childhood andmy father is takingme to themovies
at the
Detroit YachtClub. We ascend the red-carpeted stairs, passing silver sailing trophies and the
oil portrait of the hydroplane racer Gar Wood. On the second floor, we enter the auditorium.
Wooden folding chairs are set up before a movie screen. And now the lights have been switched
off and the clanking projector shoots out a beamof light, showing amillion dustmotes in the air.
The onlywaymy father could think of to instill inme a sense ofmyheritagewas to takeme to
dubbed Italian versions of the ancient Greek myths. And so, every week, we saw Hercules
slaying the Nemean lion, or stealing the girdle of the Amazons (“That’s some girdle, eh,
Callie?”), or being thrown gratuitously into snake pits without textual support. But our favorite
was theMinotaur . . .
. . . On the screen an actor in a bad wig appears. “That’s Theseus,” Milton explains. “He’s got
this ball of string his girlfriend gave him, see. And he’s using it to find his way back out of the
maze.”

Now Theseus enters the Labyrinth. His torch lights up stone walls made of cardboard. Bones
and skulls litter his path. Bloodstains darken the fake rock. Without taking my eyes from the
screen, I hold out my hand. My father reaches into the pocket of his blazer to find a butterscotch
candy.As he gives it tome, hewhispers, “Here comes theMinotaur!”And I shiverwith fear and
delight.
Academic tome then, the sad fate of the creature. Asterius, through no fault of his own, born a
monster. The poisoned fruit of betrayal, a thing of shame hidden away; I don’t understand any of
that at eight. I’m just rooting forTheseus . . .
. . . as my grandmother, in 1923, prepares to meet the creature hidden in her womb. Holding
her belly, she sits in the backseat of the taxi, while Lina, up front, tells the driver to hurry.
Desdemona breathes in and out, like a runner pacing herself, and Lina says, “I’m not even mad
at you for waking me up. I was going to the hospital in the morning anyway. They’re letting me
take the baby home.” But Desdemona isn’t listening. She opens her prepacked suitcase, feeling
among nightgown and slippers for her worry beads. Amber like congealed honey, cracked by
heat, they’ve gotten her through massacres, a refugee march, and a burning city, and she clicks
themas the taxi rattles over the dark streets, trying to outrace her contractions . . .
. . . as Zizmo races the Packard over the ice. The speedometer needle rises. The engine
thunders. Tire chains rooster-tail snow.The
Packard hurtles into the darkness, skidding on patches, fishtailing. “Did you two have it all
planned?” he shouts. “HaveLinamarry anAmerican citizen so she could sponsor you?”
“What are you talking about?” my grandfather tries to reason. “When you and Lina got
married, I didn’t even know Iwas coming toAmerica. Please slowdown.”
“Was that the plan? Find a husband and thenmove into his house!”
The never-failing conceit of Minotaur movies. The monster always approaches from the
direction you least expect. Likewise, out on Lake St. Clair, my grandfather has been looking out
for the Purple Gang, when in reality the monster is right next to him, at the wheel of the car. In
the wind from the open door, Zizmo’s frizzy hair streams back like a mane. His head is lowered,
his nostrils flared.His eyes shinewith fury.
“Who is it!”
“Jimmy!Turn around!The ice!You’renot looking at the ice.”
“Iwon’t stop unless you tellme.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Lina’s a good girl. Agoodwife to you. I swear!”
But the Packard hurtles on.Mygrandfather flattens himself against his seat.
“What about the baby, Jimmy?Think about your daughter.”
“Who says it’smine?”
“Of course it’s yours.”
“I never should havemarried that girl.”
Lefty doesn’t have time to argue the point.Without answering anymore questions, he rolls out
the open door, free of the car. The wind hits him like a solid force, knocking him back against
the rear fender. He watches as his muffler, in slow motion, winds itself around the Packard’s
back wheel. He feels it tighten like a noose, but then the scarf comes loose from his neck, and
time speeds up again as Lefty is thrown clear of the auto. He covers his face as he hits the ice,
skidding a great distance. When he looks up again, he sees the Packard, still going. It’s
impossible to tell if Zizmo is trying to turn, to brake. Lefty stands up, nothing broken, and
watches asZizmohurtles crazily on into the darkness . . . sixty yards . . . eighty . . . a hundred . . .
until suddenly another sound is heard.Above the engine
roar comes a loud crack, followed by a scintillation spreading underfoot, as the Packard hits a
dark patch on the frozen lake.
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the
Packard’swheel, has already changed past understanding. Right here iswhere the trail goes cold.
I can take you this far and no further.Maybe itwas a jealous rage.Ormaybe hewas just figuring
his options. Weighing a dowry against the expense of raising a family. Guessing that it couldn’t

goon forever, this boom time of Prohibition.
And there’s one further possibility: hemight have been faking thewhole thing.
But there’s no time for these ruminations. Because the ice is screaming. Zizmo’s front wheels
crash through the surface. The Packard, as gracefully as an elephant standing on its front legs,
flips up onto its grille. There’s a moment where the headlamps illuminate the ice and water
below, like a swimming pool, but then the hood crashes through and, with a shower of sparks,
everything goes dark.

At Women’s Hospital, Desdemona was in labor for six hours. Dr. Philobosian delivered the
baby, whose sex was revealed in the usual manner: by spreading the legs apart and looking.
“Congratulations.A son.”
Desdemona,with great relief, cried out, “The only hair is on his head.”
Lefty arrived at the hospital soon thereafter.He hadwalked back to shore and hitched a ride on
a milk truck home. Now he stood at the window of the nursery, his armpits still rank with fear,
his right cheek roughened by his fall on the ice and his lower lip swollen. Just that morning,
fortuitously, Lina’s baby had gained enough weight to leave the incubator. The nurses held up
both children. The boy was named Miltiades after the great Athenian general, but would be
known asMilton, after the great English poet. The girl, whowould growupwithout a father,was
named Theodora, after the scandalous empress of Byzantium whom Sourmelina admired. She
would later get anAmerican nickname, too.
But there was something else I wanted to mention about those babies. Something impossible
to seewith the naked eye. Look closer. There. That’s right:
Onemutation apiece.

MARRIAGEONICE

JimmyZizmo’s funeralwas held thirteen days later by permission of the bishop inChicago. For
nearly two weeks the family stayed at home, polluted by death, greeting the occasional visitor
who came to pay respects. Black cloths covered the mirrors. Black streamers draped the doors.
Because a person should never show vanity in the presence of death, Lefty stopped shaving and
by the day of the funeral had grownnearly a full beard.
The failure of the police to recover the body had caused the delay. On the day after the
accident, two detectives had gone out to inspect the scene. The ice had refrozen during the night
and a few inches of new snow had fallen. The detectives trudged back and forth, searching for
tire tracks, but after a half hour gave up. They accepted Lefty’s story that Zizmo had gone ice-
fishing and might have been drinking. One detective assured Lefty that bodies often turned up in
the spring, remarkably preserved because of the freezingwater.
The family went ahead with their grief. Father Stylianopoulos brought the case to the attention
of the bishop,who granted the request to giveZizmo anOrthodox funeral, provided an interment
ceremony be held at the graveside if the body were later found. Lefty took care of the funeral
arrangements. He picked out a casket, chose a plot, ordered a headstone, and paid for the death
notices in the newspaper. In those days Greek immigrants were beginning to use funeral parlors,
but Sourmelina insisted that the viewing be held at
home. For over a week mourners arrived into the darkened sala, where the window shades
had been drawn and the scent of flowers hung heavy in the air. Zizmo’s shadowy business
associates made visits, as well as people from the speakeasies he supplied and a few of Lina’s
friends. After giving the widow their condolences, they crossed the living room to stand before
the open coffin. Inside, resting on a pillow, was a framed photograph of Jimmy Zizmo. The
picture showed Zizmo in three-quarters profile, gazing up toward the celestial glow of studio
lighting. Sourmelina had cut the ribbon between their wedding crowns and placed her husband’s
inside the coffin, too.
Sourmelina’s anguish at her husband’s death far exceeded her affection for him in life. For ten
hours over two days she keened over Jimmy Zizmo’s empty coffin, reciting the mirologhia. In
the best histrionic village style, Sourmelina unleashed soaring arias in which she lamented the
death of her husband and castigated him for dying.When shewas finishedwith Zizmo she railed
at God for taking him so soon, and bemoaned the fate of her newborn daughter. “You are to
blame! It is all your fault!” she cried. “What reason was there for you to die? Youhave left me a
widow! Youhave left your child on the streets!” She nursed the baby as she keened and every so
often held her up so that Zizmo and God could see what they had done. The older immigrants,
hearing Lina’s rage, found themselves returning to their childhood in Greece, to memories of
their own grandparents’ or parents’ funerals, and everyone agreed that such a display of grief
would guarantee JimmyZizmo’s soul eternal peace.
In accordance with Church law, the funeral was held on a weekday. Father Stylianopoulos,
wearing a tall kalimafkion on his head and a large pectoral cross, came to the house at ten in the

morning. After a prayer was said, Sourmelina brought the priest a candle burning on a plate. She
blew it out, the smoke rose and dispersed, and Father Stylianopoulos broke the candle in two.
After that, everyone filed outside to begin the procession to the church. Lefty had rented a
limousine for the day, and opened the door for his wife and cousin. When he got in himself, he
gave a smallwave to themanwhohad been chosen to stay behind, blocking the doorway to keep
Zizmo’s spirit from reentering the house. This man was Peter Tatakis, the future chiropractor.
Following tradition,Uncle Pete guarded the doorway
formore than twohours, until the service at the churchwas over.
The ceremony contained the full funeral liturgy, omitting only the final portion where the
congregation is asked to give the deceased a final kiss. Instead, Sourmelina passed by the casket
and kissed thewedding crown, followed byDesdemona andLefty.AssumptionChurch,which at
that time operated out of a small storefront on Hart Street, was still less than a quarter full.
Jimmy and Lina had not been regular churchgoers. Most of the mourners were old widows for
whom funerals were a form of entertainment. At last the pallbearers brought the casket outside
for the funeral photograph. The participants clustered around it, the simple Hart Street church in
the background. Father Stylianopoulos took his position at the head of the casket. The casket
itself was reopened to show the photo of Jimmy Zizmo resting against the pleated satin. Flags
were held over the coffin, the Greek flag on one side, the American flag on the other. No one
smiled for the flash. Afterward, the funeral procession continued to Forest Lawn Cemetery on
VanDyke, where the casket was put in storage until spring. There was still a possibility that the
bodymightmaterializewith the spring thaw.
Despite the performance of all the necessary rites, the family remained aware that Jimmy
Zizmo’s soulwasn’t at rest. After death, the souls of theOrthodox do notwing theirway directly
to heaven. They prefer to linger on earth and annoy the living. For the next forty days, whenever
my grandmother misplaced her dream book or her worry beads, she blamed Zizmo’s spirit. He
haunted the house, making fresh milk curdle and stealing the bathroom soap. As the mourning
period drew to an end, Desdemona and Sourmelina prepared the kolyvo. It was like a wedding
cake,made in three blindinglywhite tiers. A fence surrounded the top layer, fromwhich grew fir
treesmade of green gelatin. Therewas a pond of blue jelly, andZizmo’s namewas spelled out in
silver-coated dragées. On the fortieth day after the funeral, another church ceremony was held,
after which everyone returned to Hurlbut Street. They gathered around the kolyvo, which was
sprinkled with the powdered sugar of the afterlife and mixed with the immortal seeds of
pomegranates. As soon as they ate the cake, they could all feel it: Jimmy Zizmo’s soul was
leaving the earth and entering heaven,where it couldn’t bother themanymore.
At the height of the festivities, Sourmelina caused a scandal when she returned from her room
wearing a bright orange dress.
“What are you doing?”Desdemonawhispered. “Awidowwears black for the rest of her life.”
“Forty days is enough,” saidLina, andwent on eating.
Only then could the babies be baptized. The next Saturday, Desdemona, seized with
conflicting emotions, watched as the children’s godfathers held them above the baptismal font at
Assumption. As she entered the church, my grandmother had felt an intense pride. People
crowded around, trying to get a look at her new baby, who had the miraculous power of turning
even the oldest women into young mothers again. During the rite itself, Father Stylianopoulos
clipped a lock of Milton’s hair and dropped it into the water. He chrismed the sign of the cross
on the baby’s forehead. He submerged the infant under the water. But as Milton was cleansed of
original sin,Desdemona remained cognizant of her iniquity. Silently, she repeated her vownever
to have another child.
“Lina,” she began a fewdays later, blushing.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Not nothing. Something.What?”
“I was wondering. How do you . . . if you don’t want . . .” And she blurted it out: “How do

youkeep fromgetting pregnant?”
Lina gave a low laugh. “That’s not something I have toworry about anymore.”
“But do you knowhow? Is there away?”
“My mother always said as long as you’re nursing, you can’t get pregnant. I don’t know if it’s
true, but that’swhat she said.”
“But after that,what then?”
“Simple.Don’t sleepwith your husband.”
At present, it was possible. Since the birth of the baby, my grandparents had taken a hiatus
from lovemaking. Desdemona was up half the night breast-feeding. She was always exhausted.
In addition, her perineum had torn during the delivery and was still healing. Lefty politely kept
himself from starting anything amorous, but after the secondmonth he began to comeover to her
side of the bed. Desdemona held him off as long as she could. “It’s too soon,” she said. “We
don’twant another baby.”
“Whynot?Milton needs a brother.”
“You’rehurtingme.”
“I’ll be gentle. Comehere.”
“No, please, not tonight.”
“What?Are you turning into Sourmelina?Once a year is enough?”
“Quiet.You’llwake the baby.”
“I don’t care if Iwake the baby.”
“Don’t shout.Okay.Here. I’m ready.”
But fiveminutes later: “What’s thematter?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t tellme nothing. It’s like beingwith a statue.”
“Oh, Lefty!”And she burst into sobs.
Lefty comforted her and apologized, but as he turned over to go to sleep he felt himself being
enclosed in the loneliness of fatherhood. With the birth of his son, Eleutherios Stephanides saw
his future and continuing diminishment in the eyes of his wife, and as he buried his face in his
pillow, he understood the complaint of fathers everywhere who lived like boarders in their own
homes. He felt a mad jealousy toward his infant son, whose cries were the only sounds
Desdemona seemed to hear, whose little body was the recipient of unending ministrations and
caresses, and who had muscled his own father aside in Desdemona’s affections by a seemingly
divine subterfuge, a god taking the form of a piglet in order to suckle at a woman’s breast. Over
the next weeks and months, Lefty watched from the Siberia of his side of the bed as this mother-
infant love affair blossomed. He saw his wife scrunch her face up against the baby’s to make
cooing noises; he marveled at her complete lack of disgust toward the infant’s bodily processes,
the tendernesswithwhich she cleaned up and powdered the baby’s bottom, rubbingwith circular
motions and even once, to Lefty’s shock, spreading the tiny buttocks to daub the rosebud
betweenwith petroleum jelly.
From then on, my grandparents’ relationship began to change. Up until Milton’s birth, Lefty
and Desdemona had enjoyed an unusually close and egalitarian marriage for its time. But as
Lefty began to feel left out, he retaliatedwith tradition.He stopped calling hiswife kukla, which
meant “doll,” and began calling her kyria, which meant “Madame.” He reinstituted sex
segregation in the house, reserving
the sala for his male companions and banishing Desdemona to the kitchen. He began to give
orders. “Kyria, my dinner.” Or: “Kyria, bring the drinks!” In this he acted like his
contemporaries and no one noticed anything out of the ordinary except Sourmelina. But even she
couldn’t entirely throw off the chains of the village, and when Lefty had his male friends over to
the house to smoke cigars and sing kleftic songs, she retreated to her bedroom.
Shut up in the isolation of paternity, Lefty Stephanides concentrated on finding a safer way to
make a living. He wrote to the Atlantis Publishing Company in New York, offering his services
as a translator, but received in return only a letter thanking him for his interest, along with a

catalogue. He gave the catalogue to Desdemona, who ordered a new dream book. Wearing his
blue Protestant suit, Lefty visited the local universities and colleges in person to inquire about
the possibility of becoming a Greek instructor. But there were few positions, and all were filled.
My grandfather lacked the necessary classics degree; he hadn’t even graduated from university.
Though he learned to speak a fluent, somewhat eccentric English, his written command of the
language was mediocre at best. With a wife and child to support, there was no thought of his
returning to school. Despite these obstacles or maybe because of them, during the forty-day
mourning period Lefty had set up a study for himself in the living room and returned to his
scholarly pursuits. Obstinately, and for sheer escape, he spent hours translating Homer and
Mimnermos into English. He used beautiful, much too expensive Milanese notebooks and wrote
with a fountain pen filled with emerald ink. In the evenings, other young immigrant men came
over, bringing bootleg whiskey, and they all drank and played backgammon. Sometimes
Desdemona smelled the familiarmusky-sweet scent seeping under the door.
During the daytime, if he felt cooped up, Lefty pulled his new fedora low on his forehead and
left the house to think. He walked down to Waterworks Park, amazed that the Americans had
built such a palace to house plumbing filters and intake valves. He went down to the river and
stood among the dry-docked boats. German shepherds, chained in ice-whitened yards, snarled at
him. He peeked into the windows of bait shops closed for the winter. During one of these walks
he passed a demolished apartment building. The façade
had been torn down, revealing the inner rooms like a dollhouse. Lefty saw the brightly tiled
kitchens and bathrooms hanging in midair, half-enclosed spaces whose rich colors reminded him
of the sultans’ tombs, and he had an idea.
The next morning he climbed down into the basement on Hurlbut and went to work. He
removed Desdemona’s spiced sausages from the heating pipes. He swept up the cobwebs and
laid a rug over the dirt floor. He brought down Jimmy Zizmo’s zebra skin from upstairs and
tacked it on thewall. In front of the sink he built a small bar out of discarded lumber and covered
it with scavenged tiles: blue-and-white arabesques; Neapolitan checkerboard; red heraldic
dragons; and local, earth-tone Pewabics. For tables, he upended cable reels and spread themwith
cloths. He tented bedsheets overhead, hiding the pipes. From his old connections in the rum-
running business he rented a slotmachine and ordered aweek’s supply of beer andwhiskey.And
on a cold Friday night in February of 1924, he opened for business.
The Zebra Room was a neighborhood place with irregular hours. Whenever Lefty was open
for business he put an icon of St. George in the living room window, facing the street. Patrons
came around back, giving a coded knock—a long and two shorts followed by two longs—on the
basement door. Then they descended out of the America of factory work and tyrannical foremen
into an Arcadian grotto of forgetfulness. My grandfather put the Victrola in the corner. He set
out braided sesame koulouria on the bar. He greeted people with the exuberance they expected
from a foreigner and he flirted with the ladies. Behind the bar a stained glass window of liquor
bottles glowed: the blues of English gin, the deep reds of claret and Madeira, the tawny browns
of scotch and bourbon.Ahanging lamp spun on its chain, speckling the zebra skinwith light and
making the customers feel even drunker than they were. Occasionally someone would stand up
from his chair and begin to twitch and snap his fingers to the strange music, while his
companions laughed.
Down in that basement speakeasy, my grandfather acquired the attributes of the barkeep he
would be for the rest of his life. He channeled his intellectual powers into the science of
mixology. He learned how to serve the evening rush one-man-band style, pouring whiskeys with
his right handwhile filling beer steinswith his left, as he pushed
out coasters with his elbow and pumped the keg with his foot. For fourteen to sixteen hours a
day he worked in that sumptuously decorated hole in the ground and never stopped moving the
entire time. If hewasn’t pouring drinks, hewas refilling the koulouria trays. If hewasn’t rolling
out a new beer keg, he was placing hard-boiled eggs in a wire hamper. He kept his body busy so
that his mind wouldn’t have a chance to think: about the growing coldness of his wife, or the

way their crime pursued them. Lefty had dreamed of opening a casino, and the Zebra Room was
as close as he ever came to it. There was no gambling, no potted palms, but there was rebetika
and, onmany nights, hashish.Only in 1958,when he had stepped frombehind the bar of another
ZebraRoom,wouldmygrandfather have the leisure to remember his youthful dreams of roulette
wheels. Then, trying to make up for lost time, he would ruin himself, and finally silence his
voice inmy life forever.
Desdemona and Sourmelina remained upstairs, raising the children. Practically speaking, this
meant that Desdemona got them out of bed in the morning, fed them, washed their faces, and
changed their diapers before bringing them in to Sourmelina,who by thenwas receiving visitors,
still smelling of the cucumber slices she put over her eyelids at night. At the sight of Theodora,
Sourmelina spread her arms and crooned, “Chryso fili!”—snatching her golden girl from
Desdemona and covering her face with kisses. For the rest of the morning, drinking coffee, Lina
amused herself by applying kohl to little Theodora’s eyelashes. When odors arose, she handed
the baby back, saying, “Something happened.”
Itwas Sourmelina’s belief that the soul didn’t enter the body until a child started speaking. She
let Desdemona worry about the diaper rashes and whooping coughs, the earaches and
nosebleeds. Whenever company came over for Sunday dinner, however, Sourmelina greeted
them with the overdressed baby pinned to her shoulder, the perfect accessory. Sourmelina was
bad with babies but terrific with teenagers. She was there for your first crushes and heartbreaks,
your party dresses and spins at sophisticated states like anomie. And so, in those early years,
Milton andTheodora grew up together in the traditional Stephanides way. As once a kelimi had
separated a brother and sister, now a wool blanket separated second cousins. As once a double
shadowhad leapt up against amountainside, nowa similarly conjoined
shadowmoved across the back porch of the house onHurlbut.
They grew. At one, they shared the same bathwater. At two, the same crayons. At three,
Milton sat in a toy airplane while Theodora spun the propeller. But the East Side of Detroit
wasn’t a small mountain village. There were lots of kids to play with. And so when he turned
four, Milton renounced his cousin’s companionship, preferring to play with neighborhood boys.
Theodora didn’t care. By then she had another cousin to playwith.
Desdemona had done everything she could to fulfill her promise of never having another child.
She nursed Milton until he was three. She continued to rebuff Lefty’s advances. But it was
impossible to do so every night. There were times when the guilt she felt for marrying Lefty
conflicted with the guilt she felt for not satisfying him. There were times when Lefty’s need
seemed so desperate, so pitiful, that she couldn’t resist giving in to him. And there were times
when she, too, needed physical comfort and release. It happened nomore than a handful of times
each year, though more often in the summer months. Occasionally Desdemona had too much
wine on somebody’s name day, and then it also happened. And on a hot night in July of 1927 it
significantly happened, and the resultwas a daughter: ZoëHelenStephanides,myAuntZo.
From the moment she learned that she was pregnant, my grandmother was again tormented by
fears that the baby would suffer a hideous birth defect. In the Orthodox Church, even the
children of closely related godparents were kept from marrying, on the grounds that this
amounted to spiritual incest. What was that compared with this? This was much worse! So
Desdemona agonized, unable to sleep at night as the new baby grew inside her. That she had
promised the Panaghia, the All-Holy Virgin, that she would never have another child only made
Desdemona feel more certain that the hand of judgment would now fall heavy on her head. But
once again her anxieties were for naught. The following spring, on April 27, 1928, Zoë
Stephanides was born, a large, healthy girl with the squarish head of her grandmother, a
powerful cry, and nothing at all thematterwith her.
Milton had little interest in his new sister. He preferred shooting his slingshot with his friends.
Theodorawas just the opposite. She
was enthralled with Zoë. She carried the new baby around with her like a new doll. Their
lifelong friendship, which would suffer many strains, began from day one, with Theodora

pretending to beZoë’smother.
The arrival of another baby made the house on Hurlbut feel crowded. Sourmelina decided to
move out. She found a job in a florist’s shop, leaving Lefty and Desdemona to assume the
mortgage on the house. In the fall of that same year, Sourmelina andTheodora took up residence
nearby in theO’Toole Boardinghouse, right behindHurlbut onCadillac Boulevard. The backs of
the two houses faced each other and Lina and Theodora were still close enough to visit nearly
every day.

On Thursday, October 24, 1929, on Wall Street in New YorkCity, men in finely tailored suits
began jumping from the windows of the city’s famous skyscrapers. Their lemming-like despair
seemed far away from Hurlbut Street, but little by little the dark cloud passed over the nation,
moving in the opposite direction to the weather, until it reached the Midwest. The Depression
made itself known to Lefty by a growing number of empty barstools. After nearly six years of
operating at full capacity, there began to be slow periods, nights when the place was only two-
thirds full, or just half. Nothing deterred the stoic alcoholics from their calling. Despite the
international banking conspiracy (unmasked by Father Coughlin on the radio), these stalwarts
presented themselves for duty whenever St. George galloped in the window. But the social
drinkers and familymen stopped showing up.ByMarch of 1930, only half asmany patrons gave
the secret dactylic-spondaic knock on the basement door. Business picked up during the summer.
“Don’t worry,” Lefty told Desdemona. “President Herbert Hoover is taking care of things. The
worst is over.” They skated along through the next year and a half, but by 1932 only a few
customers were coming in each day. Lefty extended credit, discounted drinks, but it was no use.
Soon he couldn’t pay for shipments of liquor. One day twomen came in and repossessed the slot
machine.
“It was terrible. Terrible!” Desdemona still cried fifty years later, describing those years.
Throughout my childhood the slightest mention of the Depression would set my yia yia off into
a full cycle of
wailing and breast-clutching. (Even once when the subject was “manic depression.”) She
would go limp in her chair, squeezing her face in both hands like the figure in Munch’s The
Scream—and then would do so: “Mana! The Depression! So terrible you no can believe!
Everybody they no have work. I remember the marches for the hunger, all the people they are
marching in the street, amillion people, one after one, one after one, to go to tellMr.Henry Ford
to open the factory. Thenwe have in the alley one night a noisewas terrible. The people they are
killing rats, plam plam plam, with sticks, to go to eat the rats. Oh my God! And Lefty he was no
working in the factory then.He only having, you know, the speakeasy,where the people they use
to come to drink. But in the Depression was in the middle another bad time, economy very bad,
and nobody they have money to drink. They no can eat, how they can drink? So soon papou
and yia yia weno havemoney.And then”—hand to heart—“then theymakeme go towork for
those mavros. Black people!OhmyGod!”
It happened like this. One night,my grandfather got into bedwithmy grandmother to find that
she wasn’t alone. Milton, eight years old now, was snuggled up against her side. On her other
side was Zoë, who was only four. Lefty, exhausted from work, looked down at the spectacle of
thismenagerie. He loved the sight of his sleeping children.Despite the problems of hismarriage,
he could never blame his son or daughter for them. At the same time, he rarely saw them. In
order to make enough money he had to keep the speakeasy open sixteen, sometimes eighteen,
hours a day.Heworked seven days aweek. To support his family he had to be exiled from them.
In the mornings when he was around the house, his children treated him like a familiar relative,
an unclemaybe, but not a father.
And then there was the problem of the bar ladies. Serving drinks day and night, in a dim
grotto, he had many opportunities to meet women drinking with their friends or even alone. My
grandfather was thirty years old in 1932. He had filled out and become a man; he was charming,
friendly, always well dressed—and still in his physical prime. Upstairs his wife was too

frightened to have sex, but down in the Zebra Room women gave Lefty bold, hot looks. Now, as
my grandfather gazed down at the three sleeping figures in the bed, his head contained all these
things at once: love for his children, love
for his wife, along with frustration with his marriage, and boyish, unmarried-feeling
excitement around the bar ladies. He bent his face close to Zoë’s. Her hair was still wet from the
bath, and richly fragrant. He took his fatherly delights while at the same time he remained a man
apart. Lefty knew that all the things in his head couldn’t hold together. And so after gazing on
the beauty of his children’s faces, he lifted them out of the bed and carried them back to their
own room. He returned and got into bed beside his sleeping wife. Gently, he began stroking her,
moving his hand up under her nightgown.And suddenlyDesdemona’s eyes opened.
“What are you doing!”
“What do you think I’mdoing?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“I’mwaking you up.”
“Shame on you.” My grandmother pushed him away. And Lefty relented. He rolled angrily
away fromher. Therewas a long silence before he spoke.
“I don’t get anything fromyou. Iwork all the time and I get nothing.”
“Youthink I don’twork? I have two children to take care of.”
“If youwere a normalwife, itmight beworth it forme to beworking all the time.”
“If youwere a normal husband, youwould helpwith the children.”
“Howcan I help you?Youdon’t even understand what it takes tomake money in this country.
Youthink I’mhaving a good time down there?”
“Youplaymusic, you drink. I can hear themusic in the kitchen.”
“That’s my job. That’s why the people come. And if they don’t come, we can’t pay our bills.
The whole thing rests on me. That’s what you don’t understand. I work all day and night and
thenwhen I come to bed I can’t even sleep. There’s no room!”
“Milton had a nightmare.”
“I’mhaving a nightmare every day.”
He switched the light on and, in its glow, Desdemona saw her husband’s face screwed up with
a malice she’d never seen before. It was no longer Lefty’s face, no longer that of her brother or
her husband. Itwas the face of someone new, a stranger shewas livingwith.
And this terrible new face delivered an ultimatum:
“Tomorrowmorning,”Lefty spat, “you’re going to go get a job.”

The next day, when Lina came over for lunch, Desdemona asked her to read the newspaper for
her.
“Howcan Iwork? I don’t even knowEnglish.”
“Youknowa little.”
“We should have gone to Greece. In Greece a husband wouldn’t make his wife go out and get
a job.”
“Don’t worry,” Lina said, holding up the recycled newsprint. “There aren’t any.” The 1932
Detroit Times classifieds, advertised to a population of fourmillion, ran to just over one column.
Sourmelina squinted, looking for something appropriate.
“Waitress,” Lina read.
“No.”
“Whynot?”
“Menwould flirtwithme.”
“Youdon’t like to flirt?”
“Read,”Desdemona said.
“Tool and dye,” saidLina.
Mygrandmother frowned. “What is that?”
“I don’t know.”

“Like dyeing fabric?”
“Maybe.”
“Goon,” saidDesdemona.
“Cigar roller,” Lina continued.
“I don’t like smoke.”
“Housemaid.”
“Lina, please. I can’t be amaid for somebody.”
“Silkworker.”
“What?”
“Silkworker. That’s all it says.And an address.”
“Silkworker? I’ma silkworker. I knoweverything.”
“Then congratulations, you have a job. If it’s not gone by the time you get there.”
An hour later, dressed for job hunting, my grandmother reluctantly left the house. Sourmelina
had tried to persuade her to borrow a dress with a low neckline. “Wear this and no one will
noticewhat
kind of English you speak,” she said. But Desdemona set out for the streetcar in one of her
plain dresses, gray with brown polka dots. Her shoes, hat, and handbag were each a brown that
almostmatched.
Though preferable to automobiles, streetcars didn’t appeal to Desdemona either. She had
trouble telling the lines apart. The fitful, ghost-powered trolleys were always making unexpected
turns, shuttling her off into unknownparts of the city.When the first trolley stopped, she shouted
at the conductor, “Downtown?”He nodded. She boarded, flipped down a seat, and took fromher
purse the addressLina hadwritten out.When the conductor passed by, she showed it to him.
“Hastings Street? Thatwhat youwant?”
“Yes.Hastings Street.”
“Stay on this car toGratiot. Then take theGratiot car downtown.Get off atHastings.”
At the mention of Gratiot, Desdemona felt relieved. She and Lefty took the Gratiot line to
Greektown. Now everything made sense. So, they don’tmake silk in Detroit? she triumphantly
asked her absent husband. That’s how much you know. The streetcar picked up speed. The
storefronts of Mack Avenue passed by, more than a few closed up, windows soaped over.
Desdemona pressed her face to the glass, but now, because she was alone, she had a few more
words to say to Lefty. If those policemen at Ellis Island hadn’t taken my silkworms, I could set
up a cocoonery in the backyard. I wouldn’t have to get a job. We could make a lot of money. I
told you so. Passengers’ clothes, still dressy in those days, nevertheless showed wear and tear:
hats gone unblocked for months, hemlines and cuffs frayed, neckties and lapels gravy-stained.
On the curb a man held up a hand-painted sign: WORK-iS-WHAT-I-WANT-AND-NOT-
CHARiTY-WHO-WiLL-HELP-ME-GET-A-JOB.-7 YEARS-IN-DETROIT. NO-MONEy.-
SENT-AWAY-FURNISH-BEST-OF-REFERENCES.Look at that poor man. Mana! He looks
like a refugee. Might as well be Smyrna, this city. What’s the difference? The streetcar labored
on, moving away from the landmarks she knew, the greengrocer’s, the movie theater, the fire
hydrants and neighborhood newspaper stands. Her village eyes, which could differentiate
between trees and bushes at a glance, glazed over at the signage along the route, the meaningless
roman letters swirling into one another
and the ragged billboards showing American faces with the skin peeling off, faces without
eyes, or with no mouth, or with nothing but a nose. When she recognized Gratiot’s diagonal
swath, she stood up and called out in a ringing voice: “Sonnamabiche!” She had no idea what
this English word meant. She had heard Sourmelina employ it whenever she missed her stop. As
usual, it worked. The driver braked the streetcar and the passengers moved quickly aside to let
her off. They seemed surprisedwhen she smiled and thanked them.
On theGratiot streetcar she told the conductor, “Please, IwantHastings Street.”
“Hastings?Yousure?”
She showedhim the address and said it louder: “Hastings Street.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know.”
The streetcarmade forGreektown.Desdemona checked her reflection in thewindowand fixed
her hat. Since her pregnancies she had put on weight, thickened in the waist, but her skin and
hair were still beautiful and she was still an attractive woman. After looking at herself, she
returned her attention to the passing scenery. What else would my grandmother have seen on the
streets of Detroit in 1932? She would have seen men in floppy caps selling apples on corners.
She would have seen cigar rollers stepping outside windowless factories for fresh air, their faces
stained a permanent brown from tobacco dust. She would have seen workers handing out pro-
union pamphlets while Pinkerton detectives tailed them. In alleyways, she might have seen
union-busting goonsworking over those same pamphleteers. Shewould have seen policemen, on
foot and horseback, 60 percent of whom were secretly members of the white Protestant Order of
the Black Legion, who had their own methods for disposing of blacks, Communists, and
Catholics. “But come on,Cal,” I hearmymother’s voice, “don’t you have anything nice to say?”
Okay, all right. Detroit in 1932 was known as “The City of Trees.” More trees per square mile
here than any other city in the country. To shop, you had Kern’s and Hudson’s. On Woodward
Avenue the auto magnates had built the beautiful Detroit Institute of Arts, where, that very
minute while Desdemona rode to her job interview, a Mexican artist named Diego Rivera was
working on his own new commission: a mural depicting the new mythology of the automobile
industry.On
scaffolding he sat on a folding chair, sketching the great work: the four androgynous races of
humankind on the upper panels, gazing down on the River Rouge assembly line, where auto
workers labored, their bodies harmonized with effort. Various smaller panels showed the “germ
cell” of an infant wrapped in a plant bulb, the wonder and dread of medicine, the indigenous
fruits and grains of Michigan; and way over in one corner Henry Ford himself, gray-faced and
tight-assed, going over the books.
The trolley passed McDougal, Jos. Campau, and Chene, and then, with a little shiver, it
crossed Hastings Street. At that moment every passenger, all of whom were white, performed a
talismanic gesture.Men pattedwallets, women refastened purses. The driver pulled the lever that
closed the rear door.Desdemona, noticing all this, looked out to see that the streetcar had entered
theBlackBottomghetto.
There was no roadblock, no fence. The streetcar didn’t so much as pause as it crossed the
invisible barrier, but at the same time in the length of a block the world was different. The light
seemed to change, growing gray as it filtered through laundry lines. The gloom of front porches
and apartments without electricity seeped out into the streets, and the thundercloud of poverty
that hung over the neighborhood directed attention downward toward the clarity of forlorn,
shadowless objects: red bricks crumbling off a stoop, piles of trash and ham bones, used tires,
crushed pinwheels from last year’s fair, someone’s old lost shoe. The derelict quiet lasted only a
moment before Black Bottom erupted from all its alleys and doorways. Look at all the children!
So many! Suddenly children were running alongside the streetcar, waving and shouting. They
played chicken with it, jumping in front of the tracks. Others climbed onto the back. Desdemona
put a hand to her throat. Why do they have so many children? What’s the matter with these
people? The mavro women should nurse their babies longer.Somebody should tell them. Now
in the alleys she saw men washing themselves at open faucets. Half-dressed women jutted out
hips on second-story porches. Desdemona looked in awe and terror at all the faces filling the
windows, all the bodies filling the streets, nearly a half million people squeezed into twenty-five
square blocks. Ever since World War I when E. I. Weiss, manager of the Packard Motor
Company, had brought, by his own report, the first “load of
niggers” to the city, here in Black Bottom was where the establishment had thought to keep
them. All kinds of professions now crowded in together, foundry workers and lawyers, maids
and carpenters, doctors and hoodlums, but most people, this being 1932, were unemployed. Still,
more and more were coming every year, every month, seeking jobs in the North. They slept on
every couch in every house. They built shacks in the yards. They camped on roofs. (This state of

affairs couldn’t last, of course. Over the years, Black Bottom, for all the whites’ attempts to
contain it—and because of the inexorable laws of poverty and racism—would slowly spread,
street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, until the so-called ghetto would become the
entire city itself, and by the 1970s, in the no-tax-base, white-flight, murder-capital Detroit of the
ColemanYoungadministration, black people could finally livewherever theywanted to . . .)
But now, back in 1932, something oddwas happening. The streetcarwas slowing down. In the
middle of Black Bottom, it was stopping and—unheard of!—opening its doors. Passengers
fidgeted. The conductor tappedDesdemona on the shoulder. “Lady, this is it. Hastings.”
“Hastings Street?” She didn’t believe him. She showed him the address again. He pointed out
the door.
“Silk factory here?” she asked the conductor.
“No tellingwhat’s here.Notmyneighborhood.”
And so my grandmother stepped off onto Hastings Street. The streetcar pulled away, as white
faces looked back at her, a woman thrown overboard. She started walking. Gripping her purse,
she hurried down Hastings as though she knew where she was going. She kept her eyes fixed
straight ahead. Children jumped rope on the sidewalk. At a third-story window a man tore up a
piece of paper and shouted, “From now on, you can send my mail to Paris, postman.” Front
porches were full of living room furniture, old couches and armchairs, people playing checkers,
arguing,waving fingers, and breaking into laughter. Always laughing, these mavros. Laughing,
laughing, as though everything is funny. What is so funny, tell me? And what is—oh my God!—a
man doing his business in the street! I won’t look. She passed the yard of a junk artist: the Seven
Wonders of theWorldmade in bottle caps.An ancient drunk in a colorful sombreromoved
in slow motion, sucking his toothless maw and holding out a hand for spare change. But what
can they do? They don’t have any plumbing. No sewers, terrible, terrible. She walked by a
barbershop where men were getting their hair straightened, wearing shower caps like women.
Across the street youngmenwere calling out to her:
“Baby, you got somany curves youmake a car crash!”
“Youmust be a doughnut, baby, ’cause youmakemy jelly roll!”
Laughter erupted behind her as she hurried on. Farther and farther in, past streets she didn’t
know the names of. The smell of unfamiliar food in the air now, fish caught from the nearby
river, pig knuckles, hominy grits, fried baloney, black-eyed peas. But also many houses where
nothingwas cooking,where no onewas laughing or even talking, dark rooms full ofweary faces
and scroungy dogs. It was from a porch like this that somebody finally spoke. A woman, thank
God.
“Youlost?”
Desdemona took in the soft,molded face. “I am looking for factory. Silk factory.”
“No factories around here. If therewas they’d be closed.”
Desdemona handed her the address.
The lady pointed across the street. “Youthere.”
And turning, what did Desdemona see? Did she see a brown brick building known until
recently as McPherson Hall? A place rented out for political meetings, weddings, or
demonstrations by the occasional traveling clairvoyant? Did she notice the ornamental touches
around the entrance, the Roman urns spilling granite fruit, the harlequin marble? Or did her eyes
focus instead on the two young black men standing at attention outside the front door? Did she
notice their impeccable suits, one the light blue of a globe’s watery portions, the other the pale
lavender of French pastilles? Certainly she must have noticed their military bearing, the high
polish of their shoes, their vivid neckties. She must have felt the contrast between the young
men’s confident air and that of the downtrodden neighborhood, but whatever she felt at that
moment, her complex reaction has comedown tome as a single, shocked realization.
Fezzes. They were wearing fezzes. The soft, maroon, flat-topped headgear of my
grandparents’ former tormentors. The hats named for the city in Morocco where the blood-
colored dye came from, and

which (on the heads of soldiers) had chased my grandparents out of Turkey, staining the earth
a dark maroon. Now here they were again, in Detroit, on the heads of two handsome young
Negroes. (And fezzes will appear once more in my story, on the day of a funeral, but the
coincidence, being the kind of thing only real life can come up with, is too good to give away
right now.)
Tentatively, Desdemona crossed the street. She told the men she’d come about the ad. One
nodded. “Youhave to go around back,” he said. Politely, he led her down an alley and into the
well-swept backyard. At that moment, as at a discreet signal, the back door swung open and
Desdemona received her second shock. Two women in chadors appeared. They looked, to my
grandmother, like devout Muslims from Bursa, except for the color of their garments. They
weren’t black. They were white. The chadors started at their chins and hung all the way to their
ankles. White headscarves covered their hair. They wore no veils, but as they came forward,
Desdemona sawbrown school oxfords on their feet.
Fezzes, chadors, and next this: a mosque. Inside, the former McPherson Hall had been
redecorated according to a Moorish theme. The attendants led Desdemona over geometric
tilework. They took her past thick, fringed draperies that shut out the light. There was no sound
but the swishing of the women’s robes and, from far off, what sounded like a voice speaking or
praying. Finally, they showedher into an officewhere awomanwas hanging a picture.
“I’m Sister Wanda,” the woman said, without turning around. “Supreme Captain, Temple No.
1.” She wore another sort of chador entirely, with piping and epaulettes. The picture she was
hanging showed a flying saucer hovering over the skyline ofNewYork.Itwas shooting out rays.
“Youcome about the job?”
“Yes. I am silk worker. Have lot experience. Farming the silk, making the cocoonery, weaving
the . . .”
Sister Wanda swiveled around. She scanned Desdemona’s face. “We got a problem. What you
is?”
“I’mGreek.”
“Greek, huh. That’s a kind ofwhite, isn’t it?Youborn inGreece?”
“No. FromTurkey.We come fromTurkey.Myhusband andme, too.”
“Turkey!Whydidn’t you say so?Turkey’s aMuslim country.YouaMuslim?”
“No,Greek.GreekChurch.”
“But you born inTurkey.”
“Ne.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“Andyour people come fromTurkey?”
“Yes.”
“So you probablymixed up a little bit, right?Younot allwhite.”
Desdemona hesitated.
“See, I’m trying to see howwe canwork it,” SisterWandawent on. “Minister Fard,who come
to us from the Holy City of Mecca, he always be impressing on us the importance of self-
reliance. Can’t rely on no white man no more. Got to do for ourself, understand?” She lowered
her voice. “Problem is, nobodyworth a toot come for the ad. People come in here, they say they
know silk, but they don’t knownothing. Just hoping to get hired and fired.Get a day’s pay.” She
narrowed her eyes. “Thatwhat you planning?”
“No. Iwant only hire.No fire.”
“Butwhat you is?Greek, Turkish, orwhat?”
Again Desdemona hesitated. She thought about her children. She imagined coming home to
them without any food. And then she swallowed hard. “Everybody mixed. Turks, Greeks, same
same.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Sister Wanda smiled broadly. “Minister Fard, he mixed, too.
Letme showyouwhatwe need.”

She led Desdemona down a long, wainscoted corridor, through a telephone operator’s office,
and into another darker hallway. At the far end heavy drapes blocked off the main lobby. Two
young guards stood at attention. “Youcome to work for us, few things you should know. Never,
ever, go through them curtains. Main temple in there, where Minister Fard deliver his sermons.
Youstay back here in the women’s quarters. Best cover your hair, too. That hat shows your ears,
which be an enticement.”
Desdemona instinctively touched her ears, looking back at the guards. Their expressions
remained impassive. She turned back, following the SupremeCaptain.
“Letme showyou the operationwegot going,” SisterWanda
said. “We got everything. All we need is a little, you know, know-how.” She started up the
stairs andDesdemona followed.
(It’s a long stairway, three flights up, and Sister Wanda has bad knees, so it will take some
time for them to reach the top. Leave them there, climbing,while I explainwhatmygrandmother
had gotten herself into.)
“Sometime in the summer of 1930, an amiable but faintly mysterious peddler suddenly
appeared in the black ghetto of Detroit.” (I’m quoting from C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black
Muslims of America.) “He was thought to be an Arab, although his racial and national identity
remain undocumented. He was welcomed into homes of culture-hungry African-Americans who
were eager to purchase his silks and artifacts, which he claimedwere thoseworn by black people
in their homeland across the sea . . . His customerswere so anxious to learn of their ownpast and
the country from which they came that the peddler soon began holding meetings from house to
house throughout the community.
“At first, the ‘prophet,’ as he came to be known, confined his teachings to a recitation of his
experiences in foreign lands, admonitions against certain foods, and suggestions for improving
listeners’ physical health.Hewas kind, friendly, unassuming and patient.”
“Having aroused the interests of his host” (we move now to An Original Man by Claude
Andrew Clegg III), “[the peddler] would then deliver his sales pitch on the history and future of
African-Americans. The tacticworkedwell, and eventually he honed it to the point thatmeetings
of curious blackswere held in private homes. Later, public hallswere rented for his orations, and
an organizational structure for his ‘Nation of Islam’ began to take shape in the midst of poverty-
strickenDetroit.”
The peddler had many names. Sometimes he called himself Mr. Farrad Mohammad, or Mr. F.
Mohammad Ali. Other times he referred to himself as Fred Dodd, Professor Ford, Wallace Ford,
W. D. Ford, Wali Farrad, Wardell Fard, or W. D. Fard. He had just as many origins. People
claimed he was a black Jamaican whose father was a Syrian Muslim. One rumor maintained that
he was a Palestinian Arab who had fomented racial unrest in India, South Africa, and London
before moving to Detroit. There was a story that he was the son of rich parents from the tribe of
Koreish, the ProphetMuhammad’s
own tribe, while FBI records stated that Fard was born in either New Zealand or Portland,
Oregon, to eitherHawaiian orBritish andPolynesian parents.
One thing is clear: by 1932, Fard had established Temple No. 1 in Detroit. It was the back
stairs of this temple thatDesdemona found herself climbing.
“We sell the silks right from the temple,” Sister Wanda explained above. “Make the clothes
ourself according to Minister Fard’s own designs. From clothes our forefathers wore in Africa.
Used to be we just ordered the fabric and sewed up the clothes ourself. But with this De-
pression, fabric getting harder and harder to come by. So Minister Fard he had one of his
revelations. Come to me one morning and said, ‘We must own the means and ends of sericulture
itself.’ That howhe talk. Eloquent?Man could talk a dog off ameat truck.”
Climbing, Desdemona was beginning to make sense of things. The fancy suits of the men
outside. The redecoration within. Sister Wanda reached the landing—“In here our training
class”—and threwopen the door.Desdemona stepped up and saw them.
Twenty-three teenage girls, in bright chadors and head scarves, sewing clothes. They didn’t so

much as look up from their labor as the Supreme Captain brought in the stranger. Heads bent,
mouths fanning straight pins, hem-covered oxfords working unseen treadles, they continued
production. “This be our Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class. See how good
and proper they are?Don’t say aword unless you do. ‘Islam’means submission.Youknow that?
But getting back to why I run the ad. We running low on fabric. Everybody out of business
seems like.”
She ledDesdemona across the room.Awooden box full of dirt lay open.
“So what we did was, we ordered these silkworms from a company. You know, mail order?
Wegotmore on theway. Problem is, they don’t seem to like it here inDe-troit. Don’t blame ’em
myself. They keep dying on us, andwhen they do?Ooowhee,what a stink!My sweet Jes—”She
caught herself. “Just an expression. I was brought up Sanctified. Listen, what you say your name
was?”
“Desdemona.”
“Listen,Des, before I becameSupremeCaptain, I did hair and nails. Not no farmer’s daughter,
understand?This thumb look green
to you? Help me out. What do these silkworm fellas like? How we get them to, you know,
silkify?”
“It hardwork.”
“Wedon’tmind.”
“It takemoney.”
“Wegot plenty.”
Desdemona picked up a shriveledworm, barely alive. She cooed to it inGreek.
“Listen up now, little sisters,” Sister Wanda said, and, as one, the girls stopped sewing,
crossed hands in laps, and looked up attentively. “This the new lady gonna teach us how tomake
silk. She a mulatto like Minister Fard and she gonna bring us back the knowledge of the lost art
of our people. Sowe can do for ourself.”
Twenty-three pairs of eyes fell on Desdemona. She gathered courage. She translated what she
wanted to say into English and went over it twice before she spoke. “To make good silk,” she
then pronounced, beginning her lessons to the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization
Class, “you have to be pure.”
“We trying,Des. PraiseAllah.We trying.”

TRICKNOLOGY

That was how my grandmother came to work for the Nation of Islam. Like a cleaning lady
working inGrosse Pointe, she came andwent by the back door. Instead of a hat, shewore a head
scarf to conceal her irresistible ears. She never spoke above awhisper. She never asked questions
or complained. Having grown up in a country ruled by others, she found it all familiar. The
fezzes, the prayer rugs, the crescentmoons: itwas a little like going home.
For the residents of Black Bottom it was like traveling to another planet. The temple’s front
doors, in a sweet reversal of most American entrances, let blacks in and kept whites out. The
former paintings in the lobby—landscapes aglow with Manifest Destiny, scenes of Indians being
slaughtered—had been carted down to the basement. In their place were depictions of African
history: a prince and princess strolling beside a crystal river; a conclave of black scholars
debating in an outdoor forum.
People came to Temple No. 1 to hear Fard’s lectures. They also came to shop. In the old
cloakroom, Sister Wanda displayed the garments that the Prophet said were “the same kind that
the Negro people use in their home in the East.” She rippled the iridescent fabrics under the
lights as converts stepped up to pay. Women exchanged the maids’ uniforms of subservience for
thewhite chadors of emancipation.Men replaced the overalls of oppressionwith the silk suits of
dignity. The temple’s cash register overflowed. In lean times, the mosque was flush. Ford was
closing factories but, at 3408Hastings Street, Fardwas open for business.
Desdemona saw little of all this up on the third floor. She spent her mornings teaching in the
classroom and her afternoons in the Silk Room, where the uncut fabrics were stored. One
morning she brought in her silkworm box for show-and-tell. She passed the box around, telling
the story of its travels, how her grandfather had carved it from olivewood and how it had
survived a fire, and she managed to do all this without saying anything derogatory about the
students’ co-religionists. In fact, the girls were so sweet and friendly that Desdemona
rememberedwhat it had been like in the timeswhen theGreeks andTurks used to get along.
Nevertheless: black people were still new to my yia yia. She was shocked by various
discoveries: “Inside the hands,” she informed her husband, “the mavros are white like us.” Or:
“The mavros don’t have scars, only bumps.” Or: “Do you know how the mavro men shave?
With a powder! I saw it in the store window.” In the streets of Black Bottom, Desdemona was
appalled at the way people lived. “Nobody sweeps up. Garbage on the porches and nobody
sweeps it. Terrible.” But at the temple things were different. The men worked hard and didn’t
drink. The girlswere clean andmodest.
“ThisMr. Fard is doing something right,” she said at Sunday dinner.
“Please,” Sourmelina dismissed this, “we left veils back inTurkey.”
ButDesdemona shook her head. “TheseAmerican girls could use a veil or two.”
The Prophet himself remained veiled to Desdemona. Fard was like a god: present everywhere
and visible nowhere. His glow lingered in the eyes of people leaving a lecture. He expressed
himself in the dietary laws, which favored native African foods—the yam, the cassava—and

prohibited the consumption of swine. Every so often Desdemona saw Fard’s car—a brand-new
Chrysler coupe—parked in front of the temple. It always looked freshly washed and waxed, its
chromegrille polished.But she never sawFard at thewheel.
“How do you expect to see him if he’s God?” Lefty asked with amusement one night as they
were going to bed.Desdemona lay
smiling, as though tickled by her first week’s pay hidden under the mattress. “I’ll have to have
a vision,” she said.

Her first project at Temple No. 1 was to convert the outhouse into a cocoonery. Calling upon the
Fruit of Islam, as the military wing of the Nation was known, she stood by while the young men
pulled out thewooden commode from the rickety shack. They covered the cesspoolwith dirt and
removed old pinup calendars from the walls, averting their eyes as they threw the offending
material in the trash. They installed shelves and perforated the ceiling for ventilation. Despite
their efforts, a bad smell lingered. “Just wait,” Desdemona told them. “Compared to silkworms,
this is nothing.”
Upstairs, the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class wove feeding trays.
Desdemona tried to save the initial batch of silkworms. She kept them warm under electric
lightbulbs and sang Greek songs to them, but the silkworms weren’t fooled. Hatching from their
black eggs, they detected the dry, indoor air and the false sun of the lightbulbs, and began to
shrivel up. “Got more on the way,” Sister Wanda said, brushing off this setback. “Be here
directly.”
The days passed. Desdemona became accustomed to the pale palms of Negro hands. She got
used to using the back door and to not speaking until spoken to. When she wasn’t teaching the
girls, shewaited upstairs in the SilkRoom.
The Silk Room: a description is in order. (So much happened in that fifteen-by-twenty-foot
space: God spoke; my grandmother renounced her race; creation was explained; and that’s just
for starters.) It was a small, low-ceilinged room, with a cutting table at one end. Bolts of silk
leaned against thewalls. The plushness extended floor to ceiling, like the inside of a jewelry box.
Fabricwas getting harder to comeby, but SisterWanda had stockpiled quite a bit.
Sometimes the silks seemed to be dancing. Stirred by air currents of a mysterious origin, the
fabrics flapped up and floated around the room. Desdemona would have to catch the cloth and
roll it back up.
And one day, in the middle of a ghostly pas de deux—a green silk leading as Desdemona
backpedaled—she heard a voice.
“IWASBORNINTHEHOLYCITYOFMECCA,ONFEBRUARY17, 1877.”
At first she thought someone had come into the room.Butwhen she turned, no onewas there.
“MY FATHER WAS ALPHONSO, AN EBONY-HUED MAN OF THE TRIBE OF SHABAZZ. MY MOTHER’S NAME
WASBABYGEE. SHEWASACAUCASIAN,ADEVIL.”
A what? Desdemona couldn’t quite hear. Or determine the location of the voice. It seemed to
be coming from the floor now. “MY FATHER MET HER IN THE HILLS OF EAST ASIA. HE SAW POTENTIAL
INHER.HELEDHER INTHERIGHTEOUSWAYSUNTILSHEBECAMEAHOLYMUSLIM.”
It wasn’t what the voice was saying that intrigued Desdemona—she didn’t catch what it was
saying. It was the sound of the voice, a deep bass that set her breastbone humming. She let go of
the dancing silk. She lowered her kerchiefed head to listen. Andwhen the voice started up again,
she searched through bolts of silk for its source. “WHY DID MY FATHER MARRY A CAUCASIAN DEVIL?
BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT HIS SON WAS DESTINED TO SPREAD THE WORD TO THE LOST PORTION OF THE
TRIBE OF SHABAZZ.” Three, four, five bolts, and there it was: a heating grate. And the voice was
louder now. “THEREFORE, HE FELT THAT I, HIS SON, SHOULD HAVE A SKIN COLOR THAT WOULD ALLOW
ME TO DEAL WITH BOTH WHITE AND BLACK PEOPLE JUSTLY AND RIGHTEOUSLY. SO I AM HERE, A
MULATTO,LIKEMUSABEFOREME,WHOBROUGHTTHECOMMANDMENTSTOTHEJEWS.”
From the depths of the building the Prophet’s voice rose. It began in the auditorium three
floors below. It filtered down through the trapdoor in the stage out of which, at the old
tobacconist conventions, the Rondega girl used to pop, clad in nothing but a cigar ribbon. The

voice reverberated in the crawl space that led to the wings, whereupon it entered a heating vent
and circulated around the building, growing distorted and echoey, until it rushed hotly out the
grate at which Desdemona now crouched. “MY EDUCATION, AS WELL AS THE ROYAL BLOOD THAT
RUNS IN MY VEINS, MIGHT HAVE LED ME TO SEEK A POSITION OF POWER. BUT I HEARD MY UNCLE
WEEPING,BROTHERS. IHEARDMYUNCLE INAMERICAWEEPING.”
She couldmake out a faint accent now. Shewaited formore, but
there was only silence. Furnace smell blew into her face. She bent lower, listening. But the
next voice she heardwasSisterWanda’s on the landing: “Yoo-hoo!Des!We ready for you.”
And she tore herself away.
My grandmother was the only white person who ever heard W. D. Fard sermonize, and she
understood less than half of what he said. It was a result of the heating vent’s bad acoustics, her
own imperfect English, and the fact that she kept lifting her head to hear if anyone was coming.
Desdemona knew that it was forbidden for her to listen to Fard’s lectures. The last thing she
wantedwas to jeopardize her new job.But therewas no other place for her to go.
Every day, at one o’clock, the grate began to rumble. At first she heard the noise of people
coming into the auditorium. Thiswas followed by chanting. She rolled extra bolts of silk in front
of the grate to muffle the sound. She moved her chair to the far corner of the Silk Room. But
nothing helped.
“PERHAPS YOU RECALL, IN OUR LAST LECTURE, HOW I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE DEPORTATION OF THE
MOON?”
“No, I don’t,” saidDesdemona.
“SIXTY TRILLION YEARS AGO A GOD-SCIENTIST DUG A HOLE THROUGH THE EARTH, FILLED IT WITH
DYNAMITE AND BLEW THE EARTH IN TWO. THE SMALLER OF THESE TWO PIECES BECAME THE MOON. DO
YOURECALLTHAT?”
My grandmother clamped her hands over her ears; on her face was a look of refusal. But
through her lips a question slipped out: “Somebody blewup the earth?Who?”
“TODAY I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT ANOTHER GOD-SCIENTIST. AN EVIL SCIENTIST. BY THE NAME OF
YACUB.”
Andnowher fingers spread apart, letting the voice reach her ears . . .
“YACUB LIVED EIGHTY-FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO IN THE PRESENT TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND-YEAR-
CYCLE OF HISTORY. HE WAS POSSESSED, THIS YACUB, OF AN UNUSUALLY LARGE CRANIUM. A SMART
MAN. A BRILLIANT MAN. ONE OF THE PREEMINENT SCHOLARS OF THE NATION OF ISLAM. THIS WAS A MAN
WHODISCOVERED
THE SECRETS OF MAGNETISM WHEN HE WAS ONLY SIX YEARS OLD. HE WAS PLAYING WITH TWO PIECES
OFSTEELANDHEHELDTHEMTOGETHERANDDISCOVEREDTHATSCIENTIFICFORMULA:MAGNETISM.”
Like a magnet itself, the voice worked on Desdemona. Now it was pulling her hands down to
her sides. Itwasmaking her lean forward in her chair . . .
“BUT YACUB WASN’T CONTENT WITH MAGNETISM. WITH HIS LARGE CRANIUM HE HAD OTHER GREAT
IDEAS. AND SO ONE DAY YACUB THOUGHT TO HIMSELF THAT IF HE COULD CREATE A RACE OF PEOPLE
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE—GENETICALLY DIFFERENT—THAT RACE COULD
COMETODOMINATETHEBLACKNATIONTHROUGHTRICKNOLOGY.”
. . . And when leaning wasn’t enough, she moved closer. Walking across the room, moving
silk bolts aside, she knelt down before the grate, as Fard continued his explanation: “EVERY
BLACK MAN IS MADE OF TWO GERMS: A BLACK GERM AND A BROWN GERM. AND SO YACUB CONVINCED
FIFTY-NINE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE MUSLIMS TO EMIGRATE TO THE ISLAND OF
PELAN. THE ISLAND OFPELAN IS INTHE AEGEAN. YOUWILL FIND ITTODAY ONEUROPEAN MAPS,UNDER A
FALSE NAME. TO THIS ISLAND YACUB BROUGHT HIS FIFTY-NINE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-
NINEMUSLIMS.ANDTHEREHECOMMENCEDHISGRAFTING.”
She could hear other things now. Fard’s footsteps as he paced the stage. The squeaking of
chairs as his listeners bent forward, hanging on his everyword.
“IN HIS LABORATORIES ON PELAN, YACUB KEPT ALL ORIGINAL BLACK PEOPLE FROM REPRODUCING. IF
A BLACK WOMAN GAVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, THAT CHILD WAS KILLED. YACUB ONLY LET BROWN BABIES
LIVE.HEONLYLETBROWN-SKINNEDPEOPLEMATE.”
“Terrible,”Desdemona said, up on the third floor. “Terrible, thisYacubperson.”
“YOU HAVE HEARD OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION? THIS WAS UNNATURAL
SELECTION. BY HIS SCIENTIFIC GRAFTING YACUB PRO-DUCED THE FIRST YELLOW AND RED PEOPLE. BUT

HE DIDN’T STOP THERE. HE WENT ON MATING THE LIGHT-SKINNED OFFSPRING OF THOSE PEOPLE. OVER
MANY, MANY YEARS HE GENETICALLY CHANGED THE BLACK MAN, ONE GENERATION AT A TIME, MAKING
HIM PALER AND WEAKER, DILUTING HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS AND MORALITY, TURNING HIM INTO THE PATHS
OFEVIL.ANDTHEN,MYBROTHERS,ONEDAYYACUBWASDONE.ONEDAYYACUBWASFINISHEDWITHHIS
WORK. AND WHAT HAD HIS WICKEDNESS CREATED? AS I HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE: LIKE CAN ONLY COME
FROM LIKE. YACUB HAD CREATED THE WHITE MAN! BORN OF LIES. BORN OF HOMICIDE. A RACE OF BLUE-
EYEDDEVILS.”
Outside, the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class installed silkworm trays.
They worked in silence, daydreaming of various things. Ruby James was thinking about how
handsome John 2X had looked that morning, and wondered if they would get married someday.
Darlene Wood was beginning to get miffed because all the brothers had gotten rid of their slave
names but Minister Fard hadn’t gotten around to the girls yet, so here she was, still Darlene
Wood. Lily Hale was thinking almost entirely about the spit curl hairdo she had hidden up under
her headscarf and how tonight she was going to stick her head out her bedroom window,
pretending to check the weather, so that Lubbock T. Hass next door could see. Betty Smith was
thinking, Praise Allah Praise Allah Praise Allah. Millie Littlewanted gum.
While upstairs, her face hot from the air rushing out of the vent, Desdemona resisted this new
twist in the story line. “Devils? All white people?” She snorted. She got up from the floor,
dusting herself off. “Enough. I’m not going to listen to this crazy person anymore. I work. They
payme. That’s it.”
But the next morning, she was back at the temple. At one o’clock the voice began speaking,
and againmygrandmother paid attention:
“NOWLETUSMAKEAPHYSIOLOGICALCOMPARI-SONBETWEENTHEWHITERACEANDTHEORIGINAL
PEOPLE. WHITE BONES, ANATOMICALLY SPEAKING, ARE MORE FRAGILE. WHITE BLOOD IS THINNER.
WHITESPOSSESSROUGHLYONE-THIRDTHEPHYSICALSTRENGTHOFBLACKS.WHOCANDENYTHIS?WHAT
DOESTHEEVIDENCEOFYOUROWNEYESSUGGEST?”
Desdemona argued with the voice. She ridiculed Fard’s pronouncements. But as the days
passed, my grandmother found herself obediently spreading out silk before the heating vent to
cushion her knees. She knelt forward, putting her ear to the grate, her forehead nearly touching
the floor. “He’s just a charlatan,” she said. “Taking everyone’smoney.” Still, she didn’tmove. In
amoment, the heating system rumbledwith the latest revelations.
What was happening to Desdemona? Was she, always so receptive to a deep priestly voice,
coming under the influence of Fard’s disembodied one? Or was she just, after ten years in the
city, finally becoming aDetroiter,meaning that she saweverything in terms of black andwhite?
There’s one last possibility. Could it be that my grandmother’s sense of guilt, that sodden,
malarial dread that swamped her insides almost seasonally—could this incurable virus have
opened her up to Fard’s appeal? Plagued by a sense of sin, did she feel that Fard’s accusations
hadweight?Did she take his racial denunciations personally?
One night she askedLefty, “Doyou think anything iswrongwith the children?”
“No.They’re fine.”
“Howdoyouknow?”
“Look at them.”
“What’s thematterwith us?Howcouldwedowhatwe did?”
“Nothing’s thematterwith us.”
“No, Lefty.We”—she started to cry—“we are not good people.”
“The children are fine.We’re happy. That’s all in the past now.”
But Desdemona threw herself onto the bed. “Why did I listen to you?” she sobbed. “Why
didn’t I jump into thewater like everybody else!”
Mygrandfather tried to embrace her, but she shrugged himoff. “Don’t touchme!”
“Des, please . . .”
“Iwish I had died in the fire! I swear to you! Iwish I had died in Smyrna!”
She began to watch her children closely. So far, aside from one scare—at five, Milton had
nearly died from a mastoid infection—they had both been healthy. When they cut themselves,
their blood congealed. Milton got good marks at school, Zoë above average. But Desdemona

wasn’t reassured by any of this. She kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some
abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most
devastatingwaypossible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children.

I can feel how the house changed in the months leading to 1933. A coldness passing through its
root-beer-colored bricks, invading its rooms and blowing out the vigil light burning in the hall. A
cold wind that fluttered the pages of Desdemona’s dream book, which she consulted for
interpretations to increasingly nightmarish dreams. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling,
dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Now she avoided all lovemaking,
even in the summer, even after three glasses of wine on somebody’s name day. After a while,
Lefty stopped persisting. My grandparents, once so inseparable, had drifted apart. When
Desdemona went off to Temple No. 1 in the morning, Lefty was asleep, having kept the
speakeasy open all night.He disappeared into the basement before she returned home.
Following this coldwind,which kept blowing through the Indian summer of 1932, I sail down
the basement stairs to find my grandfather, one morning, counting money. Shut out of his wife’s
affections, Lefty Stephanides concentrated on work. His business, however, had gone through
some changes. Responding to the fall-off in customers at the speakeasy, my grandfather had
diversified.
It is a Tuesday, just past eight o’clock.Desdemona has left forwork.And in the frontwindow,
a hand is removing the icon of St. George fromview. At the curb, an oldDaimler pulls up. Lefty
hurries outside and gets into the backseat.
My grandfather’s new business associates: in the front seat sits Mabel Reese, twenty-six years
old, from Kentucky, face rouged, hair giving off a burnt smell from the morning’s curling iron.
“Back in Paducah,” she is telling the driver, “there’s this deaf man who’s got a camera. He just
goes up and down the river, taking pictures.He takes the darndest things.”
“So do I,” responds the driver. “But mine make money.” Maurice Plantagenet, his Kodak box
camera sitting in the backseat beside Lefty, smiles at Mabel and drives out Jefferson Avenue.
Plantagenet has found these pre-WPA years inimical to his artistic inclinations. As they head
towardBelle Isle he delivers a disquisition on the history of photography, howNicéphoreNiepce
invented it, and howDaguerre got all the credit. He describes the first photograph ever taken of a
human being, a Paris street scene done with an exposure so long that none of the fast-moving
pedestrians showed up except for a lone figure who had stopped to get his shoes shined. “I want
to get in the history booksmyself. But I don’t think this is the right route, exactly.”
OnBelle Isle, Plantagenet pilots theDaimler alongCentral Avenue. Instead of heading toward
TheStrand, however, he takes a small turnoff down a dirt road that dead-ends.He parks and they
all get out. Plantagenet sets up his camera in favorable light, while Lefty attends to the
automobile. With his handkerchief he polishes the spoked hubcaps and the headlamps; he kicks
mud off the running board, cleans the windows and windshield. Plantagenet says, “The maestro
is ready.”
Mabel Reese takes off her coat. Underneath she is wearing only a corset and garter belt.
“Where do youwantme?”
“Stretch out over the hood.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah.Good. Face against the hood.Nowspread your legs just a bit.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah. Now turn your head and look back at the camera. Okay, smile. Like I’m your
boyfriend.”
That was how itwent everyweek. Plantagenet took the photographs.My grandfather provided
the models. The girls weren’t hard to find. They came into the speakeasy every night. They
needed money like everybody else. Plantagenet sold the photos to a distributor downtown and
gave Lefty a percentage of the take. The formula was straightforward: women in lingerie
lounging in cars. The scantily dressed girls curled up in the backseat, or bared breasts in the

front, or fixed flat tires, bending way over. Usually there was one girl, but sometimes there were
two. Plantagenet teased out all the harmonies, between a buttock’s curve and a fender’s, between
corset and upholstery
pleats, between garter belts and fan belts. It was my grandfather’s idea. Remembering his
father’s old hidden treasure, “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” he’d had a vision for updating
an old ideal. The days of the harem were over. Bring on the era of the backseat! Automobiles
were the new pleasure domes. They turned the common man into a sultan of the open road.
Plantagenet’s photographs suggested picnics in out-of-the-way places. The girls napped on
running boards, or dipped to get a tire iron out of the trunk. In the middle of the Depression,
when people had no money for food, men found money for Plantagenet’s auto-erotica. The
photographs provided Lefty with a steady side income. He began to save money, in fact, which
later brought about his next opportunity.
Every now and then at flea markets, or in the occasional photography book, I come across one
of Plantagenet’s old pictures, usually erroneously ascribed to the twenties because of the
Daimler. Sold during the Depression for a nickel, they now fetch upward of six hundred dollars.
Plantagenet’s “artistic” work has all been forgotten, but his erotic studies of women and
automobiles remain popular. He got into the history books on his day off, when he thought he
was compromising himself. Going through the bins, I look at his women, their engineered
hosiery, their uneven smiles. I gaze into those faces my grandfather gazed into, years ago, and I
ask myself: Why did Lefty stop searching for his sister’s face and start searching for others, for
blondes with thin lips, for gun molls with provocative rumps? Was his interest in these models
merely pecuniary? Did the cold wind blowing through the house lead him to seek warmth in
other places?Or had guilt begun to infect him, too, so that to distract himself from the thing he’d
done he ended upwith theseMabels andLucies andDoloreses?
Unable to answer these questions, I return now to Temple No. 1, where new converts are
consulting compasses. Tear-shaped, white with black numbers, the compasses have a drawing of
the Kaaba stone at the center. Still hazy about the actual requirements of their new faith, these
men pray at no prescribed times. But at least they’ve got these compasses, bought from the same
good sister who sells the clothes. The men revolve, one step at a time, until compass needles
point to 34, the number coding for Detroit. They consult the rim’s arrow to determine the
direction ofMecca.
“LET US MOVE NOW TO CRANIOMETRY. WHAT IS CRANIOMETRY? IT IS THE SCIENTIFIC MEASUREMENT
OF THE BRAIN, OF WHAT IS CALLED BY THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY ‘GRAY MATTER.’ THE BRAIN OF THE
AVERAGE WHITE MAN WEIGHS SIX OUNCES. THE BRAIN OF THE AVERAGE BLACK MAN WEIGHS SEVEN
OUNCES AND ONE HALF.” Fard lacks the fire of a Baptist preacher, the deep-gut oratory, but to his
audience of disaffected Christians (and one Orthodox believer) this turns out to be an advantage.
They’re tired of the holy-rolling, the shouting and brow-mopping, the raspy breathing. They’re
tired of slave religion, bywhich theWhiteMan convinces theBlack that servitude is holy.
“BUT THERE IS ONE THING AT WHICH THE WHITE RACE EXCELLED THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE. BY DESTINY,
AND BY THEIR OWN GENETIC PROGRAMMING, THE WHITE RACE EXCELLED AT TRICKNOLOGY. DO I HAVE
TO TELL YOU THIS? THIS IS WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY THE EUROPEANS
BROUGHT THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE FROM MECCA AND OTHER PARTS OF EAST ASIA. IN 1555 A SLAVE TRADER
NAMEDJOHNHAWKINSBROUGHTTHEFIRSTMEMBERSOFTHETRIBEOFSHABAZZTOTHESHORESOFTHIS
COUNTRY. 1555. THE NAME OF THE SHIP? JESUS. THIS IS IN THE HISTORY BOOKS. YOU CAN GO TO THE
DETROITPUBLICLIBRARYANDLOOKTHISUP.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST GENERATION OF ORIGINAL PEOPLE IN AMERICA? THE WHITE MAN
MURDERED THEM. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY. HE MURDERED THEM SO THAT THEIR CHILDREN WOULD
GROW UP WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR OWN PEOPLE, OF WHERE THEY CAME FROM. THE DESCENDANTS
OFTHOSE CHILDREN, THEDESCENDANTS OFTHOSE POORORPHANS—THAT ISWHOYOUARE. YOUHERE IN
THIS ROOM. AND ALL THE SO-CALLED NEGROES IN THE GHETTOS OF AMERICA. I HAVE COME HERE TO
TELLYOUWHOYOUARE.YOUARETHELOSTMEMBERSOFTHETRIBEOFSHABAZZ.”
And riding throughBlackBottomdidn’t help.Desdemona realized
now why there was so much trash in the streets: the city didn’t pick it up. White landlords let
their apartment buildings fall into disrepair while they continued to raise the rents. One day
Desdemona saw a white shop clerk refuse to take change from a Negro customer. “Just leave it

on the counter,” she said. Didn’twant to touch the lady’shand! And in those guilt-ridden days,
her mind crammed with Fard’s theories, my grandmother started to see his point. There were
blue-eyed devils all over town. The Greeks had an old saying, too: “Red beard and blue eyes
portend theDevil.” Mygrandmother’s eyeswere brown, but that didn’tmake her feel any better.
If anybody was a devil it was her. There was nothing she could do to change the way things
were. But she couldmake sure that it didn’t happen again. Shewent to seeDr. Philobosian.
“That’s a very extrememeasure,Desdemona,” the doctor told her.
“Iwant tomake sure.”
“But you’re still a youngwoman.”
“No, Dr. Phil, I’m not,” my grandmother said in a weary voice. “I’m eighty-four hundred
years old.”

On November 21, 1932, the Detroit Times ran the following headline: “Altar Scene of Human
Sacrifice.” The story followed: “One hundred followers of a negro cult leader, who is held for
human sacrifice on a crude altar in his home, were being rounded up today by police for
questioning. The self-styled king of theOrder of Islam isRobertHarris, 44, of 1429DuboisAve.
The victim, whom he admits bludgeoning with a car axle and stabbing with a silver knife
through the heart, was James J. Smith, 40, negro roomer in the Harris home.” This Harris, who
came to be known as the “voodoo slayer,” had hung around Temple No. 1. Just possibly, he had
read Fard’s “Lost Found Muslim Lessons No. 1 and 2,” including the passage: “ALL MUSLIMS
WILL MURDER THE DEVIL BECAUSE THEY KNOW HE IS A SNAKE AND ALSO IF HE BE ALLOWED TO LIVE, HE
WOULD STING SOMEONE ELSE.” Harris had then founded his own order. He had gone looking for a
(white) devil but, finding one hard to come by in his neighborhood, had settled for a devil closer
at hand.
Three days later, Fard was arrested. Under interrogation, he insisted that he had never
commanded anyone to sacrifice a humanbeing.
He claimed that he was the “supreme being on earth.” (At least, that was what he said during
his first interrogation. The second time he was arrested, months later, he “admitted,” according
to the police, that theNation of Islamwas nothing but “a racket.”He had invented the prophecies
and the cosmologies “to get all the money he could.”) Whatever the truth of the matter, the
upshot was this: in exchange for having the charges dropped, Fard agreed to leave Detroit once
and for all.
And so we come to May 1933. And to Desdemona, saying goodbye to the Muslim Girls
Training and General Civilization Class. Head scarves frame faces streaked with tears. The girls
file by, kissing Desdemona on both cheeks. (My grandmother will miss the girls. She has grown
very fond of them.) “My mother used to tell me in bad times silkworms no can spin,” she says.
“Make bad silk. Make bad cocoons.” The girls accept this truth and examine the newly hatched
worms for signs of despair.
In the Silk Room, all the shelves are empty. Fard Muhammad has transferred power to a new
leader. Brother Karriem, the former Elijah Poole, is now Elijah Muhammad, Supreme Minister
of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad has a different vision for the Nation’s economic
future. Fromnowon, itwill be real estate, not clothing.
And now Desdemona is descending the stairs on her way out. She reaches the first floor and
turns to look back at the lobby. For the first time ever, the Fruit of Islam do not guard the lobby
entrance. The drapes hang open.Desdemona knows she should keep going out the back door, but
she has nothing to lose now, and so ventures toward the front. She approaches the double doors
and pushes herway into the sanctum sanctorum.
For the first fifteen seconds, she stands still, as her idea of the room switches places with
reality. She had imagined a soaring dome, a richly colored Ezine carpet, but the room is just a
simple auditorium. A small stage at one end, folding chairs stacked along the walls. She absorbs
all this quietly.And then, oncemore, there is a voice:
“Hello,Desdemona.”
On the empty stage, the Prophet, the Mahdi, Fard Muhammad, stands behind the podium. He

is barelymore than a silhouette, slender and elegant,wearing a fedora that shadows his face.
“You’renot supposed to be in here,” he says. “But I guess today it’s all right.”
Desdemona, her heart in her throat,manages to ask, “Howyouknowmyname?”
“Haven’t you heard? I knoweverything.”
Coming through the heating vent, Fard Muhammad’s deep voice had made her solar plexus
vibrate. Now, closer up, it penetrates her entire body. The rumble spreads down her arms until
her fingers are tingling.
“How’sLefty?”
This question rocks Desdemona back on her heels. She is speechless. She is thinking many
things at once, first of all, how can Fard know her husband’s name, did she tell Sister Wanda?
. . . and, second, if it’s true he knows everything, then the rest must be true, too, about the blue-
eyed devils and the evil scientist and the Mother Plane from Japan that will come to destroy the
world and take the Muslims away. Dread seizes her, while at the same time she is remembering
something, askingwhere she has heard that voice before . . .
NowFardMuhammad steps frombehind the podium.He crosses the stage and descends to the
main floor.He approachesDesdemonawhile continuing to display his omniscience.
“Still running the speakeasy? Those days are numbered. Lefty better find something else to
do.” Fedora tilted to one side, suit neatly buttoned, face in shadow, the Mahdi approaches her.
Shewants to flee but cannot. “And howare the children?” Fard asks. “Miltonmust bewhat now,
eight?”
He is only ten feet away. As Desdemona’s heart madly thumps, Fard Muhammad removes his
hat to reveal his face.And the Prophet smiles.
Surely you’ve guessed by now.That’s right: JimmyZizmo.
“Mana!”
“Hello,Desdemona.”
“You!”
“Who else?”
She stares,wide-eyed. “We thought you died, Jimmy! In the car. In the lake.”
“Jimmydid.”
“But you are Jimmy.”Having said this,Desdemona becomes
aware of the repercussions and begins to scold. “Why you leave your wife and child? What’s
thematterwith you?”
“Myonly responsibility is tomypeople.”
“What people?The mavros?”
“TheOriginal People.” She cannot tell if he is serious or not.
“Whyyoudon’t likewhite people?Whyyou call themdevils?”
“Look at the evidence. This city. This country.Don’t you agree?”
“Every place has devils.”
“That house onHurlbut, especially.”
There is a pause, afterwhichDesdemona cautiously asks, “Howyoumean?”
Fard, or Zizmo, is smiling again. “Much that is hidden has been revealed tome.”
“What is hidden?”
“My so-called wife Sourmelina is a woman of, let us say, unnatural appetites. And you and
Lefty?Doyou think you fooledme?”
“Please, Jimmy.”
“Don’t callme that. That isn’tmyname.”
“What youmean?Youaremybrother-in-law.”
“You don’t know me!” he shouts. “You never knew me!” Then, composing himself: “You
never knewwho Iwas orwhere I came from.”With that, theMahdiwalks pastmy grandmother,
through the lobby and double doors, and out of our lives.
This last part Desdemona didn’t see. But it’s well documented. First, Fard Muhammad shook
hands with the Fruit of Islam. The young men fought back tears as he said farewell. He then

moved through the crowd outside Temple No. 1 to his Chrysler coupe parked at the curb. He
stepped up on the running board. Afterward, every single person would insist that the Mahdi had
maintained personal eye contact the entire time. Women were openly weeping now, pleading for
him not to go. Fard Muhammad removed his hat and held it to his chest. He looked down kindly
and said, “Don’t worry. I am with you.” He raised the hat in a gesture that took in the entire
neighborhood, the ghettowith its shantytown porches, unpaved streets, and disconsolate laundry.
“I will be back to you in the near future to lead you out of this hell.” Then Fard Muhammad got
into theChrysler, turned the ignition, andwith a final, reassuring smile,motored away.
Fard Muhammad was never seen again in Detroit. He went into occultation like the Twelfth
Imam of the Shiites. One report places him on an ocean liner bound for London in 1934.
According to the Chicago newspapers in 1959, W.D. Fard was a “Turkish-born Nazi agent” and
ended up working for Hitler in World War II. A conspiracy theory holds that the police or the
FBI were involved in his death. It’s anybody’s guess. Fard Muhammad, my maternal
grandfather, returned to the nowhere fromwhich he’d come.
As for Desdemona, her meeting with Fard may have contributed to the drastic decision she
made around the same time. Not long after the Prophet’s disappearance, my grandmother
underwent a fairly novel medical procedure. A surgeon made two incisions below her navel.
Stretching open the tissue and muscle to expose the circuitry of the fallopian tubes, he tied each
in a bow, and therewere nomore children.

CLARINETSERENADE

We had our date. I picked Julie up at her studio in Kreuzberg. I wanted to see her work, but
shewouldn’t letme.And sowewent to dinner at a place calledAustria.
Austria is like a hunting lodge. Thewalls are coveredwithmounted deer horns,maybe fifty or
sixty sets. These horns look comically small, as though they come from animals you could kill
with your bare hands. The restaurant is dark, warm, woody, and comfortable. Anybody who
wouldn’t like it is someone Iwouldn’t like. Julie liked it.
“Since youwon’t showmeyourwork,” I said aswe sat down, “can you at least tellmewhat it
is?”
“Photography.”
“Youprobably don’twant to tellme ofwhat.”
“Let’s have a drink first.”
Julie Kikuchi is thirty-six. She looks twenty-six. She is short without being small. She is
irreverent without being crude. She used to see a therapist but stopped. Her right hand is partly
arthritic, from an elevator accident. This makes it painful to hold a camera for a long period. “I
need an assistant,” she told me. “Or a new hand.” Her fingernails are not particularly clean. In
fact they are the dirtiest fingernails I have ever seen on such a lovely, wonderful-smelling
person.
Breasts have the same effect onme as on anyonewithmy testosterone level.
I translated the menu for Julie and we ordered. Out came the platters of boiled beef, the bowls
of gravy and red cabbage, the knödels as big as softballs. We talked about Berlin and the
differences between European countries. Julie told me a Barcelona story of getting locked in the
Parque Güell with her boyfriend after visiting hours. Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-
boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table,
presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts. After that, I would
be called on to present my own ragged gallery. And here is where my first dates generally go
wrong. I lack sufficient data. I don’t have it in quite the bulk a man of my years should have.
Women sense this and a strange, questioning look comes into their eyes. And already I am
retreating from them, before dessert has been served . . .
But that didn’t happen with Julie. The boyfriend popped up in Barcelona and then was gone.
None followed. This was surely not because there weren’t any. This was because Julie isn’t
husbandhunting. So she didn’t have to interviewme for the job.
I like JulieKikuchi. I like her a lot.
And so I have my usual questions. What does she want from? Howwould she react if? Should
I tell her that? No. Too soon. We haven’t even kissed. And right now, I’ve got another romance
to concentrate on.

We open on a summer evening in 1944. Theodora Zizmo, whom everyone now calls Tessie, is
painting her toenails. She sits on a daybed at theO’TooleBoardinghouse, her feet propped up on
a pillow, a pillow of cotton between each toe. The room is full of wilting flowers and her
mother’s various messes: lidless cosmetics, discarded hose, Theosophy books, and a box of
chocolates, also lidless, full of empty paper wrappings and a few tooth-scarred, rejected creams.
Over where Tessie is, it’s neater. Pens and pencils stand upright in cups. Between brass
bookends, each aminiature bust of Shakespeare, are the novels she collects at yard sales.
Tessie Zizmo’s twenty-year-old feet: size four and a half, pale, blue-veined, the red toenails
fanning out like suns on a peacock’s tail.
She examines them sternly, going down the line, just as a gnat, attracted by the lotion
perfuming her legs, lands on her big toenail and gets stuck. “Oh, shoot,” Tessie says. “Darn
bugs.” She sets towork again, picking the gnat off, reapplying polish.
On this evening in the middle of World War II, a serenade is about to begin. It’s minutes
away. If you listen closely you can hear awindow scraping open, a fresh reed being inserted into
awoodwind’smouthpiece. Themusicwhich started everything and onwhich, you could say,my
entire existence depended, is on itsway.But before the tune launches into full volume, letme fill
you in onwhat has happened these last eleven years.
Prohibition has ended, for one thing. In 1933, by ratification of all the states, the Twenty-first
Amendment repealed the Eighteenth. At the American Legion Convention in Detroit, Julius
Stroh removed the bung from a Gilded Keg of Stroh’s Bohemian beer. President Roosevelt was
photographed sipping a cocktail at the White House. And on Hurlbut Street, my grandfather,
Lefty Stephanides, took down the zebra skin, dismantled his underground speakeasy, and
emerged once again into the upper atmosphere.
With the money he’d saved from the auto-erotica, he put a down payment on a building on
Pingree Street, just offWestGrandBoulevard. The above-groundZebraRoomwas a bar&grill,
set in the middle of a busy commercial strip. The neighboring businesses were still there when I
was a kid. I can dimly remember them: A. A. Laurie’s optometrist’s shop with its neon sign in
the shape of a pair of eyeglasses; New Yorker Clothes, in whose front window I saw my first
naked mannequins, dancing a murderous tango. Then there was Value Meats, Hagermoser’s
Fresh Fish, and the Fine-Cut Barber Shop. On the corner was our place, a narrow single-story
building with a wooden zebra’s head projecting over the sidewalk. At night, blinking red neon
outlined themuzzle, neck, and ears.
The clientele were mainly auto workers. They came in after their shifts. They came in, quite
often, before their shifts. Lefty opened the bar at eight in the morning, and by eight-thirty the
barstools were filled with men dulling themselves before reporting to work. As he filled their
shells with beer, Lefty learned what was going on in the city outside. In 1935 his patrons had
celebrated the forming of the United Auto Workers. Two years later, they cursed the armed
guards
from Ford who had beat up their leader, Walter Reuther, in the “Battle of the Overpass.” My
grandfather took no sides in these discussions. His job was to listen, nod, refill, smile. He said
nothing in 1943 when talk at the bar turned ugly. On a Sunday in August, fistfights had broken
out between blacks and whites on Belle Isle. “Some nigger raped a white woman,” one customer
said. “Nowall those niggers are going to pay.Youwait and see.”ByMondaymorning a race riot
was under way. But when a group of men came in, boasting of having beaten a Negro to death,
mygrandfather refused to serve them.
“Whydon’t you go back to your own country?” one of them shouted.
“This is my country,” Lefty said, and to prove it, he did a very American thing: he reached
under the counter and produced a pistol.
These conflicts lie in the past now—as Tessie paints her toenails—overshadowed by a much
bigger conflict. All over Detroit in 1944, automobile factories have been retooled. At Willow
Run, B-24s roll off the assembly line instead of Ford sedans. Over at Chrysler, they’re making

tanks. The industrialists have finally found a cure for the stalled economy: war. The Motor City,
which hasn’t been dubbed Motown yet, becomes for a time the “Arsenal of Democracy.” And in
the boardinghouse on Cadillac Boulevard, Tessie Zizmo paints her toenails and hears the sound
of a clarinet.
Artie Shaw’s big hit “Begin the Beguine” floats on the humid air. It freezes squirrels on
telephone lines, who cock their heads alertly to listen. It rustles the leaves of apple trees and sets
a rooster on a weather vane spinning. With its fast beat and swirling melody, “Begin the
Beguine” rises over the victory gardens and the lawn furniture, the bramble-choked fences and
porch swings; it hops the fence into the backyard of the O’Toole Boardinghouse, stepping
around the mostly male tenants’ recreational activities—a lawn-bowling swath, some forgotten
croquet mallets—and then the song climbs the ragged ivy along the brick facing, past windows
where bachelors snooze, scratch their beards, or, in the case of Mr. Danelikov, formulate chess
problems; up and up it soars, Artie Shaw’s best and most beloved recording from back in ’39,
which you can still hear playing from radios all over the city, music so fresh and lively it seems
to ensure the purity of theAmerican cause and theAllies’ eventual triumph;
but now here it is, finally, coming through Theodora’s window, as she fans her toes to dry
them.And, hearing it,mymother turns toward thewindowand smiles.
The source of the music was none other than a Brylcreemed Orpheus who lived directly
behind her. Milton Stephanides, a twenty-year-old college student, stood at his own bedroom
window, dexterously fingering his clarinet. He was wearing a Boy Scout uniform. Chin lifted,
elbows out, right knee keeping time within khaki trousers, he unleashed his love song on the
summer day, playing with an ardor that had burned out completely by the time I found that fuzz-
clogged woodwind in our attic twenty-five years later. Milton had been third clarinet in the
Southeastern High School orchestra. For school concerts he had to play Schubert, Beethoven,
and Mozart, but now that he had graduated, he was free to play whatever he liked, which was
swing.He styled himself after Artie Shaw.He copied Shaw’s exuberant, off-balance stance, as if
being blown backward by the force of his own playing. Now, at the window, he flourished his
stickwith Shaw’s precise, calligraphic dips and circles.He looked along the length of the shining
black instrument, sighting on the house two backyards away, and especially on the pale, timid,
excited face at the third-floor window. Tree branches and telephone lines obscured his view, but
he couldmake out the long dark hair that shone like his clarinet itself.
She didn’t wave. She made no sign—other than smile—that she heard him at all. In
neighboring yards people continued what they were doing, oblivious to the serenade. They
watered lawns or filled bird feeders; young kids chased butterflies. When Milton got to the end
of the song, he lowered his instrument and leaned out the window, grinning. Then he started
again, from the beginning.
Downstairs, entertaining company,Desdemona heard her son’s clarinet and, as if orchestrating
a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and
their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee
table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were
drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor’sginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat
on the table.
“What do you think about that, Gaia?” her father teased her. “Milton’s got flat feet. Does that
sour the deal for you?”
“Daddeee,” saidGaia, embarrassed.
“Better to have flat feet than to be knocked off your feet forever,” saidLefty.
“That’s right,” agreed Georgia Vasilakis. “You’re lucky they wouldn’t take Milton. I don’t
think it’s any kind of dishonor at all. I don’t knowwhat I’d do if I had to send a son off towar.”
Every so often during this conversation,Desdemona had pattedGaiaVasilakison the knee and
said, “Miltie he is coming. Soon.” She had been saying it since her guests arrived. She had been
saying it every Sunday for the past month and a half, and not only to Gaia Vasilakis. She had
said it to Jeanie Diamond, whose parents had brought her last Sunday, and she had said it to

VickyLogathetis,who’d come theweek before that.
Desdemona had just turned forty-three and, in the manner of women of her generation, she
was practically an old woman. Gray had infiltrated her hair. She’d begun to wear rimless gold
eyeglasses that magnified her eyes, making her look even more perpetually dismayed than she
already was. Her tendency to worry (which the swing music upstairs had aggravated of late) had
brought back her heart palpitations. They were a daily occurrence with her now. Within the
surround of this worrying, however, Desdemona remained a bundle of activity, always cooking,
cleaning, doting on her children and the children of others, always shrieking at the top of her
lungs, full of noise and life.
Despite my grandmother’s corrective lenses, the world remained out of focus. Desdemona
didn’t understand what the fighting was all about. At Smyrna the Japanese had been the only
country to send ships to rescue refugees. My grandmother maintained a lifelong sense of
gratitude. When people brought up the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, she said, “Don’t tell me
about an island in the middle of the ocean. This country isn’t big enough they have to have all
the islands, too?” The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as
everywhere:men and theirwars. Fortunately,Milton had been turned downby theArmy. Instead
of going off to war he was going to night school and helping out at the bar during the day. The
only uniformheworewas that of theBoyScouts,where hewas a troop leader. Every so often he
took his scouts camping up north.
After five more minutes, when Milton still had not materialized, Desdemona excused herself
and climbed the stairs. She stopped outside
Milton’s bedroom, frowning at the music coming from inside. Then, without knocking, she
entered.
In front of the window, clarinet erect, Milton played on, oblivious. His hips swayed in an
indecent fashion and his lips glistened as brightly as his hair. Desdemona marched across the
roomand slammed thewindow shut.
“Come,Miltie,” she commanded. “Gaia is downstairs.”
“I’mpracticing.”
“Practice later.” She was squinting out the window at the O’Toole Boardinghouse across the
yard.At the third-floorwindow she thought she sawahead duck down, but she couldn’t be sure.
“Whyyou always play by thewindow?”
“I get hot.”
Desdemonawas alarmed. “Howyoumean hot?”
“Fromplaying.”
She snorted. “Come.Gaia brought you cookies.”
For some time now my grandmother had suspected the growing intimacy between Milton and
Tessie. She noted the attention Milton paid to Tessie whenever Tessie came over for dinner with
Sourmelina. Growing up, Zoë had always been Tessie’s best friend and playmate. But now it
was Milton whom Tessie sat in the porch swing with. Desdemona had asked Zoë, “Why you no
gooutwithTessie nomore?”AndZoë, in a slightly bitter tone, had replied, “She’s busy.”
This was what brought on the return of my grandmother’s heart palpitations. After everything
she had done to atone for her crime, after she had turned her marriage into an arctic wasteland
and allowed a surgeon to tie her fallopian tubes, consanguinity wasn’t finished with her. And so,
horrified, my grandmother had resumed an activity at which she had tried her hand once before,
with decidedlymixed results.Desdemonawasmatchmaking again.

From Sunday to Sunday, as in the house in Bithynios, a parade of marriageable girls came
through the front door of Hurlbut. The only difference was that in this case they weren’t the
same two girls multiplied over and over. InDetroit, Desdemona had a large pool to choose from.
There were girls with squeaky voices or soft altos, plump girls and thin ones, babyish girls who
wore heart lockets and girls who were old before their time and worked as secretaries in
insurance firms. Therewas SophieGeorgopoulos,whowalked funny

ever since stepping on hot coals during a camping trip, and there was Mathilda Livanos,
supremely bored in the way of beautiful girls, who’d shown no interest in Milton and hadn’t
even washed her hair. Week after week, aided or coerced by their parents, they came, and week
after week Milton Stephanides excused himself to go up to his bedroom and play his clarinet out
thewindow.
Now, with Desdemona riding herd behind, he came down to see Gaia Vasilakis. She was
sitting between her parents on the overstuffed sea-foam-green sofa, a large girl herself, wearing a
white crinoline dress with a ruffled hem and puffed sleeves. Her short white socks had ruffles,
too. They remindedMilton of the lace cover over the bathroom trashcan.
“Boy, those are a lot of badges,”GusVasilakissaid.
“Milton needed onemore badge and he could have been anEagle Scout,” Lefty said.
“Which one is that?”
“Swimming,” saidMilton. “I can’t swim for beans.”
“I’mnot a very good swimmer either,”Gaia said, smiling.
“Have a cookie,Miltie,”Desdemona urged.
Milton looked down at the tin and took a cookie.
“Gaiamade them,”Desdemona said. “Howyou like it?”
Milton chewed,meditatively.After amoment, he held up theBoyScout salute. “I cannot tell a
lie,” he said. “This cookie is lousy.”

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp
as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the
starting lineup? It’s impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly
by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh. Milton
lying on his bed, dreaming about my mother in the same way I would later dream about the
Obscure Object. Milton writing love letters and even, after reading Marvell’s “To His Coy
Mistress” at night school, love poems.MiltonmixingElizabethanmetaphysicswith the rhyming
styles of EdgarBergen:
                    You’rejust as amazing, TessieZizmo
                    as some new mechanical gizmo
                    a GE exec might give a pal
                    you’re a World’sFair kind of gal . . .
Even looking back through a daughter’s forgiving eye, I have to admit: my father was never
good-looking. At eighteen, he was alarmingly, consumptively skinny. Blemishes dotted his face.
Beneath his doleful eyes the skinwas already darkening in pouches. His chinwasweak, his nose
overdeveloped, his Brylcreemed hair as massive and gleaming as a Jell-O mold. Milton,
however, was aware of none of these physical deficits. He possessed a flinty self-confidence that
protected him like a shell from theworld’s assaults.
Theodora’s physical appeal was more obvious. She had inherited Sourmelina’s beauty on a
smaller scale. She was only five foot one, thin-waisted and small-busted, with a long, swanlike
neck supporting her pretty, heart-shaped face. If Sourmelina had always been aEuropean kind of
American, a sort of Marlene Dietrich, then Tessie was the fully Americanized daughter Dietrich
might have had. Her mainstream, even countrified, looks extended to the slight gap between her
teeth and her turned-up nose. Traits often skip a generation. I look much more typically Greek
than my mother does. Somehow Tessie had become a partial product of the South. She said
things like “shucks” and “golly.” Working every day at the florist’s shop, Lina had left Tessie in
the care of an assortment of older women, many of them Scotch Irish ladies from Kentucky, and
in this way a twang had gotten into Tessie’s speech. Compared with Zoë’s strong, mannish
features, Tessie had so-called all-American looks, and this was certainly part of what attracted
my father.
Sourmelina’s salary at the florist’s shop was not high. Mother and daughter were forced to
economize.At secondhand shops, Sourmelina gravitated toVegasshowgirl outfits. Tessie picked

out sensible clothes. Back at O’Toole’s, she mended wool skirts and hand-washed blouses; she
de-pilled sweaters and polished used saddle shoes. But the faint thrift-store smell never quite left
her clothes. (It would attach to me years later when I went on the road.) The smell went along
with her fatherlessness, andwith growing up poor.
Jimmy Zizmo: all that remained of him was what he’d left on Tessie’s body. Her frame was
delicate like his, her hair, though silken, was black like his. When she didn’t wash it enough, it
got oily, and, sniffing her pillow, she would think, “Maybe this is what my dad smelled like.”
She got canker sores in wintertime (against which Zizmo had taken vitamin C). But Tessie was
fair-skinned and burned easily in the sun.
Ever since Milton could remember, Tessie had been in the house, wearing the stiff, churchy
oufits her mother found so amusing. “Look at the two of us,” Lina would say. “Like a Chinese
menu. Sweet and sour.” Tessie didn’t like it when Lina talked this way. She didn’t think she was
sour; only proper. She wished that her mother would act more proper herself. When Lina drank
too much, Tessie was the one who took her home, undressed her, and put her to bed. Because
Lina was an exhibitionist, Tessie had become a voyeur. Because Lina was loud, Tessie had
turned out quiet. She played an instrument, too: the accordion. It sat in its case under her bed.
Every so often she took it out, throwing the strap over her shoulders to keep the huge, many-
keyed, wheezing instrument off the ground. The accordion seemed nearly as big as she was and
she played it dutifully, badly, and alwayswith the suggestion of a carnival sadness.
As little children Milton and Tessie had shared the same bedroom and bathtub, but that was
long ago. Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his
friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. “That’s honey from the
icebox,” he said, asArtie Shawmight have. “Cold sweets don’t spread.”
And then one day Milton came home with some new reeds from the music store. He hung his
coat and hat on the pegs in the foyer, took out the reeds, and balled the paper bag up in his fist.
Stepping into the living room, he took a set shot. The paper sailed across the room, hit the rim of
the trashcan, and bounced out.Atwhich point a voice said, “Youbetter stick tomusic.”
Milton looked to seewho it was.He sawwho itwas. Butwho it waswas no longerwho it had
been.
Theodora was lying on the couch, reading. She had on a spring dress, a pattern of red flowers.
Her feet were bare and that was when Milton saw them: the red toenails. Milton had never
suspected that Theodora was the kind of girl who would paint her toenails. The red nails made
her look womanly while the rest of her—the thin pale arms, the fragile neck—remained as
girlish as always. “I’mwatching the roast,” she explained.
“Where’smymom?”
“Shewent out.”
“Shewent out? She never goes out.”
“She did today.”
“Where’smy sister?”
“4-H.”Tessie looked at the black case hewas holding. “That your clarinet?”
“Yeah.”
“Play something forme.”
Milton set his instrument case down on the sofa. As he opened it and took out his clarinet, he
remained aware of the nakedness of Tessie’s legs. He inserted the mouthpiece and limbered up
his fingers, running them up and down the keys. And then, at the mercy of an overwhelming
impulse, he bent forward, pressing the flaring end of the clarinet to Tessie’s bare knee, and blew
a long note.
She squealed,moving her knee away.
“Thatwas aD flat,”Milton said. “Youwant to hear aD sharp?”
Tessie still had her hand over her buzzing knee. The vibration of the clarinet had sent a shiver
all the way up her thigh. She felt funny, as though she were about to laugh, but she didn’t laugh.
She was staring at her cousin, thinking, “Will you just look at him smiling away? Still got

pimples but thinks he’s the cat’smeow.Where does he get it?”
“All right,” she answered at last.
“Okay,” saidMilton. “D sharp.Here goes.”
That first day it was Tessie’s knees. The following Sunday, Milton came up from behind and
played his clarinet against the back of Tessie’s neck. The sound was muffled. Wisps of her hair
flewup. Tessie screamed, but not long. “Yeah,dad,” saidMilton, standing behind her.
And so it began. He played “Begin the Beguine” against Tessie’s collarbone. He played
“Moonface” against her smooth cheeks. Pressing the clarinet right up against the red toenails that
had so dazzled him, he played “It Goes to YourFeet.” With a secrecy they didn’t acknowledge,
Milton and Tessie drifted off to quiet parts of the house, and there, lifting her skirt a little, or
removing a sock, or once, when nobody was home, pulling up her blouse to expose her lower
back, Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her bodywithmusic. At first
it only tickled her. But after awhile the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations
penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs
hum.
Milton played his instrument with the same fingers he used for the Boy Scout salute, but his
thoughts were anything but wholesome. Breathing hard, bent over Tessie with trembling
concentration, he moved the clarinet in circles, like a snake charmer. And Tessie was a cobra,
mesmerized, tamed, ravished by the sound. Finally, one afternoon when they were all alone,
Tessie, his proper cousin, lay down on her back. She crossed one arm over her face. “Where
should I play?” whispered Milton, his mouth feeling too dry to play anything. Tessie undid a
button on her blouse and in a strangled voice said, “My stomach.”
“I don’t knowa song about a stomach,”Milton ventured.
“My ribs, then.”
“I don’t knowany songs about ribs.”
“My sternum?”
“Nobody everwrote a song about a sternum,Tess.”
She undidmore buttons, her eyes closed.And in barely awhisper: “Howabout this?”
“That one I know,” saidMilton.

When he couldn’t play against Tessie’s skin, Milton opened the window of his bedroom and
serenaded her from afar. Sometimes he called the boardinghouse and asked Mrs. O’Toole if he
could speak with Theodora. “Minute,” Mrs. O’Toole said, and shouted up the stairs, “Phone for
Zizmo!” Milton heard the sound of feet running down the stairs and then Tessie’s voice saying
hello.Andhe began playing his clarinet into the phone.
(Years later, my mother would recall the days when she was wooed by clarinet. “Your father
couldn’t play very well. Two or three songs. That was it.” “Whaddya mean?” Milton would
protest. “I had a whole repertoire.” He’d begin to whistle “Begin the Beguine,” warbling the
melody to evoke a clarinet’s vibrato and fingering the air. “Why don’t you serenade me
anymore?” Tessie would ask. But Milton had something else on his mind: “Whatever happened
to that old clarinet of mine?” And then Tessie: “How should I know? You expect me to keep
track of everything?” “Is it down in the basement?” “Maybe I threw it out!” “You threw it out!
What the hell did you do that for!” “What are you going to do, Milt, practice up? Youcouldn’t
play the darn thing back then.”)
All love serenades must come to an end. But in 1944, there was no stop to the music. By July,
when the telephone rang at the O’Toole Boardinghouse, there was sometimes another kind of
love song issuing from the earpiece: “Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison.” A soft voice, nearly as
feminine as Tessie’s own, cooing into a phone a few blocks away. The singing continued for a
minute at least.And thenMichaelAntoniouwould ask, “Howwas that?”
“Thatwas swell,”mymother said.
“Itwas?”
“Just like in church.Youcould have fooledme.”

Which bringsme to the final complication in that overplotted year.Worried aboutwhatMilton
and Tessie were getting up to, my grandmother wasn’t only trying to marry Milton off to
somebody else. By that summer she had a husband picked out for Tessie, too.
Michael Antoniou—Father Mike, as he would come to be known in our family—was at that
time a seminarian at the Greek Orthodox Holy Cross Theological School out in Pomfret,
Connecticut. Back home for the summer, he had been paying a lot of attention to Tessie Zizmo.
In 1933, Assumption Church had moved out of its quarters in the storefront on Hart Street. Now
the congregation had a real church, on VernorHighway just off Beniteau. The church was made
of yellow brick. It wore three dove-gray domes, like caps, and had a basement for socializing.
During coffee hour, Michael Antoniou told Tessie what it was like out at Holy Cross and
educated her about the lesser-known aspects of Greek Orthodoxy. He told her about the monks
ofMountAthos,who in their zeal for purity banned not onlywomen from their islandmonastery
but the females of every other species, too. There were no female birds on Mount Athos, no
female snakes, no female dogs or cats. “A little too strict for me,” Michael Antoniou said,
smiling meaningfully at Tessie. “I just want to be a parish priest. Married with kids.” My mother
wasn’t surprised that he showed interest in her. Being short herself, she was used to short guys
asking her to dance. She didn’t like being chosen by virtue of her height, but Michael Antoniou
was persistent. And he might not have been pursuing her because she was the only girl shorter
than he was. He might have been responding to the need in Tessie’s eyes, her desperate yearning
to believe that therewas something instead of nothing.
Desdemona seized her opportunity. “Mikey is good Greek boy, nice boy,” she said to Tessie.
“And going to be a priest!” And to Michael Antoniou: “Tessie is small but she is strong. How
many plates you think she can carry, Father Mike?” “I’m not a father yet, Mrs. Stephanides.”
“Please, how many?” “Six?” “That all you think? Six?” And now holding up two hands: “Ten!
Ten plates Tessie can carry.Never break a thing.”
She began inviting Michael Antoniou over for Sunday dinner. The presence of the seminarian
inhibited Tessie, who no longer wandered upstairs for private swing sessions. Milton, growing
surly at this new development, threw barbs across the dinner table. “I guess it must be a lot
harder to be a priest over here inAmerica, huh?”
“Howdoyoumean?”MichaelAntoniou asked.
“I just mean that over in the old country people aren’t too well educated,” Milton said.
“They’ll believe whatever stories the priests tell them. Here it’s different. Youcan go to college
and learn to think for yourself.”
“The Church doesn’t want people not to think,” Michael replied without taking offense. “The
Church believes that thinking will take a person only so far. Where thinking ends, revelation
begins.”
“Chrysostomos!” Desdemona exclaimed. “FatherMike, you have amouth of gold.”
ButMilton persisted, “I’d saywhere thinking ends, stupidity begins.”
“That’s how people live, Milt”—Michael Antoniou again, still kindly, gently—“by telling
stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s
how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. And what story
does theChurch have to tell? That’s easy. It’s the greatest story ever told.”
My mother, listening to this debate, couldn’t fail to notice the stark contrasts between her two
suitors.Onone side, faith; on the other, skepticism.Onone side, kindness; on the other, hostility.
An admittedly short though pleasant-looking young man against a scrawny, pimply, 4-F boy
with circles under his eyes like a hungry wolf. Michael Antoniou hadn’t so much as tried to kiss
Tessie, whereas Milton had led her astray with a woodwind. D flats and A sharps licking at her
like somany tongues of flame, here behind the
knee, up here on the neck, right below the navel . . . the inventory filled her with shame. Later
that afternoon, Milton cornered her. “I got a new song for you, Tess. Just learned it today.” But
Tessie told him, “Get away.” “Why?What’s thematter?” “It’s . . . it’s . . .”—she tried to think of
themost damning pronouncement—“It’s not nice!” “That’s notwhat you said lastweek.”Milton

waved the clarinet, adjusting the reed with a wink, until Tessie, finally: “I don’t want to do that
anymore!Doyouunderstand?Leaveme alone!”
Every Saturday for the remainder of the summer, Michael Antoniou came by O’Toole’s to
pickTessie up. Taking her purse as theywalked along, he swung it by its strap, pretending itwas
a censer. “Youhave to do it just right,” he told her. “If you don’t swing it hard enough, the chain
buckles and the embers fall out.” On their way down the street, my mother tried to ignore her
embarrassment at being seen in public with a man swinging a purse. At the drugstore soda
fountain, she watched him tuck a napkin into his shirt collar before eating his sundae. Instead of
popping the cherry into his mouth as Milton would have done, Michael Antoniou always offered
it to her. Later, seeing her home, he squeezed her hand and looked sincerely into her eyes.
“Thank you for another enjoyable afternoon. See you in church tomorrow.” Then he walked
away, folding his hands behind his back. Practicing how towalk like a priest, too.
After hewas gone, Tessiewent inside and climbed the stairs to her room. She lay downon her
daybed to read. One afternoon, unable to concentrate, she stopped reading and put the book over
her face. Just then, outside, a clarinet began to play. Tessie listened for a while, without moving.
Finally, her hand rose to take the book off her face. It never got there, however. The hand waved
in the air, as if conducting the music, and then, sensibly, resignedly, desperately, it slammed the
window shut.
“Bravo!” Desdemona shouted into the phone a few days later. Then, holding the mouthpiece
to her chest: “Mikey Antoniou just proposed to Tessie! They’re engaged! They are going to get
married as soon asMikey he finishes the seminary.”
“Don’t look too excited,” Zoë told her brother.
“Whydon’t you shut up?”
“Don’t get sore at me,” she said, blind to the future. “I’m not marrying him. You’d have to
shootme first.”
“If she wants to marry a priest,” Milton said, “let her marry a priest. The hell with her.” His
face turned red and he bolted from the table and fled up the stairs.
But why did my mother do it? She could never explain. The reasons people marry the people
they do are not always evident to those involved. So I can only speculate. Maybe my mother,
having grown up without a father, was trying to marry one. It’s possible, too, that her decision
was a practical one. She’d asked Milton what he wanted to do with his life once. “I was thinking
of maybe taking over my dad’s bar.” On top of all the other oppositions, there may have been
this final one: bartender, priest.
Impossible to imagine my father weeping from a broken heart. Impossible to imagine him
refusing to eat. Impossible, also, to imagine him calling the boardinghouse again and again until
finallyMrs.O’Toole said, “Listen, sugar. She don’twant to talk to you.Get it?” “Yeah”—Milton
swallowing hard—“I got it.” “Plenty of other fish in the sea.” Impossible to imagine any of these
things, but they are, in fact,what happened.
MaybeMrs.O’Toole’smaritimemetaphor had given him an idea.Aweek after Tessie became
engaged, on a steamy Tuesday morning, Milton put his clarinet away for good and went down to
Cadillac Square to exchange hisBoyScout uniform for another.
“Well, I did it,” he told the family at dinner that night. “I enlisted.”
“In theArmy!”Desdemona said, horrified.
“What did you do that for?” saidZoë. “Thewar’s almost over.Hitler’s finished.”
“I don’t know about Hitler. It’s Hirohito I’ve got to worry about. I joined the Navy. Not the
Army.”
“What about your feet?”Desdemona cried.
“They didn’t ask aboutmy feet.”
My grandfather, who had sat through the clarinet serenades as he sat through everything,
aware of their significance but unconvinced of the wisdom of getting involved, now glared at his
son. “You’rea very stupid youngman, do you know that?Youthink this is somekind of game?”
“No, sir.”

“This is a war. Youthink it is some kind of fun, a war? Some kind of big joke to play on your
parents?”
“No, sir.”
“Youwill seewhat kind of a big joke it is.”
“TheNavy!”Desdemonameanwhile continued tomoan. “What if your boat it sinks?”
“You see what you do?” Lefty shook his head. “You’re going to make your mother sick
worrying somuch.”
“I’ll be okay,” saidMilton.
Looking at his son, Lefty now saw a painful sight: himself twenty years earlier, full of stupid,
cocky optimism. There was nothing to do with the spike of fear that shot through him but to
speak out in anger. “Okay, then. Go to the Navy,” said Lefty. “But you know what you forgot,
Mr. almost Eagle Scout?” He pointed at Milton’s chest. “You forgot you never win a badge for
swimming.”

NEWSOFTHEWORLD

I waited three days before calling Julie again. It was ten o’clock at night and shewas still in her
studio working. She hadn’t eaten, so I suggested we get something. I said I’d come by and pick
her up.
This time, she let me in. Her studio was a mess, frightening in its chaos, but after the first few
steps I forgot about all that. My attention was arrested by what I saw on the walls. Five or six
large test prints were tacked up, each one showing the industrial landscape of a chemical plant.
Julie had shot the factory froma crane, so that the effect for the viewerwas of floating just above
the snaking pipes and smokestacks.
“Okay, that’s enough,” she said, pushingme toward the door.
“Hold on,” I said. “I love factories. I’m fromDetroit. This is like anAnselAdams forme.”
“Nowyou’ve seen it,” she said, shooingmeout, pleased, uncomfortable, smiling, stubborn.
“I’ve got aBernd andHillaBecher inmy living room,” I boasted.
“You’vegot aBernd andHillaBecher?” She stopped pushingme.
“It’s an old cement factory.”
“Okay, all right,” said Julie, relenting. “I do factories. That’s what I do. Factories. These are
the I. G. Farben plant.” She winced. “I’m worried it’s the typical thing for an American to do
over here.”
“Holocaust industry, youmean?”
“I haven’t read that book, but yeah.”
“If you’ve always done factories, I think it’s different,” I told her. “Then you’re not just
glomming on. If factories are your subject, howcould you not do I.G. Farben.”
“Youthink it’s okay?”
I pointed to the test prints. “These are great.”
We fell silent, looking at each other, and without thinking I leaned forward and kissed Julie
lightly on the lips.
When the kiss was over she opened her eyes very wide. “I thought you were gay when we
met,” she said.
“Must have been the suit.”
“My gay-dar went off completely.” Julie was shaking her head. “I’m always suspicious, being
the last stop.”
“The lastwhat?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of that?Asian chicks are the last stop. If a guy’s in the closet, he goes
for anAsian because their bodies aremore like boys’.”
“Yourbody’s not like a boy’s,” I said.
This embarrassed Julie. She looked away.
“You’vehad a lot of closeted gay guys go after you?” I asked her.
“Twice in college, three times in graduate school,” answered Julie.
Therewas no other response to this but to kiss her again.

To resume my parents’ story, I need to bring up a very embarrassing memory for a Greek
American: Michael Dukakis on his tank. Do you remember that? The single image that doomed
our hopes of getting a Greek into the White House: Dukakis, wearing an oversize army helmet,
bouncing along on top of an M41 Walker Bulldog. Trying to look presidential but looking
instead like a little boy on an amusement park ride. (Every time a Greek gets near the Oval
Office something goes wrong. First it was Agnew with the tax evasion and then it was Dukakis
with the tank.) Before Dukakis climbed up on that armored vehicle, before he took off his J.
Press suit and put on those army fatigues, we all felt—I speak for my fellow Greek Americans,
whether they want me to or not—a sense of exultation. This man was the Democratic nominee
for President of the United States! He was from Massachusetts, like the Kennedys! He practiced
a religion even
stranger than Catholicism, but no one was bringing it up. This was 1988. Maybe the time had
finally come when anyone—or at least not the same old someones—could be President. Behold
the banners at the Democratic Convention! Look at the bumper stickers on all the Volvos.
“Dukakis.”Anamewithmore than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had
happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking, Americans like
their presidents to have nomore than two vowels. Truman. Johnson.Nixon.Clinton. If they have
more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one
syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice. Why did Mario Cuomo decide against
running for President? What conclusion did he come to as he withdrew to think the matter
through? Unlike Michael Dukakis, who was from academic Massachusetts, Mario Cuomo was
from New York and knew what was what. Cuomo knew he’d never win. Too liberal for the
moment, certainly. But also: toomanyvowels.
On top of a tank, Michael Dukakis rode toward a bank of photographers and into the political
sunset. Painful as the image is to recall, I bring it up for a reason. More than anything, that was
whatmynewly enlisted father, Seaman 2ndClassMilton Stephanides, looked like as he bounced
in a landing craft off the California coast in the fall of 1944. Like Dukakis, Milton was mostly
helmet. LikeDukakis’s,Milton’s chin strap looked as though it had been fastened by hismother.
Like Dukakis’s, Milton’s expression betrayed a creeping awareness of error. Milton, too,
couldn’t get off his moving vehicle. He, too, was riding toward extinction. The only difference
was the absence of photographers because itwas themiddle of the night.
A month after joining the United States Navy, Milton found himself stationed at Coronado
naval base in San Diego. He was a member of the Amphibious Forces, whose job it was to
transport troops to the Far East and assist their storming of beaches. It wasMilton’s job—luckily
so far only in maneuvers—to lower the landing craft off the side of the transport ship. For over a
month, six days a week, ten hours a day, that’s what he’d been doing—lowering boats full of
men into various sea conditions.
When he wasn’t lowering landing craft, he was in one himself. Three or four nights a week,
they had to practice night landings.
These were extremely tricky. The coast around Coronado was treacherous. The inexperienced
pilots had trouble steering toward the diff lights, which marked the beaches, and often brought
the boats to shore on the rocks.
Though the army helmet obscuredMilton’s present vision, it gave him a pretty good picture of
the future. The helmet weighed as much as a bowling ball. It was as thick as the hood of a car.
Youput it over your head, like a hat, but it was nothing like a hat. In contact with the skull, an
army helmet transmitted images directly into the brain. These were of objects the helmet was
designed to keep out. Bullets, for instance. And shrapnel. The helmet closed off the mind for
contemplation of these essential realities.

And if you were a person like my father, you began to think about how you could escape such
realities. After a singleweek of drills,Milton realized that he hadmade a terriblemistake joining
the Navy. Battle could be only slightly less dangerous than this preparation for it. Every night
someone got injured. Waves slammed guys up against the boats. Guys fell and got swept
underneath. Theweek before, a kid fromOmaha had drowned.
During the day they trained, playing football on the beach in army boots to build up their legs,
and then at night they had the drills. Exhausted, seasick, Milton stood packed in like a sardine,
shouldering a heavy pack. He had always wanted to be an American and now he got to see what
his fellow Americans were like. In close quarters he suffered their backwoods lubricity and
knucklehead talk. They were in the boats for hours together, getting slammed around, getting
wet. They got to bed at three or four in the morning. Then the sun came up and it was time to do
it all over again.
Why had he joined the Navy? For revenge, for escape. He wanted to get back at Tessie and he
wanted to forget her. Neither had worked. The dullness of military life, the endless repetition of
duties, the standing in line to eat, to use the bathroom, to shave, served as no distraction at all.
Standing in line all day brought on the very thoughts Milton wanted to avoid, of a clarinet
imprint, like a ring of fire, on Tessie’s flushed thigh. Or of Vandenbrock, the kid from Omaha
who’d drowned: his battered face, the seawater leaking through his busted teeth.
All aroundMilton in the boat nowguyswere already getting sick.
Ten minutes in the swells and sailors were bending over and regurgitating the beef stew and
instant mashed potatoes of that evening’s dinner onto the ridged metal floor. This provoked no
comment. The vomit, which was an eerie blue color in the moonlight, had its own wave action,
sloshing back and forth over everybody’s boots. Milton lifted his face, trying to get a whiff of
fresh air.
The boat pitched and rolled. It fell off waves and came crashing down, the hull shuddering.
They were getting close to shore, where the surf picked up. The other men readjusted their packs
and got ready for the make-believe assault, and Seaman Stephanides abandoned the solitude of
his helmet.
“Saw it in the library,” the sailor beside himwas saying to another. “On the bulletin board.”
“What kind of test?”
“Somekind of admittance exam. ForAnnapolis.”
“Yeah,right, they’re gonna let a couple of guys like us intoAnnapolis.”
“Doesn’t matter if they let us in or not. Deal is, whoever takes the test gets excused from
drills.”
“What did you say about a test?”Milton asked, butting in.
The sailor looked around to see if anyone else had heard. “Keep quiet about it. If we all sign
up, itwon’twork.”
“When is it?”
But before the sailor could answer there was a loud, grinding sound: they had hit the rocks
again. The sudden stop knocked everyone forward. Helmets rang against one another; noses
broke. Sailors fell into a pile and the front hatch fell away. Water was streaming into the boat
now and the lieutenant was yelling. Milton, along with everyone else, leapt into the
confusion—the black rocks, the sucking undertow, theMexican beer bottles, the startled crabs.

Back in Detroit, also in the dark, my mother was at the movies. Michael Antoniou, her fiancé,
had returned to Holy Cross and now she had her Saturdays free. On the screen of the Esquire
theater, numerals flashed . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . and a newsreel began. Muted trumpets blared. An
announcer began giving war reports. It had been the same announcer throughout the war, so that
by nowTessie felt she knewhim; hewas almost family.Week afterweek he had informed
her about Monty and the Brits driving Rommel’s tanks out of North Africa and the American
troops liberating Algeria and landing in Sicily. Munching popcorn, Tessie had watched as the
months and years passed. The newsreels followed an itinerary. At first they’d concentrated on

Europe. There were tanks rolling through tiny villages and French girls waving handkerchiefs
from balconies. The French girls didn’t look like they’d been through a war; they wore pretty,
ruffled skirts, white ankle socks, and silk scarves. None of the men wore berets, which surprised
Tessie. She’d always wanted to go to Europe, not to Greece so much, but to France or Italy. As
she watched these newsreels, what Tessie noticed wasn’t the bombed-out buildings but the
sidewalk cafés, the fountains, the self-composed, urbane little dogs.
Two Saturdays ago, she’d seen Antwerp and Brussels liberated by the Allies. Now, as
attention turned toward Japan, the scenerywas changing. Palm trees cropped up in the newsreels,
and tropical islands. This afternoon the screen gave the date “October 1944” and the announcer
announced, As American troops prepare for the final invasion of the Pacific, General Douglas
MacArthur, vowing to make good on his promise of “I shall return,” surveys his troops. The
footage showed sailors standing at attention on deck, or dropping artillery shells into guns, or
horsing around on a beach, waving to the folks back home. And out in the audience my mother
found herself doing a crazy thing. Shewas looking forMilton’s face.
He was her second cousin, wasn’t he? It was only natural she should worry about him. They
had also been, not in love exactly, but in something more immature, a kind of infatuation or
crush. Nothing like what she had with Michael. Tessie sat up in her seat. She adjusted her purse
in her lap. She sat up like a young lady who was engaged to be married. But after the newsreel
ended and the movie began, she forgot about being an adult. She sank down in her seat and put
her feet up over the seat in front.
Maybe it wasn’t a very good movie that day, or maybe she’d seen too many movies
lately—she’d gone for the last eight straight days—but whatever the reason, Tessie couldn’t
concentrate. She kept thinking that if something happened to Milton, if he was wounded or, God
forbid, if he didn’t comeback—shewould be somehow to blame. She hadn’t told him to enlist in
the Navy. If he’d asked her, she would have told him not to. But she knew he’d done it because
of
her. It was a little like Into the Sands, with Claude Barron, which she’d seen a couple of
weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol
marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol
leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron is fighting the Arabs. By the time
Rita Carrol gets there he’s in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent, and
she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, “I went into the desert to forget about you.
But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was
nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.” And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mascara
ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful.

Drilling at night and going to Saturdaymatinees, jumping into the sea and sliding down inmovie
seats, worrying and regretting and hoping and trying to forget—nevertheless, to be perfectly
honest, mostly what people did during the war was write letters. In support ofmy personal belief
that real life doesn’t live up to writing about it, the members of my family seem to have spent
most of their time that year engaged in correspondence. From Holy Cross, Michael Antoniou
wrote twice a week to his fiancée. His letters arrived in light blue envelopes embossed with the
head of Patriarch Benjamin in the upper left-hand corner, and on the stationery inside, his
handwriting, like his voice, was feminine and neat. “Most likely, the first place they’ll send us
after my ordination will be somewhere in Greece. There’s going to be a lot of rebuilding to do
now that theNazis have left.”
At her desk beneath the Shakespeare bookends, Tessie wrote back faithfully, if not entirely
truthfully. Most of her daily activities didn’t seem virtuous enough to tell a seminarian-fiancé.
And so she began to invent a more appropriate life for herself. “This morning Zo and I went
down to volunteer at the Red Cross,” wrote my mother, who had spent the entire day at the Fox
Theater, eating nonpareils. “They had us cut up old bedsheets into strips for bandages. You
should see the blister I’ve got on my thumb. It’s a real whopper.” She didn’t start out with these

wholesale fictions. At first Tessie had given an honest accounting of her days. But in one letter
Michael Antoniou had said, “Movies are fine as entertainment, but with the war I wonder if
they’re the bestway to spend your time.”After that, Tessie started
making things up. She rationalized her lying by telling herself that this was her last year of
freedom. By next summer she’d be a priest’s wife, living somewhere in Greece. To mitigate her
dishonesty, she deflected all honor from herself, filling her letters with praise for Zoë. “She
works six days a week but on Sundays gets up bright and early to take Mrs. Tsontakis to
church—poor thing’s ninety-three and can barelywalk. That’s Zoë.Always thinking of others.”

Meanwhile, Desdemona and Milton were writing to each other, too. Before going off to war, my
father had promised his mother that he’d finally become literate in Greek. Now, from California,
lying on his bunk in the evenings, so sore he could barely move, Milton consulted a Greek-
English dictionary to piece together reports on his navy life. No matter how hard he
concentrated, however, by the time his letters arrived at Hurlbut Street something had been lost
in translation.
“What kind of paper this is?” Desdemona asked her husband, holding up a letter that
resembled Swiss cheese. Like mice, military censors had nibbled at Milton’s letters before
Desdemona got to digest them. They bit off any mention of the word “invasion,” any reference
to “San Diego” or “Coronado.” They chewed through whole paragraphs describing the naval
base, the destroyers and submarines docked at the pier. Since the censors’Greekwas evenworse
thanMilton’s, they oftenmademistakes, lopping off endearments, x’s and o’s.
Despite the gaps in Milton’s missives (syntactical and physical), my grandmother registered
the danger of his situation. In his badly penned sigmas and deltas she spied the shaking hand of
her son’s growing anxiety. Over his grammatical mistakes she detected the note of fear in his
voice. The stationery itself frightened her because it already looked blown to bits.
Seaman Stephanides, however, was doing his best to prevent injury. On a Wednesday
morning, he reported to the base library to take the admittance exam for the U.S. Naval
Academy. Over the next five hours, every time he looked up from his test paper, he saw his
shipmates doing calisthenics in the hot sun. He couldn’t help smiling. While his buddies were
baking out there, Milton was sitting under a ceiling fan, working out a mathematical proof.
While they were forced to run up and down the sandy gridiron, Milton was reading a paragraph
by someone namedCarlyle and answering the questions
that followed. And tonight, when they would be getting creamed against the rocks, he would
be snug in his bunk, fast asleep.
By the time the early months of 1945 rolled in, everyone was looking for exemptions from
duty.Mymother hid fromcharitableworks by going to themovies.My father duckedmaneuvers
by taking a test. But when it came to exemptions, my grandmother sought one from nothing less
than heaven itself.
One Sunday inMarch, she arrived atAssumption before theDivine Liturgy had started.Going
into a niche, she approached the icon of St. Christopher and proposed a deal. “Please, St.
Christopher,” Desdemona kissed her fingertips and touched them to the saint’s forehead, “if you
keepMiltie safe in thewar, Iwillmake himpromise to go back toBithynios and fix the church.”
She looked up at St. Christopher, themartyr ofAsiaMinor. “If theTurks destroyed it,Miltiewill
build it again. If it only needs painting, he’ll paint.” St. Christopher was a giant. He held a staff
and forded a rushing river. On his back was the Christ Child, the heaviest baby in history
because he had the world in his hands. What better saint to protect her own son, in peril on the
sea? In the shadowy, lamplit space, Desdemona prayed. She moved her lips, spelling out the
conditions. “Iwould also like, if possible, St. Christopher, ifMiltie he could be excused from the
training. He tells me it is very dangerous. He’s writing to me in Greek now, too, St. Christopher.
Not too good but okay. I alsomake himpromise to put in the church newpews.Also, if you like,
some carpets.” She lapsed into silence, closing her eyelids. She crossed herself numerous times,
waiting for an answer. Then her spine suddenly straightened. She opened her eyes, nodded,

smiled. She kissed her fingertips and touched them to the saint’s picture, and she hurried home to
writeMilton the good news.

“Yeah, sure,” my father said when he got the letter. “St. Christopher to the rescue.” He slipped
the letter into his Greek-English dictionary and carried both to the incinerator behind the
Quonset hut. (That was the end of my father’s Greek lessons. Though he continued to speak
Greek to his parents, Milton never succeeded in writing it, and as he got older he began to forget
what even the simplest words meant. In the end he couldn’t say much more than Chapter Eleven
orme,whichwas almost nothing at all.)
Milton’s sarcasmwas understandable under the circumstances.
Only the day before, his C.O. had given Milton a new assignment in the upcoming invasion.
The news, like all bad news, hadn’t registered at first. It was as if the C.O.’s words, the actual
syllables he addressed to Milton, had been scrambled by the boys over in Intelligence. Milton
had saluted and walked out. He’d continued down to the beach still unaffected, the bad news
acting with a kind of discretion, allowing him these last few peaceful, deluded moments. He
watched the sunset. He admired a neutral Switzerland of seals out on the rocks. He took off his
boots to feel the sand against his feet, as if the world were a place he was only beginning to live
in instead of somewhere he would soon be leaving. But then the fissures appeared. A split in the
top of his skull, through which the bad news hissingly poured; a groove in his knees, which
buckled, and suddenlyMilton couldn’t keep it out any longer.
Thirty-eight seconds. Thatwas the news.
“Stephanides, we’re switching you over to signalman. Report to Building B at 0700 hours
tomorrow morning. Dismissed.” That was what the C.O. had said. Only that. And it was no
surprise, really. As the invasion neared, there had been a sudden rash of injuries to signalmen.
Signalmen had been chopping off fingers doing KP duty. Signalmen had been shooting
themselves in the feet while cleaning their guns. In the nighttime drills, signalmen lustily flung
themselves onto the rocks.
Thirty-eight seconds was the life expectancy of a signalman. When the landing took place,
Seaman Stephanides would stand in the front of the boat. He would operate a sort of lantern,
flashing signals in Morse code. This lantern would be bright, clearly visible to enemy positions
onshore. That was what he was thinking about as he stood on the beach with his boots off. He
was thinking that hewould never take over his father’s bar. He was thinking that hewould never
see Tessie again. Instead, a fewweeks fromnow, hewould stand up in a boat, exposed to hostile
fire, holding a bright light. For a littlewhile, at least.

Not included in the News of the World: a shot of my father’s AKA transport ship leaving
Coronado naval base, heading west. At the Esquire Theater, holding her feet off the sticky floor,
Tessie Zizmo watches as white arrows arc across the Pacific. The U.S. Naval Twelfth Fleet
forges ahead on its invasion of the Pacific, the announcer says. Final
destination: Japan. One arrow starts out in Australia, moving through New Guinea toward the
Philippines. Another arrow shoots out from the Solomon Islands and another from the Marianas.
Tessie has never heard of these places before. But now the arrows continue on, advancing toward
other islands she’s never heard of—Iwo Jima, Okinawa—each flagged with the Rising Sun. The
arrows converge from three directions on Japan,which is just a bunch of islands itself. AsTessie
is getting the geography straight, the newsreel breaks into filmed footage. A hand cranks an
alarm bell; sailors jump out of bunks, double-time it up stairways, assuming battle stations. And
then there he is—Milton—running across the deck of the ship! Tessie recognizes his skinny
chest, his raccoon eyes. She forgets about the floor and puts her feet down. In the newsreel the
destroyer’s guns fire without sound and, half a world away, amid the elegance of an old-
fashioned cinema, Tessie Zizmo feels the recoils. The theater is about half-full, mostly with
young women like her. They, too, are snacking on candies for emotional reasons; they, too, are
searching the grainy newsreel for the faces of fiancés. The air smells of Tootsie Pops and

perfume and of the cigarette the usher is smoking in the lobby. Most of the time the war is an
abstract event, happening somewhere else.Only here, for four or fiveminutes, squeezed between
the cartoon and the feature, does it become concrete. Maybe the blurring of identity, the mob
release, has an effect on Tessie, inspiring the kind of hysteria Sinatra does. Whatever the reason,
in the bedroom light of the movie theater Tessie Zizmo allows herself to remember things she’s
been trying to forget: a clarinet nosing its way up her bare leg like an invading force itself,
tracing an arrow to her own island empire, an empire which, she realizes at that moment, she is
giving up to the wrong man. While the flickering beam of the movie projector slants through the
darkness over her head, Tessie admits to herself that she doesn’t want to marry Michael
Antoniou. She doesn’t want to be a priest’s wife or move to Greece. As she gazes at Milton in
the newsreel, her eyes fill with tears and she says out loud, “There was nowhere I could go that
wouldn’t be you.”
And while people shush her, the sailor in the newsreel approaches the camera—and Tessie
realizes that it isn’t Milton. It doesn’t matter, however. She has seen what she has seen. She gets
up to leave.
On Hurlbut Street that same afternoon, Desdemona was lying in bed. She had been there for
the last three days, ever since themail-man
had delivered another letter from Milton. The letter wasn’t in Greek but English and Lefty had
to translate:
Dear folks,
This is the last letter I’ll be able to send you. (Sorry for not writing in the native tongue, ma,
but I’m a little busy at themoment.) The brasswon’t letme saymuch aboutwhat’s going on, but
I just wanted to drop you this note to tell you not to worry about me. I’m headed to a safe place.
Keep the bar in good shape, Pop. This war’ll be over some day and I want in on the family
business. Tell Zo to stay out ofmy room.
Love and laughs,
Milt
Unlike the previous letters, this one arrived intact. Not a single hole anywhere.At first this had
cheered Desdemona until she realized what it implied. There was no need for secrecy anymore.
The invasionwas already underway.
At that point, Desdemona stood up from the kitchen table and, with a look of triumphant
desolation,made a grave pronouncement:
“Godhas brought the judgment downonus thatwe deserve,” she said.
She went into the living room, where she straightened a sofa cushion in passing, and climbed
the stairs to the bedroom. There she undressed and put on her nightgown, even though it was
only ten in the morning. And then, for the first time since being pregnant with Zoë and the last
time before climbing in forever twenty-five years later,mygrandmother took to her bed.
For three days she had stayed there, getting up only to go to the bathroom.Mygrandfather had
tried in vain to coax her out. When he left for work the third morning, he had brought up some
food, a dish ofwhite beans in tomato sauce and bread.
The meal was still lying untouched on the bedside table when there came a knock at the front
door. Desdemona did not get up to answer it but only pulled a pillow over her face. Despite this
muffling, she heard the knocking continue. A little later, the front door opened, and finally
footstepsmade theirway up the stairs and into her room.
“AuntDes?”Tessie said.
Desdemona did notmove.
“I’ve got something to tell you,”Tessie continued. “Iwanted you to be the first to know.”
The figure in the bed remained motionless. Still, the alertness that had seized Desdemona’s
body told Tessie that she was awake and listening. Tessie took a breath and announced, “I’m
going to call off thewedding.”
There was a silence. Slowly Desdemona pulled the pillow off her face. She reached for her
glasses on the bedside table, put themon, and sat up in bed. “Youdon’twant tomarryMikey?”

“No.”
“Mikey is a goodGreek boy.”
“I knowhe is. But I don’t love him. I loveMilton.”
Tessie expected Desdemona to react with shock or outrage, but to her surprise my
grandmother barely seemed to register the confession. “You don’t know this, but Milton asked
me tomarry himawhile ago. I said no.Now I’mgoing towrite himand say yes.”
Desdemona gave a little shrug. “You can write what you want, honey mou. Miltie he won’t
get it.”
“It’s not illegal or anything. First cousins can marry even. We’re only second cousins. Milton
went and looked up all the statutes.”
Once again Desdemona shrugged. Drained by worry, abandoned by St. Christopher, she
stopped fighting an eventuality that had never been fated in the first place. “If you and Miltie
want to get married, you have my blessing,” she said. Then, having given her benediction, she
settled back into her pillows and closed her eyes to the pain of living. “And may God grant that
you never have a childwhodies in the ocean.”
In my family, the funeral meats have always furnished the wedding tables. My grandmother
agreed to marry my grandfather because she never thought she’d live to see the wedding. And
my grandmother blessed my parents’ marriage, after vigorously plotting against it, only because
she didn’t thinkMiltonwould survive to the end of theweek.

At sea, my father didn’t think so either. Standing at the bow of the transport ship, he stared out
over thewater at his fast-approaching
end. He wasn’t tempted to pray or to settle his accounts with God. He perceived the infinite
before him but didn’t warm it up with human wishing. The infinite was as vast and cold as the
ocean spreading around the ship, and in all that emptiness what Milton felt most acutely was the
reality of his ownbuzzingmind. Somewhere out over thewaterwas the bullet thatwould end his
life.Maybe itwas already loaded in the Japanese gun fromwhich itwould be fired;maybe itwas
in an ammunition roll. He was twenty-one, oily-skinned, prominent about the Adam’s apple. It
occurred to him that he had been stupid to run off to war because of a girl, but then he took this
back, because it wasn’t just some girl; it was Theodora.As her face appeared inMilton’smind, a
sailor tapped himon the back.
“Whodoyouknow inWashington?”
Hehandedmy father a transfer, effective immediately.Hewas to report to theNavalAcademy
atAnnapolis.On the admissions test,Milton had scored a ninety-eight.
EveryGreek drama needs a deus exmachina.Mine comes in the formof the bosun’s chair that
picked my father off the deck of the AKA transport ship and whisked him through the air to
deposit him on the deck of a destroyer heading back to the U.S. mainland. From San Francisco
he traveled by elegant Pullman car toAnnapolis,where hewas enrolled as a cadet.
“I tell you St. Christopher get you out of the war,” Desdemona exulted when he called home
with the news.
“He sure did.”
“Nowyouhave to fix the church.”
“What?”
“The church.Youhave to fix it.”
“Sure, sure,” Naval Cadet Stephanides said, and maybe he even intended to. He was grateful
to be alive and to have his future back. But with one thing or another, Milton would put off his
trip to Bithynios. Within a year’s time he was married; later, he was a father. The war ended. He
graduated from Annapolis and served in the Korean War. Eventually he returned to Detroit and
went into the family business. From time to time Desdemona would remind her son about his
outstanding obligation to St. Christopher, but my father always found an excuse for not fulfilling
it. His procrastination would have disastrous effects, if you believe in that sort of thing, which,
somedays,when the oldGreek blood is running high, I do.

Myparentsweremarried in June of 1946. In a showof generosity,Michael Antoniou attended
the wedding. An ordained priest now, he presented a dignified, benevolent figure, but by the
second hour of the reception it was clear he was crushed. He drank too much champagne at
dinner and, when the band began playing, sought out the next best thing to the bride: the
bridesmaid, ZoëStephanides.
Zoë looked down at him—about a foot. He asked her to dance. The next thing she knew, they
had started off across the ballroom floor.
“Tessie toldme a lot about you in her letters,” saidMichaelAntoniou.
“Nothing too bad, I hope.”
“Just the opposite. She toldmewhat a goodChristian you are.”
His long robe concealed his small feet, making it difficult for Zoë to follow. Nearby, Tessie
was dancing with Milton in his white naval uniform. As the couples passed each other, Zoë
glared comically at Tessie and mouthed the words, “I’m going to kill you.” But then Milton
twirledTessie around and the two rivals came face-to-face.
“Hey there,Mike,” saidMilton cordially.
“It’s FatherMike now,” said the vanquished suitor.
“Got a promotion, eh?Congratulations. I guess I can trust youwithmy sister.”
He danced away with Tessie, who looked back in silent apology. Zoë, who knew how
infuriating her brother could be, felt sorry for FatherMike. She suggested they get somewedding
cake.

EXOVOOMNIA

So, to recap: Sourmelina Zizmo (née Papadiamandopoulos) wasn’t only my first cousin twice
removed. Shewas alsomy grandmother.My fatherwas his ownmother’s (and father’s) nephew.
In addition to being my grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty were my great-aunt and -uncle. My
parents would be my second cousins once removed and Chapter Eleven would be my third
cousin as well as my brother. The Stephanides family tree, diagrammed in Dr. Luce’s
“Autosomal Transmission of Recessive Traits,” goes into more detail than I think you would
care to know about. I’ve concentrated only on the gene’s last few transmissions. And now we’re
almost there. In honor of Miss Barrie, my eighth-grade Latin teacher, I’d like to call attention to
the quotation above: ex ovo omnia. Getting to my feet (as we did whenever Miss Barrie entered
the room), I hear her ask, “Infants? Can any of you translate this little snippet and give its
provenance?”
I raisemyhand.
“Calliope, ourmuse,will start us off.”
“It’s fromOvid. Metamorphoses. The story of creation.”
“Stunning.And can you render it intoEnglish for us?”
“Everything comes out of an egg.”
“Did you hear that, infants? This classroom, your bright faces, even dear old Cicero on my
desk—they all cameout of an egg!”

Among the arcana Dr. Philobosian imparted to the dinner table over the years (aside from the
monstrous effects of maternal imagination) was the seventeenth-century theory of Preformation.
The Preformationists, with their roller-coaster names—Spallazani, Swammerdam,
Leeuwenhoek—believed that all of humankind had existed in miniature since Creation, in either
the semen of Adam or the ovary of Eve, each person tucked inside the next like a Russian
nesting doll. It all started when Jan Swammerdam used a scalpel to peel away the outer layers of
a certain insect. What kind? Well . . . a member of the phylum Arthropoda. Latin name? Okay,
then: Bombyx mori. The insect Swammerdam used in his experiments back in 1669 was nothing
other than a silkworm. Before an audience of intellectuals, Swammerdam cut away the skin of
the silkworm to reveal what appeared to be a tiny model of the future moth inside, from
proboscis to antennae to foldedwings. The theory of Preformationwas born.
In the same way, I like to imagine my brother and me, floating together since the world’s
beginning on our raft of eggs. Each inside a transparent membrane, each slotted for his or her (in
my case both) hour of birth. There’s Chapter Eleven, always so pasty, and bald by the age of
twenty-three, so that he makes a perfect homunculus. His pronounced cranium indicates his
future deftness with mathematics and mechanical things. His unhealthy pallor suggests his

coming Crohn’s disease. Right next to him, there’s me, his sometime sister, my face already a
conundrum, flashing like a lenticular decal between two images: the dark-eyed, pretty little girl I
used to be; and the severe, aquiline-nosed, Roman-coinish person I am today. And so we drifted,
the twoof us, since theworld began, awaiting our cues and observing the passing show.
For instance: Milton Stephanides graduating from Annapolis in 1949. His white hat flying up
into the air. He and Tessie were stationed at Pearl Harbor, where they lived in austere marital
housing and where my mother, at twenty-five, got a terrible sunburn and was never seen in a
bathing suit again. In 1951 they were transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, at which point Chapter
Eleven’s egg sac next door to mine began to vibrate. Nevertheless, he stuck around to watch the
Korean conflict, where Ensign Stephanides served on a submarine chaser. We watched Milton’s
adult character forming during those years, taking on the no-nonsense attributes of our future
father. TheU.S.Navywas responsible for the precisionwithwhichMilton
Stephanides ever after parted his hair, his habit of polishing his belt buckle with his shirt
sleeve, his “yes, sir”s and “shipshape”s, and his insistence on making us synchronize our
watches at themall. Under the brass eagle and fasces of his ensign’s cap,Milton Stephanides left
the Boy Scouts behind. The Navy gave him his love of sailing and his aversion to waiting in
lines. Even then his politics were being formed, his anti-communism, his distrust of the
Russians. Ports of call in Africa and Southeast Asia were already forging his beliefs about racial
IQ levels. From the social snubs of his commanding officers, he was picking up his hatred of
Eastern liberals and the Ivy League at the same time as he was falling in love with Brooks
Brothers clothing. His taste for tasseled loafers and seersucker shorts was seeping into him. We
knew all this about our father before we were born and then we forgot it and had to learn it all
over again. When the Korean War ended in 1953, Milton was stationed again in Norfolk. And in
March of 1954, asmy fatherweighed his future, Chapter Eleven,with a littlewave of farewell to
me, raised his arms and traveled down thewaterslide into theworld.
And Iwas all alone.
Events in the years before my birth: after dancing with Zoë at my parents’ wedding, Father
Mike pursued her doggedly for the next two and a half years. Zoë didn’t like the idea of
marrying someone either so religious or so diminutive. Father Mike proposed to her three times
and in each case she refused, waiting for someone better to come along. But no one did. Finally,
feeling that she had no alternative (and coaxed by Desdemona, who still thought it was a
wonderful thing to marry a priest), Zoë gave in. In 1949, she married Father Mike and soon they
went off to live in Greece. There she would give birth to four children, my cousins, and remain
for the next eight years.
In Detroit, in 1950, the Black Bottom ghetto was bulldozed to put in a freeway. The Nation of
Islam, now headquartered at Temple No. 2 in Chicago, got a new minister by the name of
Malcolm X. During the winter of 1954, Desdemona first began to talk of retiring to Florida
someday. “They have a city in Florida you know what it is called? New Smyrna Beach!” In
1956, the last streetcar stopped running in Detroit and the Packard plant closed. And that same
year, Milton Stephanides, tired of military life, left the Navy and returned home to pursue an old
dream.
“Do something else,” Lefty Stephanides told his son. They were in the Zebra Room, drinking
coffee. “Yougo to theNavalAcademy to be a bartender?”
“I don’t want to be a bartender. I want to run a restaurant. A whole chain. This is a good place
to start.”
Lefty shook his head.He leaned back and spread his arms, taking in thewhole bar. “This is no
place to start anything,” he said.
He had a point. Despite my grandfather’s assiduous drink-refilling and counter-wiping, the bar
on Pingree Street had lost its luster. The old zebra skin, which he still had on the wall, had dried
out and cracked. Cigarette smoke had dirtied the diamond shapes of the tin ceiling. Over the
years the Zebra Room had absorbed the exhalations of its auto worker patrons. The place
smelled of their beer and hair tonic, their punch-clock misery, their frayed nerves, their trade

unionism. The neighborhood was also changing. When my grandfather had opened the bar in
1933, the area had been white and middle-class. Now it was becoming poorer, and
predominantly black. In the inevitable chain of cause and effect, as soon as the first black family
had moved onto the block, the white neighbors immediately put their houses up for sale. The
oversupply of houses depressed the real estate prices, which allowed poorer people to move in,
andwith poverty came crime, andwith crime camemoremoving vans.
“Business isn’t so good anymore,” Lefty said. “If you want to open a bar, try Greektown. Or
Birmingham.”
My father waved these objections aside. “Bar business isn’t so good maybe,” he said. “That’s
because there’s too many bars around here. Too much competition. What this neighborhood
needs is a decent diner.”
Hercules Hot Dogs™, which at its height would boast sixty-six locations throughout
Michigan, Ohio, and southeastern Florida—each restaurant identified by the distinctive “Pillars
of Hercules” out front—could be said to have begun on the snowy February morning in 1956
when my father arrived at the Zebra Room to begin renovations. The first thing he did was to
remove the sagging venetian blinds from the front windows to let in more light. He painted the
interior a bright white. With a G.I. business loan, he had the bar remodeled into a diner counter
and had a small kitchen installed.
Workmen put red vinyl booths along the far wall and reupholstered the old barstools with
Zizmo’s zebra skin. One morning two deliverymen carried a jukebox in the front door. And
while hammers pounded and sawdust filled the air, Milton acquainted himself with the papers
and deedsLefty had haphazardly kept in a cigar box beneath the register.
“What the hell is this?” he asked his father. “You’ve got three insurance policies on this
place.”
“You can never have too much insurance,” Lefty said. “Sometimes the companies don’t pay.
Better to be sure.”
“Sure? Each one of these is for more than this place is worth. We’re paying on all these?
That’s awaste ofmoney.”
Up until this point, Lefty had let his son make whatever changes he wanted. But now he stood
firm. “Listen to me, Milton. You haven’t lived through a fire. You don’t know what happens.
Sometimes in a fire the insurance company burns down, too. Thenwhat can you do?”
“But three—”
“Weneed three,” insistedLefty.
“Just humor him,”Tessie toldMilton later that night. “Yourparents have been through a lot.”
“Sure they’ve been through a lot. But we’re the ones who have to keep paying these
premiums.”Nevertheless, he did as hiswife said andmaintained all three policies.
The Zebra Room I remember as a kid: it was full of artificial flowers, yellow tulips, red roses,
dwarf trees bearing wax apples. Plastic daisies sprouted from teapots; daffodils erupted from
ceramic cows. Photos of Artie Shaw and Bing Crosby adorned the wall, next to hand-painted
signs that said ENJOY A NICE LIME RICKEY! and OUR FRENCH TOAST IS THE TOAST OF THE TOWN!
There were photos of Milton putting a finishing-touch cherry on a milk shake or kissing
someone’s baby like the mayor. There were photographs of actual mayors, Miriani and
Cavanaugh. The great right fielder Al Kaline, who stopped in on his way to practice at Tiger
Stadium, had autographed his own head shot: “To my pal Milt, great eggs!” When a Greek
Orthodox church in Flint burned down, Milton drove up and salvaged one of the surviving
stained glasswindows.He hung it on thewall over the booths.Athena olive oil tins
lined the front window next to a bust of Donizetti. Everything was hodgepodge:
grandmotherly lamps stood next to El Greco reproductions; bull’s horns hung from the neck of
an Aphrodite statuette. Above the coffeemaker an assortment of figurines marched along the
shelf: PaulBunyan andBabe theBlueOx,MickeyMouse, Zeus, andFelix theCat.
My grandfather, trying to be of help, drove off one day and returned with a stack of fifty
plates.

“I already ordered plates,” said Milton. “From a restaurant supply place. They’re only
charging us 10 percent down.”
“Youdon’twant these?”Lefty looked disappointed. “Okay. I’ll take themback.”
“Hey, Pop,” his son called after him. “Why don’t you take the day off? I can handle things
here.”
“Youdon’t need help?”
“Gohome.HaveMamake you lunch.”
Lefty did as he was told. But as he drove down West Grand Boulevard, feeling unneeded, he
passed Rubsamen Medical Supply—a store with dirty windows and a neon sign that blinked
even in the day—and felt the stirrings of old temptation.
The following Monday, Milton opened the new diner. He opened it at six in the morning, with
a newly hired staff of two, Eleni Papanikolas, in a waitress uniform purchased at her own
expense, and her husband, Jimmy, as short-order cook. “Remember, Eleni, you mostly work for
tips,”Milton pep-talked. “So smile.”
“Atwho?” askedEleni. For despite the red carnations in bud vases gracing each booth, despite
the zebra-stripedmenus,matchbooks, and napkins, theZebraRoom itselfwas empty.
“Smart-ass,” Milton said, grinning. Eleni’s ribbing didn’t bother him. He’d worked it all out.
He’d found a need and filled it.
In the interest of time, I offer you now a stock capitalist montage. We see Milton greeting his
first customers. We see Eleni serving them scrambled eggs. We see Milton and Eleni standing
back, biting their lips. But now the customers are smiling and nodding! Eleni runs to refill their
coffee. Next Milton, in different clothes, is greeting more customers; and Jimmy the cook is
cracking eggs one-handed; and Lefty is looking left out. “Give me two fried whiskey down!”
Milton shouts, showing off his new lingo. “Drywhite, 68,
hold the ice!” Close-up of the cash register ringing open and closed; of Milton’s hands
counting money; of Lefty putting on his hat and leaving unnoticed. Then more eggs; eggs being
cracked, fried, flipped, and scrambled; eggs arriving in cartons through the back door and
coming out on plates through the front hatch; fluffy heaps of scrambled eggs in gleaming yellow
Technicolor; and the cash register banging open again; and money piling up. Until, finally, we
seeMilton andTessie, dressed in their best, following a real estate agent through a big house.

The neighborhood of Indian Village lay just twelve blocks west of Hurlbut, but it was a different
world altogether. The four grand streets of Burns, Iroquois, Seminole, and Adams (even in
Indian Village the White Man had taken half the names) were lined with stately houses built in
eclectic styles. Red-brick Georgian rose next to English Tudor, which gave onto French
Provincial. The houses in Indian Village had big yards, important walkways, picturesquely
oxidizing cupolas, lawn jockeys (whose days were numbered), and burglar alarms (whose
popularity was only just beginning). My grandfather remained silent, however, as he toured his
son’s impressive new home. “How do you like the size of this living room?” Milton was asking
him. “Here, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Tessie and I want you and Ma to feel like this
is your house, too.Now that you’re retired—”
“What do youmean retired?”
“Okay, semiretired. Now that you can take it a little bit easy, you’ll be able to do all the things
you always wanted to do. Look, in here’s the library. Youwant to come over and work on your
translations, you can do it right here.Howabout that table?Big enough for you?And the shelves
are built right into thewall.”
Pushed out of the daily operations at the Zebra Room, my grandfather began to spend his days
driving around the city. He drove downtown to the Public Library to read the foreign
newspapers. Afterward, he stopped to play backgammon at a coffee house in Greektown. At
fifty-four, Lefty Stephanides was still in good shape. He walked three miles a day for exercise.
He ate sensibly and had less of a belly than his son. Nevertheless, time was making its inevitable
depredations. Lefty had towear bifocals now.Hehad a touch of bursitis

in his shoulder. His clothes had gone out of style, so that he looked like an extra in a gangster
movie. One day, appraising himself with severity in the bathroom mirror, Lefty realized that he
had become one of those older men who slicked their hair back in allegiance to an era no one
could remember. Depressed by this fact, Lefty gathered up his books. He drove over to
Seminole, intending to use the library, but when he got to the house he kept on going. With a
wild look in his eyes, he headed instead forRubsamenMedical Supply.
Once you’ve visited the underworld, you never forget the way back. Forever after, you’re able
to spot the red light in the upstairs window or the champagne glass on the door that doesn’t open
until midnight. For years now, driving past Rubsamen Medical Supply, my grandfather had
noticed the unchanging window display of hernia truss, neck brace, and crutches. He’d seen the
desperate, crazily hopeful faces of the Negro men and women who went in and out without
buying a thing. My grandfather recognized that desperation and knew that now, in his forced
retirement, this was the place for him. Roulette wheels spun behind Lefty’s eyes as he sped
toward the West Side. The clicking of backgammon dice filled his ears as he pressed the
accelerator. His blood grew hot with an old excitement, a quickening of the pulse he hadn’t felt
since descending the mountain to explore the back streets of Bursa. He parked at the curb and
hurried inside. He walked past the startled customers (who weren’t used to seeing white people);
he strode past the props of aspirin bottles, corn plasters, and laxatives, and went up to the
pharmacist’swindow in the rear.
“Can I help you?” the pharmacist asked.
“Twenty-two,” saidLefty.
“Yougot it.”
Trying to reclaim the drama of his gambling days, my grandfather started playing the West
Side numbers. He started small. Little bets of two or three dollars. After a few weeks, to recoup
his losses, he went up to ten bucks. Every day he wagered a piece of the new profits from the
restaurant. One day he won and so went double or nothing the next, and lost. Amid hot-water
bottles and enema bags, he placed his bets. Surrounded by cough medicine and cold sore
ointment, he started playing a “gig,” meaning three numbers at once. As they had in Bursa, his
pockets filled upwith scraps of paper.He
wrote out lists of the numbers he played along with the dates, so as not to repeat any. He
played Milton’s birthday, Desdemona’s birthday, the date of Greek Independence minus the last
digit, the year of the burning of Smyrna. Desdemona, finding the scraps in the wash, thought
they had to do with the new restaurant. “My husband the millionaire,” she said, dreaming of
Florida retirement.
For the first time ever, Lefty consulted Desdemona’s dream book, in the hope of calculating a
winning number on the abacus of his unconscious. He became alert to the integers that appeared
in his dreams. Many of the Negroes who frequented Rubsamen’s Medical Supply noticed my
grandfather’s preoccupationwith the dreambook, and after hewon for twoweeks in a row,word
spread. This led to the only contribution Greeks have ever made to African American culture
(aside from the wearing of gold medallions) as the blacks of Detroit began to buy dream books
themselves. The Atlantis Publishing Company translated the books into English and shipped
them to major cities all over America. For a short time elderly colored women began to hold the
same superstitions my grandmother did, believing, for instance, that a running rabbit meant you
were coming into money or that a black bird on a telephone line augured that somebody was
about to die.
“Taking thatmoney to the bank?”Milton asked, seeing his father empty the cash register.
“Yes, to the bank.” And Lefty did go to the bank. He went to withdraw money from his
savings account, in order to continue his steady assault on all nine hundred and ninety-nine
possible permutations of a three-digit variable. Whenever he lost, he felt awful. He wanted to
stop. He wanted to go home and confess to Desdemona. The only antidote to this feeling,
however, was the prospect of winning the next day. It’s possible that a hint of self-
destructiveness played a part in my grandfather’s numbers-playing. Full of survivor’s guilt, he

was surrendering himself to the random forces of the universe, trying to punish himself for still
being alive. But,mostly, gambling just filled his empty days.
I alone, from the private box of my primordial egg, saw what was going on. Milton was too
busy running the diner to notice. Tessie was too busy taking care of Chapter Eleven to notice.
Sourmelina might have noticed something, but she didn’t make many appearances at our house
during those years. In 1953, at a Theosophical Society
meeting, Aunt Lina had met a woman named Mrs. Evelyn Watson. Mrs. Watson had been
attracted to the Theosophical Society by the hope of contacting her deceased husband, but soon
lost interest in communicating with the spirit world in favor of whispering with Sourmelina in
the flesh. With shocking speed, Aunt Lina had quit her job at the florist’s shop and moved down
to the Southwest with Mrs. Watson. Every Christmas since, she sent my parents a gift box
containing hot sauce, a flowering cactus, and a photograph ofMrs.Watson and herself in front of
some national monument. (One surviving photo shows the couple in an Anasazi ceremonial cave
at Bandelier, Mrs. Watson looking as wisely lined as Georgia O’Keeffe while Lina, in a
tremendous sunhat, descends a ladder into a kiva.)
As for Desdemona, during the mid-to-late fifties she was experiencing a brief and completely
uncharacteristic spell of contentment. Her son had returned unhurt from another war. (St.
Christopher had kept his word during the “police action” in Korea and Milton hadn’t been so
much as fired on.) Her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy had caused the usual anxiety, of course, but
Chapter Eleven had been born healthy. The restaurant was doing well. Every week family and
friends gathered atMilton’s newhouse in IndianVillage for Sunday dinner.One dayDesdemona
received a brochure from the New Smyrna Beach Chamber of Commerce, which she had sent
away for. It didn’t look like Smyrna at all, but at least itwas sunny, and therewere fruit stands.
Meanwhile, my grandfather was feeling lucky. Having played at least one number every day
for a little over two years, he had now bet on every number from 1 to 740. Only 259 numbers to
go to reach 999! Then what? What else?—start over. Bank tellers handed rolls of money to
Lefty, which he in turn handed to the pharmacist behind the window. He played 741, 742, and
743. He played 744, 745, and 746. And then one morning the bank teller informed Lefty that
there weren’t sufficient funds in his account to make a withdrawal. The teller showed him his
balance: $13.26. My grandfather thanked the teller. He crossed the bank lobby, adjusting his tie.
He felt suddenly dizzy. The gambling fever he’d had for twenty-six months broke, sending a last
wave of heat over his skin, and suddenly his entire body was dripping wet. Mopping his brow,
Leftywalked out of the bank into his penniless old age.
The earsplitting crymygrandmother let outwhen she learned of
the disaster cannot be done justice in print. The shriek went on and on, as she tore her hair and
rent her garments and collapsed onto the floor. “HOW WILL WE EAT!” Desdemona wailed,
staggering around the kitchen. “WHERE WILL WE LIVE!” She spread her arms, appealing to
God, then beat on her chest, and finally took hold of her left sleeve and ripped it off. “WHAT
KIND OF HUSBAND ARE YOU TO DO THIS TO YOUR WIFE WHO COOKED AND
CLEANED FOR YOU AND GAVEYOU CHILDREN AND NEVER COMPLAINED!” Now
she tore off her right sleeve. “DIDN’T I TELL YOU NOT TO GAMBLE? DIDN’T I?” She
started on her dress proper now. She took the hem in her hands, as ancient Near Eastern
ululations issued from her throat. “OULOULOULOULOULOULOU!
OULOULOULOULOULOULOU!” Mygrandfather watched in astonishment as hismodest wife
shredded her clothing before his eyes, the skirt of the dress, the waist, the bosom, the neckline.
With a final rip, the dress split in two andDesdemona lay on the linoleum, exposing to theworld
the misery of her underwear, her overburdened underwire brassiere, her gloomy underpants, and
the frantic girdle whose stays she was even now popping as she approached the summit of her
dishevelment. But at last she stopped. Before shewas completely naked,Desdemona fell back as
though depleted. She pulled off her hairnet and her hair spilled out to cover her and she closed
her eyes, spent. In the next moment, she said in a practical tone, “Now we have to move in with
Milton.”

Three weeks later, in October 1958, my grandparents moved out of Hurlbut, one year before
they would have paid off the mortgage. Over a warm Indian summer weekend, my father and
dishonored grandfather carried furniture outside for the yard sale, the sea-foam-green sofa and
armchairs, which still looked brand-new beneath plastic slipcovers, the kitchen table, the
bookcases. Lamps were set out on the grass along with Milton’s old Boy Scout manuals, Zoë’s
dolls and tap shoes, a framed photograph of Patriarch Athenagoras, and a closetful of Lefty’s
suits, which my grandmother forced him to sell as punishment. Hair safely restored beneath her
hairnet, Desdemona glowered around the yard, submerged in a despair too deep for tears. She
examined each object, sighing audibly before affixing a price tag, and scolded her husband for
trying to carry things too heavy for him.
“Do you think you’re young? Let Milton do it. You’re an old man.” Under one arm she held
the silkworm box, which wasn’t for sale. When she saw the portrait of the Patriarch, she gasped
in horror. “Wedon’t have bad luck enough youwant to sell the Patriarch?”
She snatched it up and carried it inside. For the rest of the day she remained in the kitchen,
unable to watch the miscellaneous horde of yard sale scavengers pick over her personal
possessions. There were weekend antiquers from the suburbs who brought their dogs along, and
families down on their luck who roped chairs to the roofs of battered cars, and discriminating
male couples who turned everything over to search for trademarks on the bottom. Desdemona
would have felt no more ashamed had she herself been for sale, displayed naked on the green
sofa, a price tag hanging from her foot. When everything had been sold or given away, Milton
drovemygrandparents’ remaining belongings in a rented truck the twelve blocks to Seminole.
In order to give them privacy, my grandparents were offered the attic. Risking injury, my
father and Jimmy Papanikolas carried everything up the secret stairway behind the wallpapered
door. Up into the peaked space they carted my grandparents’ disassembled bed, the leather
ottoman, the brass coffee table, and Lefty’s rebetika records. Trying to make up with his wife,
my grandfather brought home the first of the many parakeets my grandparents would have over
the years, and gradually, living on top of us all, Desdemona and Lefty made their next-to-last
home together. For the next nine years, Desdemona complained of the cramped quarters and of
the pain in her legs when she descended the stairs; but every time my father offered to move her
downstairs, she refused. In my opinion, she enjoyed the attic because the vertigo of living up
there reminded her of Mount Olympus. The dormer window provided a good view (not of
sultans’ tombs but of the Edison factory), and when she left the window open, the wind blew
through as it used to do in Bithynios. Up in the attic, Desdemona and Lefty came back to where
they started.
As doesmy story.
Because now Chapter Eleven, my five-year-old brother, and Jimmy Papanikolas are each
holding a red egg. Dyed the color of the blood of Christ, more eggs fill a bowl on the dining
room table. Red eggs are lined along themantel. They hang in string pouches over
doorways.
Zeus liberated all living things from an egg. Ex ovo omnia. The white flew up to become the
sky, the yolk descended into earth. And on Greek Easter, we still play the egg-cracking game.
JimmyPapanikolas holds his egg out, passive, asChapter Eleven rams his egg against it. Always
only one egg cracks. “I win!” shouts Chapter Eleven. Now Milton selects an egg from the bowl.
“This looks like a good one. Built like a Brinks truck.” He holds it out. Chapter Eleven prepares
to ram it. But before anything happens, my mother taps my father on the back. She has a
thermometer in hermouth.
As dinner dishes are cleared from the table downstairs, my parents ascend hand in hand to
their bedroom. As Desdemona cracks her egg against Lefty’s, my parents shuck off a strict
minimum of clothing. As Sourmelina, back from New Mexico for the holidays, plays the egg
game with Mrs. Watson, my father lets out a small groan, rolls sideways off my mother, and
declares, “That should do it.”
The bedroom grows still. Inside my mother, a billion sperm swim upstream, males in the lead.

They carry not only instructions about eye color, height, nose shape, enzyme production,
microphage resistance, but a story, too. Against a black background they swim, a long white
silken thread spinning itself out. The thread began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago,
when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a baby’s fifth
chromosome. That baby passed the mutation on to her son, who passed it on to his two
daughters, who passed it on to three of their children (my great-great-greats, etc.), until finally it
ended up in the bodies of my grandparents. Hitching a ride, the gene descended a mountain and
left a village behind. It got trapped in a burning city and escaped, speaking bad French. Crossing
the ocean, it faked a romance, circled a ship’s deck, and made love in a lifeboat. It had its braids
cut off. It took a train to Detroit and moved into a house on Hurlbut; it consulted dream books
and opened an underground speakeasy; it got a job at Temple No. 1 . . . And then the gene
moved on again, into new bodies . . . It joined the Boy Scouts and painted its toenails red; it
played “Begin the Beguine” out the back window; it went off to war and stayed at home,
watching newsreels; it took an entrance exam; posed like the movie magazines; received a death
sentence andmade a dealwith St. Christopher; it dated a future priest and broke off an
engagement; it was saved by a bosun’s chair . . . always moving ahead, rushing along, only a
few more curves left in the track now, Annapolis and a submarine chaser . . . until the biology
gods knew this was their time, this was what they’d been waiting for, and as a spoon swung and
a yia yia worried,mydestiny fell into place . . . OnMarch 20, 1954,Chapter Eleven arrived and
the biology gods shook their heads, nope, sorry . . . But there was still time, everything was in
place, the roller coaster was in free fall and there was no stopping it now, my father was seeing
visions of little girls and my mother was praying to a Christ Pantocrator she didn’t entirely
believe in, until finally—right this minute!—on Greek Easter, 1959, it’s about to happen. The
gene is about tomeet its twin.
As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. There’s a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks. I
feelmyself shift, already losing bits ofmy prenatal omniscience, tumbling toward the blank slate
of personhood. (With the shred of all-knowingness I have left, I see my grandfather, Lefty
Stephanides, on the night of my birth nine months from now, turning a demitasse cup upside
down on a saucer. I see his coffee grounds forming a sign as pain explodes in his temple and he
topples to the floor.)Again the sperm ramsmy capsule; and I realize I can’t put it off any longer.
The lease on my terrific little apartment is finally up and I’m being evicted. So I raise one fist
(male-typically) and begin to beat on the walls of my eggshell until it cracks. Then, slippery as a
yolk, I dive headfirst into theworld.
“I’m sorry, little baby girl,” my mother said in bed, touching her belly and already speaking to
me. “Iwanted it to bemore romantic.”
“Youwant romantic?” saidmy father. “Where’smy clarinet?”

BOOKTHREE

HOMEMOVIES

My eyes, switched on at last, saw the following: a nurse reaching out to take me from the
doctor; my mother’s triumphant face, as big as Mount Rushmore, as she watched me heading for
my first bath. (I said it was impossible, but still I remember it.) Also other things, material and
immaterial: the relentless glare ofOR lights; white shoes squeaking overwhite floors; a housefly
contaminating gauze; and all around me, up and down the halls of Women’s Hospital, individual
dramas under way. I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude
of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the
reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new
father’s terror as he calculated the tuition for triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless
rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst
ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of
female suffering,with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.
The nurse who cleaned me up was named Rosalee. She was a pretty, long-faced woman from
the Tennessee mountains. After suctioning the mucus from my nostrils, she gave me a shot of
vitamin K to coagulate my blood. Inbreeding is common in Appalachia, as are genetic
deformities, but Nurse Rosalee noticed nothing unusual about me. She was concerned about a
purple splotch onmycheek,
thinking it was a port-wine stain. It turned out to be placenta, and washed off. Nurse Rosalee
carriedme back toDr. Philobosian for an anatomical exam. She placedme downon the table but
kept one hand on me for security’s sake. She’d noticed the doctor’s hand tremor during the
delivery.
In 1960, Dr. Nishan Philobosian was seventy-four. He had a camel’s head, drooping on its
neck, with all the activity in the cheeks. White hair surrounded his otherwise bald head in a
nimbus and plugged his big ears like cotton. His surgeon’s eyeglasses had rectangular loupes
attached.
He began with my neck, searching for cretinous folds. He counted my fingers and toes. He
inspected my palate; he noted my Moro reflex without surprise. He checked my backside for a
sacral tail. Then, putting me on my back again, he took hold of each of my curved legs and
pulled themapart.
What did he see? The clean, saltwater mussel of the female genitalia. The area inflamed,
swollen with hormones. That touch of the baboon all babies have. Dr. Philobosian would have
had to pull the folds apart to see any better, but he didn’t. Because right at that instant Nurse
Rosalee (for whom the moment was also destiny) accidentally touched his arm. Dr. Phil looked
up. Presbyopic, Armenian eyes met middle-aged, Appalachian ones. The gaze lingered, then
broke away. Five minutes old, and already the themes of my life—chance and sex—announced
themselves. Nurse Rosalee blushed. “Beautiful,” Dr. Philobosian said, meaning me but looking
at his assistant. “Abeautiful, healthy girl.”

OnSeminole, the birth celebrationswere tempered by the prospect of death.
Desdemona had found Lefty on our kitchen floor, lying next to his overturned coffee cup. She
knelt beside him and pressed an ear to his chest. When she heard no heartbeat, she cried out his
name. Her wail echoed off the kitchen’s hard surfaces: the toaster, the oven, the refrigerator.
Finally she collapsed on his chest. In the silence that followed, however, Desdemona felt a
strange emotion rising inside her. It spread in the space between her panic and grief. It was like a
gas inflating her. Soon her eyes snapped open as she recognized the emotion: it was happiness.
Tearswere running downher face, shewas
already berating God for taking her husband from her, but on the other side of these proper
emotions was an altogether improper relief. The worst had happened. This was it: the worst
thing. For the first time in her lifemygrandmother had nothing toworry about.
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,”
“joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies
feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car
constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping
with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family
members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a
word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a
room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve
entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance
anymore. From here on in, everything I’ll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of
being part of events. Here’s where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the
world feels heavier, now I’m a part of it. I’m talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the
smell ofmildew inmovie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain
on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside.
Upuntil now it hasn’t beenmyworld.NotmyAmerica. But herewe are, at last.
The happiness that attends disaster didn’t possess Desdemona for long. A few seconds later
she returned her head to her husband’s chest—and heard his heart beating! Lefty was rushed to
the hospital. Two days later he regained consciousness. His mind was clear, his memory intact.
Butwhen he tried to askwhether the babywas a boy or a girl, he found hewas unable to speak.

According to Julie Kikuchi, beauty is always freakish. Yesterday,over strudel and coffee at Café
Einstein, she tried to prove this to me. “Look at this model,” she said, holding up a fashion
magazine. “Look at her ears. They belong on a Martian.” She started flipping pages. “Or look at
themouth on this one.Youcould put yourwhole head in it.”
I was trying to get another cappuccino. The waiters in their Austrian uniforms ignored me, as
they do everyone, and outside, the yellow lindenswere dripping andweeping.
“Or what about Jackie O.?” said Julie, still advocating. “Her eyes were so wide-set they were
basically on the sides of her head. She looked like a hammerhead.”
I’m working up with the foregoing to a physical description of myself. Baby pictures of the
infant Calliope show a variety of features on the freakish side. My parents, looking fondly down
into my crib, got stuck on every one. (I sometimes think that it was the arresting, slightly
disturbing quality of my face that distracted everyone’s attention from the complications below.)
Imagine my crib as a diorama in a museum. Press one button and my ears light up like two
golden trumpets. Press another andmy stark chin begins to glow. Another, and the high, ethereal
cheekbones appear out of the darkness. So far the effect isn’t promising.On the evidence of ears,
chin, and cheekbones I might be a baby Kafka. But the next button illuminates my mouth and
things begin to improve. The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical. Then, in the
middle of the map, comes the nose. It is nothing like the noses you see in classical Greek
sculpture. Here is a nose that came to Asia Minor, like silk itself, from the East. In this case, the
Middle East. The nose of the diorama baby already forms, if you look closely, an arabesque.
Ears, nose, mouth, chin—now eyes. Not only are they widely set (like Jackie O.’s), they’re big.

Too big for a baby’s face. Eyes like my grandmother’s. Eyes as big and sad as the eyes in a
Keane painting. Eyes rimmed with long, dark eyelashes my mother couldn’t believe had formed
inside her. How had her body worked in such detail? The complexion around these eyes: a pale
olive. The hair: jet black. Now press all the buttons at once. Can you see me? All of me?
Probably not.Noone ever really has.
As a baby, even as a little girl, I possessed an awkward, extravagant beauty. No single feature
was right in itself and yet,when theywere taken all together, something captivating emerged.An
inadvertent harmony. A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another,
having second thoughts.
Desdemona wasn’t interested in my looks. She was concerned with the state of my soul. “The
baby she is two months old,” she said to my father in March. “Why you still no baptize her?” “I
don’t
want her baptized,” answered Milton. “It’s a bunch of hocus-pocus.” “Hokey pokey is it?”
Desdemona now threatened himwith an index finger. “YouthinkHolyTradition that theChurch
keep for two thousand years is hokey pokey?” And then she called on the Panaghia, using every
one of her names. “All-Holy, immaculate, most blessed and glorified Lady, Mother of God and
Ever-Virgin, do you hear what my son Milton is saying?” When my father still refused,
Desdemona unleashed her secretweapon. She started fanning herself.
To anyone who never personally experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the ominous, storm-
gathering quality of my grandmother’s fanning. Refusing to argue anymore with my father, she
walked on swollen ankles into the sun room. She sat down in a cane chair by the window. The
winter light, coming from the side, reddened the far, translucent wing of her nose. She picked up
her cardboard fan. The front of the fan was emblazoned with the words “Turkish Atrocities.”
Below, in smaller print, were the specifics: the 1955 pogrom in Istanbul in which 15 Greeks
were killed, 200 Greek women raped, 4,348 stores looted, 59 Orthodox churches destroyed, and
even the graves of the Patriarchs desecrated. Desdemona had six atrocity fans. They were a
collector’s set. Each year she sent a contribution to the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and a few
weeks later a new fan arrived, making claims of genocide and, in one case, bearing a photograph
of Patriarch Athenagoras in the ruins of a looted cathedral. Not appearing on Desdemona’s
particular fan that day, but denounced nonetheless, was the most recent crime, committed not by
the Turks but by her own Greek son, who refused to give his daughter a proper Orthodox
baptism. Desdemona’s fanning wasn’t a matter of moving the wrist back and forth; the agitation
came from deep within her. It originated from the spot between her stomach and liver where she
once told me the Holy Spirit resided. It issued from a place deeper than her own buried crime.
Milton tried to take shelter behind his newspaper, but the fan-disturbed air rustled the newsprint.
The force of Desdemona’s fanning could be felt all over the house; it swirled dustballs on the
stairs; it stirred the window shades; and, of course, since it was winter, it made everyone shiver.
After a while the entire house seemed to be hyperventilating. The fanning even pursued Milton
into hisOldsmobile,which began tomake a soft hissing from the radiator.
In addition to the fanning,mygrandmother appealed to family
feeling. Father Mike, her son-in-law and my very own uncle, was by this time back from his
years inGreece and serving—in an assistant capacity—atAssumptionGreekOrthodoxChurch.
“Please, Miltie,” Desdemona said. “Think of Father Mike. They never give him top job at the
church. You think if his own niece she no gets baptized it will look good? Think of your sister,
Miltie. PoorZoë!They no havemuchmoney.”
Finally, in a sign that he was weakening, my father asked my mother, “What do they charge
for a baptism these days?”
“They’re free.”
Milton’s eyebrows lifted. But after a moment’s consideration he nodded, confirmed in his
suspicions. “Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.”
By 1960, the Greek Orthodox congregation of Detroit’s East Side had yet another new
building to worship in. Assumption had moved from Vernor Highway to a new site on

Charlevoix. The erection of the Charlevoix church had been an event of great excitement. From
the humble beginnings of the storefront on Hart Street, to the respectable but by no means
splashy domicile off Beniteau, Assumption was finally going to get a grand church building.
Many construction firms bid for the job, but in the end it was decided to give it to “someone
from the community,” and that someonewasBart Skiotis.
Themotives behind building the new churchwere twofold: to resurrect the ancient splendor of
Byzantium and to show the world the financial wherewithal of the prospering Greek American
community. No expense was spared. An icon painter from Crete was imported to render the
iconography. He stayed for over a year, sleeping in the unfinished structure on a thin mat. A
traditionalist, he refrained from meat, alcohol, and sweets, in order to purify his soul and receive
divine inspiration. Even his paintbrush was by the book, made from the tip of a squirrel’s tail.
Slowly, over two years, our East Side Hagia Sophia went up, not far from the Ford Freeway.
There was only one problem. Unlike the icon painter, Bart Skiotis had not worked with a pure
heart. It turned out that he had used inferior materials, siphoning the remaining cash into his
personal bank account. He laid the foundation incorrectly, so that it wasn’t long before cracks
began to branch over thewalls, scarring the iconography. The ceiling leaked, too.
Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky
foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before
Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that
stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which,
without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery
whence it began. My godfather, Jimmy Papanikolas, took me from my father’s arms. He
presented me to Father Mike. Smiling, overjoyed to be center stage for once, Father Mike cut a
lock of my hair and tossed it into the baptismal pool. (It was this part of the ritual, I later
suspected, that was responsible for the fuzzy quality of our font’s surfaces. Years and years of
baby hair, stimulated by the life-giving water, had taken root and grown.) But now Father Mike
was ready for the dunking. “The servant of God, Calliope Helen is baptized in the Name of the
Father, Amen . . . ” and he pushed me under for the first time. In the Orthodox Church, we don’t
go in for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you
have to be buried first, so under the water I went. My family looked on, my mother seized with
anxiety (what if I inhaled?), my brother dropping a penny into the water when no one was
looking, my grandmother stilling her fan for the first time in weeks. Father Mike pulled me up
into the air again—“and of the Son, Amen”—and dunked me under once more. This time I
opened my eyes. Chapter Eleven’s penny, in freefall, glinted through the murk. Down it sank to
the bottomwhere, I nownoticed, lots of thingswere collected: other coins, for instance, hairpins,
somebody’s old Band-Aid. In the green, scummy, holy water, I felt at peace. Everything was
silent. The sides ofmyneck tingled in the placewhere humans once had gills. Iwas dimly aware
that this beginning was somehow indicative of the rest of my life. My family were around me; I
was in the hands of God. But I was in my own, separate element, too, submerged in rare
sensations, pushing evolution’s envelope. This knowledge whizzed through my mind, and then
Father Mike pulled me up again—“and of the Holy Spirit, Amen . . .” One more dunking to go.
Down I went and back up again, into light and air. The three submersions had taken a while. In
addition to being murky, the water was warm. By the third time up, therefore, I had indeed been
reborn: as a fountain. Frombetweenmycherubic legs a streamof crystalline liquid
shot into the air. Lit from the dome above, its yellow scintillance arrested everyone’s attention.
The stream rose in an arc. Propelled by a full bladder, it cleared the lip of the font. And before
my nouno had time to react, it struckFatherMike right in themiddle of the face.
Suppressed laughter from the pews, a few old ladies gasping in horror, then silence. Disgraced
by his own partial immersion—and dabbing himself like a Protestant—Father Mike completed
the ceremony. Taking the chrismon his fingertips, he anointedme,marking the sign of theCross
on the required places, first my forehead, then eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet.
As he touched each place, he said, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Finally he gave me

myFirst Communion (with one exception: FatherMike didn’t forgiveme formy sin).
“That’smygirl,”Milton crowed on thewayhome. “Pissed on a priest.”
“It was an accident,” Tessie insisted, still hot with embarrassment. “Poor Father Mike! He’ll
never get over it.”
“Thatwent really far,”marveledChapter Eleven.
In all the commotion, no onewondered about the engineering involved.

Desdemona took my reverse baptism of her son-in-law as a bad omen. Already potentially
responsible for her husband’s stroke, I had now committed a sacrilege at my first liturgical
opportunity. In addition, I had humiliated her by being born a girl. “Maybe you should try
guessing the weather,” Sourmelina teased her. My father rubbed it in: “So much for your spoon,
Ma. It sort of pooped out on you.” The truth was that in those days Desdemona was struggling
against assimilationist pressures she couldn’t resist. Though she had lived in America as an
eternal exile, a visitor for forty years, certain bits of her adopted country had been seeping under
the locked doors of her disapproval. After Lefty came home from the hospital, my father took a
TVup to the attic to provide some entertainment. Itwas a small black-and-white Zenith, prone to
vertical shift. Milton placed it on a bedside table and went back downstairs. The television
remained, rumbling, glowing. Lefty adjusted his pillows to watch. Desdemona tried to do
housework but found herself looking over at the screenmore andmore often. She still didn’t like
cars. She covered her ears
whenever the vacuumcleanerwas on. But the TVwas somehowdifferent.Mygrandmother took
to television right away. It was the first and only thing about America she approved of.
Sometimes she forgot to turn the set off and would awaken at 2 a.m. to hear “The Star-Spangled
Banner” playing before the station signed off.
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents’
lives. Desdemona watched all day long, scandalized by the love affairs on As the WorldTurns.
She liked detergent commercials especially, anything with animated scrubbing bubbles or
avenging suds.
Living on Seminole contributed to the cultural imperialism. On Sundays, instead of serving
Metaxa, Milton fixed cocktails for his guests. “Drinks with the names of people,” Desdemona
complained to her mute husband back in the attic. “Tom Collins. Harvey Wall Bang. This is a
drink! And they are listening to music on the, how you say, the hi-fi. Milton he puts this music,
and they drink Tom Collins and sometimes they are, you know, dancing, one on one, men
togetherwith thewomen. Likewrestling.”
What was I to Desdemona but another sign of the end of things? She tried not to look at me.
She hid behind her fans. Then one day Tessie had to go out and Desdemona was forced to baby-
sit. Warily, she entered my bedroom. Taking cautious steps, she approached my crib. Black-
draped sexagenarian leaned down to examine pink-swaddled infant. Maybe something in my
expression set off an alarm. Maybe she was already making the connections she would later
make, between village babies and this suburban one, between old wives’ tales and new
endocrinology . . . Then again,maybe not. Because as she peered distrustfully over the rail ofmy
crib, she saw my face—and blood intervened. Desdemona’s worried expression hovered above
my (similarly) perplexed one. Her mournful eyes gazed down at my (equally) large black orbs.
Everything about us was the same. And so she picked me up and I did what grandchildren are
supposed to do: I erased the years between us. I gaveDesdemona back her original skin.
From then on, I was her favorite. Midmornings she would relieve my mother by taking me up
to the attic. Lefty had regainedmost of his strength by this time.Despite his speech paralysis,my
grandfather remained a vital person.He got up early every day, bathed,
shaved, and put on a necktie to translate Attic Greek for two hours before breakfast. He no
longer had aspirations to publish his translations but did thework because he liked it and because
it kept his mind sharp. In order to communicate with the rest of the family, he kept a little
chalkboardwith himat all times.Hewrotemessages inwords and personal hieroglyphics.Aware

that he and Desdemona were a burden to my parents, Lefty was extremely helpful around the
house, doing repairs, assisting with the cleaning, running errands. Every afternoon he took his
three-mile walk, no matter the weather, and returned cheerful, his smile full of gold fillings. At
night he listened to his rebetika records in the attic and smoked his hookah pipe. Whenever
Chapter Eleven asked what was in the pipe, Lefty wrote on his chalkboard, “Turkish mud.” My
parents always believed it was an aromatic brand of tobacco. Where Lefty obtained the hash is
anybody’s guess.Out on hiswalks, probably.He still had lots ofGreek andLebanese contacts in
the city.
From ten to noon every day my grandparents took care of me. Desdemona fed me my bottles
and changed my diapers. She finger-combed my hair. When I got fussy, Lefty carried me around
the room. Since he couldn’t speak to me, he bounced me a lot and hummed to me, and touched
his big, arching nose to my little, latent one. My grandfather was like a dignified, unpainted
mime, and I was almost five before I realized that anything was wrong with him. When he tired
ofmaking faces, he carriedme to the dormerwindow,where, together, from the opposite ends of
life,we gazed down at our leafy neighborhood.

Soon I was walking. Animated by brightly wrapped presents, I scampered into the frames of my
father’s home movies. On those first celluloid Christmases I look as overdressed as the Infanta.
Starved for a daughter, Tessie went a little overboard in dressing me. Pink skirts, lace ruffles,
Yuletidebows in my hair. I didn’t like the clothes, or the prickly Christmas tree, and am usually
shownbursting dramatically into tears . . .
Or it might have been my father’s cinematography. Milton’s camera came equipped with a
rack of merciless floodlights. The brightness of those films gives them the quality of Gestapo
interrogations.Holding up our presents,we all cringe, as though caughtwith contraband.
Aside from their blinding brightness, there was another odd thing about Milton’s home
movies: like Hitchcock, he always appeared in them. The only way to check the amount of film
left in the camera was by reading the counter inside the lens. In the middle of Christmas scenes
or birthday parties there always came a moment when Milton’s eye would fill the screen. So that
now, as I quickly try to sketch my early years, what comes back most clearly is just that: the
brown orb of my father’s sleepy, bearish eye. A postmodern touch in our domestic cinema,
pointing up artifice, calling attention tomechanics. (And bequeathingmemy aesthetic.) Milton’s
eye regarded us. It blinked.An eye as big as theChrist Pantocrator’s at church, it was better than
any mosaic. It was a living eye, the cornea a little bloodshot, the eyelashes luxuriant, the skin
underneath coffee-stained and pouchy. This eye would stare us down for as long as ten seconds.
Finally the camerawould pull away, still recording.We’d see the ceiling, the lighting fixture, the
floor, and then us again: the Stephanides.
First of all, Lefty. Still dapper despite stroke damage, wearing a starched white shirt and glen-
plaid trousers, he writes on his chalkboard and holds it up: “Christos Anesti.” Desdemona sits
across from him, her dentures making her look like a snapping turtle. My mother, in this home
movie marked “Easter ’62,” is two years from turning forty. The crow’s-feet around her eyes are
another reason (aside from the floodlights) why she holds a hand over her face. In this gesture I
see the emotional sympathy I’ve always felt with Tessie, the two of us never happier than when
unobserved, people-watching. Behind her hand I can see the traces of the novel she stayed up
reading the previous night. All the big words she had to look up in the dictionary crowd her tired
head, waiting to show up in the letters she writes me today. Her hand is also a refusal, her only
way of getting back at a husband who has begun to disappear on her. (Milton came home every
night; he didn’t drink or womanize but, preoccupied with business worries, he began to leave a
little more of himself at the diner each day, so that the man who returned to us seemed less and
less present, a kind of robot who carved turkeys and filmed holidays but who wasn’t really there
at all.) Finally, of course, my mother’s upraised hand is a kind of warning, too, a predecessor of
the black box.
Chapter Eleven sprawls on the carpet,wolfing candy.Grandson

of the two former silk farmers (with chalkboard and worry beads), he has never had to help in
the cocoonery.He has never been to theKozaHan. Environment has alreadymade its imprint on
him.Hehas the tyrannical, self-absorbed look ofAmerican children . . .
And now two dogs come bounding into the frame. Rufus and Willis, our two boxers. Rufus
sniffs my diaper and, with perfect comic timing, sits on me. He will later bite someone, and both
dogs will be given away. My mother appears, shooing Rufus . . . and there I am again. I stand up
and toddle toward the camera, smiling, trying outmywave . . .
I know this film well. “Easter ’62” was the home movie Dr. Luce talked my parents into
giving him. This was the film he screened each year for his students at Cornell University
Medical School. This was the thirty-five-second segment that, Luce insisted, proved out his
theory that gender identity is established early on in life. This was the film Dr. Luce showed to
me, to tell me who I was. And who was that? Look at the screen. My mother is handing me a
baby doll. I take the baby and hug it to my chest. Putting a toy bottle to the baby’s lips, I offer it
milk.

My early childhood passed, on film and otherwise. I was brought up as a girl and had no doubts
about this. My mother bathed me and taught me how to clean myself. From everything that
happened later, I would guess that these instructions in feminine hygiene were rudimentary at
best. I don’t remember any direct allusions to my sexual apparatus. All was shrouded in a zone
of privacy and fragility, where my mother never scrubbed me too hard. (Chapter Eleven’s
apparatus was called a “pitzi.” But for what I had there was no word at all.) My father was even
more squeamish. In the rare times he diapered me or gave me a bath, Milton studiously averted
his eyes. “Did you wash her all over?” my mother would ask him, speaking obliquely as usual.
“Not all over. That’s your department.”
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome is a skillful
counterfeiter. Until I reached puberty and androgens flooded my bloodstream, the ways in which
I differed from other little girls were hard to detect. My pediatrician never noticed anything
unusual. And by the time I was five Tessie had started taking me to Dr. Phil—Dr. Phil with his
failing eyesight and his cursory examinations.
On January 8, 1967, I turned seven years old. 1967 marked the end of many things in Detroit,
but among these was my father’s home movies. “Callie’s 7th B-Day” was the last of Milton’s
Super 8s. The setting was our dining room, decorated with balloons. On my head sits the usual
conical hat. Chapter Eleven, twelve years old, does not join the boys and girls at the table but
instead stands back against the wall, drinking punch. The difference in our ages meant that my
brother and Iwere never close growing up.When Iwas a babyChapter Elevenwas a kid,when I
was a kid hewas a teenager, and by the time I became a teenager hewas an adult. At twelve, my
brother liked nothing better than to cut golf balls in half to see what was inside. Usually, his
vivisection of Wilsons and Spaldings revealed cores consisting of extremely tightly bundled
rubber bands. But sometimes there were surprises. In fact, if you look very closely at my brother
in this home movie, you will notice a strange thing: his face, arms, shirt, and pants are covered
by thousands of tinywhite dots.
Just before my birthday party had started, Chapter Eleven had been down in his basement
laboratory, using a hacksaw on a newfangled Titleist that advertised a “liquid center.” The ball
was held firmly in a vise as Chapter Eleven sawed. When he reached the center of the Titleist,
there was a loud popping sound followed by a puff of smoke. The center of the ball was empty.
Chapter Elevenwasmystified. Butwhen he emerged from the basement,we all saw the dots . . .
Back at the party, my birthday cake is coming out with its seven candles. My mother’s silent
lips are telling me to make a wish. What did I wish for at seven? I don’t remember. In the film I
lean forward and, Aeolian, blow the candles out. In a moment, they re-ignite. I blow them out
again. Same thing happens. And then Chapter Eleven is laughing, entertained at last. That was
howour homemovies ended,with a prank onmybirthday.With candles that hadmultiple lives.
The question remains: Why was this Milton’s last movie? Can it be explained by the usual

petering out of parents’ enthusiasm for documenting their children on film? By the fact that
Milton took hundreds of baby photographs of Chapter Eleven and no more than twenty or so of
me? To answer these questions, I need to go behind the camera and see things through my
father’s eyes.
The reasonMiltonwas disappearing on us: after ten years in business,
the dinerwas no longermaking a profit. Through the frontwindow (overAthena olive oil tins)
my father looked out day after day at the changes on Pingree Street. The white family who’d
lived across theway, good customers once, hadmoved out.Now the house belonged to a colored
man named Morrison. He came into the diner to buy cigarettes. He ordered coffee, asked for a
million refills, and smoked.He never ordered any food.He didn’t seem to have a job. Sometimes
other people moved into his house, a young woman, maybe Morrison’s daughter, with her kids.
Then they were gone and it was just Morrison again. There was a tarp up on his roof with bricks
around it, to cover a hole.
Just down the block an after-hours place had opened up. Its patrons urinated in the doorway of
the diner on theirway home. Streetwalkers had startedworkingTwelfth 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.Hewasmoving 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 outwhile the getting’s good.”
And thenGusPanos,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’sWar onPoverty.
A fewweeks later,Milton had had the business appraised andwasmetwith a shock: theZebra
Roomwasworth less thanwhenLefty had acquired it in 1933.Milton hadwaited too long to sell
it. The getting outwas no longer good.
And so theZebraRoom remained on the corner of Pingree andDexter, the swingmusic 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 andwinked. “Andwhat’ll theMrs. have?”
“I’mnot theMrs.!”
“You’renot?”
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 blockwhile he orated.Always his armwas in the air, waving and gesticulating. But if
he happened to seeme, his raised fistwould open up, and hewouldwave.
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. Youand 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 hewould 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 (hewore 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 SpanishCivilWar. ChéGuevara had asthma, too.
AndMariuswore a beret. A black paramilitary beretwith 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 fingerwent down the block.
“TV store, white-owned. Grocery store, white-owned. Bank . . .” Brothers looked around . . .
“Yougot 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
unwellwhen I came roller-skating by.
“Hi,Marius.”
He did not vocally respond, a signwith him that hewas in low spirits. But he nodded his head,
which gaveme the courage to continue.
“Whydon’t you get a better chair to stand on?”
“Youdon’t likemy chair?”
“It’s all broken.”
“This chair is an antique. Thatmeans it’s supposed to be broken.”
“Not that broken.”
ButMariuswas squinting across the street at theZebraRoom.
“Letme ask you something, littleCleo.”
“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?”
“Hegives them free coffee.”
“Andwhydoyou 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.
“Youdon’t think so?”
“No.”
“Okay, then,Queenie.Youknowbest.”
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 themenu.”
“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 toldme. “Gotta study.”
“I’m in second grade,” I said.
“Only second! I had you down for high school at least.”

I gave himmymostwinning smile.
“Must be that Ptolemyblood. Just stay away from theRomanmen, 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 suddenlymy fatherwas shoutingmyname. “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.”
“Youstay away fromher, you hearme?”
“Daddy!” I protested, appalled, embarrassed formy 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 dayMilton kept afterme. “Youare never, ever, to talk to strangers like that.
What’s thematterwith you?”
“He’s not a stranger.His name isMariusWyxzewixardChallouehliczilczeseGrimes.”
“Youhearme?Youstay away frompeople 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 fewmonths, undermyownpower.

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 thatwewould 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. TheDundee 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’sme 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 theway. 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
aboutwhat Iwas saying. I had suddenly forgotten all about the nudists. Because Iwas 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 afterwinter, 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,
whileChapter Eleven picked dandelions tomake dandelionwine.
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.
Nowhe realized that the first link in that chain, theZebraRoom,was aweak 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 onMondays andTuesdays 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 endedwasn’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
thatMiltonwas thinking about Pingree Street; hewas going to seed thewayPingree Streetwas.
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’swhatMilton felt, seeing his father sunk in desk light, jutting out amoist 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 ofmymother’s nosewhenever 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 therewas a brownout in the distance andMilton 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 lumpyundermy 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, thewall 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 thewar.
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 theEconomyPrintingCo. at 9125Twelfth Street—three blocks fromPingree—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. Key-lime 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
5 a.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 fromhere?They’re numb to that, too, except for a couplewho 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 awindowopens and someone yells, “It’s the fuzz!Out the backway!”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 andwatch as the clients of the blind pig are led out in handcuffs, and a fewgirls 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, theway the air has somehowbeen 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 recom-missioned, because the riots have begun . . .

At 6:23 a.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, letme speak to your father?”
“Just one minute please.” I put down the pink phone, walked into my parents’ bedroom, and
shookmy father awake.
“It’sMr. 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-filledmorning erection. (So itwas
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.”
Andme, still squeezingmyeyes shut to erasewhat 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 earlymorning streets.All theway toWoodward 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 thewheel signaledMilton to turn back, butMilton 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 onTrumbullwaswhereMrs. 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 itwas somekind of game, somekind 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 amoment and thenwinked out.

In every chase scene we’d everwatched, the hero always climbed up to the roof. Strict realists in
my family, we always objected: “Why do they always go up?” “Watch. He’s going to climb the
tower. See? I told you.” But Hollywood knew more about human nature than we realized.
Because, facedwith this emergency, Tessie tookChapter Eleven andme up to the attic.Maybe it
was a vestige of our arboreal past; we wanted to climb up and out of danger. Or maybe my
mother felt safer there because of the door that blended in with the wallpaper. Whatever the
reason, we took a suitcase full of food up to the attic and stayed there for three days, watching
the city burn onmygrandparents’ small black-and-white. In housedress and sandals, Desdemona
held her cardboard fan to her chest, shielding herself
against the spectacle of life repeating itself. “Oh my God! Is like Smyrna! Look at the mavros!
Like theTurks they are burning everything!”
It was hard to argue with the comparison. In Smyrna people had taken their furniture down to
the waterfront; and on television now people were carrying furniture, too. Men were lugging
brand-new sofas out of stores. Refrigerators were sailing along the avenues, as were stoves and
dishwashers. And just like in Smyrna everyone seemed to have packed all their clothes. Women
were wearing minks despite the July heat. Menwere trying on new suits and running at the same
time. “Smyrna! Smyrna! Smyrna!” Desdemona kept wailing, and I’d already heard so much
about Smyrna in my seven years that I watched the screen closely to see what it had been like.
But I didn’t understand. Sure, buildings were burning, bodies were lying in the street, but the
mood wasn’t one of desperation. I’d never seen people so happy in my entire life. Men were
playing instruments taken from a music store. Other men were handing whiskey bottles through
a shatteredwindowandpassing themaround. It lookedmore like a block party than it did a riot.
Up until that night, our neighborhood’s basic feeling about our fellow Negro citizens could be
summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier’s performance in ToSir with
Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, “You see, they can speak perfectly
normal if they want.” That was how we felt. (Even me back then, I won’t deny it, because we’re
all the children of our parents.) We were ready to accept the Negroes. We weren’t prejudiced
against them.Wewanted to include them in our society if they would only act normal!
In their support for Johnson’s Great Society, in their applause after To Sir with Love, our
neighbors and relatives made clear their well-intentioned belief that the Negroes were fully
capable of being just like white people—but then what was this? they asked themselves as they
saw the pictures on television. What were those young men doing carrying a sofa down the
street? Would Sidney Poitier ever take a sofa or a large kitchen appliance from a store without
paying?Would he dance like that in front of a burning building? “No respect for private property
whatsoever,” cried Mr. Benz, who lived next door. And his wife Phyllis: “Where are they going

to live if they burn down their ownneighborhood?”OnlyAuntZo seemed to sympathize: “I
don’t know. If I was walking down the street and there was a mink coat just sitting there, I
might take it.” “Zoë!” Father Mike was shocked. “That’s stealing!” “Oh, what isn’t, when you
come right down to it. Thiswhole country’s stolen.”
For three days and two nights we waited in the attic to hear from Milton. The fires had
knocked out phone service, andwhenmymother called the restaurant, all she gotwas a recorded
messagewith an operator’s voice.
For three days no one left the attic except Tessie, who hurried downstairs to get food from our
emptying cupboards.Wewatched the death toll rise.

Day 1: Deaths—15. Injuries—500. Stores looted—1,000.
Fires—800.
Day 2: Deaths—27. Injuries—700. Stores looted—1,500.
Fires—1,000.
Day 3: Deaths—36. Injuries—1,000. Stores looted—1,700.
Fires—1,163.

For three dayswe studied the photographs of the victims as they appeared onTV.Mrs. Sharon
Stone, struck by a sniper’s bullet as her car was stopped at a traffic light. Carl E. Smith, a
fireman, killed by a sniper as he battled a blaze.
For three dayswewatched the politicians hesitate and argue: theRepublican governor,George
Romney, asking President Johnson to send in federal troops; and Johnson, aDemocrat, saying he
had an “inability” to do such a thing. (Therewas an election coming up in the fall. Theworse the
riots got, the worse Romney was going to do. And so before he sent in the paratroopers,
President Johnson sent in Cyrus Vance to assess the situation. Nearly twenty-four hours passed
before federal troops arrived. In themeantime the inexperiencedNationalGuardwas shooting up
the town.)
For three days we didn’t bathe or brush our teeth. For three days all the normal rituals of our
life were suspended, while half-forgotten rituals, like praying, were renewed. Desdemona said
the prayers inGreek aswe gathered around her bed, andTessie tried as usual to dispel her doubts
and truly believe. The vigil light no longer contained oil butwas an electric bulb.
For three dayswe received noword fromMilton.WhenTessie returned
from her trips downstairs I began to detect, in addition to the traces of tears on her face, faint
streaks of guilt. Death alwaysmakes people practical. Sowhile Tessie had been on the first floor,
foraging for food, she had also been searching in Milton’s desk. She had read the terms of his
life insurance policy. She had checked the balance in their retirement account. In the bathroom
mirror she appraised her looks, wondering if she could attract another husband at her age. “I had
you kids to think of,” she confessed to me years later. “I was wondering what we’d do if your
father didn’t comeback.”
To live in America, until recently, meant to be far from war. Wars happened in Southeast
Asian jungles. They happened in Middle Eastern deserts. They happened, as the old song has it,
over there. But then why, peeking out the dormer window, did I see, on the morning after our
second night in the attic, a tank rolling by our front lawn? A green army tank, all alone in the
long shadows of morning, its enormous treads clanking against the asphalt. An armor-plated
military vehicle encountering no greater obstacle than a lost roller skate. The tank rolled past the
affluent homes, the gables and turrets, the porte cocheres. It stopped briefly at the stop sign. The
gun turret looked bothways, like a driver’s ed student, and then the tankwent on itsway.
What had happened: late Monday night, President Johnson, finally giving in to Governor
Romney’s request, had ordered in federal troops. General John L. Throckmorton set up the
headquarters of the 101st Airborne at Southeastern High, where my parents had gone to school.
Though the fiercest rioting was on the West Side, General Throckmorton chose to deploy his

paratroopers on the East Side, calling this decision “an operational convenience.” By early
Tuesdaymorning the paratroopersweremoving in to quell the disturbance.
No one elsewas awake to see the tank rumble by.Mygrandparentswere dozing in bed. Tessie
and Chapter Eleven were curled on air mattresses on the floor. Even the parakeets were quiet. I
remember looking at my brother’s face peeking out of his sleeping bag. On the flannel lining,
hunters shot at ducks. This masculine background served only to emphasize Chapter Eleven’s
lack of heroic qualities. Who was going to come to my father’s aid? Who could my father rely
on?Chapter Elevenwith hisCoke-bottle glasses?Leftywith his
chalkboard and sixty-plus years? What I did next had no connection, I believe, with my
chromosomal status. It did not result from the high-testosterone plasma levels in my blood. I did
what any loving, loyal daughter would have done who had been raised on a diet of Hercules
movies. In that instant, I decided to find my father, to save him, if necessary, or at least to tell
him to comehome.
Crossing myself in the Orthodox fashion, I stole down the attic stairs, closing the door behind
me. In my bedroom I put on sneakers and my Amelia Earhart aviator’s cap. Without waking
anyone I let myself out the front door, ran to my bicycle parked at the side of the house, and
pedaled away. After two blocks, I caught sight of the tank: it had stopped at a red light. The
soldiers inside were busy looking at maps, trying to find the best route to the riots. They didn’t
notice the little girl in the aviator’s cap stealing up on a banana bike. It was still dark out. The
birds were beginning to sing. Summer smells of lawn and mulch filled the air, and suddenly I
lost my nerve. The closer I got to the tank, the bigger it looked. I was frightened and wanted to
run back home. But the light changed and the tank lurched forward. Standing up on my pedals, I
sped after it.

Across town, in the lightless Zebra Room, my father was trying to stay awake. Barricaded
behind the cash register, holding the revolver in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other,
Milton looked out the front window to see what was happening in the street. Over the last two
sleepless nights the circles under Milton’s eyes had darkened steadily with each cup of coffee he
drank. His eyelids hung at half mast, but his brow was damp with the perspiration of anxiety and
vigilance.His stomach hurt.He needed to go to the bathroom in theworstway but didn’t dare.
Outside, they were at it again: the snipers. It was almost 5 a.m. Each night, the sinking sun,
like a ring on a window shade, pulled night down over the neighborhood. From wherever the
snipers disappeared to during the hot day, they returned. They took up their positions. From the
windows of condemned hotels, from fire escapes and balconies, from behind cars jacked up in
front yards, they extended the barrels of their assorted guns. If you looked closely, if you were
brave or reckless enough to stick your head out the window this time of night, you could see by
themoon—that other pull ring, going
up—hundreds of glinting guns, pointed down into the street, through which the soldiers were
nowadvancing.
The only light inside the diner came from the red glow of the jukebox. It stood to one side of
the front door, a Disco-Matic made of chrome, plastic, and colored glass. There was a small
window through which you could watch the robotic changing of records. Through a circulatory
system along the jukebox’s edges trails of dark blue bubbles rose. Bubbles representing the
effervescence of American life, of our postwar optimism, of our fizzy, imperial, carbonated
drinks. Bubbles full of the hot air of American democracy, boiling up from the stacked vinyl
platters inside. “Mama Don’t Allow It” by Bunny Berigan maybe, or “Stardust” by Tommy
Dorsey and his orchestra. But not tonight. Tonight Milton had the jukebox off so that he could
hear if anyonewas trying to break in.
The cluttered walls of the restaurant took no notice of the rioting outside. Al Kaline still
beamed from his frame. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox continued on their trek below the
daily special. The menu board itself still offered eggs, hash browns, seven kinds of pie. So far
nothing had happened. Somewhat miraculously. Squatting at the front window yesterday, Milton

had seen looters break into every store down the block. They looted the Jewish market, taking
everything but the matzoh and the yahrzeit candles. With a sharp sense of style, they stripped
Joel Moskowitz’s shoe store of its higher-priced and more fashionable models, leaving only
some orthopedic offerings and a few Florsheims. All that was left in Dyer’s Appliance, as far as
Milton could tell, was a rack of vacuum bags. What would they loot if they looted the diner?
Would they take the stained glass window, which Milton himself had taken? Would they show
interest in the photo of Ty Cobb snarling as he slid, spikes first, into second base? Maybe they’d
rip the zebra skins off the barstools. They liked anything African, didn’t they? Wasn’t that the
new vogue, or the old vogue that was new again? Hell, they could have the goddamned zebra
skins.He’d put themout front as a peace offering.
But now Milton heard something. The doorknob, was it? He listened. For the last few hours
he’d been hearing things. His eyes had been playing tricks on him, too. He crouched behind the
counter, squinting into the darkness. His ears echoed the way seashells do. He heard the distant
gunfire and the squawking sirens.He heard the
humof the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock. To all thiswas added the rush of his blood,
roaring through the channels in his head.But no sound came from the doorway.
Milton relaxed. He took another bite of the sandwich. Gently, experimentally, he lowered his
head onto the counter. Just for a minute. When he closed his eyes, the pleasure was immediate.
Then the doorknob rattled again, and Milton jumped. He shook his head, trying to wake himself
up.He put down the sandwich and tiptoed out frombehind the counter, holding the gun.
He didn’t intend to use it. The idea was to scare the looter off. If that didn’t work, Milton was
prepared to leave. The Oldsmobile was parked out back. He could be home in ten minutes. The
knob rattled again. And without thinking Milton stepped toward the glass door and shouted,
“I’ve got a gun!”
Except it wasn’t the gun. It was the ham sandwich! Milton was threatening the looter with two
pieces of toasted bread, a slice of meat, and some hot mustard. Nevertheless, because it was dark
out, thisworked. The looter outside the door held up his hands.
ItwasMorrison fromacross the street.
Milton stared at Morrison. Morrison stared back. And then my father said—this is what white
people say in a situation like this, “Can I help you?”
Morrison squinted, disbelieving. “What you doing here, man? You crazy? Ain’t safe for no
white people down here.” A shot rang out. Morrison flattened himself against the glass. “Ain’t
safe for nobody.”
“I’ve gotta protectmyproperty.”
“You life ain’t you property?” Morrison raised his eyebrows to indicate the unimpeachable
logic of this statement. Then he dropped the superior expression altogether and coughed. “Listen,
chief, long as you here, maybe you can help me out.” He held up small change. “Came over for
some cigarettes.”
Milton’s chin dipped, fattening his neck, and his eyebrows slanted in disbelief. In a dry voice
he said, “Now’d be a good time to kick the habit.”
Another shot rang out, this time closer. Morrison jumped, then smiled. “It sure is bad for my
health. And gettin’ more dangerous all the time.” Then he smiled broadly. “This’ll be my last
pack,” he said,
“swear to God.” He dropped the change through the mail slot. “Parliaments.” Milton looked
down at the coins for amoment and thenwent and got the cigarettes.
“Got anymatches?”Morrison said.
Milton slipped these through, too. As he did, the riots, his frayed nerves, the smell of fire in
the air, and the audacity of this man Morrison dodging sniper fire for a pack of cigarettes all
became too much for Milton. Suddenly he was waving his arms, indicating everything, and
shouting through the door, “What’s thematterwith you people?”
Morrison took only amoment. “Thematterwith us,” he said, “is you.”And then hewas gone.

“Thematterwith us is you.”Howmany times did I hear that growing up?Delivered byMilton in
his so-called black accent, delivered whenever any liberal pundit talked about the “culturally
deprived” or the “underclass” or “empowerment zones,” spoken out of the belief that this one
statement, having been delivered to him while the blacks themselves burned down a significant
portion of our beloved city, proved its own absurdity. As the years went on, Milton used it as a
shield against any opinions to the contrary, and finally it grew into a kind of mantra, the
explanation forwhy theworldwas going to hell, applicable not only toAfricanAmericans but to
feminists and homosexuals; and then of course he liked to use it on us, whenever we were late
for dinner orwore clothesTessie didn’t approve of.
“The matter with us is you!” Morrison’s words echoed in the street, but Milton didn’t have
time to concentrate on them. Because right then, like a creaky Godzilla in a Japanese movie, the
first military tank lumbered into view. Soldiers stood on both sides, not cops now but National
Guardsmen, camouflaged, helmeted, nervously holding rifleswith bayonets. Pointing those rifles
up at all the other rifles pointing down. There was a moment of relative silence, enough for
Milton to hear the slamming of Morrison’s screen door across the street. Then there was a pop, a
sound like a toy gun, and suddenly the street lit upwith a thousand bursts of fire . . .
I heard them, too, from a quarter mile away. Following the slow tank at a discreet distance, I
had ridden my bike from Indian Village on the East Side all the way to the West. I tried to keep
mybearings
as best I could, but I was only seven and a half, and didn’t know many street names. While
passing through downtown, I recognized The Spirit of Detroit, the Marshall Fredericks statue
that stood in front of the City-County Building. A few years earlier, a prankster had painted a
trail of red footprints in the statue’s size, leading across Woodward to rendezvous with a statue
of a naked woman in front of the National Bank of Detroit. The footprints were still faintly
visible as I pedaled past. The tank turned up Bush Street, and I followed it past Monroe and the
lights of Greektown. On a normal day, the old Greek men of my grandfather’s generation would
have been arriving at the coffee houses to spend the day playing backgammon, but on the
morning of July 25, 1967, the street was empty. At some point my tank had found others; in a
line they now headed northwest. Soon downtown vanished and I didn’t know where I was.
Ducking aerodynamically over my handlebars, I pedaled furiously into the thick, oily exhaust of
themoving column . . .
. . . while, back on Pingree Street, Milton is crouching behind the crenellated olive oil tins.
Bullets fly from every darkened window along the block, from Frank’s Pool Hall and the Crow
Bar, from the bell tower of the African Episcopal Church, so many bullets they blur the air like
rain, making the one working streetlamp look as if it’s flickering out. Bullets pounding on armor
and ricocheting off brickwork and tattooing the parked cars. Bullets ripping the legs right out
from under a U.S. Postal Service mailbox, so that it falls over on its side like a drunk. Bullets
obliterating the window of the veterinarian office and continuing on through the walls to reach
the cages of the animals in back. The German shepherd that has been barking nonstop for three
days and twonights finally shuts up.A cat twists in the air, letting out a scream, its blazing green
eyes going out like a light. A real battle is under way now, a firefight, a little bit of Vietnam
brought back home. But in this case the Vietcong are lying on Beautyrest mattresses. They are
sitting in camping chairs and drinking malt liquor, a volunteer army facing off against the
enlistees in the streets.
It’s impossible to know who all these snipers were. But it’s easy to understand why the police
called them snipers. It’s easy to understand why Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh called them snipers,
andGovenorGeorgeRomney, too.A sniper, by definition, acts alone.A
sniper is cowardly, sneaky; he kills from a distance, unseen. It was convenient to call them
snipers, because if they weren’t snipers, then what were they? The governor didn’t say it; the
newspapers didn’t say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing
on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a
guerrilla uprising.

TheSecondAmericanRevolution.
And now the guardsmen are fighting back. When the riot first broke, the police, on the whole,
acted with restraint. They moved off, trying to contain the disturbance. Likewise, the federal
troops, the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne and 101st, are battle-hardened veterans who know
to use appropriate force. But the National Guard is a different story. Weekend warriors, they
have been called from their homes into sudden battle. They are inexperienced, scared. They
move through the streets, blasting away at anything they see. Sometimes they drive tanks right
up onto front lawns. They drive onto people’s porches and crash through the walls. The tank in
front of the Zebra Room has stopped momentarily. Ten or so troops surround it, taking aim at a
sniper on the fourth floor of the Beaumont Hotel. The sniper fires; the National Guardsmen fire
back, and the man drops, his legs tangling on the fire escape. Directly thereafter, another light
flashes across the street. Milton looks up to see Morrison in his living room, lighting a cigarette.
Lighting a Parliament with the zebra-striped matches. “No!” Milton shouts. “No!” . . . And
Morrison, if he hears, just thinks it’s another diatribe against smoking, but let’s face it, he
doesn’t hear. He only lights his cigarette and, two seconds later, a bullet rips through the front of
his skull and he crumples in a heap.And then the soldiersmove on.
The street is empty again, silent. The machine guns and tanks begin ripping up the next block,
or the block after that.Milton stands at the front door, looking across at the emptywindowwhere
Morrison had stood. And the realization comes over him that the restaurant is safe. The soldiers
have come and gone. The riot is over . . .
. . . Except that now someone else is advancing along the street. As the tanks disappear down
Pingree, a new figure is approaching from the other direction. Somebody who lives in the
neighborhood is rounding the corner and heading for theZebraRoom . . .
. . . following the line of tanks, I amno longer thinking about
showing up my brother. The outbreak of so much shooting has taken me completely by
surprise. I have looked through my father’s World War II scrapbook many times; I have seen
Vietnam on television; I have ingested countless movies about Ancient Rome or the battles of
the Middle Ages. But none of it has prepared me for warfare in my own hometown. The street
we are moving down is lined with leafy elms. Cars are parked at the curb. We pass lawns and
porch furniture, bird feeders and birdbaths. As I look up at the canopy of elms, the sky is just
beginning to grow light. Birdsmove among the branches, and squirrels, too.A kite is stuck up in
one tree. Over a limb of another, someone’s tennis shoes dangle with the laces knotted. Directly
below these sneakers, I see a street sign. It is full of bullet holes, but Imanage to read it: Pingree.
All of a sudden I recognizewhere I am. There isValueMeats!AndNewYorkerClothes. I am so
happy to see them that for amoment I don’t register that both places are on fire. Letting the tanks
get away, I ride up a driveway and stop behind a tree. I get offmybike and peek across the street
at the diner. The zebra head sign is still intact. The restaurant is not burning. At that moment,
however, the figure that has been approaching the Zebra Room enters my field of vision. From
thirty yards away I see him lift a bottle in his hand. He lights the rag hanging from the bottle’s
mouth and with a not terribly good arm flings the Molotov cocktail through the front window of
theZebraRoom.And as flames eruptwithin the diner, the arsonist shouts in an ecstatic voice:
“Opa,motherfucker!”
I saw him only from the back. It was not yet fully light. Smoke rose from the adjacent burning
buildings. Still, in the firelight, I thought I recognized the black beret of my friend Marius
Wyxze-wixardChallouehliczilczeseGrimes before the figure ran off.
“Opa!” Inside the diner, my father heard the well-known cry of Greek waiters, and before he
knewwhat was happening the place was going up like a flaming appetizer. The Zebra Room had
become a saganaki! As the booths caught fire, Milton raced behind the counter to grab the fire
extinguisher. Coming out again, he held the hose, like a lemon wedge wrapped in cheesecloth,
over the flames, and prepared to squeeze . . .
. . . when suddenly he stopped.And now I recognize a familiar expression onmy father’s face,
the expression hewore so often at the

dinner table, the faraway look of amanwho could never stop thinking about business. Success
depends on adapting to new situations. And what situation was newer than this? Flames were
climbing thewalls; the photo of JimmyDorseywas curling up.AndMiltonwas asking himself a
few, pertinent questions. For instance: How would he ever run a restaurant in this neighborhood
again? And: What do you suppose the already depressed real estate prices would be tomorrow
morning? Most important of all: How was it a crime? Did he start the riot? Did he throw the
Molotov cocktail? Like Tessie, Milton’s mind was searching the bottom drawer of his desk, in
particular a fat envelope containing the three fire insurance policies from separate companies. He
saw them in his mind’s eye; he read the fire indemnity coverage, and added them up. The final
sum, $500,000, blinded him to everything else. Half a million bucks! Milton looked around with
wild, eager eyes. The French toast sign was in flames. The zebra-skin barstools were like a row
of torches.Andmadly, he turned and hurried outside to theOldsmobile . . .
Where he encounteredme.
“Callie!What the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to help.”
“What’s the matter with you!”Milton shouted. But despite the anger in his voice hewas down
onhis knees, huggingme. Iwrappedmyarms around his neck.
“The restaurant’s burning down,Daddy.”
“I know it is.”
I began to cry.
“It’s okay,”my father toldme, carryingme to the car. “Let’s go homenow. It’s all over.”
Sowas it a riot or a guerrilla uprising?Letme answer that questionwith other questions.After
the riot was over, were, or were there not, caches of weapons found all over the neighborhood?
And were these weapons, or were they not, AK-47s and machine guns? And why had General
Throckmorton deployed his tanks on the East Side, miles from the rioting? Was that the kind of
thing you did to subdue an unorganized gang of snipers? Orwas itmore in keepingwithmilitary
strategy? Was it like establishing a front line in a war? Believe whatever you want. I was seven
years old and followed a tank into battle and saw what I saw. It turned out that when it finally
happened,
the revolutionwasn’t televised.OnTV they called it only a riot.
The following morning, as the smoke cleared, the city’s flag could once again be seen.
Remember the symbol on it?Aphoenix rising from its ashes.And thewords beneath? Speramus
meliora; resurget cineribus. “Wehope for better things; itwill rise from the ashes.”

MIDDLESEX

Shameful as it is to say, the riots were the best thing that ever happened to us. Overnight we
went from being a family desperately trying to stay in the middle class to one with hopes of
sneaking into the upper, or at least the upper-middle. The insurance money didn’t amount to
quite as much as Milton had anticipated. Two of the companies refused to pay the full amount,
citing excessive insurance clauses. They paid only a quarter of their policies’ value. Still, taken
all together, the money was much more than the Zebra Room had been worth, and it allowed my
parents tomake some changes in our lives.
Of allmy childhoodmemories, none has themagic, the pure dreaminess, of the nightwe heard
a honk outside our house and looked out the window to see that a spaceship had landed in our
driveway.
It had set down noiselessly next to my mother’s station wagon. The front lights flashed. The
back end gave off a red glow. For thirty seconds nothing more happened. But then finally the
window of the spaceship slowly retracted to reveal, instead of a Martian inside, Milton. He had
shaved off his beard.
“Get yourmother,” he called, smiling. “We’re going for a little ride.”
Not a spaceship then, but close: a 1967 Cadillac Fleetwood, as intergalactic a car as Detroit
ever produced. (Themoon shotwas only
a year away.) Itwas as black as space itself and shaped like a rocket lying on its side. The long
front end came to a point, like a nose cone, and from there the craft stretched back along the
driveway in a long, beautiful, ominously perfect shape. There was a silver multi-chambered
grille, as though to filter stardust. Chrome piping, like the housing for circuitry, led from conical
yellow turn signals along the rounded sides of the car, all the way to the rear, where the vehicle
flared propulsively into jet fins and rocket boosters.
Inside, the Cadillac was as plushly carpeted and softly lit as the bar at the Ritz. The armrests
were equipped with ashtrays and cigarette lighters. The interior itself was black leather and gave
off a strong new smell. Itwas like climbing into somebody’swallet.
We didn’t move right away. We remained parked, as if it were enough just to sit in the car, as
if now that we owned it, we could forget about our living room and stay in the driveway every
night. Milton started the engine. Keeping the transmission in park, he showed us the marvels. He
opened and closed the windows by pressing a button. He locked the doors by pressing another.
He buzzed the front seat forward, then tilted it back until I could see the dandruff on his
shoulders. By the time he put the car into gear we were all slightly giddy. We drove away down
Seminole, past our neighbors’ houses, already saying farewell to Indian Village. At the corner,
Milton put the blinker on and it ticked, counting the seconds down to our eventual departure.
The ’67 Fleetwood was my father’s first Cadillac, but there were many more to come. Over
the next seven years, Milton traded up almost every year, so it’s possible for me to chart my life
in relation to the styling features of his long line of Cadillacs. When tail fins disappeared, I was
nine; when power antennas arrived, eleven. My emotional life accords with the designs, too. In

the sixties, when Cadillacs were futuristically self-assured, I was also self-confident and
forward-looking. In the gas-short seventies, however, when the manufacturer came out with the
unfortunate Seville—a car that looked as though it had been rear-ended—I also felt misshapen.
Pick a year and I’ll tell you what car we had. 1970: the cola-colored Eldorado. 1971: the red
sedan DeVille. 1972: the golden Fleetwood with the passenger sun visor that opened up into a
starlet’s dressing room mirror (in which Tessie checked her makeup and I my first blemishes).
1973:
the long, black, dome-roofed Fleetwood that made other cars stop, thinking a funeral was
passing. 1974: the canary-yellow, two-door “Florida Special” with white vinyl top, sunroof, and
tan leather seats thatmymother is still driving today, almost thirty years later.
But in 1967 it was the space-age Fleetwood. Once we got going the required speed, Milton
said, “Okay. Now get a load of this.” He flipped a switch under the dash. There was a hissing
sound, like balloons inflating. Slowly, as if lifted on a magic carpet, the four of us rose to the
upper reaches of the car’s interior.
“That’swhat they call the ‘Air-Ride.’ Brand-new feature. Smooth, huh?”
“Is it somekind of hydraulic suspension system?”Chapter Elevenwanted to know.
“I think so.”
“Maybe Iwon’t have to usemypillowwhen I drive,” saidTessie.
For a moment after that, none of us spoke. We were headed east, out of Detroit, literally
floating on air.
Which brings me to the second part of our upward mobility. Shortly after the riots, like many
otherwhiteDetroiters,my parents began looking for a house in the suburbs. The suburb they had
their sights onwas the affluent lakefront district of the automagnates:Grosse Pointe.
It was much harder than they ever expected. In the Cadillac, scouting the five Grosse Pointes
(the Park, the City, the Farms, the Woods, the Shores), my parents saw for sale signs on many
lawns. But when they stopped in at the realty offices and filled out applications, they found that
the houses suddenlywent off themarket, orwere sold, or doubled in price.
After two months of searching, Milton was down to his last real estate agent, a Miss Jane
Marsh ofGreat LakesRealty.He had her—and somegrowing suspicions.
“This property is rather eccentric,” Miss Marsh is telling Milton one September afternoon as
she leads him up the driveway. “It takes a buyer with a little vision.” She opens the front door
and leads him inside. “But it does have quite a pedigree. It was designed by Hudson Clark.” She
waits for recognition. “Of the Prairie School?”
Milton nods, dubiously.He swivels his head, looking over the place.He hadn’tmuch cared for
the pictureMissMarsh had shownhimover at the office. Too boxy-looking. Toomodern.
“I’mnot suremywifewould go for this kind of thing,MissMarsh.”
“I’mafraidwedon’t have anythingmore traditional to showat themoment.”
She leads him along a sparewhite hallway and down a small flight of open stairs. And now, as
they step into the sunken living room, Miss Marsh’s head begins to swivel, too. Smiling a polite
smile that reveals a rabbity expanse of upper gum, she examines Milton’s complexion, his hair,
his shoes. She glances at his real estate application again.
“Stephanides.What kind of name is that?”
“It’sGreek.”
“Greek.How interesting.”
More upper gum flashes as Miss Marsh makes a notation on her pad. Then she resumes the
tour: “Sunken living room.Greenhouse adjoining the dining area.And, as you can see, the house
iswell suppliedwithwindows.”
“It pretty much is a window, Miss Marsh.” Milton moves closer to the glass and examines
the backyard.Meanwhile, a few feet behind,MissMarsh examinesMilton.
“May I askwhat business you’re in,Mr. Stephanides?”
“The restaurant business.”
Another mark of pen on pad. “Can I tell you what churches we have in the area? What

denomination are you?”
“I don’t go in for that sort of thing.Mywife takes the kids to theGreek church.”
“She’s aGrecian, too?”
“She’s aDetroiter.We’re bothEast Siders.”
“Andyouneed space for your two children, is that right?”
“Yes,ma’am. Pluswehavemy folks livingwith us, too.”
“Oh, I see.” And now pink gums disappear as Miss Marsh begins to add it all up. Let’s see.
Southern Mediterranean. One point. Not in one of the professions. One point. Religion? Greek
church. That’s some kind of Catholic, isn’t it? So there’s another point there. And he has his
parents living with him! Two more points! Which makes—five! Oh, that won’tdo. That won’tdo
at all.
To explainMissMarsh’s arithmetic: back in those days, the real estate agents inGrosse Pointe
evaluated prospective buyers by something called the Point System. (Milton wasn’t the only one
whoworried
about the neighborhood going to hell.) No one spoke of it openly. Realtors only mentioned
“community standards” and selling to “the right sort of people.” Now that white flight had
begun, the Point System was more important than ever. Youdidn’t want what was happening in
Detroit to happen out here.
Discreetly, Miss Marsh now draws a tiny “5” next to “Stephanides” and circles it. As she does
so, however, she feels something. A kind of regret. The Point System isn’t her idea, after all. It
was in place long before she came to Grosse Pointe from Wichita, where her father works as a
butcher. But there is nothing she can do. Yes,Miss Marsh feels sorry. I mean, really. Look at
this house! Who’sgoing to buy it if not an Italian or a Greek. I’ll never be able to sell it. Never!
Her client is still standing at thewindow, looking out.
“I do understand your preference for something more ‘Old World,’ Mr. Stephanides. We do
get them from time to time. You just have to be patient. I’ve got your telephone number. I’ll let
you know if anything comes on themarket.”
Milton doesn’t hear her. He is absorbed in the view. The house has a roof deck, plus a patio
out back.And there are twoother, smaller buildings beyond that.
“Tellmemore about thisHudsonClark fella,” he nowasks.
“Clark?Well, to be honest, he’s aminor figure.”
“Prairie School, eh?”
“HudsonClarkwas noFrankLloydWright, if that’swhat youmean.”
“What are these outbuildings I see here?”
“I wouldn’t call them outbuildings, Mr. Stephanides. That’s making it a bit grand. One’s a
bathhouse. Rather decrepit, I’m afraid. I’mnot sure it evenworks.Behind that is the guest house.
Which also needs a lot ofwork.”
“Bathhouse? That’s different.” Milton turns away from the glass. He begins walking around
the house, looking it over in a new light: the Stonehenge walls, the Klimt tilework, the open
rooms. Everything is geometric and grid-like. Sunlight falls in beams through the many
skylights. “Now that I’m in here,” Milton says, “I sort of get the idea behind this place. The
photo you showedmedoesn’t do it justice.”
“Really, Mr. Stephanides, for a family such as yours, with young children, I’m not sure this is
quite the best—”
Before she can finish, however, Milton holds up his hands in surrender. “You don’t have to
showmeanymore.Decrepit outbuildings or not, I’ll take it.”
There is a pause. Miss Marsh smiles with her double-decker gums. “That’s wonderful, Mr.
Stephanides,” she says without enthusiasm. “Of course, it’s all contingent on the approval of the
loan.”
But now it isMilton’s turn to smile. For all the disavowals of its existence, the Point System is
no secret. Harry Karras tried unsuccessfully to buy a house in Grosse Pointe the year before.
Same thing happened to Pete Savidis. But no one is going to tell Milton Stephanides where to

live.NotMissMarsh and not a bunch of country club real estate guys, either.
“Youdon’t have to botherwith that,”my father said, relishing themoment. “I’ll pay cash.”
Over the barrier of the Point System, my father managed to get us a house in Grosse Pointe. It
was the only time in his life he paid for anything up front. But what about the other barriers?
What about the fact that real estate agents had shown him only the least-desirable houses, in the
areas closest to Detroit? Houses no one else wanted? And what about his inability to see
anything except the grand gesture, and the fact that he bought the house without first consulting
mymother?Well, for those problems therewas no remedy.
Onmoving day we set off in two cars. Tessie, fighting tears, took Lefty and Desdemona in the
family station wagon. Milton drove Chapter Eleven and me in the new Fleetwood. Along
Jefferson, signs of the riots still remained, as did my unanswered questions. “What about the
Boston Tea Party?” I challenged my father from the backseat. “The colonists stole all that tea
and dumped it into the harbor. Thatwas the same thing as a riot.”
“That wasn’t the same at all,” Milton answered back. “What the hell are they teaching you in
that school of yours? With the Boston Tea Party the Americans were revolting against another
country thatwas oppressing them.”
“But it wasn’t another country, Daddy. It was the same country. There wasn’t even such a
thing as theUnited States then.”
“Let me ask you something. Where was King George when they dumped all that tea into the
drink? Was he in Boston? Was he in America even? No. He was way the hell over there in
England, eating crumpets.”
The implacable black Cadillac powered along, bearing my father, brother, and me out of the
war-torn city. We crossed over a thin canal which, like a moat, separated Detroit from Grosse
Pointe. And then, beforewe had time to register the changes, wewere at the house onMiddlesex
Boulevard.
The trees were what I noticed first. Two enormous weeping willows, like woolly mammoths,
on either side of the property. Their vines hung over the driveway like streamers of sponge at a
car wash. Above was the autumn sun. Passing through the willows’ leaves, it turned them a
phosphorescent green. It was as though, in the middle of the block’s cool shade, a beacon had
been switched on; and this impression was only strengthened by the house we’d now stopped in
front of.
Middlesex! Did anybody ever live in a house as strange? As sci-fi? As futuristic and outdated
at the same time? A house that was more like communism, better in theory than reality? The
walls were pale yellow, made of octagonal stone blocks framed by redwood siding along the
roofline. Plate glasswindows ran along the front.HudsonClark (whose nameMiltonwould drop
for years to come, despite the fact that no one ever recognized it) had designed Middlesex to
harmonize with the natural surroundings. In this case, that meant the two weeping willow trees
and the mulberry growing against the front of the house. Forgetting where he was (a
conservative suburb) and what was on the other side of those trees (the Turnbulls and the
Picketts), Clark followed the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, banishing the Victorian vertical
in favor of a midwestern horizontal, opening up the interior spaces, and bringing in a Japanese
influence. Middlesex was a testament to theory uncompromised by practicality. For instance:
Hudson Clark hadn’t believed in doors. The concept of the door, of this thing that swung one
way or the other, was outmoded. So on Middlesex we didn’t have doors. Instead we had long,
accordion-like barriers, made from sisal, that worked by a pneumatic pump located down in the
basement. The concept of stairs in the traditional sense was also something the world no longer
needed. Stairs represented a teleological view of the universe, of one thing leading to another,
whereas now everyone knew that one thing didn’t lead to another but often nowhere at all. So
neither did our stairs. Oh, they went up, eventually. They took the persistent climber to the
second
floor, but on the way they took him lots of other places as well. There was a landing, for
instance, overhung with a mobile. The stairway walls had peepholes and shelves cut into them.

As you climbed, you could see the legs of someone passing along the hallway above. Youcould
spy on someone down in the living room.
“Where are the closets?”Tessie asked as soon aswegot inside.
“Closets?”
“The kitchen’s a million miles away from the family room, Milt. Every time you want a snack
you have to traipse all theway across the house.”
“It’ll give us some exercise.”
“And how am I supposed to find curtains for those windows? They don’t make curtains that
big. Everyone can see right in!”
“Think of it thisway.We can see right out.”
But then therewas a screamat the other end of the house:
“Mana!”
Against her better judgment, Desdemona had pressed a button on the wall. “What kind door
this is?” shewas shouting aswe all came running. “Itmove by itself!”
“Hey, cool,” said Chapter Eleven. “Try it, Cal. Put your head in the doorway. Yeah, like that
. . .”
“Don’t foolwith that door, kids.”
“I’m just testing the pressure.”
“Ow!”
“What did I tell you?Birdbrain.Nowget your sister out of the door.”
“I’m trying. The button doesn’twork.”
“What do youmean it doesn’twork?”
“Oh, this is wonderful, Milt. No closets, and now we have to call the fire department to get
Callie out of the door.”
“It’s not designed to have someone’s neck in it.”
“Mana!”
“Can you breathe, honey?”
“Yeah,but it hurts.”
“It’s like that guy at Carlsbad Caverns,” said Chapter Eleven. “He got stuck and they had to
feed him for forty days and then he finally died.”
“Stopwriggling,Callie.You’remaking it—”
“I’m not wriggling—”
“I can seeCallie’s underwear! I can seeCallie’s underwear!”
“Stop that right now.”
“Here, Tessie, takeCallie’s leg.Okay, on three.A-one and a-two and a-three!”

We settled in, with our various misgivings. After the incident with the pneumatic door,
Desdemona had a premonition that this house of modern conveniences (which was in fact nearly
as old as shewas)would be the last shewould ever live in. Shemovedwhat remained of her and
my grandfather’s belongings into the guest house—the brass coffee table, the silkworm box, the
portrait of Patriarch Athenagoras—but she could never get used to the skylight, which was like a
hole in the roof, or the push-pedal faucet in the bathroom, or the box that spoke on the wall.
(Every room on Middlesex was equipped with an intercom. Back when they had been installed
in the 1940s—over thirty years after the house itself had been built in 1909—the intercoms had
probably all worked. But by 1967 you might speak into the kitchen intercom only to have your
voice comeout in themaster bedroom.The speakers distorted our voices, so thatwe had to listen
very closely to understandwhatwas being said, like deciphering a child’s first, garbled speech.)
Chapter Eleven tapped into the pneumatic system in the basement and spent hours sending a
Ping-Pong ball around the house through a network of vacuum cleaner hoses. Tessie never
stopped complaining about the lack of closet space and the impractical layout, but gradually,
thanks to a touch of claustrophobia, she grew to appreciateMiddlesex’s glasswalls.
Lefty cleaned them. Making himself useful as always, he took upon himself the Sisyphean

task of keeping all those Modernist surfaces sparkling. With the same concentration he trained
on the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs—a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that
might never be completed—Lefty nowcleaned the huge picturewindows, the fogged glass of the
greenhouse, the sliding doors that led to the courtyard, and even the skylights. As he was
Windexing the new house, however, Chapter Eleven and I were exploring it. Or, I should say,
them. The meditative, pastel yellow cube that faced the street contained the main living quarters.
Behind that
lay a courtyardwith a dry pool and a fragile dogwood leaning over in vain to see its reflection.
Along the western edge of this courtyard, extending from the back of the kitchen, ran a white,
translucent tunnel, something like the tubes that conduct football teams onto the field. This
tunnel led to a small domed outbuilding—a sort of huge igloo—surrounded by a covered porch.
Insidewas a bathing pool (justwarming up now, getting ready to play its part inmy life). Behind
the bathhouse was yet another courtyard, floored with smooth black stones. Along the eastern
edge of this, to balance the tunnel, ran a portico lined with thin brown iron beams. The portico
led up to the guest house, where no guests ever stayed: only Desdemona, for a short time with
her husband and a long time alone.
But more important to a kid: Middlesex had lots of sneaker-sized ledges to walk along. It had
deep, concrete window wells perfect for making into forts. It had sun decks and catwalks.
Chapter Eleven and I climbed all over Middlesex. Lefty would wash the windows and, five
minutes later, my brother and I would come along, leaning on the glass and leaving fingerprints.
And seeing them, our tall, mute grandfather, who in another life might have been a professor but
in this one was holding a wet rag and bucket, only smiled and washed the windows all over
again.
Although he never said a word to me, I loved my Chaplinesque papou. His speechlessness
seemed to be an act of refinement. It went with his elegant clothes, his shoes with woven vamps,
the glaze of his hair. And yet he was not stiff at all but playful, even comedic. When he took me
for rides in the car Lefty often pretended to fall asleep at the wheel. Suddenly his eyes would
close and he would slump to one side. The car would continue on, unpiloted, drifting toward the
curb. I laughed, screamed, pulled my hair and kicked my legs. At the last possible second, Lefty
would spring awake, taking thewheel and averting disaster.
We didn’t need to speak to each other.We understood each otherwithout speaking. But then a
terrible thing happened.
It is a Saturday morning a few weeks after our move to Middlesex. Lefty is taking me for a
walk around the new neighborhood. The plan is to go down to the lake. Hand in hand we stroll
across our new front lawn. Change is clinking in his trouser pocket, just below the level of my
shoulders. I runmy fingers over his thumb, fascinated
by themissing nail, whichLefty has always toldme amonkey bit off at the zoo.
Now we reach the sidewalk. The man who makes the sidewalks in Grosse Pointe has left his
name in the cement: J. P.Steiger. There is also a crack,where ants are having awar.Nowwe are
crossing the grass between the sidewalk and the street.Andnowwe are at the curb.
I step down. Lefty doesn’t. Instead, he drops, cleanly, six inches into the street. Still holding
his hand, I laugh at him for being so clumsy. Lefty laughs, too. But he doesn’t look at me. He
keeps staring straight ahead into space. And, gazing up, I suddenly can see things about my
grandfather I should be too young to see. I see fear in his eyes, and bewilderment, and, most
astonishing of all, the fact that some adult worry is taking precedence over our walk together.
The sun is in his eyes.His pupils contract.We remain at the curb, in its dust and leafmatter. Five
seconds. Ten seconds. Long enough for Lefty to come face-to-face with the evidence of his own
diminished faculties and forme to feel the onrush ofmyowngrowing ones.
What nobody knew: Lefty had had another stroke the week before. Already speechless, he
now began to suffer spatial disorientation. Furniture advanced and retreated in the mechanical
manner of a fun house. Like practical jokers, chairs offered themselves and then pulled away at
the last moment. The diamonds of the backgammon board undulated like player piano keys.

Lefty told no one.
Because he no longer trusted himself to drive, Lefty started taking me on walks instead. (That
was how we’d arrived at that curb, the curb he couldn’t wake up and turn away from in time.)
Wewent alongMiddlesex, the silent, old, foreign gentleman and his skinny granddaughter, a girl
who talked enough for two, who babbled so fluently that her father the ex-clarinet man liked to
joke she knew circular breathing. I was getting used to Grosse Pointe, to the genteel mothers in
chiffon headscarves and to the dark, cypress-shrouded house where the one Jewish family lived
(having also paid cash). Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying
reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding
movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was
a biological accident. Though he’d never been religious, he realized now that he’d always
believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to
waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his
youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he
would be nomore.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather. I was the new kid on
the block and wanted to make friends. From our roof deck I sometimes glimpsed a girl about my
age who lived in the house behind us. She came out onto a small balcony in the evenings and
tugged petals off flowers in thewindowbox. In friskier moods, she performed lazy pirouettes, as
though to the accompaniment of my own music box, which I always brought to the roof to keep
me company. She had long, white-blond hair cut in bangs, and since I never saw her in the
daytime, I decided shewas an albino.
But I was wrong: because there she was one afternoon in sunshine, getting a ball that had
flown onto our property. Her name was Clementine Stark. She wasn’t an albino, just very pale,
and allergic to hard-to-avoid items (grass, house dust). Her father was about to have a heart
attack, and my memories of her now are tinged with a blue wash of misfortune that hadn’t quite
befallen her at the time. She was standing bare-legged in the jungly weeds that grew up between
our houses. Her skin was already beginning to react to the grass cuttings stuck to the ball, whose
sogginesswas suddenly explained by the overweight Labradorwhonow limped into view.
Clementine Stark had a canopy bed moored like an imperial barge at one end of her sea-blue
bedroom carpet. She had a collection of mounted poisonous-looking insects. She was a year
older than me, hence worldly, and had been to Krakow once, which was in Poland. Because of
her allergies, Clementine was kept indoors a lot. This led to our being inside togethermost of the
time and toClementine’s teachingmehow to kiss.
When I told my life story to Dr. Luce, the place where he invariably got interested was when I
came to Clementine Stark. Luce didn’t care about criminally smitten grandparents or silkworm
boxes or serenading clarinets. To a certain extent, I understand. I even agree.
Clementine Stark invited me over to her house. Without even comparing it to Middlesex, it
was an overwhelmingly medieval-looking place, a fortress of gray stone, unlovely except for the
one extravagance—a concession to the princess—of a single, pointed tower flying a lavender
pennant. Inside there were tapestries on the walls, a suit of armor with French script over the
visor, and, in black leotards, Clementine’s slendermother. Shewas doing leg lifts.
“This isCallie,”Clementine said. “She’s coming over to play.”
I beamed. I attempted a kind of curtsy. (This was my introduction to polite society, after all.)
ButClementine’smother didn’t somuch as turn her head.
“We justmoved in,” I said. “We live in the house behind yours.”
Now she frowned. I thought I’d said something wrong—my first etiquette mistake in Grosse
Pointe.Mrs. Stark said, “Whydon’t you girls go upstairs?”
We did. In her bedroom Clementine mounted a rocking horse. For the next three minutes she
rode it without saying another word. Then she abruptly got off. “I used to have a turtle but he
escaped.”

“Hedid?”
“Mymomsays he could survive if hemade it outside.”
“He’s probably dead,” I said.
Clementine accepted this bravely. She came over and held her arm next to mine. “Look, I’ve
got freckles like the Big Dipper,” she announced. We stood side to side before the full-length
mirror, making faces. The rims of Clementine’s eyes were inflamed. She yawned. She rubbed
her nosewith the heel of her hand.And then she asked, “Doyouwant to practice kissing?”
I didn’t knowwhat to answer. I already knewhow to kiss, didn’t I?Was there somethingmore
to learn? But while these questions were going through my head, Clementine was going ahead
with the lesson. She came around to face me. With a grave expression she put her arms around
myneck.
The necessary special effects are not in my possession, but what I’d like for you to imagine is
Clementine’s white face coming close to mine, her sleepy eyes closing, her medicine-sweet lips
puckering up, and all the other sounds of the world going silent—the rustling of our dresses, her
mother counting leg lifts downstairs, the airplane outside making an exclamation mark in the
sky—all silent, asClementine’s highly educated, eight-year-old lipsmetmine.
And then, somewhere below this,myheart reacting.
Not a thump exactly. Not even a leap. But a kind of swish, like a frog kicking off from a
muddy bank. My heart, that amphibian, moving that moment between two elements: one,
excitement; the other, fear. I tried to pay attention. I tried to hold up my end of things. But
Clementine was way ahead ofme. She swiveled her head back and forth the way actresses did in
the movies. I started doing the same, but out of the corner of her mouth she scolded, “You’re the
man.” So I stopped. I stood stiffly with arms at my sides. Finally Clementine broke off the kiss.
She looked atmeblankly amoment, and then responded, “Not bad for your first time.”

“Mo-om!” I shouted, coming home that evening. “I made a fri-end!” I told Tessie about
Clementine, the old rugs on the walls, the pretty mother doing exercises, omitting only the
kissing lessons. From the beginning I was aware that there was something improper about the
way I felt about Clementine Stark, something I shouldn’t tell my mother, but I wouldn’t have
been able to articulate it. I didn’t connect this feeling to sex. I didn’t know sex existed. “Can I
invite her over?”
“Sure,” saidTessie, relieved thatmy loneliness in the neighborhoodwas nowover.
“I bet she’s never seen a house like ours.”
And now it is a cool, gray October day a week or so later. From the back of a yellow house,
two girls emerge, playing geisha. We have coiled up our hair and crossed take-out chopsticks in
it.Wewear sandals and silk shawls.We carry umbrellas, pretending they’re parasols. I knowbits
of The Flower Drum Song, which I sing as we traverse the courtyard and mount the steps to the
bathhouse. We come in the door, failing to notice a dark shape in the corner. Inside, the bath is a
bright, bubbling turquoise. Silk robes fall to floor. Two giggling flamingos, one fair-skinned, the
other light olive, test the water with one toe each. “It’s too hot.” “It’s supposed to be that way.”
“Youfirst.” “No, you.” “Okay.” And then: in. Both of us. The smell of redwood and eucalyptus.
The smell of sandalwood soap. Clementine’s hair plastered to her skull. Her foot appearing now
and then above the water like a shark fin. We laugh, float, waste my mother’s bath beads. Steam
rises from the surface so thick it obscures the walls, the ceiling, the dark shape in the corner. I’m
examining the arches ofmy feet, trying
to understand what it means that they have “fallen,” when I see Clementine breasting through
the water to me. Her face appears out of the steam. I think we’re going to kiss again, but instead
she wraps her legs around my waist. She’s laughing hysterically, covering her mouth. Her eyes
widen and she says intomy ear, “Get some comfort.” She hoots like amonkey and pullsme back
onto a shelf in the tub. I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink . . . and then we’re
twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me, and giggling, and making bird
cries. Steam envelops us, cloaks us; light sparkles on the agitated water; and we keep spinning,

so that at some point I’m not sure which hands are mine, which legs. We aren’t kissing. This
game is far less serious, more playful, free-style, but we’re gripping each other, trying not to let
the other’s slippery body go, and our knees bump, our tummies slap, our hips slide back and
forth. Various submerged softnesses on Clementine’s body are delivering crucial information to
mine, information I store away but won’t understand until years later. How long do we spin? I
have no idea. But at some point we get tired. Clementine beaches on the shelf, with me on top. I
rise onmy knees to get my bearings—and then freeze, hot water or not. For right there, sitting in
the corner of the room—is my grandfather! I see him for a second, leaning over sideways—is he
laughing? angry?—and then the steam rises again and blots himout.
I am too stunned to move or speak. How long has he been there? What did he see? “We were
just doing water ballet,” Clementine says lamely. The steam parts again. Lefty hasn’t moved.
He’s sitting exactly as before, head tilted to one side. He looks as pale as Clementine. For one
crazy second I think he’s playing our driving game, pretending to sleep, but then I understand
that hewill never play anything ever again . . .
And next all the intercoms in the house are wailing. I shout to Tessie in the kitchen, who
shouts to Milton in the den, who shouts to Desdemona in the guest house. “Come quick!
Something’swrongwith papou!”And thenmore screaming and an ambulance flashing its lights
andmymother tellingClementine it’s time for her to go homenow.
Later that night: the spotlight rises on two rooms in our new house on Middlesex. In one pool
of light, an oldwoman crosses herself
and prays, while in the other a seven-year-old girl is also praying, praying for forgiveness,
because it was clear to me that I was responsible. It was what I did . . . what Lefty saw . . . And I
am promising never to do anything like that again and asking Please don’t let papou die and
swearing It was Clementine’s fault. She made me do it.
(And now it’s time for Mr. Stark’s heart to have its moment. Its arteries coated with what
looks like foie gras, it seizes up one day. Clementine’s father crumples forward in the shower.
Downon the first floor, sensing something,Mrs. Stark stops doing leg lifts; and threeweeks later
she sells the house andmoves her daughter away. I never sawClementine again . . .)

Lefty did recover and came home from the hospital. But this was only a pause in the slow but
inevitable dissolution of his mind. Over the next three years, the hard disk of his memory slowly
began to be erased, beginning with the most recent information and proceeding backward. At
first Lefty forgot short-term things like where’d he put down his fountain pen or his glasses, and
then he forgot what day it was, what month, and finally what year. Chunks of his life fell away,
so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back. In 1969 it became clear to us
that he was living in 1968, because he kept shaking his head over the assassinations of Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. By the time we crossed over into the valley of the
seventies, Lefty was back in the fifties. Once again he was excited about the completion of the
St. Lawrence Seaway, and he stopped referring to me altogether because I hadn’t been born. He
reexperienced his gambling mania and his feelings of uselessness after retiring, but this soon
passed because it was the 1940s and he was running the bar and grill again. Every morning he
got up as though hewere going towork.Desdemona had to devise elaborate ruses to satisfy him,
telling him that our kitchen was the Zebra Room, only redecorated, and lamenting at how bad
business was. Sometimes she invited ladies from church over who played along, ordering coffee
and leavingmoney on the kitchen counter.
In his mind Lefty Stephanides grew younger and younger while in actuality he continued to
age, so that he often tried to lift things he couldn’t or to tackle stairs his legs couldn’t climb. Falls
ensued. Things shattered.At thesemoments, bending to help himup,Desdemona
would see a momentary clarity in her husband’s eyes, as if he were playing along too,
pretending to relive his life in the past so as not to face the present. Then he would begin to cry
andDesdemonawould lie downnext to him, holding himuntil the fit ended.
But soon he was back in the thirties and was searching the radio, listening for speeches from

FDR.Hemistook our blackmilkman for JimmyZizmo and sometimes climbed up into his truck,
thinking they were going rum-running. Using his chalkboard, he engaged the milkman in
conversations about bootleg whiskey, and even if this had made sense, the milkman wouldn’t
have been able to understand, because right about this time Lefty’s English began to deteriorate.
He made spelling and grammatical mistakes he’d long mastered and soon he was writing broken
English and then no English at all. He made written allusions to Bursa, and now Desdemona
began to worry. She knew that the backward progression of her husband’s mind could lead to
only one place, back to the days when he wasn’t her husband but her brother, and she lay in bed
at night awaiting the moment with trepidation. In a sense she began to live in reverse, too,
because she suffered the heart palpitations of her youth. O God, she prayed, Let me die now.
Before Lefty gets back to the boat. And then one morning when she got up, Lefty was sitting at
the breakfast table. His hair was pomaded à la Valentinowith some Vaseline he’d found in the
medicine chest. A dishrag was wrapped around his neck like a scarf. And on the table was the
chalkboard, onwhichwaswritten, inGreek, “Goodmorning, sis.”
For three days he teased her as he used to do, and pulled her hair, and performed dirty
Karaghiozis puppet shows. Desdemona hid his chalkboard, but it was no use. During Sunday
dinner he took a fountain pen from Uncle Pete’s shirt pocket and wrote on the tablecloth, “Tell
my sister she’s getting fat.” Desdemona blanched. She put her hands to her face and waited for
the blow she’d always feared to descend. But Peter Tatakis only took the pen from Lefty and
said, “It appears that Lefty is now under the delusion that you are his sister.” Everyone laughed.
What else could they do? Hey there, sis, everyone kept saying to Desdemona all afternoon, and
each time she jumped; each time she thought her heartwould stop.
But this stage didn’t last long. My grandfather’s mind, locked in its graveyard spiral,
accelerated as it hurtled toward its destruction,
and three days later he started cooing like a baby and the next he started soiling himself. At
that point, when there was almost nothing left of him, God allowed Lefty Stephanides to remain
another three months, until the winter of 1970. In the end he became as fragmentary as the
poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the
face of the woman who’d been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then
there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time,
washing even the last fragments of his self away.

From the beginning there existed a strange balance between my grandfather and me. As I cried
my first cry, Lefty was silenced; and as he gradually lost the ability to see, to taste, to hear, to
think or even remember, I began to see, taste, and remember everything, even stuff I hadn’t seen,
eaten, or done. Already latent inside me, like the future 120 mph serve of a tennis prodigy, was
the ability to communicate between the genders, to see notwith themonovision of one sex but in
the stereoscope of both. So that at the makaria after the funeral, I looked around the table at the
Grecian Gardens and knew what everyone was feeling. Milton was beset by a storm of emotion
he refused to acknowledge. He worried that if he spoke he might start to cry, and so said nothing
throughout the meal, and plugged his mouth with bread. Tessie was seized with a desperate love
for Chapter Eleven and me and kept hugging us and smoothing our hair, because children were
the only balm against death. Sourmelina was remembering the day at Grand Trunk when she’d
told Lefty that she would know his nose anywhere. Peter Tatakis was lamenting the fact that he
would never have a widow to mourn his death. Father Mike was favorably reviewing the eulogy
he’d given earlier that morning, while Aunt Zo was wishing she had married someone like her
father.
The only one whose emotions I couldn’t plumb was Desdemona. Silently, in the widow’s
position of honor at the head of the table, she picked at her whitefish and drank her glass of
Mavrodaphne, but her thoughtswere as obscured tome as her face behind her black veil.
Lacking any clairvoyance into my grandmother’s state of mind that day, I’ll just tell you what
happened next. After the makaria, my parents, grandmother, brother, and I got into my father’s

Fleetwood.
With a purple funeral pennant flying from the antenna, we left Greektown and headed down
Jefferson. The Cadillac was three years old now, the oldest one Milton ever had. As we were
passing the old Medusa Cement factory, I heard a long hiss and thought that my yia yia, sitting
next to me, was sighing over her misfortunes. But then I noticed that the seat was tilting.
Desdemonawas sinking down. Shewho had always feared automobiles was being swallowed by
the backseat.
It was the Air-Ride. Youweren’t supposed to turn it on unless you were going at least thirty
miles per hour. Distracted by grief, Milton had been going only twenty-five. The hydraulic
system ruptured. The passenger side of the car sloped down and stayed like that from then on.
(Andmy father began trading in his cars in every year.)
Limping, dragging, we returned home. My mother helped Desdemona out of the car and led
her to the guest house out back. It took some time. Desdemona kept leaning on her cane to rest.
Finally, outside her door, she announced, “Tessie, I amgoing to bed now.”
“Okay, yia yia,”mymother said. “Youtake a rest.”
“I am going to bed,” Desdemona said again. She turned and went inside. Beside the bed, her
silkworm box was still open. That morning, she had taken out Lefty’s wedding crown, cutting it
away from her own so he could be buried with it. She looked into the box for a moment now
before closing it. Then she undressed. She took off her black dress and hung it in the garment
bag full of mothballs. She returned her shoes to the box from Penney’s. After putting on her
nightgown, she rinsed out her panty hose in the bathroom and hung them over the shower rod.
And then, even though itwas only three in the afternoon, she got into bed.
For the next ten years, except for a bath every Friday, she never got out again.

THEMEDITERRANEANDIET

She didn’t like being left on earth. She didn’t like being left inAmerica. Shewas tired of living.
She was having a harder and harder time climbing stairs. A woman’s life was over once her
husband died. Somebody had given her the evil eye.
Such were the answers Father Mike brought back to us the third day after Desdemona refused
to get out of bed. My mother asked him to talk to her and he returned from the guest house with
his Fra Angelico eyebrows lifted in tender exasperation. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass,” he said. “I see
this kind of thingwithwidows all the time.”
We believed him. But as the weeks went by, Desdemona only became more depressed and
withdrawn. A habitual early riser, she began to sleep late. When my mother brought in a
breakfast tray,Desdemona opened one eye and gestured for her to leave it. Eggs got cold. Coffee
filmed over. The only thing that roused her was her daily lineup of soap operas. She watched the
cheating husbands and scheming wives as faithfully as ever, but she didn’t reprimand them
anymore, as if she’d given up correcting the errors of the world. Propped up against the
headboard, her hairnet cinched on her forehead like a diadem, Desdemona looked as ancient and
indomitable as the elderly Queen Victoria. A queen of a sceptered isle that consisted only of a
bird-filled bedroom.Aqueen in exile,with only two attendants remaining, Tessie andme.
“Pray forme to die,” she instructedme. “Pray for yia yia to die and go bewith papou.”

. . . But before I go onwithDesdemona’s story, Iwant to update you on developments with Julie
Kikuchi. With regard to the main point: there have been no developments. On our last day in
Pomerania, we got very cozy, Julie and I. Pomerania belonged to East Germany. The seaside
villas of Herringsdorf had been allowed to fall apart for fifty years. Now, after reunification,
there is a real estate boom. Being Americans, Julie and I could not fail but be alert to this. As we
strolled the wide boardwalk, holding hands, we speculated about buying this or that old,
crumbling villa and fixing it up. “We could get used to the nudists,” Julie said. “We could get a
Pomeranian,” I said. I don’t know what came over us. That “we.” We were prodigal in its usage,
we were reckless with its implications. Artists have good instincts for real estate. And
Herringsdorf energized Julie. We inquired about a few coops, a new thing here. We toured two
or three mansions. It was all very marital. Under the influence of that old, aristocratic,
nineteenth-century summer resort, Julie and I were acting old-fashioned, too. We discussed
setting up house without even having slept together. But of course we never mentioned love or
marriage.Only downpayments.
But on the way back to Berlin a familiar fear descended on me. Humming over the road, I
began to look ahead. I thought of the next step and what would be required of me. The
preparations, the explanations, the very real possibility of shock, horror, withdrawal, rebuff. The
usual reactions.
“What’s thematter?” Julie askedme.
“Nothing.”

“Youseemquiet.”
“Just tired.”
In Berlin, I dropped her off. My hug was cold, peremptory. I haven’t called her since. She left
a message on my machine. I didn’t respond. And now she has stopped calling, too. So it’s all
over with Julie. Over before it began. And instead of sharing a future with someone, I am back
againwith the past,withDesdemonawhowanted no future at all . . .

I brought her dinner, sometimes lunch. I carried trays along the portico of brown metal posts.
Abovewas the sun deck, underutilized,
the redwood rotting. To my right was the bathhouse, smooth and poured. The guest house
repeated the clean, rectilinear lines of the main house. The architecture of Middlesex was an
attempt to rediscover pure origins. At the time, I didn’t know about all that. But as I pushed
through the door into the skylit guest house I was aware of the disparities. The boxlike room,
stripped of all embellishment or parlor fussiness, a room thatwished to be timeless or ahistorical,
and there, in the middle of it, my deeply historical, timeworn grandmother. Everything about
Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of
remembering. Against her heap of pillows she lay, exuding woe vapors, but in a kindly way.
That was the signature of my grandmother and the Greek ladies of her generation: the kindliness
of their despair. How they moaned while offering you sweets! How they complained of physical
ailments while patting your knee! My visits always cheered Desdemona up. “Hello, dolly mou,”
she said, smiling. I sat on the bed as she strokedmyhair, cooing endearments inGreek.Withmy
brother Desdemona kept a happy face the entire time he was there. But with me, after ten
minutes, her buoyant eyes subsided, and she told me the truth about how she felt. “I am too old
now.Tooold, honey.”
Her lifelong hypochondria had never had a better field in which to flower. When she first
sentenced herself to the mahogany limbo of her four-poster bed, Desdemona complained only of
her usual heart palpitations. But a week later she began to suffer fatigue, dizziness, and
circulation problems. “I amhaving inmy legs pain. The blood it doesn’tmove.”
“She’s fine,” Dr. Philobosian told my parents, after a half-hour examination. “Not young
anymore, but I see nothing serious.”
“I no can breathe!”Desdemona arguedwith him.
“Yourlungs sound fine.”
“My leg it is like needles.”
“Try rubbing it. To stimulate the circulation.”
“He’s too old now too,” Desdemona said after Dr. Phil had left. “Get me a new doctor who he
isn’t already dead himself.”
My parents complied. Violating our family loyalty to Dr. Phil, they went behind his back and
called in new physicians. A Dr. Tuttlesworth. A Dr. Katz. The unfortunately named Dr. Cold.
Every single one gaveDesdemona the samedire diagnosis that therewas
nothingwrongwith her. They looked into thewrinkled prunes of her eyes; they peered into the
dried apricots of her ears; they listened to the indestructible pump of her heart, and pronounced
herwell.
We tried to cajole her out of bed. We invited her to watch Never on Sunday on the big
television. We called Aunt Lina in New Mexico and put the phone up to the intercom. “Listen,
Des,whydon’t you visitme downhere? It’s so hot you’ll think you’re back in the horeo.”
“I no can hear you, Lina!” Desdemona shouted, despite her lung problems. “It is working no
good themachine!”
Finally, appealing to Desdemona’s fear of God, Tessie told her that it was a sin to miss church
when you were physically able to go. But Desdemona patted the mattress. “The next time I go to
the church is in a coffin.”
She began to make final preparations. From her bed she directed my mother to clean out the
closets. “Papou’s clothes you can give to the Goodwill. My nice dresses, too. Now I only need

something for to bury me.” The necessity of caring for her husband during his final years had
made Desdemona a bundle of activity. Only a few months before, she’d been peeling and
stewing the soft food he ate, changing his diapers, cleaning his bedding and pajamas, and
harrying his body with moistened towels and Q-tips. But now, at seventy, the strain of having no
one to care for but herself aged her overnight. Her salt-and-pepper hair turned completely gray
and her robust figure sprang a slow leak, so that she seemed to be deflating day by day. She grew
paler. Veins showed. Tiny red sunspots burst on her chest. She stopped checking her face in the
mirror. Because of her poor dentures, Desdemona hadn’t really had lips for years. But now she
stopped putting lipstick even in the placewhere her lips used to be.
“Miltie,” she askedmy father one day, “you bought forme the place next to papou?”
“Don’tworry,Ma. It’s a double plot.”
“Nobody they are going take it?”
“It’s got your nameon it,Ma.”
“It no havemyname,Miltie! Thatwhy Iworry. It have papou’s name one side.Other side is
grass only. I want you go put sign it says, this place is for yia yia. Some other lady maybe she
die and try to get next tomyhusband.”
But her funeral preparations didn’t end there.Not only didDesdemona
pick out her burial plot. She also picked out her mortician. Georgie Pappas, Sophie Sassoon’s
brother who worked at the T. J. Thomas Funeral Home, arrived at Middlesex in April (when a
bout of pneumonia was looking promising). He carried his sample cases of caskets, crematory
urns, and flower arrangements out to the guest house and sat by Desdemona’s bed while she
looked the photographs over with the excitement of someone browsing travel brochures. She
askedMiltonwhat he could afford.
“I don’twant to talk about it,Ma.You’renot dying.”
“I am no asking for the Imperial. Georgie says Imperial is top of line. But for yia yia
Presidential is okay.”
“When the time comes, you can havewhatever youwant. But—”
“And satin inside. Please. And a pillow. Like here. Page eight. Number five. Pay attention!
And tellGeorgie leavemyglasses.”
As far as Desdemona was concerned, death was only another kind of emigration. Instead of
sailing from Turkey to America, this time she would be traveling from earth to heaven, where
Lefty had already gotten his citizenship and had a placewaiting.
Gradually we became accustomed to Desdemona’s retreat from the family sphere. By this
time, the spring of 1971, Milton was busy with a new “business venture.” After the disaster on
Pingree Street,Milton vowed never tomake the samemistake again.Howdo you escape the real
estate rule of location, location, location? Simple: be everywhere at once.
“Hot dog stands,” Milton announced at dinner one night. “Start with three or four and add on
as you go.”
With the remaining insurance money Milton rented space in three malls in the Detroit
metropolitan area. On a pad of yellow paper, he came up with the design for the stands.
“McDonald’s hasGoldenArches?” he said. “We’ve got the Pillars ofHercules.”
If you ever drove along the blue highways anywhere from Michigan to Florida, anytime from
1971 to 1978, you may have seen the bright white neon pillars that flanked my father’s chain of
hot dog restaurants. The pillars combined his Greek heritage with the colonial architecture of his
beloved native land. Milton’s pillars were the Parthenon and the Supreme Court Building; they
were the Herakles of myth as well as the Hercules of Hollywood movies. They also got people’s
attention.
Milton started out with three Hercules Hot Dogs™ but quickly added franchises as profits
allowed. He began in Michigan but soon spilled over into Ohio, and from there went on down
the Interstate to the deep South. The format was more like Dairy Queen than McDonald’s.
Seatingwasminimal or nonexistent (atmost a couple of picnic tables). Therewere no play areas,
no sweepstakes or “Happy Meals,” no giveaways or promotions. What there was was hot dogs,

Coney Island style, as that term was used in Detroit, meaning they were served with chili sauce
and onions.HerculesHotDogswere side-of-the-road places, and usually not the nicest roads. By
bowling alleys, by train stations, in small towns on the way to bigger ones, anywhere where real
estatewas cheap and a lot of cars or people passed through.
I didn’t like the stands. To me they were a steep come-down from the romantic days of the
Zebra Room. Where were the knickknacks, the jukebox, the glowing shelf of pies, the deep
maroon booths? Where were the regulars? I couldn’t understand how these hot dog stands could
make so much more money than the diner ever had. But make money they did. After the first,
touch-and-go year, my father’s chain of hot dog restaurants began to make him a comfortably
wealthy man. Aside from securing good locations, there was another element to my father’s
success. A gimmick or, in today’s parlance, a “branding.” Ball Park franks plumped when you
cooked them, but Hercules Hot Dogs did something better. They came out of the package
looking like normal, udder-pink wieners, but as they got hot, an amazing transformation took
place. Sizzling on the grill, the hot dogs bulged in themiddle, grew fatter, and, yes, flexed.
This was Chapter Eleven’s contribution. One night, my then seventeen-year-old brother had
gone down into the kitchen to make himself a late-night snack. He found some hot dogs in the
refrigerator. Notwanting towait forwater to boil, he got out a frying pan.Next he decided to cut
the hot dogs in half. “Iwanted to increase the surface area,” he explained tome later. Rather than
slicing the hot dogs lengthwise, Chapter Eleven tried various combinations to amuse himself. He
made notches here and slits there and then he put all the hot dogs in a pan and watched what
happened.
Not much, that first night. But a few of my brother’s incisions resulted in the hot dogs
assuming funny shapes.After that, it became a
kind of gamewith him.He grew adept atmanipulating the shapes of cooking hot dogs and, for
fun, developed an entire line of gag frankfurters. There was the hot dog that stood on end when
heated, resembling the Tower of Pisa. In honor of the moon landing, there was the Apollo 11,
whose skin gradually stretched until, bursting, the wiener appeared to blast off into the air.
Chapter Eleven made hot dogs that danced to Sammy Davis’s rendition of “Bojangles” and
others that formed letters, L and S, though he never accomplished a decent Z. (For his friends
he had hot dogs do other things. Laughter emanated from the kitchen late at night. You heard
Chapter Eleven: “I call this the Harry Reems,” and then the other boys shouting: “No way,
Stephanides!” And while we’re on the subject, was I the only one who was shocked by those old
Ball Park ads with their shots of red franks swelling and lengthening? Where were the censors?
Did anyone notice the expressions on mothers’ faces when those ads played, or the way, right
afterward, they often discussedwhat kind of “buns” they preferred? I certainly noticed, because I
was a girl at the time and those adswere designed to getmy attention.)
Once you ate a Hercules hot dog you never forgot it. Very quickly they had wide name
recognition. A large food processing company offered to buy the rights and sell the hot dogs in
stores, butMilton,mistakenly thinking that popularity is eternal, rejected it.
Aside from inventing the Herculean frankfurters, my brother had little interest in the family
business. “I’m an inventor,” he said. “Not a hot dog man.” In Grosse Pointe he fell into a group
of boys whose main bond was their unpopularity. A hot Saturday night for them consisted of
sitting in my brother’s room, staring at Escher prints. For hours they followed figures up
staircases that were also going down, or watched geese turn into fish and then into geese again.
They ate peanut butter crackers, getting gunk all over their teethwhile quizzing each other on the
periodic table. Steve Munger, Chapter Eleven’s best friend, used to infuriate my father with
philosophical arguments. (“But howcan you prove you exist,Mr. Stephanides?”)Wheneverwe
picked my brother up at school I saw him through a stranger’s eyes. Chapter Eleven was geeky,
nerdy. His body was a stalk supporting the tulip of his brain. As he walked to the car, his head
was often tilted back, alert to phenomena in the trees. He didn’t pick up on styles or trends.
Tessie still bought his
clothes for him. Because he was my older brother, I admired him; but because I was his sister,

I felt superior. In doling out our respective gifts God had given me all the important ones.
Mathematical aptitude: to Chapter Eleven. Verbal aptitude: to me. Fix-it handiness: to Chapter
Eleven. Imagination: tome.Musical talent: toChapter Eleven. Looks: tome.
The beauty I possessed as a baby only increased as I grew into a girl. It was no surprise why
Clementine Stark had wanted to practice kissing with me. Everyone wanted to. Elderly
waitresses bent close to take my order. Red-faced boys appeared at my desk, stammering, “Y-y-
you dropped your eraser.” Even Tessie, angry about something, would look down at me—at my
Cleopatra eyes—and forget what she was mad about. Wasn’t there the slightest rumble in the air
whenever I brought in drinks to the Sunday debaters? Uncle Pete, Jimmy Fioretos, Gus Panos,
men fifty, sixty, seventy years old looking up over expansive bellies and having thoughts they
didn’t admit?Back inBithynios,where sustained respiration rendered a bachelor eligible,men of
equivalent age had successfully asked for the hand of a girl like me. Were they remembering
those days, lounging on our love seats? Were they thinking, “If this wasn’t America, I just might
. . .”? I can’t say. Looking back now, I can only remember a timewhen theworld seemed to have
a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like
the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open—on the bus, in the
pharmacy—and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and the desperation.
For hours at a time I would admire my looks myself, turning this way and that before the
mirror, or assuming a relaxed pose to seewhat I looked like in real life. By holding a handmirror
I could see my profile, still harmonious at the time. I combed my long hair and sometimes stole
my mother’s mascara to do my eyes. But increasingly my narcissistic pleasure was tempered by
the unlovely condition of the pool intowhich I gazed.
“He’s popping his zits again!” I complained tomymother.
“Don’t be so squeamish,Callie. It’s just a little . . . here, I’llwipe it off.”
“Gross!”
“Wait’ll you get pimples!”Chapter Eleven shouted, ashamed and furious, from the hallway.
“I’mnot going to.”
“Youwill, too! Everybody’s sebaceous glands overproducewhen they go through puberty!”
“Quiet, both of you,” saidTessie, but she didn’t need to. I’d already gotten quiet onmyown. It
was that word: puberty. The source of a great amount of anxious speculation on my part at the
time. A word that lay in wait for me, jumping out now and then, scaring me because I didn’t
know exactly what it meant. But now at least I knew one thing: Chapter Eleven was involved in
it somehow. Maybe that explained not only the pimples but the other thing about my brother I’d
been noticing lately.
Not long after Desdemona took to her bed, I’d begun to notice, in the vague creepy way of a
sisterwith a brother, a new, solitary pastime ofChapter Eleven’s. It was amatter of a perceptible
activity behind the locked bathroomdoor.Of a certain strain to the reply, “Just aminute,”when I
knocked. Still, Iwas younger than hewas and ignorant of the pressing needs of adolescent boys.
But let me backtrack a minute. Three years earlier, when Chapter Eleven was fourteen and I
was eight, my brother had played a trick on me. It happened on a night when our parents had
gone out to dinner. It was raining and thundering. I was watching television when Chapter
Eleven suddenly appeared.Hewas holding out a lemon cake. “Lookwhat I have!” he sang.
Magnanimously he cut me a slice. He watched me eat it. Then he said, “I’m telling! That cake
was for Sunday.”
“No fair!”
I ran at him. I tried to hit him, but he caught my arms. We wrestled standing up, until finally
Chapter Eleven offered a deal.
As I said: in those days, the world was always growing eyes. Here were two more. They
belonged tomybrother, who, in the guest bathroom, amid the fancy hand towels, stoodwatching
as I pulled down my underpants and lifted my skirt. (If I showed him, he wouldn’t tell.)
Fascinated as he was, he stayed at a distance. His Adam’s apple rose and fell. He looked amazed
and frightened. He didn’t have much to compare me to, but what he saw didn’t misinform him

either: pink folds, a cleft. For ten seconds Chapter Eleven studied my documents, detecting no
forgery, as the clouds burst overhead, and Imade himgetmeonemore piece of cake.
Apparently, Chapter Eleven’s curiosity hadn’t been satisfied by
looking at his eight-year-old sister. Now, I suspected, he was looking at pictures of the real
thing.
In 1971, all the men in our lives were gone, Lefty to death, Milton to Hercules Hot Dogs, and
Chapter Eleven to bathroomsolitaire. LeavingTessie andme to dealwithDesdemona.
We had to cut her toenails. We had to hunt down flies that found their way into her room. We
had to move her birdcages around according to the light. We had to turn on the television for the
day’s soap operas and we had to turn it off before the murders on the evening news. Desdemona
didn’t want to lose her dignity, however. When nature called, she called us on the intercom, and
wehelped her out of bed and into the bathroom.
The simplest way to say it is: years passed. As the seasons changed outside the windows, as
the weeping willows shed their million leaves, as snow fell on the flat roof and the angle of
sunlight declined,Desdemona remained in bed. Shewas still therewhen the snowmelted and the
willows budded again. She was there when the sun, climbing higher, dropped a sunbeam straight
though the skylight, like a ladder to heaven shewasmore than eager to climb.
What happenedwhileDesdemonawas in bed:
Aunt Lina’s friend Mrs. Watson died, and with the poor judgment grief always brings,
Sourmelina decided to sell their adobe house and move back north to be close to her family. She
arrived inDetroit in February of 1972. Thewinterweather felt colder than she ever remembered.
Worse, her time in the Southwest had changed her. Somehow in the course of her life
Sourmelina had become an American. Almost nothing of the village remained in her. Her self-
entombed cousin, on the other hand, had never left it. They were both in their seventies, but
Desdemona was an old, gray-haired widow waiting to die while Lina, another kind of widow
entirely, was a bottle redhead who drove a Firebird and wore belted denim skirts with turquoise
belt buckles. After her life in the sexual counterculture, Lina found my parents’ heterosexuality
as quaint as a sampler. Chapter Eleven’s acne alarmed her. She disliked sharing a shower with
him. A strained atmosphere existed in our house while Sourmelina stayed with us. She was as
garish and out of place in our living room as a retired Vegas showgirl, and because we watched
her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she didmade too
much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank toomuchwine at dinner.
We got to know our new neighbors. There were the Picketts, Nelson, who’d played tackle for
Georgia Tech and now worked for Parke-Davis, the pharmaceutical company, and his wife,
Bonnie, who was always reading the miraculous tales in Guideposts. Across the street was Stew
“Bright Eyes” Fiddler, an industrial parts salesman with a taste for bourbon and barmaids, and
his wife, Mizzi, whose hair changed color like a mood ring. At the end of the block were Sam
and Hettie Grossinger, the first Orthodox Jews we’d ever met, and their only child, Maxine, a
shy violin prodigy. Sam, however, was funny, and Hettie was loud, and they talked about money
without thinking it was impolite, and so we felt comfortable around them. Milt and Tessie often
had the Grossingers over to dinner, though their dietary restrictions continually baffled us. My
mother would drive all the way across town to buy kosher meat, for instance, only to serve it
with a cream sauce. Or she would skip the meat and cream altogether and serve crab cakes.
Though faithful to their religion, the Grossingers were midwestern Jews, low-key and
assimilationist. They hid behind their wall of cypresses and at Christmas put up a Santa Claus
alongwith lights.
In 1971: Judge Stephen J. Roth of the U.S. District Court ruled that de jure segregation
existed in the Detroit school system. He immediately ordered the schools to be desegregated.
There was only one problem. By 1971 the Detroit student population was 80 percent black.
“That busing judge can bus all he wants,” Milton crowed, reading about the decision in the
paper. “Doesn’t make any difference now. You see, Tessie? Youunderstand why your dear old
husbandwanted to get the kids out of that school system?Because if I didn’t, that goddamnRoth

would be busing them to school in downtownNairobi, that’swhy.”
In 1972: Five-foot five-inch S. Miyamoto, rejected by the Detroit police force for failing to
meet the five-foot seven-inch requirement (he had tried elevator heels, etc.), appeared on The
TonightShow to plead his case. I wrote a letter to the police commissioner myself in support of
Miyamoto, but I never received a reply, and Miyamoto was rejected. A few months later, Police
CommissionerNicholswas thrown fromhis horse during a parade. “That’swhat you get!” I said.
In 1972: H. D. Jackson and L. D. Moore, who had brought a police brutality case for four
million dollars, hijacked a Southern Airways jet to Cuba, outraged at being awarded damages in
the amount of twenty-five dollars.
In 1972:MayorRomanGribbs claimed thatDetroit had turned around. The city had overcome
the trauma of the ’67 riots. Therefore, he wasn’t planning on running for another term. A new
candidate appeared, the man who would become the city’s first African American mayor,
ColemanA.Young.
And I turned twelve.

A few months earlier, on the first day of sixth grade, Carol Horning came into class wearing a
slight but unmistakably self-satisfied smile. Below this smile, as if displayed on a trophy shelf,
were the new breasts she had gotten over the summer. She wasn’t the only one. During the
growingmonths, quite a fewofmy schoolmates had—as adults liked to say—“developed.”
I wasn’t entirely unprepared for this. I’d spent a month the previous summer at Camp
Ponshewaing, near Port Huron. During the slow march of summer days I was aware, as one is
aware of a drum steadily beating across a lake, of something unspooling itself in the bodies of
my campmates. Girls were growing modest. They turned their backs to dress. Some had
surnames stitched onto not only shorts and socks but training bras, too. Mostly, it was a personal
matter that no one spoke about. But now and then there were dramatic manifestations. One
afternoon during swimming hour, the tin door of the changing room clanged open and shut. The
sound caromed off the trunks of pine trees, carrying past the meager beach out over the water,
where I floated on an inner tube, reading Love Story. (Swimming hourwas the only time I could
get any reading done, and though the camp counselors tried to motivate me to practice my
freestyle, I persevered every day in reading the new bestseller I’d found on my mother’s night
table.) Now I looked up. Along a dusty brown path in the pine needles, Jenny Simonson was
advancing in a red, white, and blue swimsuit. All nature grew hushed at the sight. Birds fell
silent. Lake swans unfurled tremendous necks to get a glimpse. Even a chainsaw in the distance
cut its engine. I beheld themagnificence of JennyS. The golden, late afternoon light intensified
around her. Her patriotic swimsuit swelled in ways no one else’s did. Muscles flexed in her
long thighs. She ran to the end of the dock and plunged into the lake, where a throng of naiads
(her friends fromCedarRapids) swamover tomeet her.
Lowering my book, I looked down at my own body. There it was, as usual: the flat chest, the
nothing hips, the forked, mosquito-bitten legs. Lake water and sun were making my skin peel.
My fingers had gotten allwrinkly.
Thanks to Dr. Phil’s decrepitude and Tessie’s prudishness, I arrived at puberty not knowing
much about what to expect. Dr. Philobosian still had an office near Women’s Hospital, though
the hospital itself had been closed down by then. His practice had changed considerably. There
were a few remaining elderly patients who, having survived so long under his care, were afraid
to change doctors. The rest were welfare families. Nurse Rosalee ran the office. She and Dr. Phil
had been married a year after they met delivering me. Now she did the scheduling and
administered shots. Her Appalachian childhood had acquainted her with government assistance,
and shewas awhizwith theMedicaid forms.
In his eighties, Dr. Phil had taken up painting. His office walls were covered salon-style with
thick, swirling oils. He didn’t use a brush much, mainly a palette knife. And what did he paint?
Smyrna? The quay at dawn? The terrible fire? No. Like many amateurs, Dr. Phil assumed that
the only proper subject for art was a picturesque landscape that had nothing to do with his

experience.He painted sea vistas he’d never seen and forest hamlets he’d never visited, complete
with a pipe-smoking figure resting on a log. Dr. Philobosian never talked about Smyrna and left
the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his first wife, or his murdered sons and daughters.
Maybe thiswas the reason for his survival.
Nevertheless, Dr. Phil was becoming a fossil. For my annual physical in 1972 he used
diagnostic methods popular back in medical school in 1910. There was a trick where he
pretended to slap me in the face to check my reflexes. There was an auscultation accomplished
with a wineglass. When he bent his head to listen to my heart I was treated to an aerial view of
the Galápagos of scabs on his bald pate. (The archipelago changed position from year to year,
continentally drifting across the globe of his skull but never healing.)Dr. Philobosian
smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps. His medical
diploma looked as if it were written on parchment. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, to cure
fever, Dr. Phil hadwritten out a prescription for leeches. Hewas correct with me, never friendly,
and directedmost of his conversation to Tessie, who sat in a chair in the corner.Whatmemories,
I wonder, was Dr. Phil avoiding in not looking at me? Did the ghosts of Levantine girls haunt
those cursory checkups, suggested by the fragility of my collarbone, or the birdcall of my small,
congested lungs? Was he trying not to think of water palaces and loosened robes, or was he just
tired, old, half-blind, and too proud to admit it?
Whatever the answer, year after year, Tessie faithfully tookme to him, in repayment for an act
of charity during a catastrophe he would no longer acknowledge. In his waiting room I
encountered the same tattered Highlights magazine every visit. “Can you find these?” the
puzzle asked inside.And there in the spreading chestnut treewere the knife, the dog, the fish, the
old woman, the candlestick—all circled by my own hand, shaky with earache, years and years
before.
My mother avoided bodily matters, too. She never spoke openly about sex. She never
undressed in front of me. She disliked dirty jokes or nudity in movies. For his own part, Milton
was unable to discuss the birds and the bees with his young daughter, and so I was left, in those
years, to figure things out formyself.
From hints Aunt Zo let slip in the kitchen I was aware that something happened to women
every so often, something they didn’t like, something men didn’t have to put up with (like
everything else). Whatever it was, it seemed safely far off, like getting married or giving birth.
And then one day at Camp Ponshewaing, Rebecca Urbanus climbed up on a chair. Rebecca was
from South Carolina. She had slave-owning ancestors and a trained voice. During dances with
the boys from the neighboring camp, she waved a hand in front of her face as though holding a
fan. Why was she up on a chair? We were having a talent show. Rebecca Urbanus was maybe
singing or reciting the poetry of Walter de la Mare. The sun was still high and her shorts were
white.And then suddenly, as she sang (or recited), the back of herwhite shorts darkened.At first
it appeared to be only a shadowof the surrounding trees. Some kid’swaving hand. But no:while
our band of twelve-year-olds satwatching, each of us in camp
T-shirt and Indian headband, we saw what Rebecca Urbanus didn’t. While her upper half
performed, her bottom half upstaged her. The stain grew, and it was red. Camp counselors were
unsure how to react. Rebecca sang, arms outflung. She revolved on her chair before her theater-
in-the-round: us, staring, perplexed and horrified. Certain “advanced” girls understood. Others,
like me, thought: knife wound, bear attack. Right then Rebecca Urbanus saw us looking. She
looked downherself.And screamed.And fled the stage.
I returned from camp browner and leaner, pinned with a single badge (ironically, for
orienteering). But that other badge, which Carol Horning displayed so proudly the first day of
school, I was still without. I felt ambivalent about this. On the one hand, if Rebecca Urbanus’s
mishap was any indication, it might be safer to stay the way I was. What if something similar
happened to me? I went through my closet and threw out anything white. I stopped singing
altogether.Youcouldn’t control it. Younever knew. It could happen anytime.
Except, with me, it didn’t. Gradually, as most of the other girls in my grade began to undergo

their own transformations, I began to worry less about possible accidents and more about being
left behind, left out.
I am in math class, sometime during the winter of sixth grade. Miss Grotowski, our youngish
teacher, is writing an equation on the blackboard. Behind her, at wooden-topped desks, students
follow her calculations, or doze, or kick each other from behind. A gray winter Michigan day.
The grass outside resembles pewter. Overhead, fluorescent lights attempt to dispel the season’s
dimness. A picture of the great mathematician Ramanujan (whom we girls at first took to be
Miss Grotowski’s foreign boyfriend) hangs on the wall. The air is stuffy in the way only air at
school can be stuffy.
And behind our teacher’s back, in our desks, we are flying through time. Thirty kids, in six
neat rows, being borne along at a speed we can’t perceive. As Miss Grotowski sketches
equations on the board, my classmates all around me begin to change. Jane Blunt’s thighs, for
instance, seem to get a little bit longer every week. Her sweater swells in front. Then one day
BeverlyMaas,who sits right next tome, raises her hand and I see darkness up her sleeve: a patch
of light brownhair.When did it appear?Yesterday?The day before?
The equations get longer and longer throughout the year, more complicated, andmaybe it’s all
the numbers, or the multiplication tables; we are learning to quantify large sums as, by new
math, bodies arrive at unexpected answers. Peter Quail’s voice is two octaves lower than last
month and he doesn’t notice. Why not? He’s flying too fast. Boys are getting peach fuzz on
upper lips. Foreheads and noses are breaking out. Most spectacularly of all, girls are becoming
women. Not mentally or emotionally even, but physically. Nature is making its preparations.
Deadlines encoded in the species aremet.
Only Calliope, in the second row, is motionless, her desk stalled somehow, so that she’s the
only onewho takes in the true extent of themetamorphoses around her.While solving proofs she
is aware of Tricia Lamb’s purse on the floor next to her desk, of the tampon she glimpsed inside
it that morning—which you use how, exactly?—and whom can she ask? Still pretty, Calliope
soon finds herself the shortest girl in the room. She drops her eraser. No boy brings it back. In
the Christmas pageant she is cast not as Mary as in past years but as an elf . . . But there’s still
hope, isn’t there? . . . because the desks are flying, day after day; arranged in their squadron, the
students bank and roar through time, so that Callie looks up from her ink-stained paper one
afternoon and sees it is spring, flowers budding, forsythia in bloom, elms greening; at recess girls
and boys hold hands, kissing sometimes behind trees, and Calliope feels gypped, cheated.
“Rememberme?” she says, to nature. “I’mwaiting. I’m still here.”

As was Desdemona. By April of 1972, her application to join her husband in heaven was still
working its way though a vast, celestial bureaucracy. Though Desdemona was perfectly healthy
when she got into bed, the weeks, months, and finally years of inactivity, coupled with her own
remarkable willpower to do away with herself, brought her the reward of a Physician’s
Handbook of ailments. During her bedridden years Desdemona had fluid in her lungs; lumbago;
bursitis; a spell of eclampsia that manifested itself a half-century later than etiologically normal
and then just as mysteriously vanished, to Desdemona’s regret; a severe case of shingles that
made her ribs and back the color and texture of ripe strawberries and stung like a cattle prod;
nineteen colds; a week of purely figurative “walking” pneumonia; ulcers; psychosomatic
cataractswhich clouded her vision on the anniversaries
of her husband’s death and which she basically just cried away; and Dupuytren’s contracture,
where inflamed fascia in her hand curled her thumb and three fingers painfully into her palm,
leaving hermiddle finger raised in an obscene gesture.
One doctor enrolled Desdemona in a longevity study. He was writing an article for a medical
journal on “The Mediterranean Diet.” To that end he plied Desdemona with questions about the
cuisine of her homeland. How much yogurt had she consumed as a child? How much olive oil?
Garlic? She answered every one of his queries because she thought his interest indicated that
there was something, at last, organically the matter with her, and because she never missed a

chance to stroll through the precincts of her childhood. The doctor’s name was Müller. German
by blood, he renounced his race when it came to its cooking. With postwar guilt, he decried
bratwurst, sauerbraten, and Königsberger Klopse as dishes verging on poison. They were the
Hitler of foods. Instead he looked to our own Greek diet—our eggplant aswim in tomato sauce,
our cucumber dressings and fish-egg spreads, our pilafi, raisins, and figs—as potential curatives,
as life-giving, artery-cleansing, skin-smoothing wonder drugs. And what Dr. Müller said
appeared to be true: though he was only forty-two, his face was wrinkled, burdened with jowls.
Gray hair prickled up on the sides of his head; whereas my father, at forty-eight, despite the
coffee stains beneath his eyes, was still the possessor of an unlined olive complexion and a rich,
glossy, black head of hair. They didn’t call it Grecian Formula for nothing. It was in our food! A
veritable fountain of youth in our dolmades and taramasalata and even in our baklava, which
didn’t commit the sin of containing refined sugar but had only honey. Dr. Müller showed us
graphs he’d made, listing the names and birth dates of Italians, Greeks, and a Bulgarian living in
the Detroit metropolitan area, and we saw our own entrant—Desdemona Stephanides, age
ninety-one—going strong in the midst of the rest. Plotted against Poles killed off by kielbasa, or
Belgians done in by pommes frites, or Anglo-Saxons disappeared by puddings, or Spaniards
stopped cold by chorizo, our Greek dotted line kept going where theirs tailed off in a tangle of
downward trajectories. Who knew? As a people we hadn’t had, for the past few millennia, that
much to be proud of. So it was perhaps understandable that during Dr. Müller’s house calls we
failed tomention the troubling anomaly
of Lefty’s multiple strokes. We didn’t want to skew the graph with new data, and so didn’t
mention that Desdemona was actually seventy-one, not ninety-one, and that she always confused
sevens with nines. We didn’t mention her aunts, Thalia and Victoria, who both died of breast
cancer as young women; and we said nothing about the high blood pressure that taxed the veins
within Milton’s own smooth, youthful exterior. We couldn’t. We didn’t want to lose out to the
Italians or even that one Bulgarian. And Dr. Müller, lost in his research, didn’t notice the store
display of mortuary services next to Desdemona’s bed, the photograph of the dead husband next
to the photograph of his grave, the abundant paraphernalia of awidowabandoned on earth.Not a
member of a band of immortals fromMountOlympus. Just the onlymember left alive.

Meanwhile, tensions betweenmymother andmewere rising.
“Don’t laugh!”
“I’m sorry, honey.But it’s just, you’ve got nothing to . . . to . . .”
“Mom!”
“. . . to hold it up.”
A tantrum-edged scream. Twelve-year-old feet running up the stairs, while Tessie called out,
“Don’t be so dramatic, Callie. We’ll get you a bra if you want.” Up into my bedroom, where,
after locking the door, I pulled offmy shirt before themirror to see . . . thatmymotherwas right.
Nothing!Nothing at all to hold up anything.And I burst into tears of frustration and rage.
That evening,when I finally cameback down to dinner, I retaliated in the onlyway I could.
“What’s thematter?You’renot hungry?”
“Iwant normal food.”
“What do youmean normal food?”
“American food.”
“I have tomakewhat yia yia likes.”
“What aboutwhat I like?”
“Youlike spanakopita.You’vealways liked spanakopita.”
“Well, I don’t anymore.”
“Okay, then.Don’t eat. Starve if youwant. If you don’t likewhatwe give you, you can just sit
at the table untilwe’re finished.”
Faced with the mirror’s evidence, laughed at by my own mother, surrounded by developing
classmates, I had come to a dire conclusion.

I had begun to believe that the Mediterranean Diet that kept my grandmother alive against her
will was also sinisterly retarding my maturity. It only served to reason that the olive oil Tessie
drizzled over everything had some mysterious power to stop the body’s clock, while the mind,
impervious to cooking oils, kept going. That was why Desdemona had the despair and fatigue of
a person of ninety along with the arteries of a fifty-year-old. Might it be, I wondered, that the
omega-3 fatty acids and the three-vegetables-per-meal I consumedwere responsible for retarding
my sexualmaturity?Was yogurt for breakfast stallingmybreast development? Itwas possible.
“What’s the matter, Cal?” asked Milton, eating while reading the evening newspaper. “Don’t
youwant to live to be a hundred?”
“Not if I have to eat this stuff thewhole time.”
But nowTessiewas the one tearing up. Tessiewho for almost twoyears nowhad 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. “Youdon’t do the shopping,”
she said, tearfully. “Youdon’t see what I see. When’s the last time you’ve been to the drugstore,
Little Miss Normal Food? Youknow 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. Youwant to
know the truth?This entire country can’t do number two!”
“Oh, now I reallywant 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, Iwouldn’t say theGreat Salt Lake has undergone any kind of geological—”
“Well, your face has, zithead!”
“Still as flat as ever. Perfect for time trials.”
But thenMilton shouted, “Goddamn it!”—drowning us both out.
We thought hewas tired of our bickering.
“That goddamn judge!”
Hewasn’t looking at us.Hewas staring at the front page of The Detroit News. Hewas turning
red and then—that high blood pressurewehadn’tmentioned—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!”

THEWOLVERETTE

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 theMiddle School JuniorVarsityseason 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! Youcan feel that one all theway 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’mcomplaining. “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 Iwill learn to identify
in the coming year’s English class, is amustache.
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-
coifedmother in the picture, clipping a rose from the garden.
And next it is twomonths later, near the end of the fall term, and the stationwagon 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 ofmy childhoodwas 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 buildingwith its long echoing
hallways and churchy smell, its leadedwindows, itsGothic gloom.TheLatin 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,
andE.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 thework’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 hitme.My insides twisted, eruptingwith a lava flowof pain.
I bent forward, tripping onmygoalie stick.And then Iwas tumbling, falling . . .)
But there’s still time to record a fewother 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,whilemy teethwere slowly coerced into straightness,
the rest ofmy 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” enteredmy 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,
thewaywe’re chained to our bodies,which are chained toTime.
The hockey ball rocketed forward. It hit the side ofmymask,which deflected it into the center
of the net.We lost. TheHornets celebrated.

In disgrace, as usual, I returned to the gymnasium. Carrying mymask, 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 stillmanaged to look blue.Most of the time, however, itwas 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. Iwas looking at the gymnasiumdoorswith an expression ofwariness 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 sorenesswent away, and nothing cameof 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!Comeon.Hustle up!” She sawme coming andmanaged to smile.
“Good effort,” she said, handingme a towel.
Hierarchies exist everywhere, but especially in locker rooms. The swampiness, the nudity
bring back original conditions. Letmeperform
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 anotherBraceletwas 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 reachedmy 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 andwhales 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 fromhome.
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
asAmerican carmakers), did they showaptitudes formath 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 prudentWasp, I’mdipping 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, butwhat comes back is only a bundle of emotions: envy,
certainly, but also disdain. Inferiority and superiority at once.Above all, therewas panic.
In front of me girls were entering and exiting the showers. The flashes of nakedness were like
shouts going off. A year or so earlier these same girls had been porcelain figurines, gingerly
dipping their toes into the disinfectant basin at the public pool. Now they were magnificent
creatures. Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came, kicking my heavy,
padded legs and gaping through the goalie mask at the fantastic underwater life all around me.
Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates’ legs. They came in all colors, black,
brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing,
tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving in the current, feeding on microscopic
plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the
depths.
The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the
creatures of air; down below, those of water. One planet, containing two worlds. My classmates
were as unastonished by their extravagant traits as a blowfish is by its quills. They seemed to be
a different species. Itwas as if they had scent glands or
marsupial pouches, adaptations for fecundity, for procreating in thewild,which had nothing to
do with skinny, hairless, domesticated me. I hurried by, desolate, my ears ringing with the noise
of the place.
Beyond the Charm Bracelets I passed next into the area of the Kilt Pins. The most populous
phylum in our locker room, the Kilt Pins took up three rows of lockers. There they were, fat and
skinny, pale and freckled, clumsily putting on socks or pulling up unbecoming underwear. They
were like the devices that held our tartans together, unremarkable, dull, but necessary in their
way. I don’t remember any of their names.
Past the Charm Bracelets, through the Kilt Pins, deeper into the locker room, Calliope limped.

Back to where the tiles were cracked and the plaster yellowing, under the flickering light
fixtures, by the drinking fountain with the prehistoric piece of gum in the drain, I hurried to
where I belonged, tomyniche of the local habitat.
I wasn’t alone that year in having my circumstances altered. The specter of busing had started
other parents looking into private schools. Baker & Inglis, with an impressive physical plant but
a small endowment, wasn’t averse to increasing enrollment. And so, in the autumn of 1972, we
had arrived (the steam thins out this far from the showers and I can see my old friends clearly):
Reetika Chura-swami, with her enormous yellow eyes and sparrow’s waist; and Joanne Maria
Barbara Peracchio, with her corrected clubfoot and (it must be admitted) John Birch Society
affiliation; Norma Abdow, whose father had gone away on the Haj and never come back; Tina
Kubek, who was Czech by blood; and Linda Ramirez, half Spanish, half Filipina, who was
standing still, waiting for her glasses to unfog. “Ethnic” girls we were called, but then who
wasn’t,when you got right down to it?Weren’t theCharmBracelets every bit as ethnic?Weren’t
they as full of strange rituals and food? Of tribal speech? They said “bogue” for repulsive and
“queer” for weird. They ate tiny, crustless sandwiches on white bread—cucumber sandwiches,
mayonnaise, and something called “watercress.”Untilwe came toBaker& Inglismy friends and
I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that
there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America
wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth
Rock. Itwas about something
that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had
happened since. Instead of everything thatwas happening now!
Suffice it to say that, in seventh grade, Calliope found herself aligned with, taken in by,
nurtured and befriended by the year’s newcomers. As I opened my locker, my friends said
nothing about my porous goaltending. Instead Reetika kindly turned the subject to an upcoming
math test. Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio slowly peeled off a knee sock. Correctional surgery
had left her right ankle as thin as a broomstick. The sight of it always made me feel better about
myself. Norma Abdow opened her locker, looked in, and shouted, “Gross!” I stalled, unlacing
my pads. On either side, my friends, with quick, shivery movements, stripped off their clothes.
They wrapped themselves in towels. “You guys?” Linda Ramirez asked. “Can I borrow some
shampoo?” “Only if you’re my lunch peon tomorrow.” “No way!” “Then no shampoo.” “Okay,
okay.” “Okay,what?” “Okay,YourHighness.”
I waited until they left before I undressed. First I took off my knee socks. I reached under my
athletic tunic and pulled downmy shorts. After tying a bath towel aroundmywaist, I unbuttoned
the shoulder straps of my tunic and pulled it over my head. This left me with the towel and my
jersey on. Now came the tricky part. The brassiere I had was size 30 AA. It had a tiny rosette
between the cups and a label that read “YoungMiss by Olga.” (Tessie had urged me to get an
old-fashioned training bra, but I wanted something that looked like what my friends had, and
preferably padded.) I now fastened this item around my waist, clasps in front, and then rotated it
into position. At that point, one sleeve at a time, I pulled my arms inside my jersey so that it sat
on my shoulders like a cloak. Working inside it, I slid the bra up my torso until I could slip my
arms through the armholes. When that was accomplished, I put my kilt on under my towel,
removedmy jersey, put onmyblouse, and tossed the towel away. Iwasn’t naked for a second.
The only witness to my cunning was our school mascot. On the wall behind me a faded felt
banner proclaimed: “1955 State Field Hockey Champions.” Below this, striking her customary
insouciant pose, was the B&I Wolverette. With her beady eyes, sharp teeth, and tapering snout,
she stood leaning on her hockey stick, right foot crossed over left ankle. She wore a blue tunic
with a red sash.A red
ribbon sat between her furry ears. It was difficult to tell if she was smiling or snarling. There
was something of the Yalebulldog’s tenacity in ourWolverette, but there was elegance, too. The
Wolverette didn’t just play towin. She played to keep her figure.
At the nearby drinking fountain, I pressed one finger over the hole, making the water squirt

high in the air. I putmyhead into this stream.CoachStork always touched our hair before letting
us leave,making sure itwaswet.

The year I was packed off to private school, Chapter Eleven went off to college. Although he
was safe from the long arm of Judge Roth, other arms had been reaching for him. One hot day
the previous July, as I was passing down our upstairs hall, I heard a strange voice emanating
from Chapter Eleven’s bedroom. The voice was a man’s and he was reading numbers and dates.
“February fourth,” the voice said, “thirty-two. February fifth—three hundred and twenty-one.
February sixth . . .” The accordion doorwasn’t latched, so I peeked in.
My brother was lying on his bed, wrapped in an old afghan Tessie had crocheted for him. His
head extended from one end—eyes glazed—and his white legs from the other. Across the room
his stereo amplifierwas on, the radio needle jumping.
That spring, Chapter Eleven had received two letters, one from the University of Michigan
informing him of his acceptance and the other from the U.S. government informing him of his
eligibility for the draft. Since then my apolitical brother had been taking an unusual interest in
current events. Every night, he watched the news with Milton, tracking military developments
and paying close attention to the guarded statements of Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks.
“Power is the greatest aphrodisiac,”Kissinger famously said, and itmust have been true: because
Chapter Eleven was glued to the set night after night, following the machinations of diplomacy.
At the same time, Milton was pricked by the strange desire of parents, and especially of fathers,
to see their children repeat their own sufferings. “Might do you some good being in the service,”
he said. Towhich Chapter Eleven replied, “I’ll go toCanada.” “Youwill not. If they call you up,
you’ll serve your country just like I did.” And then Tessie: “Don’t worry. The whole thing’ll be
over before they can get you.”
In the summer of ’72, however, as I watched my number-stunned brother, the war was still
officially on.Nixon’sChristmas bombings
were still awaiting their holiday season. Kissinger was still shuttling between Paris and
Washington tomaintain his sex appeal. In actuality, the Paris PeaceAccordswould be signed the
following January and the last American troops would pull out of Vietnam in March. But as I
peeked in at my brother’s inert body, no one knew that yet. I was aware only of what a strange
thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the
discrimination of being sent to war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable? I felt a
sympathy and protectiveness for my brother I’d never felt before. I thought of Chapter Eleven in
an army uniform, squatting in the jungle. I imagined himwounded on a stretcher, and I started to
cry. The voice on the radio droned on: “February twenty-first—one hundred and forty-one.
February twenty-second—seventy-four. February twenty-third—twohundred and six.”
I waited until March 20, Chapter Eleven’s birthday. When the voice announced his draft
number—it was two hundred and ninety, he would never go to war—I burst into his room.
Chapter Eleven leapt out of bed. We looked at each other and—almost unheard of between
us—wehugged.
The next fall, my brother left not for Canada but for Ann Arbor. Once again, as when Chapter
Eleven’s egg had dropped, I was left alone. Alone at home to note my father’s growing anger at
the nightly news, his frustration at the “half-assed” way the Americans were waging the war
(napalm notwithstanding) and his increasing sympathy for President Nixon. Alone, also, to
detect a feeling of uselessness that began to plague my mother. With Chapter Eleven out of the
house and me growing up, Tessie found herself with too much time on her hands. She began to
fill her days with classes at the War Memorial Community Center. She learned decoupage. She
wove plant hangers. Our house began to fill up with her craft projects. There were painted
baskets and beaded curtains, paperweights with various objects suspended in them, dried
flowers, colored grains and beans. She went antiquing and hung an old washboard on the wall.
She took yoga, too.
It was the combination of Milton’s disgust at the antiwar movement and Tessie’s sense of

uselessness that led them to begin reading the entire one-hundred-and-fifteen-volume set of the
Great Books series. Uncle Pete had been touting these books for a long time, not to mention
quoting from them liberally to score points in Sunday debates.
And now, with so much learning in the air—Chapter Eleven majoring in engineering, I myself
taking first-year Latin with Miss Silber, who wore sunglasses in class—Milton and Tessie
decided it was time to round out their education. The Great Books arrived in ten boxes stamped
with their contents. Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates in one; Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Virgil in
another. As we shelved the books in the built-in stacks on Middlesex, we read the names, many
familiar (Shakespeare), others not (Boethius). Canon-bashing wasn’t in vogue yet, and besides,
the Great Books began with names not unlike our own (Thucydides), so we felt included.
“Here’s a good one,” said Milton, holding up Milton. The only thing that disappointed him was
that the series didn’t contain a book byAynRand.Nevertheless, that evening after dinner,Milton
began reading aloud toTessie.
They went chronologically, starting with volume one and working their way toward one
hundred and fifteen. While I did my homework in the kitchen I heard Milton’s resonant, drill-
like voice saying, “Socrates: ‘There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts.’
Adeimantus: ‘What are they?’ Socrates: ‘Wealth, I said, and poverty.’ ”When the Plato got to be
hard going, Milton suggested skipping ahead to Machiavelli. After a few days of that, Tessie
asked for Thomas Hardy, but an hour later Milton put the book down, unimpressed. “Too many
heaths,” he complained. “Heath this and heath that.” Then they read The Old Man and the Sea
byErnestHemingway,which they enjoyed, and then they gave the project up.
I bring up my parents’ failed assault on the Great Books for a reason. Throughout my
formative years, the set remained on our library shelves, weighty and regal-looking with its gold
spines. Even back then the Great Books were working on me, silently urging me to pursue the
most futile human dream of all, the dream of writing a book worthy of joining their number, a
one hundred and sixteenthGreatBookwith another longGreek nameon the cover: Ste-phanides.
That was when I was young and full of grand dreams. Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting
fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which,
whatever its flaws,will leave a record ofmy impossible life.
The life which, as I shelved books, was finally revealing itself. Because here is Calliope,
opening another carton.Here she is taking out number
forty-five (Locke, Rousseau). Here she is reaching up, without resorting to tiptoes, to put it on
the top shelf.Andhere is Tessie, looking up and saying, “I think you’re growing,Cal.”
It turned out to be an understatement. Beginning in January of seventh grade and continuing
into the following August, my previously frozen body underwent a growth spurt of uncommon
proportions and unforeseeable consequences. Though at home I was still kept on the
Mediterranean Diet, the food at my new school—chicken pot pies, Tater Tots, cubed Jell-
O—canceled out its fountain-of-youth effects and, in all ways but one, I began to grow up. I
sprouted with the velocity of the mung beans we studied in Earth Science. Learning about
photosynthesis, we kept one tray in the dark and one in the light, and measured them every day
with metric rulers. Like a mung bean my body stretched up toward the great grow lamp in the
sky, and my case was even more significant because I continued to grow in the dark. At night,
my joints ached. I had trouble sleeping. I wrapped my legs in heating pads, smiling through the
pain. Because along with my new height, something else was finally happening. Hair was
beginning to appear in the required places. Every night, after locking my bedroom door, I angled
my desk lamp just so and began to count the hairs. One week there were three; the next, six; two
weeks later, seventeen. In a grand mood one day I ran a comb through them. “About time,” I
said, and even thatwas different:myvoicewas beginning to change.
It didn’t do so overnight. I don’t remember any cracking. Instead my voice began a slow
descent that continued for the next couple of years. The earsplitting quality it had had—which I
used as aweapon againstmybrother—disappeared.Hitting the “free” in the national anthemwas
a thing of the past.Mymother kept thinking that I had a cold. Sales ladies looked pastme for the

womanwhohad asked for help. It was a not unbewitching sound, amix of flute and bassoon,my
consonants slightly slurred, a rush and breathiness to most of my pronouncements. And there
were the signs only a linguist could pick up,middle-class elisions, grace notes passed down from
Greek intomidwestern twang, the heritage frommygrandparents and parents that lived on inme
like everything else.
I grew tall. My voice matured. But nothing seemed unnatural. My slight build, my thin waist,
the smallness ofmyhead, hands, and
feet raised no questions in anybody’s mind. Many genetic males raised as girls don’t blend in
so easily. Froman early age they look different,move differently, they can’t find shoes or gloves
that fit. Other kids call them tomboys or worse: ape-women, gorillas. My skinniness disguised
me. The early seventies were a good time to be flat-chested. Androgyny was in. My rickety
height and foal’s legs gave me the posture of a fashion model. My clothes weren’t right, my face
wasn’t right, but my angularity was. I had that saluki look. Plus, for whatever reason—my
dreamy temperament,mybookishness—I fit right in.
Still, it wasn’t uncommon for certain innocent, excitable girls to respond to my presence in
ways they weren’t aware of. I’m thinking of Lily Parker, who used to lie down on the lobby
couches and rest her head in my lap, looking up and saying, “Youhave the most perfect chin.”
Or of June James, who used to pull my hair over her own head, so that we could share it like a
tent. My body might have released pheromones that affected my schoolmates. How else to
explain the way my friends tugged on me, leaned on me? At this early stage, before my male
secondary characteristics hadmanifested themselves, before there were whispers about me in the
halls and girls thought twice about laying their heads inmy lap—in seventh grade,whenmyhair
was glossy instead of frizzy,my cheeks still smooth,mymuscles undeveloped, and yet, invisibly
but unmistakably, I began to exude some kind of masculinity, in the way I tossed up and caught
my eraser, for instance, or in the way I dive-bombed people’s desserts with my spoon, in the
intensity of my knit brow or my eagerness to debate anyone on anything in class; when I was a
changeling, before I changed, Iwas quite popular atmynew school.
But this stage was brief. Soon my headgear lost its nighttime war against the forces of
crookedness. Apollo gave in to Dionysius. Beauty may always be a little bit freakish, but the
year I turned thirteen Iwas becoming freakier than ever.
Consider the yearbook. In the field hockey team photo, taken in the fall, I am on one knee in
the front row.With my homeroom in the spring, I am stooping in the back. My face is shadowed
with self-consciousness. (Over the years my perpetually perplexed expression would drive
photographers to distraction. It ruined class photos and Christmas cards until, in the most widely
published pictures ofme, the problemwas finally solved by blocking outmy face altogether.)
IfMiltonmissed having a beautiful daughter, I never knew it. Atweddings he still askedme to
dance, regardless of how ridiculous we looked together. “Come on, kukla,” he’d say, “let’s cut
the rug,” and we’d be off, the squat, plump father leading with confident, old-fashioned, fox-trot
steps, and the awkward prayingmantis of a daughter trying to follow along.Myparents’ love for
me didn’t diminish with my looks. I think it’s fair to say, however, that as my appearance
changed in those years a species of sadness infiltrated my parents’ love. They worried that I
wouldn’t attract boys, that I would be a wallflower, like Aunt Zo. Sometimes when we were
dancing,Milton squared his shoulders and looked around the floor, as if daring anyone tomake a
crack.
My response to all this growing was to grow my hair. Unlike the rest of me, which seemed
bent on doing whatever it wanted, my hair remained under my control. And so like Desdemona
after her disastrous YWCA makeover, I refused to let anyone cut it. All through seventh grade
and into eighth I pursued my goal. While college students marched against the war, Calliope
protested against hair clippers. While bombs were secretly dropped on Cambodia, Callie did
what she could to keep her own secrets. By the spring of 1973, the war was officially over.
President Nixon would be out of office in August of the next year. Rock music was giving way
to disco. Across the nation, hairstyles were changing. But Calliope’s head, like a midwesterner

who always got the fashions late, still thought itwas the sixties.
My hair! My unbelievably abundant, thirteen-year-old hair! Has there ever existed a head of
hair like mine at thirteen? Did any girl ever summon as many Roto-Rooter men out of their
trucks? Monthly, weekly, semiweekly, the drains in our house clogged. “Jesus Christ,” Milton
complained, writing out yet another check, “you’re worse than those goddamn tree roots.” Hair
like a ball of tumbleweed, blowing through the rooms of Middlesex. Hair like a black tornado
wheeling across an amateur newsreel. Hair so vast it seemed to possess its ownweather systems,
because my dry split ends crackled with static electricity whereas closer in, near my scalp, the
atmosphere grew warm and moist like a rain forest. Desdemona’s hair was long and silky, but
I’d gotten Jimmy Zizmo’s spikier variety. Pomade would never subdue it. First ladies would
never buy it. It was hair that could turn the Medusa to stone, hair snakier than all the snake pits
in aminotaurmovie.
My family suffered.Myhair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the
rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in
the fridge—even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black
hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the
pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once—I swear—inside an egg
Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor’s cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair
was not the cat’s. “That’s so gross!” Becky Turnbull shouted. “I’m calling the SPCA!” In vain
Milton tried to getme towear one of the paper hats his employees had towear by law. Tessie, as
though Iwere still six, took a hairbrush tome.
“I—don’t—see—why—you—won’t—let—Sophie—do—something—with—your—hair.”
“Because I seewhat she does to her hair.”
“Sophie has a perfectly nice hairstyle.”
“Ow!”
“Well,what do you expect? It’s a rat’s nest.”
“Just leave it.”
“Be still.” More brushing, tugging. My head jerking with every stroke. “Short hair’s the style
nowanyway,Callie.”
“Are you finished?”
A few final, frustrated strokes. Then, plaintively: “At least tie it back. Keep it out of your
face.”
What could I tell her? That that was the whole point of having long hair? To keep it in my
face? Maybe I didn’t look like Dorothy Hamill. Maybe I was even starting to bear a strong
resemblance to our weeping willow trees. But there were virtues to my hair. It covered tinsel
teeth. It covered satyrical nose. It hid blemishes and, best of all, it hid me. Cut my hair? Never! I
was still growing it out.Mydreamwas to someday live inside it.
Imagine me then at unlucky thirteen as I entered the eighth grade. Five feet ten inches tall,
weighing one hundred and thirty-one pounds.Black hair hanging like drapes on either side ofmy
nose. People knocking on the air in front ofmy face and calling out, “Anybody in there?”
Iwas in there all right.Where else could I go?

WAXINGLYRICAL

I am back to my old ways. To my solitary walks through Victoriapark. To my Romeo y
Julietas, my Davidoff Grand Crus. To my embassy receptions, my Philharmonie concerts, my
nightly rounds at the Felsenkeller. It’s my favorite time of year, fall. The slight chill to the air,
quickening the brain, and all the schoolkid, school-year memories attached to autumn. Youdon’t
get the bright leaves here in Europe the way you do in New England. The leaves smolder but
never catch flame. It’s still warm enough to bicycle. Last night I rode from Schöneberg to
Orianenburgstrasse in Mitte. I met a friend for a drink. Leaving, riding through the streets, I was
hailed by the intergalactic streetwalkers. In their Manga suits, their moon boots, they tossed their
teased doll’s hair and called, Hallohallo. Maybe they would be just the thing for me.
Remunerated to tolerate most anything. Shocked by nothing. And yet, as I pedaled past their
lineup, their Strich, my feelings toward them were not a man’s. I was aware of a good girl’s
reproachfulness and disdain, along with a perceptible, physical empathy. As they shifted their
hips, hooking me with their darkly painted eyes, my mind filled not with images of what I might
dowith them, butwithwhat itmust be like for them, night after night, hour after hour, to have to
do it. The Huren themselves didn’t look too closely at me. They saw my silk scarf, my Zegna
pants,mygleaming shoes. They saw themoney inmywallet. Hallo, they called.Hallo.Hallo.
It was fall then, too, the fall of 1973. I was only a few months from turning fourteen. And one
Sunday after church Sophie Sassoon whispered in my ear, “Hon? You’re getting just the tiniest
bit of amustache.Have yourmother bring you by the shop. I’ll take care of it for you.”
A mustache? Was it true? Like Mrs. Drexel? I hurried to the bathroom to see. Mrs. Tsilouras
was reapplying lipstick, but as soon as she left I put my face up to the mirror. Not a full-fledged
mustache: only a fewdarkish hairs abovemyupper lip. Thiswasn’t as surprising as itmay seem.
In fact, I’d been expecting it.
Like the Sun Belt or the Bible Belt, there exists, on this multifarious earth of ours, a Hair Belt.
It begins in southern Spain, congruent with Moorish influence. It extends over the dark-eyed
regions of Italy, almost all of Greece, and absolutely all of Turkey. It dips south to include
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt. Continuing on (and darkening in color as maps do to
indicate ocean depth) it blankets Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, before lightening gradually in
India.After that, except for a single dot representing theAinu in Japan, theHairBelt ends.
Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair! Sing of depilatory creams
and tweezers! Of bleach and beeswax! Sing how the unsightly black fuzz, like the Persian
legions of Darius, sweeps over the Achaean mainland of girls barely into their teens! No,
Calliope was not surprised by the appearance of a shadow above her upper lip. My Aunt Zo, my
mother, Sourmelina, and even my cousin Cleo all suffered from hair growing where they didn’t
want it to. When I close my eyes and summon the fond smells of childhood, do I smell
gingerbread baking or the pine-fresh scent of Christmas trees? Not primarily. The aroma that

fills, as itwere, the nostrils ofmymemory is the sulfurous, protein-dissolving fetor ofNair.
I seemymother,with her feet in the tub,waiting for the bubbling, stinging foam towork. I see
Sourmelina, heating up a tin of wax on the stove. The pains they took to make themselves
smooth! The rashes the creams left! The futility of it all! The enemy, hair, was invincible. It was
life itself.
I told my mother to make an appointment for me at Sophie Sassoon’s beauty parlor at the
EastlandMall.
Wedged between a movie theater and a submarine sandwich shop, the Golden Fleece did what
it could to distance itself socially from its neighbors. A tasteful awning hung over the entrance,
bearing the silhouette of a Parisian grande dame. Inside, flowers sat on the front desk. Just as
colorful as the flowers was Sophie Sassoon herself. In a purple muumuu, braceleted and
begemmed, she glided from chair to chair. “How we doing here? Oh, you look gorgeous. That
color takes ten years off.” Then to the next customer: “Don’t look so worried. Trust me. This is
how they’re wearing their hair now. Reinaldo, tell her.” And Reinaldo in his hip-huggers: “Like
Mia Farrow in Rosemary’sBaby. Sick flick, but she looked great.” By then Sophie had moved
on to the next person. “Hon, let me give you some advice. Don’t blow-dry your hair. Let it dry
wet. Also I’ve got a conditioner for you you won’t believe. I’m an authorized dealer.” It was
Sophie Sassoon’s personal attention the women came for, the feeling of safety the salon gave
them, the assurance that in here they could expose their flawswithout embarrassment andSophie
would take care of them. It must have been the love they came for. Otherwise the customers
would have noticed that Sophie Sassoon was herself in need of beauty advice. They would have
seen that her eyebrows were drawn on as though by Magic Marker, and that her face, owing to
the Princess Borghese makeup she sold on commission, was the color of a brick. But did I see it
that day myself, or in the weeks that followed? Like everyone else, instead of judging the final
effect of Sophie Sassoon’s makeup job, I was impressed by the complexity of it. I knew, as did
my mother and the other ladies, that to “put on her face” every morning it took Sophie Sassoon
no less than one hour and forty-fiveminutes. She had to apply eye creams and under-eye creams.
She had to lay down various layers, like shellacking a Stradivarius. In addition to the brick-
colored final coat there were others: dabs of green to control redness, pinks to add blush, blues
above the eyes. She used dry eyeliner, liquid eyeliner, lip liner, lip conditioner, a frosted
highlighter, and a pore minimizer. Sophie Sassoon’s face: it was created with the rigor of a sand
painting blowngrain by grain byTibetanmonks. It lasted only a day and then itwas gone.
This face now said to us, “Right this way, ladies.” Sophie was warm, as always, loving as
always. Her hands, treated every night with vanishing cream, fluttered around us, stroking,
rubbing.Her earrings looked like somethingSchliemann had dug up at Troy. She
led us past a line of women having their hair set, across a stifling ghetto of hair dryers, and
through a blue curtain. In the front of the Golden Fleece, Sophie fixed people’s hair; in the back
she removed it. Behind the blue curtain half-naked women presented portions of themselves to
wax. One large woman was on her back, her blouse pulled up to expose her navel. Another was
lying on her stomach, reading amagazinewhilewax dried on the back of her thighs. Therewas a
woman sitting in a chair, her sideburns and chin smeared with dark golden wax, and there were
twobeautiful youngwomen lying naked from thewaist down, having their bikini lines done. The
smell of the beeswax was strong, pleasant. The atmosphere was like a Turkish bath without the
heat, a lazy, draped feeling to everything, steamcurling off pots ofwax.
“I’monly havingmy face done,” I told Sophie.
“She sounds like she’s paying,” Sophie joked tomymother.
My mother laughed, and the other women joined in. Everyone was looking our way, smiling.
I’d come from school andwas still inmyuniform.
“Be glad it’s just your face,” said one of the bikini-liners.
“Fewyears fromnow,” said the other, “youmight be heading south.”
Laughter. Winks. Even, to my astonishment, a sly smile spreading over my mother’s face. As
if behind the blue curtain Tessie was another person. As if, now that we were getting waxed

together, she could treatme like an adult.
“Sophie,maybe you can convinceCallie to get her hair cut,” Tessie said.
“It’s a little bushy, hon,” Sophie leveledwithme. “For your face shape.”
“Just awax, please,” I said.
“Shewon’t listen,” saidTessie.
A Hungarian woman (from the outskirts of the Hair Belt) did the honors. With the short-order
efficiency of Jimmy Papanikolas, she positioned us around the room like food on a grill: in one
corner the large woman as pink as a slab of Canadian bacon; down at the bottom Tessie and me,
lumped together like home fries; over on the left the bikini-liners, lying sunny side up. Helga
kept us all sizzling.Holding her aluminum tray, shemoved frombody to body, spreading
maple-syrup-coloredwaxwhere itwas neededwith a flatwooden spoon, and pressing in strips
of gauze before it hardened. When the large woman was done on one side, Helga flipped her
over. Tessie and I lay in our chairs, listening towax being violently removed. “Ohmy!” cried the
large lady. “Is nothing,” belittled Helga. “I do it perfect.” “Oweee!” yelped a bikini-liner. And
Helga, taking an oddly feminist stance: “See what you do for the mens? Yousuffer. Is not worth
it.”
Now Helga came over to me. She took hold of my chin and moved my head from side to side,
examining. She spread wax above my upper lip. She moved to my mother and did the same.
Thirty seconds later thewaxhad hardened.
“I have a surprise for you,”Tessie said.
“What?” I asked, as Helga ripped. I was certain my fledgling mustache was gone. Also, my
upper lip.
“Yourbrother’s coming home forChristmas.”
My eyes were tearing. I blinked and said nothing, momentarily dumbfounded. Helga turned to
mymother.
“Some surprise,” I said.
“He’s bringing a girlfriend.”
“He’s got a girlfriend?Whowould go outwith him?”
“Her name is . . .”Helga ripped.After amomentmymother resumed, “Meg.”
From then on, Sophie Sassoon took care of my facial hair. I went in about twice a month,
adding depilation to an ever-growing list of upkeep requirements. I started shaving my legs and
underarms. I plucked my eyebrows. The dress code at my school forbade cosmetics. But on
weekends I got to experiment, within limits. Reetika and I painted our faces in her bedroom,
passing a hand mirror back and forth. I was particularly given to dramatic eyeliner. My model
here was Maria Callas, or possibly Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. The triumphant, long-nosed
divas.At home I snooped inTessie’s bathroom. I loved the amulet-like vials, the sweet-smelling,
seemingly edible creams. I tried out her facial steamer, too. Youput your face to the plastic cone
and were blasted by heat. I stayed away from greasy moisturizers, worried they would make me
break out.
WithChapter Eleven off at college—hewas a sophomore now—Ihad the bathroom tomyself.
Thiswas evident from themedicine cabinet.
Two pink Daisy razors stood upright in a small drinking cup, next to a spray can of Psssssst
instant shampoo. A tube of Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, which tasted like the soft drink, kissed a
bottle of “Gee, YourHair Smells Terrific.” My Breck Creme Rinse with Body promised to make
me “the girlwith the hair” (butwasn’t I already?). From therewemove on to the facial products:
my Epi*Clear Acne Kit; my Crazy Curl hair iron; a bottle of FemIron pills which I was hoping
to someday need; and a shaker of Love’s Baby Soft body powder. Then there was my aerosol
can of Soft & Dri non-sting antiperspirant and my two bottles of perfume: Woodhue, a mildly
disturbing Christmas present from my brother, which I consequently never wore; and L’Air du
Temps by Nina Ricci (“Only the romantic need apply”). I also had a tub of Jolén Creme Bleach,
for between appointments at theGolden Fleece. Interspersed amid these totemic itemswere stray
Q-tips and cotton balls, lip liners, Max Factor eye makeup, mascara, blush, and everything else I

used in a losing battle to make myself beautiful. Finally, hidden in the back of the cabinet, was
the box of Kotex pads, which my mother had given me one day. “We better just keep these on
hand,” she’d said, astonishingme completely.No further explanation than that.

The hug I had given Chapter Eleven in the summer of ’72 turned out to be a kind of farewell,
because when he returned home from college after his freshman year my brother had become
another person. He’d grown his hair out (not as long as mine, but still). He’d started learning the
guitar. Perched on his nosewas a pair of granny glasses and instead of straight-legs he nowwore
faded bell-bottom jeans. The members of my family have always had a knack for self-
transformation. While I finished my first year at Baker & Inglis and began my second, while I
went from being a short seventh grader to an alarmingly tall eighth grader, Chapter Eleven, up at
college,went from science geek to JohnLennon look-alike.
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 beatingMilton.
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 beatenMilton!
“I’mon 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, hismost 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 itswings 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
whenwe sawhimagain.
We quickly found out. As my father had feared, Chapter Eleven had scuttled his plans to
become an engineer.Now, he informed us, hewasmajoring 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
everythingwe
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 hewould lean forward and beginwritingmadly 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 inme.OnFriday afternoonwhile Iwas diligently doing some advance homework at
the kitchen table, he came and sat down.He stared atme thoughtfully for a long time.
“Latin, huh?Thatwhat they’re teaching you in that school?”
“I like it.”
“Youa necrophiliac?”
“Awhat?”
“That’s someonewhogets off on dead people. Latin’s dead, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know someLatin.”
“Youdo?”
“Cunnilingus.”
“Don’t be gross.”
“Fellatio.”
“Ha ha.”
“Mons veneris.”
“I’mdying of laughter.You’rekillingme. Look, I’mdead.”
Chapter Eleven was quiet for a while. I tried to go on studying but felt him staring at me.
Finally, exasperated, I closedmybook. “What are you looking at?” I said.
There was a pause characteristic of my brother. Behind his granny glasses his eyes looked
bland, but themind behind themwasworking things out.
“I’m looking atmy little sister,” he said.
“Okay.Yousawher.Nowgo.”
“I’m looking atmy little sister and thinking she doesn’t look likemy little sister anymore.”
“What’s that supposed tomean?” I asked.
Again the pause. “I don’t know,” saidmybrother. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
“Well,when you figure it out, letme 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 asmybrother.
“What are you studying up at college,Meg?”my father asked at dinner.
“Poli. sci.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“I doubt you’d likemy emphasis. I’m aMarxist.”
“Oh, you are, are you?”
“Yourun 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.”
“Megdoesn’t eatmeat,”mymother reminded.
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” said Milton. “Well, you can have some french fries. We’ve got french
fries.”
“What do you pay yourworkers?”Meg asked.
“The ones behind the counter?They getminimumwage.”
“Andyou live out here in this big house inGrosse Pointe.”
“That’s because I handle the entire business and accept the risk.”
“Sounds like exploitation tome.”
“It does, does it?” Milton smiled. “Well, if giving somebody a job is exploiting them, then I
guess I’man 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.”
“Yougot a real livewire here,”Milton said, turning tomybrother. “Where did you find her?”

“I found him,” saidMeg. “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 nowconfessed, “the car
started going up to the top. I thought Imight get crushed.But they leave some air space.”
“This iswhatwe’re paying your tuition for?”Milton asked.
“That’swhat you’re exploiting yourworkers for,” saidMeg.
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,
Meggaveme a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Chapter Eleven, swept up in the sexual revolution, tried to educateme, too.
“Youevermasturbate, Cal?”
“What!”
“Youdon’t have to be embarrassed. It’s natural. This friend of mine told me you could do it
with your hand. So Iwent into the bathroom—”
“I don’twant to hear about—”
“—and tried it out.All of sudden, all themuscles inmypenis started contracting—”
“In our bathroom?”
“—And then I ejaculated. It felt really amazing. Youshould 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.Yougotta experiment to seewhatworks.”
I putmy fingers inmy 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.
“Youstink!” I objected one day, sitting next to him in theTV room.
Chapter Eleven gave the tiniest of shrugs. “I’m a human,” he said. “This iswhat humans smell
like.”
“Then humans stink.”
“Doyou think I stink,Meg?”
“Noway,” nuzzling up to his armpit. “It turnsme on.”
“Will you guys get out of here! I’m trying towatch this show.”
“Hey, baby,my little sisterwants 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’sEve, 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, “Youknow, 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,” saidTessie.
“What do you think?” Milton asked Chapter Eleven. “Maybe we could take a family vacation
this summer.”
“Notme,” saidChapter Eleven.
“Whynot?”
“Tourism is just another formof 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 twowords toMilton, one beginningwith f, the otherwith y; andmore shouting,
andChapter Eleven’smotorcycle roaring away,withMegon 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 bedwhen his lifewas 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’sreal. Right here. Come and get it, baby!”

THEOBSCUREOBJECT

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
comfortablewith. Just the twoof 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. Iwas asmuch of aman asOlivia could bear at that point. Iwas 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 StateDepartment.Aperfect job forme. 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
upcomingAaronCopland 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 swellwith 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 theirwinter 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 broughtme intoMr. 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 beatwildly at her templewas a kind of innermetronome.
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
NorthAmerican education and a love of theEuropean novel.Nowhewas a liberalDemocrat 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 orwildflowers from the green andwore them in the 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 thatwas presently falling overMichigan.
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 nextmorning 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.
Iwas curious aboutGreecemyself, of course. Iwas eager to visit.Mr. da Silva encouragedme
in feelingGreek.
“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 sisterswere 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.)
I opened my paperback and lowered my head. My hair fell forward, cutting off
everything—Maxine, Mr. da Silva, the greenhouse’s geraniums—except the book. From behind
the velvet curtain,my lounge singer’s voice began to purr. “Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in
which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire, lovely whispers, and the force of
seduction,which takes away foresight and judgment even from themost reasonable people.”
It was one o’clock. An after-lunch lethargy lay over the room. Outside, rain threatened. There
was a knock at the door.
“Excuse me, Callie. Could you stop for a moment, please?” Mr. da Silva turned toward the
door. “Come in.”
Along with everyone else, I looked up. Standing in the doorway was a redheaded girl. Two
clouds bumped up above, skidding past each other, and let down a beam of light. This beam
struck the glass roof of the greenhouse. Passing through the hanging geraniums, it picked up the
rosy lightwhich now, in a kind ofmembrane, enveloped the girl. It was also possible that the sun
wasn’t doing this at all, but a certain intensity, a soul ray, frommyeyes.
“We’re in themiddle of class, dear.”
“I’m supposed to be in this class,” said the girl, unhappily. She held out a slip of paper.
Mr. da Silva examined it. “Are you sure Miss Durrell wants you transferred into this class?”
he said.
“Mrs. Lampe doesn’twantme in her class anymore,” replied the girl.
“Take a seat. You’ll have to share with someone. Miss Stephanides has been reading from
BookThree of The Iliad for us.”
I started reading again. That is, my eyes kept tracing over the sentences and my mouth kept
forming the words. But my mind had stopped paying attention to their meaning. When I finished
I didn’t toss my hair back. I let it stay hanging over my face. Through a keyhole in it I peeked
out.
The girl had taken a seat across fromme. Shewas leaning towardReetika as though to look on
with her, but her eyeswere taking in the plants.Her nosewrinkled up at themulchy smell.
Part of my interest was scientific, zoological. I’d never seen a creature with so many freckles
before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this
explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-
blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky
Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of
her ears.
Since we’re in English class, let me quote a poem. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,”
which begins, “Glory be to God for dappled things.” When I think back about my immediate
reaction to that redheaded girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean
the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees
in Provence. Therewas
something richly appealing in her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-
white skin, the gold highlights in the strawberry hair. It was like autumn, looking at her. It was
like driving up north to see the colors.
Meanwhile she remained slumped sideways in her desk, her legs with the blue knee socks
shoved out, revealing the worn heels of her shoes. Because she hadn’t done the reading she was
exempt frombeing called on, butMr. da Silva sent concerned looks herway. The newgirl didn’t
notice. She sprawled in her orange light and sleepily opened and closed her eyes. At one point
she yawned and, halfway through, cut the yawn off, as though it hadn’t gone right. She
swallowed something back and pounded a fist against her breastbone. She burped quietly and

whispered to herself, “Ay, caramba.” As soon as classwas over shewas gone.

Who was she? Where had she come from? Why had I never noticed her in school before? She
was obviously not new at Baker & Inglis. Her oxfords were stamped down at the heels so that
she could slip into them like clogs. This was something the Charm Bracelets did. Also, she had
an antique ring on her finger, with real rubies in it. Her lips were thin, austere, Protestant. Her
nosewas not really a nose at all. Itwas only a beginning.
She came to class every day wearing the same distant, bored expression. She shuffled in her
oxford-clogs, with a gliding or skating motion, her knees bent and her weight thrust forward. It
added to the overall desultory impression. I would be watering Mr. da Silva’s plants when she
entered. He asked me to do this before class. So every day began like that, me at one end of the
crystal room, engulfed by geranium blooms, and this answering burst of red coming through the
door.
The way she dragged her feet made it clear how she felt about the weird, old, dead poem we
were reading. She wasn’t interested. She never did the homework. She tried to bluff her way
through class. She hacked up the quizzes and tests. If she’d had a fellow Charm Bracelet with
her, they could have formed a faction of uninterested note-passers. Alone, she could only mope.
Mr. da Silva gave up trying to teach her anything and called on her as little as possible.
Iwatched her in class and Iwatched her outside it, too.As soon
as I arrived at school I was on the lookout. I sat in one of the lobby’s yellow wing chairs,
pretending to do homework, and waited for her to pass. Her brief appearances always knocked
me out. I was like somebody in a cartoon, with stars vibrating around the head. She would come
around the corner, chewing on aFlair pen and shuffling, as ifwearing slippers. Therewas always
a rush to herwalk. If she didn’t keep her feet digging forward her crushed-down shoes would fly
off. This brought out themuscles in her calves. Shewas freckled down there, too. Itwas almost a
kind of suntan. Sliding, she charged by, talking to some other Charm Bracelet, both of them
moving with that lazy, confident hauteur they all had. Sometimes she looked at me but showed
no recognition.Anictitatingmembrane lowered itself over her eyes.
Allow me an anachronism. Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire didn’t come out
until 1977. By that time the redheaded girl and I were no longer in touch. I doubt she ever saw
the movie. Nevertheless, That Obscure Object of Desire is what I think about when I think
about her. I saw it on television, in a Spanish bar, when I was stationed in Madrid. I didn’t catch
most of the dialogue. The plot was clear enough, though. An older gentleman played by
Fernando Rey is smitten with a young and beautiful girl played by Carole Bouquet and Angela
Molina. I didn’t care about any of that. It was the surrealist touch that got me. In many scenes
Fernando Rey is shown holding a heavy sack over his shoulder. The reason for this sack is never
mentioned. (Or if it is, I missed that, too.) He just goes around lugging this sack, into restaurants
and through city parks. That was exactly how I felt, following my own Obscure Object. As
though I were carrying around a mysterious, unexplained burden or weight. I’m going to call her
that, if you don’tmind. I’m going to call her theObscureObject. For sentimental reasons. (I also
have to protect her identity.)
There she was in gym class, malingering. There she was at lunch, having a laugh attack.
Doubled over the table, she tried to hit the joker responsible. Her mouth bubbled milk. Her nose
leaked a few drops, which started everyone laughing harder. Next I saw her after school, riding
double with an unknown boy. She climbed up on the bicycle seat while he stood on the pedals.
She didn’t put her arms around his waist. She managed the thing by balance alone. This gave me
hope.
One day in classMr. da Silva asked theObject to read aloud.
She was lounging in her desk as usual. At a girls’ school you didn’t have to be so vigilant
about keeping your knees together or your skirt tugged down. The Object’s knees were spread
apart and her legs, which were somewhat heavy in the thigh, were bare high up. Without
moving, she said, “I forgotmybook.”

Mr. daSilva compressed his lips.
“Youcan look onwithCallie.”
The only sign of agreement she gave was to sweep her hair off her face. She placed a hand to
her forehead and ran it back like a plow though her hair, her fingers leaving furrows. At the end
of the stroke came a little flick of the head, a flourish. Therewas her cheek, permitting approach.
I scooted over. I slidmybookonto the crack between our desks. TheObject leaned over it.
“Fromwhere?”
“Top of page one hundred and twelve. The description of the shield ofAchilles.”
I’d never been this close to the Obscure Object before. It was hard on my organism. My
nervous system launched into “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The violins were sawing away in my
spine. The timpaniwere banging inmy chest.At the same time, trying to conceal all this, I didn’t
move amuscle. I hardly breathed. Thatwas the deal basically: catatoniawithout; frenzywithin.
I could smell her cinnamongum. Itwas still in the back of hermouth somewhere. I didn’t look
directly at her. I kept my eyes on the book. A strand of her red-gold hair fell onto the desk
between us. Where the sun hit the hair, there was a prismatic effect. But while I was witnessing
the half-inch rainbow she began to read.
I expected a nasal monotone, riddled with mispronunciations. I expected bumps, swerves,
screeching brakes, head-on collisions. But the Obscure Object had a good reading voice. It was
clear, strong, supple in its rhythms. It was a voice she’d picked up at home, from poetry-reciting
uncles who drank too much. Her expression changed, too. A concentrated dignity, previously
absent, marked her features. Her head rose on a proud neck. Her chin was lifted. She sounded
twenty-four instead of fourteen. Iwonderwhichwas stranger, theEarthaKitt voice that cameout
ofmymouth or theKatharineHepburn that cameout of hers.
When she was finished there was silence. “Thank you,” said Mr. da Silva, as surprised as the
rest of us. “Thatwas very nicely done.”
The bell rang. Immediately the Object leaned away from me. She ran a hand through her hair
again, as though rinsing it in the shower. She slipped out of the desk and left the room.

On certain days,when the greenhousewas lit just so and theObscureObject’s blouse unbuttoned
two buttons, when the light illuminated the scapulars dangling between the cups of her brassiere,
did Calliope feel any inkling of her true biological nature? Did she ever, while the Obscure
Object passed in the hall, think thatwhat shewas feelingwaswrong?Yesand no. Letme remind
youwhere all thiswas happening.
It was perfectly acceptable at Baker & Inglis to get a crush on a fellow classmate. At a girls’
school a certain amount of emotional energy, normally expended on boys, gets redirected into
friendships. Girls walked arm in arm at B&I, the way French schoolgirls do. They competed for
affection. Jealousies arose. Betrayals occurred. It was common to come into the bathroom and
hear somebody sobbing in one of the stalls. Girls cried because so-and-sowouldn’t sit by themat
lunch, or because their best friend had a new boyfriend who monopolized her time. On top of
this, school rituals reinforced an intimate atmosphere. There was Ring Day, where Big Sisters
initiated Little Sisters into maturity by giving them flowers and gold bands. There was the
Distaff Dance, a maypole without men, held in the spring. There were the bimonthly “Heart-to-
Hearts,” confessional meetings run by the school chaplain, which invariably ended in paroxysms
of hugging and weeping. Nevertheless, the ethos of the school remained militantly heterosexual.
My classmates might act cozy during the day, but boys were the number one after-school
activity. Any girl suspected of being attracted to girls was gossiped about, victimized, and
shunned. Iwas aware of all this. It scaredme.
I didn’t know if the way I felt about the Obscure Object was normal or not. My friends tended
to get envious crushes on other girls. Reetika swooned over the way Alwyn Brier played
Finlandia on the piano. Linda Ramirez was smitten with Sofia Cracchiolo because she was
taking three languages at once. Was that it? Was the crush I had on the Object a result of her
elocutionary talent? I doubted it. It felt

physical, my crush. It wasn’t a judgment but a tumult in my veins. For that reason I kept quiet
about it. I hid out in the basement bathroom to think the matter through. Every day, whenever I
could, I took the back stairs down to the deserted washroom and shut myself up for at least half
an hour.
Is there anyplace as comforting as an old, institutional, prewar bathroom? The kind of
bathroom they used to build in America when the country was on the rise. The basement
bathroom at Baker & Inglis was done up like a box at the opera. Edwardian lighting fixtures
gleamed overhead. The sinks were deep white bowls set in blue slate. When you bent to wash
your face you saw tiny cracks in the porcelain, as in a Ming vase. Gold chains held the drain-
stoppers in place. Beneath the taps, dripping hadworn the porcelain thin in green stripes.
Above each sink hung an oval mirror. I wanted nothing to do with any of them. (“The hatred
of mirrors that begins in middle age” started early for me.) Avoiding my reflection, I headed
straight for the toilet stalls. There were three, and I chose the middle. Like the others, it was
marble. Gray New England marble, two inches thick, quarried in the nineteenth century and
studded with fossils millions of years old. I closed the door and latched it. I took a Safe-T-Guard
from the dispenser and laid it over the toilet seat. Germ-protected, I lowered my underpants,
lifted my kilt, and sat. Right away I could feel my body relaxing, my stoop unkinking itself. I
brushed my hair out of my face so that I could see. There were little fern-shaped fossils, and
fossils that looked like scorpions stinging themselves to death. Down beneath my legs the toilet
bowl had a rust stain, ancient, too.
The basement bathroom was the opposite of our locker room. The stalls were seven feet high
and extended all the way to the floor. Fossilized marble concealed me even better than my hair.
In the basement bathroom was a time frame I felt much more comfortable with, not the rat race
of the school upstairs but the slow, evolutionary progress of the earth, of its plant and animal life
forming out of the generative, primeval mud. The faucets dripped with the slow, inexorable
movement of time and I was alone down there, and safe. Safe from my confused feelings about
the Obscure Object; and safe, too, from the bits of conversation I’d been overhearing from my
parents’
bedroom. Just the night before,Milton’s exasperated voice had reached my ears: “Youstill got
a headache? Christ, take some aspirin.” “I took some already,” my mother replied. “Nothing
helps.” Then my brother’s name, and my father grumbling something I couldn’t make out. Then
Tessie: “I’m worried about Callie, too. She still hasn’t gotten her period.” “Hell, she’s only
thirteen.” “She’s fourteen. And look how tall she is. I think something’s wrong.” Silence a
moment, after which my father asked, “What does Dr. Phil say?” “Dr. Phil! He doesn’t say
anything. Iwant to take her to someone else.”
The humming of my parents’ voices from behind my bedroom wall, which throughout my
childhood had filled me with a sense of security, had now become a source of anxiety and panic.
So I exchanged it for walls of marble, which echoed only with the sound of dripping water, of
the flushing ofmy toilet, or ofmyvoice softly reading The Iliad aloud.
Andwhen I got tired ofHomer, I started reading thewalls.
That was another selling point of the basement bathroom. It was covered with graffiti.
Upstairs, class photos showed rows and rows of student faces. Down here it was mostly bodies.
Sketched in blue ink were little men with gigantic sexual parts. And women with enormous
breasts. Also various permutations:menwith dinky penises; andwomenwith penises, too. Itwas
an education both inwhatwas andwhatmight be.Over the graymarble this new, jagged etching
of bodies doing things, growing parts, fitting together, changing shape. Plus also jokes, words to
thewise, confessions. In one spot: “I love sex.” In another, “PattyC. is a slut.”Where elsewould
a girl like me, hiding from the world a knowledge she didn’t quite understand herself—where
else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down
what they couldn’t say,where they gave voice to theirmost shameful longings and knowledge?
For that spring, while the crocuses bloomed, while the headmistress checked on the daffodil
bulbs in the flower beds, Calliope, too, felt something budding. An obscure object all her own,

which in addition to the need for privacy was responsible for bringing her down to the basement
bathroom. A kind of crocus itself, just before flowering. A pink stem pushing up through dark
newmoss.But a strange kind of flower indeed, because it seemed to go through a
number of seasons in a single day. It had its dormant winter when it slept underground. Five
minutes later, it stirred in a private springtime. Sitting in class with a book in my lap, or riding
home in car pool, I’d feel a thaw between my legs, the soil growing moist, a rich, peaty aroma
rising, and then—while I pretended to memorize Latin verbs—the sudden, squirming life in the
warm earth beneath my skirt. To the touch, the crocus sometimes felt soft and slippery, like the
flesh of aworm.At other times itwas as hard as a root.
How did Calliope feel about her crocus? This is at once the easiest and the hardest thing to
explain. On the one hand she liked it. If she pressed the corner of a textbook against it, the
sensation was pleasurable. This wasn’t new. It had always felt nice to apply pressure there. The
crocuswas part of her body, after all. Therewas no reason to ask questions.
But there were times when I felt that something was different about the way I was made. At
Camp Ponshewaing I’d learned, on certain humid bunkhouse nights, of the bicycle seats and
fence posts that had seduced my campmates at tender ages. Lizzie Barton, roasting a
marshmallow on a stick, told us how she had become fond of the post of a leather saddle.
Margaret Thompson was the first girl in town whose parents owned a massaging shower head. I
added my own sense data to these clinical histories (that was the year I fell in love with gym
ropes), but there remained a vague, indefinable gap between the stirringsmy friends reported and
the clutching ecstasy of my own dry spasms. Sometimes, hanging down from my top bunk into
the beam of someone’s flashlight, I would finish my little self-revelation with “Youknow?” And
in the dimness three or four stringy-haired girlswould nod, once, and bite the corner of their lips,
and shift their eyes away. They didn’t know.
I worried at times that my crocus was too elaborate a bloom, not a common perennial but a
hothouse flower, a hybrid named by its originator like a rose. Iridescent Hellene. Pale Olympus.
Greek Fire. But no—that wasn’t right. My crocus wasn’t for show. It was in a state of becoming
and might turn out fine if I waited patiently. Maybe it happened like this to everybody. In the
meantime, it was best to keep everything under wraps. Which was what I was doing down in the
basement.
Another tradition atBaker& Inglis: every year the eighth graders
put on a classicalGreek play.Originally, these plays had been performed in theMiddle School
auditorium. But after Mr. da Silva took his trip to Greece, he got the idea of converting the
hockey field into a theater. With its bleachers set into the slope and its natural acoustics, it was a
perfectmini-Epidaurus. The custodial staff brought risers out and set up a stage on the grass.
The year of my infatuation with the Obscure Object, the play Mr. da Silva selected was
Antigone. There were no auditions. Mr. da Silva filled the major roles with his pets from
Advanced English. Everyone else he stuck in the chorus. So the cast list read like this: Joanne
Maria Barbara Peracchio as Creon; Tina Kubek as Eurydice; Maxine Grossinger as Ismene. In
the role of Antigone herself—the only real possibility from even a physical standpoint—was the
Obscure Object. Her midterm grade had been only a C minus. Still, Mr. da Silva knew a star
when he sawone.
“We have to learn all these lines?” asked Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio at our first
rehearsal. “In twoweeks?”
“Learn what you can,” said Mr. da Silva. “Everyone’s going to be wearing a robe. You can
keep your script underneath. Miss Fagles will also be our prompter. She’ll be in the orchestra
pit.”
“We’re going to have an orchestra?”MaxineGrossingerwanted to know.
“The orchestra,”Mr. da Silva said, pointing to his recorder, “is I.”
“I hope it doesn’t rain,” said theObject.
“Will it rain the Friday after next?” said Mr. da Silva. “Why don’t we ask our Tiresias?” And
then he turned tome.

Youexpected someone else?No, if theObscureObjectwas perfect to play the avenging sister,
I was a shoo-in to play the old, blind prophet. My wild hair suggested clairvoyance. My stoop
made me appear brittle with age. My half-changed voice had a disembodied, inspired quality.
Tiresias had also been awoman, of course. But I didn’t know that then. And it wasn’t mentioned
in the script.
I didn’t care what part I played. All that mattered, all I could think about, was that now I
would be near the Obscure Object. Not near her as I was during class, when it was impossible to
speak. Not near her as I was in the lunchroom, when she was spitting milk at another table. But
near her in rehearsals for a school play,with all thewaiting around that implied, all the backstage
intimacy, all the intense,
fraught, giddy, emotional abandon brought on by assuming identities not your own.
“I don’t think we should use scripts,” the Obscure Object now declared. She had arrived for
rehearsal looking professional, all her lines highlighted in yellow. Her sweater was tied around
her shoulders like a cloak. “I think we should all memorize our lines.” She looked from face to
face. “Otherwise it’ll be too fakey.”
Mr. da Silva was smiling. Learning lines would require effort on the Object’s part. A novel
undertaking. “Antigone has far and away the most lines,” he said. “So if Antigone wants to be
off book, then I think the rest of you should be off book, too.”
The other girls groaned. But Tiresias, already having a vision of the future, turned toward the
Object. “I’ll go over your lineswith you. If youwant.”
The future. It was already happening. The Object was looking at me. The nictitating
membraneswere lifting. “Okay,” she said, distantly.
We agreed tomeet the next day, aTuesday evening. TheObscureObjectwrote out her address
and Tessie dropped me at the house. She was sitting on a green velvet sofa when I was shown
into the library. Her oxfords were off but she still had her uniform on. Her long red hair was tied
back, the better to do what she was doing, which was to light her cigarette. Sitting Indian style,
the Object leaned forward, holding the cigarette in her mouth over a green ceramic lighter
shaped like an artichoke. The lighter was low on fluid. She shook it and flicked the button with
her thumbuntil at last a small flame shot out.
“Yourparents let you smoke?” I said.
She looked up, surprised, then returned to the work at hand. She got the cigarette going,
inhaled deeply, and let it out, slowly, satisfyingly. “They smoke,” she said. “They’d be pretty
big hypocrites if they didn’t letme smoke.”
“But they’re adults.”
“Mummy and Daddy know I’m going to smoke if I want to. If they don’t let me do it, I’ll just
sneak it.”
By the looks of it, this dispensation had been in effect for some time. The Object was not new
to smoking. She was already a professional. As she sized me up, her eyes narrowing, the
cigarette hung
aslant from her mouth. Smoke drifted close to her face. It was a strange opposition: the hard-
bitten private-eye expression on the face of a girl wearing a uniform for private school. Finally
she reached up and took the cigarette out of her mouth. Without looking for the ashtray, she
flicked her ash. It fell in.
“I doubt a kid like you smokes,” she said.
“Thatwould be a good guess.”
“Youinterested in starting?” She held out her pack ofTareytons.
“I don’twant to get cancer.”
She tossed the pack down, shrugging. “I figure they’ll be able to cure it by the time I get it.”
“I hope so. For your sake.”
She inhaled again, even more deeply. She held the smoke in and then turned in cinematic
profile and let it out.
“Youdon’t have any bad habits, I bet,” she said.

“I’ve got tons of bad habits.”
“Likewhat?”
“Like I chewmyhair.”
“I bite my nails,” she said competitively. She lifted one hand to show me. “Mummy got me
this stuff to put on them. It tastes like shit. It’s supposed to help you quit.”
“Does itwork?”
“At first it did. But now I sort of like the taste.” She smiled. I smiled. Then, briefly, trying it
out,we laughed together.
“That’s not as bad as chewing your hair,” I resumed.
“Whynot?”
“Becausewhen you chewyour hair it starts smelling likewhat you had for lunch.”
Shemade a face and said, “Bogue.”
At school we would have felt funny talking together, but here no one could see us. In the
bigger scheme of things, out in the world, we were more alike than different. We were both
teenagers. We were both from the suburbs. I set down my bag and came over to the sofa. The
Object put her Tareyton in her mouth. Planting her palms on either side of her crossed legs, she
lifted herself up, like a yogi levitating, and scooted over tomake room forme.
“I’ve got a history test tomorrow,” she said.
“Whodoyouhave for history?”
“Miss Schuyler.”
“Miss Schuyler has a vibrator in her desk.”
“Awhat!”
“Avibrator. LizClark saw it. It’s in her bottomdrawer.”
“I can’t believe it!” The Object was shocked, amused. But then she squinted, thinking. In a
confidential voice she asked, “What are those for, anyway?”
“Vibrators?”
“Yeah.”She knew shewas supposed to know.But she trusted Iwouldn’tmake fun of her. This
was the form of the pact we made that day: I would handle the deep intellectual matters, like
vibrators; shewould handle the social sphere.
“Most women can’t have orgasms by regular intercourse,” I said, quoting from the copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves MegZemka had givenme. “They need clitoral stimulation.”
Behind her freckles, a blush rose to the Object’s face. She was, of course, transfixed by such
information. I was speaking into her left ear. The blush spread across her face from that side, as
ifmywords left a visible trace.
“I can’t believe you knowall this stuff.”
“I’ll tell youwhoknows about it.Miss Schuyler, that’swho.”
The laugh, the hoot, shot out of her mouth like a geyser, and then the Object was falling back
on the couch. She screamed, with delight, with revulsion. She kicked her legs, knocking her
cigarettes off the table. She was fourteen again, instead of twenty-four, and against all odds we
were becoming friends.

“ ‘Unwept, unfriended,withoutmarriage song, I am led forth inmyhorror—’ ”
“ ‘—sorrow—’”
“ ‘—inmy sorrowon this journey that can be delayed nomore.No longer . . .’ ”
“ ‘. . . hapless one . . .’ ”
“ ‘Hapless one!’ I hate that! ‘No longer, hapless one, may I behold yon day-star’s sacred eye;
but formy fate no tear is shed, no . . . no . . .’ ”
“ ‘No friendmakesmoan.’ ”
“ ‘No friendmakesmoan.’ ”
Wewere at theObject’s house again, going over our lines.Wewere in the sun room, sprawled
on the Caribbean sofas. Parrots flocked behind the Object’s head as she squeezed her eyes shut,
reciting. We’d been at it for two hours. The Object had gone through almost a full pack. Beulah,

the maid, brought us sandwiches on a tray along with two sixty-four-ounce bottles of Tab. The
sandwiches were white, crustless, but not cucumber or watercress. A salmon-colored spread
caked the spongy bread.
We took frequent breaks. The Object required constant refreshment. I still wasn’t comfortable
in the house. I couldn’t get used to being waited on. I kept jumping up to serve myself. Beulah
was black, too,which didn’tmake it any easier.
“I’m really glad we’re in this play together,” the Object said, munching. “I would’ve never
talked to a kid like you.” She paused, realizing how this sounded. “I mean, I never knew you
were such a cool kid.”
Cool? Calliope cool? I had never dreamed of such a thing. But I was ready to accept the
Object’s judgment.
“Can I tell you something, though?” she asked. “About your part?”
“Sure.”
“Youknow how you’re supposed to be blind and everything? Well, where we go in Bermuda
there’s this man who runs a hotel. And he’s blind. And the thing about him is, it’s like his ears
are his eyes. Like if someone comes into the room, he turns one ear that way. The way you do
it—”She stopped suddenly and seizedmyhand. “You’renot gettingmad atme, are you?”
“No.”
“You’vegot theworst expression on your face, Callie!”
“I do?”
She hadmyhand. Shewasn’t letting go. “Yousure you’re notmad?”
“I’mnotmad.”
“Well, the way you pretend to be blind is you just, sort of, stumble around a lot. But the thing
is, this blind man down in Bermuda, he never stumbles. He stands up really straight and he
knowswhere everything is.Andhis ears are always focusing in on stuff.”
I turnedmy face away.
“See, you’remad!”
“I’mnot.”
“You are.”
“I’mbeing blind,” I said. “I’m looking at youwithmy ear.”
“Oh. That’s good.Yeah, like that. That’s really good.”
Without letting go ofmyhand, she leaned closer and I heard, felt, very softly, her hot breath in
my ear. “Hi, Tiresias,” she said, giggling. “It’sme.Antigone.”

The day of the play arrived (“opening night” we called it, though there would be no others). In
an improvised “dressing room” behind the stage we lead actors sat on folding chairs. The rest of
the eighth graders were already onstage, standing in a big semicircle. The play was set to begin
at seven o’clock and finish before sunset. It was 6:55. Beyond the flats we could hear the hockey
field filling up. The low rumble got steadily louder—voices, footsteps, the creaking of bleachers,
and the slamming of car doors up in the parking lot.Wewere each dressed in a floor-length robe,
tie-dyed black, gray, andwhite. TheObscureObject, however, waswearing awhite robe.Mr. da
Silva’s conceptwasminimal: nomakeup, nomasks.
“Howmanypeople are out there?”TinaKubek asked.
MaxineGrossinger peeked out. “Tons.”
“Youmust be used to this,Maxine,” I said. “Fromall your recitals.”
“I don’t get nervouswhen I’mplaying the violin. This iswayworse.”
“I am sooo nervous,” theObject said.
In her lap she had a jar ofRolaids,which shewas eating like candy. I understood nowwhy she
had pounded her chest the first day of class. The Obscure Object suffered from a more or less
constant case of heartburn. It was worse during times of stress. A few minutes earlier, she had
wandered off to smoke her last cigarette before showtime. Now she was chewing on the antacid
tablets. Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross,

adult needs and desperate palliatives. TheObjectwas still too young for the effects to tell on her.
She didn’t have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was
already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close.Her stomachwas a
mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display. The cat eyes above the snub
nosewere alert, blinking and resetting their attention to the growing noise beyond the flats.
“There’smymomand dad!”MaxineGrossinger shouted. She turned back to us and broke into
a big smile. I’d never seenMaxine smile before.Her teethwere jagged and gappy, like those of a
Sendak creature. She had braces, too. Her unconcealed joy made me understand her. She had a
whole other life apart from school. Maxine was happy in her house behind the cypresses.
Meanwhile, curly hair gushed fromher fragile,musical head.
“Oh, Jesus.” Maxine was peeking out again. “They’re sitting right in the front row. They’re
going to be staring right atme.”
We all peeked out, each in our turn. Only the Obscure Object remained seated. I saw my
parents arrive. Milton stopped at the crest of the slope to look down at the hockey field. His
expression suggested that the spectacle before him, the emerald grass, the white wooden
bleachers, the school in the distance with its blue slate roof and ivy, pleased him. In America,
England is where you go to wash yourself of ethnicity. Milton had on a blue blazer and cream-
colored trousers. He looked like the captain of a cruise ship. With one arm on her back, he was
gently leadingTessie down the steps to get a good seat.
We heard the audience grow quiet. Then a pan flute was heard—Mr. da Silva playing his
recorder.
Iwent over to theObject and said, “Don’tworry.You’llbe fine.”
She had been repeating her lines silently to herself but now stopped.
“You’rea really good actress,” I continued.
She turned away and lowered her head,moving her lips again.
“Youwon’t forget your lines. We went over them a billion times. Youhad them down perfect
yester—”
“Will you stop buggingme for aminute?” theObject snapped. “I’m trying to get psyched up.”
She glared atme. Then she turned andwalked off.
I stood watching her, crestfallen, hating myself. Cool? I was anything but. I’d already made
the Obscure Object sick of me. Feeling as if I might cry, I grabbed one of the black curtains and
wrappedmyself up in it. I stood in the darkness,wishing Iwere dead.
I hadn’t just been flattering her. She was good.Onstage, theObject’s fidgetiness stilled itself.
Her posture improved. And of course there was the sheer physical fact of her, the blood-tinged
blade that she was, the riot of color that caught everyone’s attention. The pan flute stopped and
the hockey field got silent again. People coughed, getting it out of their systems. I peeked out
from the curtains and saw the Object waiting to go on. She was standing just inside the middle
arch, no more than ten feet from me. I had never seen her so serious before, so concentrated.
Talent is a kind of intelligence. As she waited to go on, the Obscure Object was coming into
hers. Her lips moved as if she were speaking Sophocles’ lines to Sophocles himself, as if,
contrary to all intellectual evidence, she understood the literary reasons for their endurance. So
the Object stood, waiting to go on. Far away from her cigarettes and her snobbishness, her
cliquish friends, her atrocious spelling. This was what she was good at: appearing before people.
Stepping out and standing there and speaking. She was just beginning to realize it then. What I
waswitnessingwas a self discovering the self it could be.
On cue, our Antigone took a deep breath and walked onstage. Her white robe was cinched
around her torsowith silver braid. The robe fluttered as she stepped out in thewarmbreeze.
“Wilt thou aid this hand to lift the dead?”
Maxine-Ismene replied, “Thouwouldst bury him,when ’tis forbidden toThebes?”
“Iwill domypart, and thouwilt not, to a brother. False to himwill I never be found.”
Iwasn’t on for awhile. Tiresias wasn’t that big a part. So I closed the curtain aroundme again
and waited. I had a staff in my hand. It was my only prop, a plastic stick painted to look like

wood.
It was then I heard a small, choking sound. Again the Object said, “False to him will I never
be found.” Followed by silence. I peeked out the curtain. Through the central arch I could see
them. The Object had her back to me. Farther downstage Maxine Grossinger stood with a blank
look on her face. Her mouth was open, though no words were coming out. Beyond, just above
the lip of the stage,wasMiss Fagles’s florid face,whisperingMaxine’s next line.
It wasn’t stage fright. An aneurysm had burst in Maxine Gros-singer’s brain. At first, the
audience took her quick stagger and
shocked expression to be part of the play. Titters had begun at the way the girl playing Ismene
was hamming it up. But Maxine’s mother, knowing exactly what pain looked like on her child’s
face, shot up out of her seat. “No,” she cried. “No!” Twenty feet away, elevated under a setting
sun, Maxine Grossinger was still mute. A gurgle escaped from her throat. With the suddenness
of a lighting cue her face went blue. Even in the back rows people could see the oxygen leave
her blood. Pinkness drained away, down her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. Later, the Obscure
Object would swear that Maxine had been looking at her with a kind of appeal, that she had seen
the light go out ofMaxine’s eyes. According to the doctors, however, this was probably not true.
Wrapped in her dark robe, still on her feet, Maxine Grossinger was already dead. She toppled
forward seconds later.
Mrs. Grossinger scrambled up onstage. She made no sound now. No one did. In silence she
reached Maxine and tore open her robe. In silence the mother began to give the daughter mouth-
to-mouth. I froze. I let the curtains untwist and I stepped out and gawked. Suddenly a white blur
filled the arch. The Obscure Object was fleeing the stage. For a second I had a crazy idea. I
thought Mr. da Silva had been holding out on us. He was doing things the traditional way after
all. Because the Obscure Object was wearing a mask. The mask for tragedy, her eyes like knife
slashes, hermouth a boomerang ofwoe.With this hideous face she threwherself onme. “Ohmy
God!” she sobbed. “OhmyGod,Callie,” and shewas shaking and needingme.
Which leads me to a terrible confession. It is this. While Mrs. Grossinger tried to breathe life
back into Maxine’s body, while the sun set melodramatically over a death that wasn’t in the
script, I felt a wave of pure happiness surge through my body. Every nerve, every corpuscle, lit
up. I had theObscureObject inmy arms.

TIRESIAS INLOVE

I made a doctor’s appointment for you.”
“I justwent to the doctor.”
“NotwithDr. Phil.WithDr.Bauer.”
“Who’sDr.Bauer?”
“He’s . . . a ladies’ doctor.”
There was a hot bubbling in my chest. As if my heart were eating Pop Rocks. But I played it
cool, looking out at the lake.
“Who says I’ma lady?”
“Veryfunny.”
“I just went to the doctor,Mom.”
“Thatwas for your physical.”
“What’s this for?”
“When girls get to be a certain age,Callie, they have to go get checked.”
“Why?”
“Tomake sure everything’s okay.”
“What do youmean, everything?”
“Just—everything.”
We were in the car. The second-best Cadillac. When Milton got a new car he gave Tessie his
old one. The Obscure Object had invited me to spend the day at her club and my mother was
takingme to her house.
Itwas summer now, twoweeks sinceMaxineGrossinger had collapsed
onstage. School was out. On Middlesex preparations were under way for our trip to Turkey.
Determined not to let Chapter Eleven’s condemnation of tourism ruin our travel plans, Milton
was making airplane reservations and haggling with car rental agencies. Every morning he
scanned the newspaper, reporting the weather conditions in Istanbul. “Eighty-one degrees and
sunny. How does that sound, Cal?” In response to which I generally twirled an index finger. I
wasn’t keen on visiting the homeland anymore. I didn’t want to waste my summer painting a
church. Greece, Asia Minor, Mount Olympus, what did they have to do with me? I’d just
discovered awhole newcontinent only a fewmiles away.
In the summer of 1974Turkey andGreecewere about to be in the news again. But I didn’t pay
anymind to the rising tensions. I had troubles ofmyown.More than that, Iwas in love. Secretly,
shamefully, not entirely consciously, but for all that quite head-over-heels in love.
Our pretty lake was trimmed in filth. The usual June scum of fish flies. There was also a new
guardrail, which gave me a somber feeling as we drove past. Maxine Grossinger wasn’t the only
girl at school who had died that year. Carol Henkel, a junior, had died in a car accident. One
Saturday night her drunken boyfriend, a guy named Rex Reese, had plunged his parents’ car into
the lake.Rex had survived, swimming back to shore. ButCarol had been trapped inside the car.
We passed Baker & Inglis, closed for vacation and succumbing to the unreality of schools

during summertime. We turned up Kerby Road. The Object lived on Tonnacour, in a gray stone
and clapboard house with a weather vane. Parked on the gravel was an unprepossessing Ford
sedan. I felt self-conscious in the second-best Cadillac and got out quickly, wishing my mother
gone.
When I rang the bell, Beulah answered. She led me to the staircase and pointed up. That was
all. I climbed to the second floor. I’d never been upstairs at the Object’s house before. It was
messier than ours, the carpeting not new. The ceiling hadn’t been painted in years. But the
furniturewas impressively old, heavy, and sent out signals of permanence and settled judgment.
I tried three rooms before I found theObject’s. Her shadeswere drawn.Clotheswere scattered
all over the shag carpeting and I had to wade through them to reach the bed. But there she was,
sleeping,
in a Lester Lanin T-shirt. I called her name. I jiggled her. Finally she sat up against her pillows
and blinked.
“Imust look like shit,” she said after amoment.
I didn’t saywhether she did or not. It strengthenedmyposition to keep her in doubt.
We had breakfast in the breakfast nook. Beulah served us without elaboration, bringing and
taking plates. She wore an actual maid’s uniform, black, with white apron. Her eyeglasses hailed
fromher other,more stylish life. In gold script her name curled across the left lens.
Mrs. Object arrived, clacking in sensible heels: “Good morning, Beulah. I’m off to the vet’s.
Sheba’s getting a tooth pulled. I’ll drop her back here, but then I’m off to lunch. They say she’ll
be woozy. Oh—and the men are coming for the drapes today. Let them in and give them the
check that’s on the counter. Hello, girls! I didn’t see you. Youmust be a good influence, Callie.
Nine-thirty and this one’s up already?” She mussed the Object’s hair. “Are you spending the day
at the Little Club, dear? Good. Your father and I are going out with the Peterses tonight. Beulah
will leave something for you in the fridge.Bye, all!”
All this while, Beulah rinsed glasses. Keeping to her strategy. Giving Grosse Pointe the silent
treatment.
The Object spun the lazy Susan. French jams, English marmalades, an unclean butter dish,
bottles of ketchup and Lea & Perrins circled past, before what the Object wanted: an economy-
size jar ofRolaids. She shook out three tablets.
“What is heartburn, anyway?” I said.
“You’venever had heartburn?” asked theObject, amazed.

The Little Club was only a nickname. Officially the club was known as the Grosse Pointe Club.
Though the property was on the lake, there were no docks or boats in sight, only a mansion-like
clubhouse, two paddle tennis courts, and a swimming pool. It was beside this pool that we lay
every day that June and July.
As far as swimwearwent, theObscureObject favored bikinis. She looked good in thembut by
no means perfect. Like her thighs, her hips were on the large side. She claimed to envy my thin,
long legs, but shewas only being nice. Calliope appeared poolside, that first
day and every day thereafter, in an old-fashioned one-piece with a skirt. It had belonged to
Sourmelina during the 1950s. I found it in an old trunk. The stated intentwas to look funky, but I
was grateful for the full coverage. I also hung a beach towel aroundmyneck orwore an alligator
shirt over my suit. The bodice of the bathing suit was a plus, too. The cups were rubberized,
pointy, and beneath a towel or a shirt gaveme the suggestion of a bust I didn’t have.
Beyond us, pelican-bellied ladies in swim caps followed kickboards back and forth across the
pool. Their bathing suits were a lot like mine. Little kids waded and splashed in the shallow end.
There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan. The Object was in it. As we
revolved on our towels that summer, self-basting, the Object’s freckles darkened, going from
butterscotch to brown. The skin between themdarkened, too, knitting her freckles together into a
speckled harlequin mask. Only the tip of her nose remained pink. The part in her hair flamed
with sunburn.

Club sandwiches, on wave-rimmed plates, sailed out to us. If we were feeling sophisticated,
we ordered the French dip. We had milk shakes, too, ice cream, french fries. For everything the
Object signed her father’s name. She talked about Petoskey, where her family had a summer
house. “We’re going up inAugust.Maybe you could comeup.”
“We’re going toTurkey,” I said unhappily.
“Oh, right. I forgot.”And then: “Whydoyouhave to paint a church?”
“Mydadmade this promise.”
“Howcome?”
Behind usmarried coupleswere playing paddle tennis. Pennants flew from the clubhouse roof.
Was this the place to mention St. Christopher? My father’s war stories? My grandmother’s
superstitions?
“Youknowwhat I keep thinking?” I said.
“What?”
“I keep thinking aboutMaxine. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“I know. It doesn’t seem like she’s really dead. It’s like I dreamed it.”
“The onlywayweknow it’s true is thatwe both dreamed it. That’swhat reality is. It’s a dream
everyone has together.”
“That’s deep,” said theObject.
I smacked her.
“Ow!”
“That’swhat you get.”
Bugs were attracted by our coconut oil. We killed them without mercy. The Object was
making a slow, scandalized progress through The Lonely Lady by Harold Robbins. Every few
pages she shook her head and announced, “This book is sooo dirty.” I was reading Oliver Twist,
one of the assigned volumes for our summer reading list.
Suddenly the sun went in. A drop of water hit my page. But this was nothing compared to the
cascade that was being shaken onto the Obscure Object. An older boy was leaning over
sideways, shaking hiswetmopof hair.
“Goddamnyou,” she said, “cut it out!”
“What’s thematter? I’mcooling you off.”
“Quit it!”
Finally, he did.He straightened up.His bathing suit had fallen downover his skinny hipbones.
This exposed an ant trail of hair running down from his navel. The ant trail was red. But on his
head the hairwas jet black.
“Who’s the latest victimof your hospitality?” the boy asked.
“This isCallie,” said theObject. Then tome: “This ismybrother. Jerome.”
The resemblance was clear. The same palette had gone into Jerome’s face (oranges and pale
blues, primarily) but there was a crudeness to the overall sketch, something bulbous about the
nose, the eyes on the squinty side, pinpricks of light. What threw me at first was the dark,
sheenless hair,which I soon realizedwas dyed.
“Youwere the one in the play, right?”
“Yes.”
Jeromenodded.With slitty eyes glinting he said, “A thespian, eh? Just like you.Right, sis?”
“Mybrother has a lot of problems,” theObject said.
“Hey, since you gals are into the thee-a-tah, maybe you want to be in my next film.” He
looked atme. “I’mmaking a vampiremovie.You’dmake a great vampire.”
“Iwould?”
“Letme see your teeth.”
I didn’t oblige, takingmycue from theObject not to be too friendly.
“Jerome is intomonstermovies,” she said.
“Horror films,” he corrected, still directing his words to me. “Not monster movies. My sister,
as usual, belittlesmy chosenmedium.Want to know the title?”

“No,” said theObject.
“Vampires in Prep School. It’s about this vampire, played by moi, who gets sent off to prep
school because his affluent but terribly unhappy parents are going through a divorce. Anyway,
he doesn’t get along too well out there at boarding school. He doesn’t wear the right clothes. He
doesn’t have the right haircut. But then one day after this kegger he takes a walk across campus
and gets attacked by a vampire. And—here’s the kicker—the vampire is smoking a pipe. He’s
wearing a Harris tweed. It’s the fucking headmaster, man! So the next morning, our hero wakes
up and goes right out and buys a blue blazer and some Top-Siders and—presto—he’s a total
prep!”
“Will youmove, you’re blockingmy sun.”
“It’s a metaphor for the whole boarding school experience,” Jerome said. “Each generation
puts the bite on the next, turning them into the living dead.”
“Jeromehas been kicked out of twoboarding schools.”
“And I shall have my revenge upon them!” Jerome proclaimed in a hoary voice, shaking his
fist in the air. Then without another word he ran to the pool and jumped. As he did, he spun
around so hewas facing us. There Jeromehung, skinny, sunken-chested, aswhite as a saltine, his
face scrunched up and one hand clutching his nuts.He held that pose all theway down.

I was too young to ask myself what was behind our sudden intimacy. In the days and weeks that
followed, I didn’t consider the Object’s own motivations, her love vacuum. Her mother had
engagements all day long. Her father left for the office at six forty-five. Jerome was a brother
and therefore useless. The Object didn’t like being alone. She had never learned to amuse
herself. And so one evening at her house, as I was about to get on my bike and ride home, she
suggested that I sleep over.
“I don’t havemy toothbrush.”
“Youcan usemine.”
“That’s gross.”
“I’ll get you a new toothbrush.We’ve got a box of them.God, you’re such a priss.”
I was only feigning squeamishness. In actuality I wouldn’t have minded sharing the Object’s
toothbrush. I wouldn’t have minded being the Object’s toothbrush. I was already well
acquainted with the splendors of her mouth. Smoking is good for that. Youget a full display of
the puckering and the sucking. The tongue often makes an appearance, licking from the lips any
stickiness imparted by the filter. Sometimes bits of paper adhere to the bottom lip and the
smoker, pulling them away, reveals the candied lower teeth against the pulpy gums. And if the
smoker is a blower of smoke rings, you get to see all the way in to the dark velvet of the inner
cheeks.
That was how it went with the Obscure Object. A cigarette in bed was the tombstone marking
each day’s end and the reed through which she breathed herself back to life each morning.
You’veheard of installation artists? Well, the Object was an exhalation artist. She had a whole
repertoire. There was the Sidewinder, where she politely funneled smoke away from the person
shewas talking to out the corner of hermouth. Therewas theGeyserwhen shewas angry. There
was theDragonLady, featuring a plume from each nostril. There was the FrenchRecycle, where
she let smoke out hermouth only to inhale it back through her nose.And there was the Swallow.
The Swallow was reserved for crisis situations. Once, in the Science Wing bathroom, the Object
had just finished taking a long drag when a teacher charged in. My friend had time to flick her
cigarette into the toilet bowl and flush.Butwhat about the smoke?Where could it go?
“Who’s been smoking in here?” the teacher asked.
The Object shrugged, keeping her mouth closed. The teacher leaned toward her, sniffing. And
the Object swallowed. No smoke came out. Not a wisp. Not a puff. A little moistness in her eyes
the only sign of theChernobyl in her lungs.
I accepted the Object’s invitation to sleep over. Mrs. Object called Tessie to see if it was all
right and, by eleven o’clock, my friend and I went up to bed together. She gave me a T-shirt to

wear. It said “Fessenden” on the front. I put it on and theObject snickered.
“What?”
“That’s Jerome’sT-shirt.Does it reek?”
“Why’d you giveme his shirt?” I said, going stiff, shrinking from the cotton’s touchwhile still
wearing it.
“Mine are too small.Youwant one ofDaddy’s?They smell like cologne.”
“Yourdadwears cologne?”
“He lived in Paris after the war. He’s got all kinds of fruity habits.” She was climbing up onto
the big bed now. “Plus he sleptwith about amillion French prostitutes.”
“He told you that?”
“Not exactly. But whenever Daddy talks about France he acts all horny. He was in the Army
there. He was like in charge of running Paris after the war. And Mummy gets really pissed when
he talks about it.” She imitated her mother now. “ ‘That’s enough Fran-cophilia for one evening,
dear.’ ” As usual, when she did something dramatic, her IQ suddenly soared. Then she flopped
onto her stomach. “He killed people, too.”
“He did?”
“Yeah,”said theObject, adding bywayof explanation, “Nazis.”
I climbed into the big bed.At home I had one pillow.Here therewere six.
“Back rub,” theObject called out cheerily.
“I’ll do you if you dome.”
“Deal.”
I sat astride her, on the saddle of her hips, and started with her shoulders. Her hair was in the
way, so I moved it. We were quiet for a while, me rubbing, and then I asked, “Have you ever
been to a gynecologist?”
TheObject nodded into her pillow.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s torture. I hate it.”
“What do they do?”
“First they make you strip and put this little gown on. It’s made of paper and all this cold air
gets in.Youfreeze. Then theymake you lie on this table, spread-eagled.”
“Spread-eagled?”
“Yep.Youhave to put your legs in these metal things. Then the gyno gives you a pelvic exam,
which kills.”
“What do youmean, pelvic exam?”
“I thought youwere supposed to be the sex expert.”
“Comeon.”
“Apelvic exam is, you know, inside. They shove this little doohickey in you to spread you all
open and everything.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“It kills. And it’s freezing. Plus you’ve got the gyno making lame jokes while he’s nosing
around in there. But theworst iswhat he doeswith his hands.”
“What?”
“Basically he reaches in until he can tickle your tonsils.”
Now Iwasmute.Absolutely paralyzedwith shock and fear.
“Who are you going to?” theObject asked.
“Someone namedDr.Bauer.”
“Dr.Bauer! That’sRenee’s dad.He’s a total perv!”
“What do youmean?”
“I went swimming over at Renee’s one time. They have a pool. Dr. Bauer came out and stood
there, watching. Then he goes, ‘Your legs have perfect proportions. Absolutely perfect
proportions.’God,what a perv!Dr.Bauer. I pity you.”
She raised her stomach in order to free her shirt. I massaged her lower back, reaching under

the shirt to knead her shoulder blades.
The Object got quiet after that. So did I. I kept my mind off gynecology by losing myself in
the back rub. It wasn’t hard. Her honey- or apricot-colored back tapered at the waist in a way
mine didn’t. There were white spots here and there, anti-freckles. Wherever I rubbed, her skin
flushed. I was aware of the blood underneath, coursing and draining. Her underarms were rough
like a cat’s tongue. Below them the sides of her breasts swelled out, flattened against the
mattress.
“Okay,” I said, after a longwhile, “my turn.”
But that nightwas like all the others. Shewas asleep.
Itwas nevermy turnwith theObject.

They come back to me, the scattered days of that summer with the Object, each encased in a
souvenir snowglobe. Letme shake themup again.Watch the flakes float down:
We are lying in bed together on aSaturdaymorning. TheObject
is on her back. I’m fulcrumed onone elbow, leaning over to inspect her face.
“Youknowwhat sleep is?” I say.
“What?”
“Snot.”
“It is not.”
“It is. It’smucus. It’s snot that comes out your eyes.”
“That’s so gross!”
“You’vegot a little sleep in your eyes, my dear,” I say in a fake deep voice. With my finger I
flick the crust from theObject’s eyelashes.
“I can’t believe I’m letting you do this,” she says. “You’retouchingmy snot.”
We look at each other amoment.
“I’m touching your snot!” I scream. And we writhe around, throwing pillows and screaming
somemore.

On another day, theObject is taking a bath. She has her ownbathroom. I’mon the bed, reading a
gossipmagazine.
“Youcan tell Jane Fonda isn’t really naked in thatmovie,” I say.
“How?”
“She’s got a body stocking on.Youcan see it.”
I go into the bathroom to show her. In the claw-footed tub, under a layer of whipped cream,
theObject lolls, pumicing one heel.
She looks at the photograph and says, “You’renever naked, either.”
I am frozen, speechless.
“Doyouhave somekind of complex?”
“No, I don’t have a complex.”
“What are you afraid of, then?”
“I’mnot afraid.”
The Object knows this isn’t true. But her intentions aren’t malicious. She isn’t trying to catch
meout, only to putme at ease.Mymodesty baffles her.
“I don’t knowwhat you’re soworried about,” she says. “You’remybest friend.”
I pretend to be engrossed in the magazine. I can’t get myself to look away. Inside, however,
I’mburstingwith happiness. I’m erupting
with joy, but I keep staring at themagazine as though I’mmad at it.

It’s late. We’ve stayed up watching TV.The Object is brushing her teeth when I come into the
bathroom. I pull downmyunderpants and sit on the toilet. I do this sometimes as a compensatory
tactic. TheT-shirt is long enough to covermy lap. I peewhile theObject brushes.
It’s then I smell smoke. Looking up, I see, besides a toothbrush in the Object’s mouth, a

cigarette.
“Youeven smoke while youbrush your teeth?”
She looks atme sideways. “Menthol,” she says.

The thing about those souvenirs, though: the glitter falls fast.
A reminder taped to our refrigerator broughtmeback to reality: “Dr.Bauer, July 22, 2 p.m.”
I was filled with dread. Dread of the perverted gynecologist and his inquisitorial instruments.
Dread of the metal things that would spread my legs and of the doohickey that would spread
something else.Anddread ofwhat all this spreadingmight reveal.
It was in this state, this emotional foxhole, that I started going to church again. One Sunday in
early July my mother and I dressed up (Tessie in heels, me not) and drove down to Assumption.
Tessie was suffering, too. It had been six months since Chapter Eleven had sped away from
Middlesex on his motorcycle, and since that time he hadn’t been back. Worse, in April he had
broken the news that he was dropping out of college. He was planning to move to the Upper
Peninsula with some friends and, as he put it, live off the land. “You don’t think he’d do
something crazy like run off and marry that Meg, do you?” Tessie asked Milton. “Let’s hope
not,” he answered. Tessie worried that Chapter Eleven wasn’t taking care of himself, either. He
wasn’t going to the dentist regularly. His vegetarianism made him pale. And he was losing his
hair.At the age of twenty. ThismadeTessie feel suddenly old.
United in anxiety, seeking solace for differing complaints (Tessie wanting to get rid of her
painswhile Iwantedmine to begin),we entered the church.As far as I could tell, what happened
every Sunday atAssumptionGreekOrthodoxChurchwas that the priests got together
and read the Bible out loud. They started with Genesis and kept going straight through
Numbers and Deuteronomy. Then on through Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, all the way up to the New Testament. Then they read that. Given the
length of our services, I sawnoother possibility.
They chanted as the church slowly filled up. Finally the central chandelier flicked on and
FatherMike, like a life-size puppet, sprang through the icon screen. The transformationmyuncle
went through every Sunday always amazed me. At church Father Mike appeared and
disappeared with the capriciousness of a divinity. One minute he was up on the balcony, singing
in his tender, tone-deaf voice. The next minute he was back on ground level, swinging his
censer. Glittering, bejeweled, as overdone in his vestments as a Fabergé egg, he promenaded
around the church, giving us God’s blessing. Sometimes his censer produced so much smoke it
seemed that Father Mike had the ability to cloak himself in a mist. When the mist dispersed,
however, later that afternoon in our living room, he was once again a short, shy man, in black,
polyester-blend clothes and a plastic collar.
Aunt Zoë’s authority went in the opposite direction. At church she was meek. The round gray
hat she wore looked like the head of a screw fastening her to her pew. She was constantly
pinching her sons to keep them awake. I could barely connect the anxious person hunched down
every week in front of us to the funny woman who, under the inspiration of wine, launched into
comedy routines in our kitchen. “You men stay out!” she’d shout, dancing with my mother.
“We’ve got knives in here.”
So startling was the contrast between churchgoing Zoë and wine-drinking Zoë that I always
made a point of watching her closely during the liturgy. On most Sundays, when my mother
tapped her on the shoulder in greeting, Aunt Zo responded only with a weak smile. Her large
nose looked swollen with grief. Then she turned back, crossed herself, and settled in for the
duration.
And so: Assumption Church that July morning. Incense rising with the pungency of irrational
hope. Closer in (it had been drizzling out), the smell of wet wool. The dripping of umbrellas
stashed under pews. The rivulets from these umbrellas flowing down the uneven floor of our
poorly built church, pooling in spots. The smell of hairspray and perfume, of cheap cigars, and
the slow ticking ofwatches.

The grumbling of more and more stomachs. And the yawning. The nodding off and the
snoring and the being elbowed awake.
Our liturgy, endless; my own body immune to the laws of time. And right in front of me, Zoë
Antoniou, onwhom time had also been doing a number.
The life of a priest’s wife had been even worse than Aunt Zo had expected. She had hated her
years in the Peloponnese. They had lived in a small, unheated stone house. Outside, the village
women spread blankets under olive trees, beating the branches until the olives fell. “Can’t they
stop that damn racket!” Zoë had complained. In five years, to the incessant sound of trees being
clubbed to death, she bore four children. She sent letters to my mother detailing her hardships:
no washing machine, no car, no television, a backyard full of boulders and goats. She signed her
letters, “St. Zoë,Churchmartyr.”
Father Mike had liked Greece better. His years there represented the best period of his
priesthood. In that tiny Peloponnesian village the old superstitions survived. People still believed
in the evil eye. Nobody pitied him for being a priest, whereas later on in America his
parishioners always treated him with a slight but unmistakable condescension, like a crazy
person whose delusions had to be humored. The humiliation of being a priest in a market
economy didn’t plague Father Mike while he was in Greece. In Greece he could forget about my
mother, who had jilted him, and he could escape comparison with my father, who made so much
more money. His wife’s nagging complaints hadn’t begun to make Father Mike think about
leaving the priesthood yet, and hadn’t led him to his desperate act . . .
In 1956 Father Mike was reappointed stateside to a church in Cleveland. In 1958 he became a
priest at Assumption. Zoë was happy to be back home, but she never got used to her position as
presvytera. She didn’t like being a role model. She found it difficult to keep her children looking
neat and well dressed. “On what money?” she shouted at her husband. “Maybe if they paid you
halfway decent the kids would look better.” My cousins—Aristotle, Socrates, Cleopatra, and
Plato—had the thwarted, overbrushed look ofministers’ children. The boyswore cheap, garishly
colored double-breasted suits. They had Afros. Cleo, who was as beautiful and almond-eyed as
her namesake,made dowith dresses fromMontgomeryWard. She rarely spoke, and played cat’s
cradlewith Plato during the service.
I always liked Aunt Zo. I liked her big, grandstanding voice. I liked her sense of humor. She
was louder thanmostmen; she couldmakemymother laugh like nobody else.
That Sunday, for instance, during one of the many lulls, Aunt Zo turned around and dared to
joke. “I have to be here, Tessie.What’s your excuse?”
“Callie and I just felt like coming to church,”mymother answered.
Plato, who was small like his father, sang out with mock censure, “Shame on you, Callie.
What did you do?”He rubbed his right index finger repeatedly over his left.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Hey, Soc,” Platowhispered to his brother. “Is cousinCallie blushing?”
“Shemust have done something she doesn’twant to tell us.”
“Shush up now, you,” said Aunt Zo. For Father Mike was approaching with the censer. My
cousins turned around. My mother bowed her head to pray. I did, too. Tessie prayed for Chapter
Eleven to come to his senses. And me? That’s easy. I prayed for my period to come. I prayed to
receive thewomanly stigmata.

Summer sped on.Milton brought our suitcases up from the basement and toldmymother andme
to start packing. I tanned with the Object at the Little Club. Dr. Bauer haunted my mind, judging
the proportions of my legs. The appointment was a week away, then half a week, then two days
. . .
And sowe come to the preceding Saturday night, July 20, 1974.A night full of departures and
secret plans. In the early hours of Sunday morning (which was still Saturday night back in
Michigan), Turkish jets took off from bases on the mainland. They headed southeast over the
Mediterranean Sea toward the island of Cyprus. In the ancient myths, gods favoring mortals

often hid them away. Aphrodite blotted out Paris once, saving him from certain death at the
hands of Menelaus. She wrapped Aeneas in a coat to sneak him off the battlefield. Likewise, as
the Turkish jets roared over the sea, they were also hidden. That night, Cypriot military
personnel reported a mysterious malfunctioning of their radar screens. The screens filled with
thousands ofwhite blips: an electromagnetic
cloud. Invisible inside this, the Turkish jets reached the island and began dropping their
bombs.
Meanwhile, back in Grosse Pointe, Fred and Phyllis Mooney were also leaving home base,
heading to Chicago. On the front porch, waving goodbye, stood their children, Woody and Jane,
who had secret plans of their own. Flying toward the Mooneys’ house at that moment were the
silver bombers of beer kegs and the tight formations of six-packs. Cars full of teenagers were on
theirway.And sowere theObject and I. Powdered and glossed, our hair hot-combed intowings,
we had set off for the party ourselves. In thin corduroy skirts and clogs we came up the front
lawn.But theObject stoppedmeon the porch beforewewent in. Shewas biting her lip.
“You’remybest friend, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Sometimes I think I have bad breath.” She stopped. “The thing is, you can never tell if
you have bad breath or not. So the thing is”—she paused—“Iwant you to check it forme.”
I didn’t knowwhat to say and so said nothing.
“Is that too disgusting?”
“No,” I said, finally.
“Okay, here goes.” She leaned towardme and huffed a single breath intomy face.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Good.Nowyou.”
I leaned down and exhaled in her face.
“It’s fine,” she said, decisively. “Okay.Nowwe can go to the party.”
I’d never been to a party before. I felt for the parents. As we squeezed by the throngs in the
throbbing house, I cringed at the destruction under way. Cigarette ashes were dropping on Pierre
Deux upholstery. Beer cans were spilling onto heirloom carpets. In the den I saw two laughing
boys urinating into a tennis trophy. It was mostly older kids. A few couples climbed the stairs,
disappearing into bedrooms.
The Object was trying to act older herself. She was copying the superior, bored expressions of
the high school girls. She crossed to the back porch ahead ofme and got in the line for the keg.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’mgetting a beer.What do you think?”
It was fairly dark outside. As in most social situations, I let my hair fall into my face. I was
standing behind theObject, looking likeCousin It,when someone put his hands overmy eyes.
“Guesswho?”
“Jerome.”
I pulled his hands offmy face and turned around.
“Howdid you know itwasme?”
“The curious smell.”
“Ouch,” said a voice behind Jerome. I looked over and received a shock. Standing with
Jerome was Rex Reese, the guy who had driven Carol Henkel to her watery death. Rex Reese,
our local Teddy Kennedy. He didn’t look particularly sober now, either. His dark hair covered
his ears and hewore a piece of blue coral on a leather thong around his throat. I searched his face
for signs of remorse or repentance. Rex wasn’t searching my face, however. He was eyeing the
Object, his hair falling into his eyes above the curl of a smile.
Deftly, the two boys moved in between us, turning their backs to each other. I had a final
glimpse of theObscureObject. She had her hands in the back pockets of her corduroy skirt. This
looked casual but had the effect of pushing out her chest. Shewas looking up atRex and smiling.
“I start filming tomorrow,” Jerome said.

I looked blank.
“Mymovie.Myvampiremovie.Yousure you don’twant to be in it?”
“We’re going on vacation thisweek.”
“That sucks,” said Jerome. “It’s going to be genius.”
We stood silent.After amoment I said, “Real geniuses never think they’re geniuses.”
“Who says?”
“Me.”
“Becausewhy?”
“Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven’t you ever heard that? As soon as you
think you’re a genius, you slack off.Youthink everything you do is so great and everything.”
“I justwant tomake scarymovies,” Jerome replied. “With occasional nudity.”
“Just don’t try to be a genius andmaybe you’ll end up being one by accident,” I said.
Hewas looking atme in a funnyway, intense, but also grinning.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Why are you looking atme like that?”
“Looking at you likewhat?”
In the dark, Jerome’s resemblance to the Obscure Object was even more pronounced. The
tawny eyebrows, the butterscotch complexion—here theywere again, in permissible form.
“You’rea lot smarter thanmost ofmy sister’s friends.”
“You’rea lot smarter thanmost ofmy friends’ brothers.”
He leaned toward me. He was taller than I was. That was the big difference between him and
his sister. It was enough towakeme frommy trance. I turned away. I circled around himback to
theObject. Shewas still staring up bright-faced atRex.
“Comeon,” I said. “We’ve got to go to that thing.”
“What thing?”
“Youknow.That thing.”
Finally I managed to pull her away. She left trailing smiles and significant looks. As soon as
wegot off the porch shewas frowning atme.
“Where are you takingme?” she said angrily.
“Awayfrom that creep.”
“Can’t you leaveme alone for aminute?”
“Youwantme to leave you alone?” I said. “Okay, I’ll leave you alone.” I didn’tmove.
“Can’t I even talk to a boy at a party?” theObject asked.
“Iwas taking you awaybefore itwas too late.”
“What do youmean?”
“You’vegot bad breath.”
This checked theObject. This struck her to her core. Shewilted. “I do?” she asked.
“It’s just a little oniony,” I said.
We were on the back lawn now. Kids were sitting on the stone porch rail, their cigarette tips
glowing in the darkness.
“What do you think ofRex?” theObjectwhispered.
“What?Don’t tellme you like him.”
“I didn’t say I like him.”
I scoped her face, seeking the answer. She noticed this andwalked farther away over the lawn.
I followed. I said earlier that most of my emotions are hybrids. But not all. Some are pure and
unadulterated. Jealousy, for instance.
“Rex is okay,” I saidwhen I had caught up to her. “If you likemanslaughterers.”
“Thatwas an accident,” said theObject.
Themoonwas three-quarters full. It silvered the fat leaves of the trees. The grasswaswet.We
both kicked off our clogs to stand in it. After a moment, sighing, the Object laid her head on my
shoulder.

“It’s good you’re going away,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because this is too weird.” I looked back to see if anyone could see us. No one could. So I
putmy armaround her.
For the next few minutes we stood under the moon-blanched trees, listening to the music
blaring from the house. The cops would come soon. The cops always came. That was something
you could depend on inGrosse Pointe.

The nextmorning, Iwent to churchwith Tessie. As usual, Aunt Zowas down in front, setting an
example. Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato were wearing their gangster suits. Cleo was sunk into her
blackmane, about to doze off.
The rear and sides of the church were dark. Icons gloomed from the porticoes or raised stiff
fingers in the glinting chapels. Beneath the dome, light fell in a chalky beam.The airwas already
thickwith incense.Moving back and forth, the priests looked likemen at a hammam.
Then itwas showtime.One priest flicked a switch. The bottom tier of the enormous chandelier
blazed on. From behind the icono-stasis Father Mike entered. He was wearing a bright turquoise
robe with a red heart embroidered on his back. He crossed the solea and came down among the
parishioners. The smoke from his censer rose and curled, fragrant with antiquity. “Kyrie
eleison,” Father Mike sang. “Kyrie eleison.” And though the words meant nothing to me, or
almost nothing, I felt their weight, the deep groove they made in the air of time. Tessie crossed
herself, thinking aboutChapter Eleven.
First Father Mike did the left side of the church. In blue waves, incense rolled over the
gathered heads. It dimmed the circular lights of the chandelier. It aggravated the widows’ lung
conditions. It subdued the brightness of my cousins’ suits. As it wrapped me in its dry-ice
blanket, I breathed it in and began to pray myself. Please God let Dr. Bauer not find anything
wrong with me. And let me be just friends with the Object. And don’t let her forget about me
while we’re in Turkey. And help my mother not to be so worried about my brother. And make
Chapter Eleven go back to college.
Incense serves a variety of purposes in the Orthodox church. Symbolically, it’s an offering to
God. Like the burnt sacrifices in pagan times, the fragrance drifts upward to heaven. Before the
days of modern embalming, incense had a practical application. It covered the smell of corpses
during funerals. It can also, when inhaled in sufficient amounts, create a lightheadedness that
feels like religious reverie.And if you breathe in enough of it, it canmake you sick.
“What’s thematter?”Tessie’s voice inmy ear. “Youlook pale.”
I stopped praying and openedmyeyes.
“I do?”
“Doyou feel okay?”
I began to answer in the affirmative. But then I stoppedmyself.
“Youlook really pale, Callie,” Tessie said again. She touched her hand tomy forehead.
Sickness, reverie, devotion, deceit—they all came together. If God doesn’t help you, you have
to help yourself.
“It’smy stomach,” I said.
“What have you been eating?”
“Or not exactlymy stomach. It’s lower down.”
“Doyou feel faint?”
Father Mike passed by again. He swung the censer so high it nearly touched the tip of my
nose. And I widened my nostrils and breathed in as much smoke as possible to make myself
even paler than I alreadywas.
“It’s like somebody’s twisting something insideme,” I hazarded.
Which must have been more or less right. Because Tessie was now smiling. “Oh, honey,” she
said. “Oh, thankGod.”
“You’rehappy I’m sick?Thanks a lot.”

“You’renot sick, honey.”
“Thenwhat am I? I don’t feel good. It hurts.”
My mother took my hand, still beaming. “Hurry, hurry,” she said. “We don’t want an
accident.”

By the time I closedmyself into a church bathroom stall, news of the Turkish invasion ofCyprus
had reached the United States. When Tessie and I arrived back home, the living room was filled
with shoutingmen.
“Our battleships are sitting off the coast to intimidate the Greeks,” Jimmy Fioretos was
yelling.
“Sure they’re sitting off the coast,” Milton now, “what do you expect? The Junta comes in and
throwsMakarios out. So theTurks are getting anxious. It’s a volatile situation.”
“Yeah,but to help theTurks—”
“The U.S. isn’t helping the Turks,” Milton went on. “They just don’t want the Junta to get out
of hand.”
In 1922, while Smyrna burned, American warships sat idly by. Fifty-two years later, off the
coast ofCyprus, they also did nothing.At least ostensibly.
“Don’t be so naïve,Milt,” JimmyFioretos again. “Who do you think’s jamming the radar? It’s
theAmericans,Milt. It’s us.”
“Howdoyouknow?”my father challenged.
And now Gus Panos through the hole in his throat: “It’s that goddamned—sssss—Kissinger.
Hemust have—ssssss—made a dealwith theTurks.”
“Of course he did.” Peter Tatakis nodded, sipping his Pepsi. “Now that the Vietnam crisis is
over,HerrDoktorKissinger can get back to playingBismarck.Hewould like to seeNATObases
inTurkey?This is hisway to get them.”
Were these accusations true? I can’t say for sure. All I know is this: on that morning,
somebody jammed the Cypriot radar, guaranteeing the success of the Turkish invasion. Did the
Turks possess such technology? No. Did the U.S. warships? Yes. But this isn’t something you
can prove . . .
Plus, it didn’t matter to me, anyway. The men cursed, and shook their fingers at the television
and pounded the radio, until Aunt Zo unplugged them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t unplug the
men.All through dinner themen shouted at each other.Knives and forks
waved in the air. The argument over Cyprus lasted for weeks and would finally put an end to
those Sunday dinners once and for all. But as formyself, the invasion had only onemeaning.
As soon as I could, I excused myself and ran off to call the Object. “Guess what?” I cried out
with excitement. “We’re not going on vacation. There’s awar!”
Then I told her I had cramps and that I’d be right over.

FLESHANDBLOOD

I’m quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I
knew all along and yet didn’t know; and the discovery by poor, half-blind Dr. Philobosian of
what he’d failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical
thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they’d given birth to (answer:
the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of themutated gene that had lain buried
in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time,waiting forAtatürk to attack, for
Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, coming
together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led up to me, here, writing in
Berlin.
That summer—while the President’s lies were also getting more elaborate—I started faking
my period. With Nixonian cunning, Calliope unwrapped and flushed away a flotilla of unused
Tampax. I feigned symptoms from headache to fatigue. I did cramps the way Meryl Streep did
accents. There was the twinge, the dull ache, the sucker punch that made me curl up on my bed.
My cycle, though imaginary, was rigorously charted on my desk calendar. I used the catacomb
fish symbol to mark the days. I scheduled my periods right through December, by which time I
was certainmy realmenarchewould have finally arrived.
Mydeceptionworked. It calmedmymother’s anxieties and somehow
even my own. I felt I’d taken charge of things. I wasn’t at the mercy of nature anymore. Even
better, with our trip to Bursa canceled—as well as my appointment with Dr. Bauer—I was free
to accept the Object’s invitation to visit her family’s summer house. In preparation I bought a
sun hat, sandals, and a pair of rustic overalls.
I wasn’t particularly tuned in to the political events unfolding in the nation that summer. But it
was impossible to miss what was going on. My father’s identification with Nixon only grew
stronger as the President’s troubles mounted. In the long-haired war protesters Milton saw his
own shaggy, condemnatory son. Now, in the Watergate scandal, my father recognized his own
dubious behavior during the riots. He thought the break-in was a mistake, but also believed that
it was no big deal. “Youdon’t think the Democrats aren’t doing the same thing?” Milton asked
the Sunday debaters. “The liberals just want to stick it to him. So they’re playing pious.”
Watching the evening news, Milton delivered a running commentary to the screen. “Oh yeah?”
he’d say. “Bullshit.” Or: “This guy Proxmire’s a total zero.” Or: “What these pointy-headed
intellectuals should beworrying about is foreign policy.What to do about the goddamnRussians
and the Red Chinese. Not pissing and moaning about a robbery at a lousy campaign office.”
Hunkered down behind his TV tray, Milton scowled at the left-wing press, and his growing
resemblance to the President couldn’t be ignored.
On weeknights he argued with the television, but on Sundays he faced a live audience. Uncle
Pete, who was usually as dormant as a snake while digesting, was now animated and jovial.
“Even from a chiropractic standpoint, Nixon is a questionable character. He has the skeleton of a
chimpanzee.”

Father Mike joined the needling. “So what do you think about your friend Tricky Dicky now,
Milt?”
“I think it’s a lot of hoo-ha.”
Things got worse when the conversation turned to Cyprus. In domestic affairs Milton had
Jimmy Fioretos on his side. But when it came to the Cyprus situation they parted company. A
month after the invasion, just as the UN was about to conclude a peace negotiation, the Turkish
Army had launched another attack. This time the Turks claimed a large portion of the island.
Now barbed wire was going up. Guard towers were being erected. Cyprus was being cut in half
like
Berlin, like Korea, like all the other places in the world that were no longer one thing or the
other.
“Now they’re showing their true stripes,” Jimmy Fioretos said. “The Turks wanted to invade
all along. Thatmalarkey about ‘protecting theConstitution’was just a pretext.”
“They hit us . . . sssss . . . while our backswere turned,” croakedGusPanos.
Milton snorted. “What do youmean ‘us’?Wherewere you born,Gus,Cyprus?”
“Youknow . . . sssss . . . what Imean.”
“America betrayed the Greeks!” Jimmy Fioretos jabbed a finger in the air. “It’s that two-faced
son of a bitchKissinger. Shakes your handwhile he pisses in your pocket!”
Milton shook his head. He lowered his chin aggressively and made a little sound, a bark of
disapproval, deep in his throat. “Wehave to dowhatever’s in our national interest.”
And thenMilton lifted his chin and said it: “To hellwith theGreeks.”
In 1974, instead of reclaiming his roots by visiting Bursa, my father renounced them. Forced
to choose between his native land and his ancestral one, he didn’t hesitate. Meanwhile, we could
hear it all the way from the kitchen: shouting; and a coffee cup breaking; swear words in both
English andGreek; feet stomping out of the house.
“Get your coat, Phyllis,we’re leaving,” JimmyFioretos said.
“It’s summer,” said Phyllis. “I don’t have a coat.”
“Then getwhatever the hell it is you have to get.”
“We’re going, too . . . sssss . . . I’ve lostmy . . . sssss . . . appetite.”
Even Uncle Pete, the self-educated opera buff, drew the line. “Maybe Gus didn’t grow up in
Greece,” he said, “but I’m sure you remember that I did. Youare talking about my native land,
Milton.Andyour parents’ own true home.”
The guests left. They didn’t come back. Jimmy and Phyllis Fioretos. Gus and Helen Panos.
Peter Tatakis. The Buicks pulled away from Middlesex, leaving behind a negative space in our
living room. After that, there were no more Sunday dinners. No more large-nosed men blowing
their noses like muted trumpets. No more cheek-pinching women who resembled Melina
Mercouri in her later years. Most of all, no more living room debates. No more arguing and
citing
examples and quoting the famous dead and castigating the infamous living. No more running
the government from our love seats. No more revamping of the tax code or philosophical fights
about the role of government, the welfare state, the Swedish health system (designed by a Dr.
Fioretos, no relation). The end of an era.Never again.Never onSunday.
The only people who stayed were Aunt Zo, Father Mike, and our cousins, because they were
related to us. Tessie was angry with Milton for causing a fight. She told him so, he exploded at
her, and she gave him the silent treatment for the rest of the day. Father Mike took advantage of
this to lead Tessie up to the sun deck. Milton got in his car and drove off. I was with Aunt Zo
when we later brought refreshments up to the deck. I had just stepped out onto the gravel
between the thick redwood railings when I saw Tessie and Father Mike sitting on the black iron
patio furniture. FatherMikewas holdingmymother’s hand, leaning his bearded face close to her
and looking into her eyes as he spoke softly. My mother had been crying, apparently. She had a
tissue balled in one hand. “Callie’s got iced tea,” Aunt Zo announced as she came out, “and I’ve
got the booze.” But then she saw how Father Mike was looking at my mother and she went

silent. My mother stood up, blushing. “I’ll take the booze, Zo.” Everyone laughed nervously.
Aunt Zo poured the glasses. “Don’t look, Mike,” she said. “The presvytera’s getting drunk on
Sunday.”

The following Friday I drove upwith theObject’s father to their summer house near Petoskey. It
was a grand Victorian, covered with gingerbread, and painted the color of pistachio saltwater
taffy. I was dazzled by the sight of the house as we drove up. It sat on a rise above Little
TraverseBay, guarded by tall pines, all itswindows blazing.
Iwas goodwith parents. Parentsweremy specialty. In the car on theway up I had carried on a
lively and wide-ranging conversation with the Object’s father. It was from him that she had
gotten her coloring. Mr. Object had the Celtic tints. He was in his late fifties, however, and his
reddish hair had been bleached almost colorless now, like a dandelion gone to seed. His freckled
skin looked blown out, too. He wore a khaki poplin suit and bow tie. After he picked me up, we
stopped at a party store near the highway, where Mr. Object bought a six-pack of Smirnoff
cocktails.
“Martinis in a can,Callie.We live in an age ofwonders.”
Five hours later, not at all sober, he turned up the unpaved road that led to the summer house.
It was ten o’clock by this time. In moonlight we carried our bags up to the back porch.
Mushrooms dotted the pine-needled path between the thin gray pines. Next to the house an
artesianwell chimed amongmossy rocks.
When we came in the kitchen door, we found Jerome. He was sitting at the table, reading the
Weekly World News. The pallor of his face suggested that he had been there pretty much all
month. His lusterless black hair looked particularly inert. He had on a Frankenstein T-shirt,
seersucker shorts,white canvasTop-Siderswithout socks.
“I present to youMiss Stephanides,”Mr.Object said.
“Welcome to the hinterland.” Jerome stood up and shook his father’s hand. They attempted a
hug.
“Where’s yourmother?”
“She’s upstairs getting dressed for the party you’re incredibly late for.Hermood reflects that.”
“Whydon’t you takeCallie up to her room?Showher around.”
“Check,” said Jerome.
Wewent up the back stairs off the kitchen. “The guest room’s being painted,” Jerome toldme.
“So you’re staying inmy sister’s room.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s out on the back porchwithRex.”
Myblood stopped. “Rex Reese?”
“His ’rents have a place up here, too.”
Jerome then showed me the essentials, guest towels, bathroom location, how to work the
lights. But his manners were lost on me. I was wondering why the Object hadn’t mentioned
anything aboutRex on the phone. She had been up here threeweeks and said nothing.
We came back into her bedroom. Her rumpled clothes lay on the unmade bed. There was a
dirty ashtray on one pillow.
“My little sister is a creature of slovenly habits,” Jerome said, looking around. “Are you neat?”
I nodded.
“Me too.Onlyway to be.Hey.”He came around to faceme now. “What happened to your trip
toTurkey?”
“It got canceled.”
“Excellent. Nowyou can be inmy film. I’m shooting it up here.Are you up for that?”
“I thought it took place in a boarding school.”
“I decided to make it a boarding school in the boonies.” Jerome was standing somewhat close
tome.His hands flopped around in his pockets as he squinted atme and rocked on his heels.
“Shouldwegodownstairs?” I finally asked.

“What? Oh, right. Yeah.Let’s go.” Jerome turned and bolted. I followed him back down and
through the kitchen.Aswewere crossing the living room I heard voices out on the porch.
“So Selfridge, that lightweight, pukes,” Rex Reese was saying. “Doesn’t even make it to the
bathroom. Pukes right on the bar.”
“I can’t believe it! Selfridge!” Itwas theObject now, crying outwith amusement.
“He blew chunks. Right into his stinger. I couldn’t believe it. It was like the Niagara Falls of
puke. Selfridge woofs on the bar and everybody jumps off their stools, right? Selfridge is
facedown in his own puke. For a minute there’s total silence. Then this one girl starts gagging
. . . and it’s like a chain reaction. The whole place starts gagging, puke’s dripping everywhere,
and the bartender is—pissed. He’s huge, too.He’s fucking huge. He comes over and looks down
at Selfridge. I’mgoing like I don’t know this guy.Never sawhimbefore.And then guesswhat?”
“What?”
“The bartender reaches out and grabs hold of Selfridge. He’s got him by the collar and the
belt, right?Andhe lifts Selfridge like a foot up in the air—andZambonis the barwith him!”
“Noway!”
“I’mnot kidding. Zambonied the Fridge right in his ownbarf!”
At that point we stepped out onto the porch. The Object and Rex Reese were sitting together
on a white wicker couch. It was dark out, coolish, but the Object was still in her swimsuit, a
shamrock bikini. She had a beach towelwrapped around her legs.
“Hi,” I called out.
TheObject turned. She looked atmeblankly. “Hey,” she said.
“She’s here,” said Jerome. “Safe and sound.Dad didn’t run off the road.”
“Daddy’s not that bad a driver,” said theObject.
“When he’s not drinking he’s not. But tonight I’d wager he had the old martini thermos on the
front seat.”
“Youroldman likes to party!”Rex called out hoarsely.
“Didmydad have occasion to quench his thirst on the drive up?” Jerome asked.
“More than one occasion,” I said.
NowJerome laughed, going loose in the body and slapping his hands together.
MeanwhileRexwas saying to theObject, “Okay. She’s here. So let’s party.”
“Where shouldwego?” theObject said.
“Hey, Je-roman, didn’t you say therewas someold hunting lodge out in thewoods?”
“Yeah.It’s about half amile in.”
“Think you could find it in the dark?”
“With a flashlightmaybe.”
“Let’s go.”Rex stood up. “Let’s take somebeers and hike on in there.”
The Object got up, too. “Let me put on some pants.” She crossed the porch in her swimsuit.
Rexwatched. “Comeon,Callie,” she said. “You’restaying inmy room.”
I followed theObject inside. Shewent quickly, almost running, and didn’t look back atme.As
she climbed the stairs ahead ofme, Iwhacked her frombehind.
“I hate you,” I said.
“What?”
“You’reso tan!”
She flashed a smile over her shoulder.
As theObject dressed, I snooped around the bedroom.The furniturewaswhitewicker up here,
too. There were amateur sailing prints on the walls and on the shelves Petoskey stones,
pinecones,musty paperbacks.
“What arewegoing to do in thewoods?” I said,with a note of complaint.
TheObject didn’t answer.
“What arewegoing to do in thewoods?” I repeated.
“We’re going for awalk,” she said.
“YoujustwantRex tomolest you.”

“Youhave such a dirtymind,Callie.”
“Don’t deny it.”
She turned around and smiled. “I knowwhowants tomolest you,” she said.
For a second, an irrepressible happiness floodedme.
“Jerome,” she finished.
“I don’twant to go out in thewoods,” I said. “There’s bugs and stuff.”
“Don’t be a such a wuss,” she said. I had never heard her say “wuss” before. It was a word
boys used; boys like Rex. Finished dressing, the Object stood before the mirror, picking at some
dry skin on her cheek. She ran a brush through her hair and put on lip gloss. Then she came over
tome. She cameupvery close. She opened hermouth and blewher breath intomy face.
“It’s fine,” I said, andmoved away.
“Don’t youwantme to check yours?”
“Nobiggie,” I said.

I decided that if the Object was going to ignore me and flirt with Rex, I would ignore her and
flirt with Jerome. After she left, I combed my hair. From the collection of atomizers on the
dresser, I chose one and squeezed the bulb, but no perfume came out. I went into the bathroom
and undid the straps of my overalls. Lifting my shirt, I stuffed a few tissues in my brassiere.
Then I shook my hair back, hitched up my overalls, and hurried outside for our walk in the
woods.
They were waiting for me under a yellow bug light on the porch. Jerome held a silver
flashlight. Slung over Rex’s shoulder was an army surplus backpack, filled with Stroh’s. We
came down the steps onto the lawn. The ground was uneven, treacherous with roots, but the pine
needles were soft underfoot. For a moment, despite my foul mood, I felt it: the crisp northern
Michigan delight. A slight chill to the air, even inAugust, something almost Russian. The indigo
sky above the black bay. The smell of cedar and pine.
At the edge of thewoods theObject stopped. “Is it going to bewet?” she said. “I only havemy
Tretorns on.”
“Comeon,” saidRexReese, pulling her by the hand. “Getwet.”
She screamed, theatrically. Leaning back like someone on a rope tow, she was pulled
unsteadily into the trees. I paused, too, peering in, waiting for Jerome to do the same. He didn’t,
though. Instead he
stepped straight into the swamp and then slowly melted below the knees. “Quicksand!” he
cried. “Help me! I’m sinking! Please somebody help . . . glub glub glub glub glub.” Up ahead,
already invisible, Rex and theObjectwere laughing.
The cedar swamp was an ancient place. No logging had ever been done here. The ground
wasn’t suitable for houses. The trees had been alive for hundreds of years and when they fell
over they fell over for good. Here in the cedar swamp verticality wasn’t an essential property of
trees. Many cedars were standing straight up but many were leaning over. Still others had fallen
against nearby trees, or crashed to the ground, popping up root systems. There was a graveyard
feeling: everywhere the gray skeletons of trees. The moonlight filtering in lit up silver puddles
and sprays of cobweb. It glanced off theObject’s red hair as shemoved and darted ahead ofme.
We made a clumsy, yahoo progress through the swamp. Rex imitated animal sounds that
sounded like no animal. Beer cans dinged in his backpack.Our deracinated feet stomped along in
themud.
After twenty minutes we found it: a one-room shack made of unpainted boards. The roof
wasn’t much taller than I was. The circular flashlight beam showed tar paper covering the
narrowdoor.
“It’s locked. Fuck,” saidRex.
“Let’s try the window,” Jerome suggested. They disappeared, leaving the Object and me
alone. I looked at her. For the first time since I’d arrived she really looked at me. There was just
enoughmoonlight to accomplish this silent exchange between our eyes.

“It’s dark out here,” I said.
“I know it,” said theObject.
Therewas a crash behind the shack, followed by laughter. TheObject took a step closer tome.
“What are they doing in there?”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly the small window of the shack lit up. The boys had lit a Coleman lantern inside.
Next the front door opened and Rex stepped out. He was smiling like a salesman. “Got a guy
herewants tomeet you.”Atwhich point he held up amousetrap dangling the jelliedmouse.
TheObject screamed. “Rex!” She jumped back and held on tome. “Take it away!”
Rex dangled it some more, laughing, and then tossed it into the woods. “Okay, okay. Don’t
have a shit fit.”Hewent back inside.
TheObjectwas still clinging tome.
“Maybewe should go back,” I ventured.
“Doyou think you know theway? I’m totally lost.”
“I can find it.”
She turned and looked into the black woods. She was thinking about it. But then Rex
reappeared in the doorway. “Comeon in,” he said. “Check it out.”
And now it was too late. The Object let go of me. Throwing the red scarf of her hair over her
shoulder, she ducked through the low threshold into the hunting shack.
Inside were two cots with Hudson’s Bay blankets. They stood at either end of the small space
separated by a crude kitchen with a camp stove. Empty bourbon bottles lined the windowsill.
Thewallswere coveredwith yellowed clippings from the local paper, angling competitions, soap
box derbies. There was also a taxidermied pike, jaws agape. Low on kerosene, the lantern
sputtered. The light was butter-colored, the ripple of smoke greasing the air. It was opium den
light, which was appropriate, because already Rex had plucked a joint from his pocket and was
lighting itwith a safetymatch.
Rex was on one cot, Jerome on the other. Casually the Object sat down next to Rex. I stood in
the middle of the floor, hunching. I could feel Jerome watching me. I pretended to examine the
shack but then turned, expecting to meet his gaze. This didn’t happen, however. Jerome’s eyes
were focused on my chest. On my falsies. He liked me already. Now here was an added
attraction, like a bonus for good intentions.
Maybe I should have been pleased by the trance he was in. But my revenge fantasy had
already gone bust. My heart wasn’t in it. Still, having no alternative, I went ahead and sat beside
Jerome.Across the shackRexReese had the joint in hismouth.
Rex was wearing shorts and a monogrammed shirt, ripped at the shoulder, showing tanned
skin. Therewas a redmark on his flamenco dancer’s neck: a bug bite, a fading hickey.He closed
his eyes to inhale deeply, his long eyelashes coming together. The hair on his head was as thick
and oiled as an otter’s pelt. Finally he opened his eyes and passed the joint to theObject.
Tomy surprise she took it. As though it were one of her belovedTareytons, she put it between
her lips and inhaled.
“Won’t thatmake you paranoid?” I said.
“No.”
“I thought you toldmepot alwaysmakes you paranoid.”
“Not when I’m out in nature,” said the Object. She gave me a hard look. Then she took
another toke.
“Don’t bogart it,” said Jerome. He got up to take the joint from her. He smoked half-standing,
and then turned and held it out to me. I looked at the joint. One end burned; the other was
mashed and wet. I had an idea that this was all part of the boys’ plan, the woods, the shack, the
cots, the drugs, the sharing of saliva. Here’s a question I still can’t answer: Did I see through the
male tricks because Iwas destined to scheme thatwaymyself?Or do girls see through the tricks,
too, and just pretend not to notice?
For one second I thought of Chapter Eleven. He was living in a shack in the woods like this. I

asked myself if I missed my brother. I couldn’t tell if I did or not. I never know what I feel until
it’s too late. Chapter Eleven had smoked his first joint at college. Iwas four years ahead of him.
“Hold it in,”Rex coachedme.
“Youhave to let theTHCbuild up in your bloodstream,” said Jerome.
There was a sound out in the woods, twigs snapping. The Object grabbed Rex’s arm. “What
was that?”
“Maybe a bear,” Jerome said.
“Neither of you girls are on the rag, I hope,” saidRex.
“Rex!” theObject protested.
“Hey, I’m serious. Bears can smell it. I was out camping in Yellowstone one time and there
was thiswomanout therewhogot killed.Grizzly could smell the blood.”
“That is not true!”
“I swear. This guy I know toldme.Hewas anOutwardBound guide.”
“Well, I don’t knowaboutCallie, but I’mnot,” said theObject.
They all looked atme. “I’mnot either,” I said.
“I guesswe’re safe, then,Roman,” saidRex, and laughed.
The Object was still holding on to him for protection. “Youwant to do a shotgun?” he asked
her.
“What’s that?”
“Here.” He turned to face her. “What you do is one person opens their mouth and the other
person blows the smoke into it. Youget totally fucked up. It’s excellent.”
Rex put the lit end of the joint in his mouth. He leaned toward the Object. She leaned forward
too. She opened her mouth. And Rex began to blow. The Obscure Object’s lips were a perfect
ripe oval and into that target, that bull’s-eye, Rex Reese directed the stream of musky smoke. I
could see the column rush into the Object’s mouth. It disappeared down her throat like
whitewater over falls. Finally she coughed and he stopped.
“Goodhit.Nowdome.”
The Object’s green eyes were watering. But she took the joint and inserted it between her lips.
She leaned towardRexReese,whoopened his ownmouthwide.
When they were finished, Jerome took the joint from his sister. “Let me see if I can master the
technical difficulties here,” he said. The next thing I knew, his face was close to mine. So finally
I did it, too. Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my
mouth a long, dirty plumeof smoke.
Smoke filled my lungs, which began to burn. I coughed and let it out. When I opened my eyes
again, Rex had his arm around the Object’s shoulder. She was trying to act casual about it. Rex
finished his beer. He opened two more, one for him and one for her. He turned toward the
Object. He smiled. He said something I couldn’t hear. And then while I was still blinking he
covered theObject’s lipswith his sour, handsome, pot-smokingmouth.
Across the flickering shack Jerome and Iwere left pretending not to notice. The joint was ours
now to bogart aswewished.Wepassed it back and forth in silence and sipped our beers.
“I’m having this weird thing where my feet look extremely far away,” Jerome said after a
while. “Doyour feet look extremely far away to you?”
“I can’t seemy feet,” I said. “It’s dark in here.”
He passed me the joint again and I took it. I inhaled and held the smoke in. I let it keep
burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart. Rex and the
Objectwere still kissing. I looked away, out the dark, grimywindow.
“Everything looks really blue,” I said. “Did you notice that?”
“Ohyeah,” said Jerome. “All kinds of strange epiphenomena.”
The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age. All day long she sat over a hole in
the ground, the omphalos, the navel of the earth, breathing petrochemical fumes escaping from
underneath. A teenage virgin, the Oracle told the future, speaking the first metered verse in
history. Why do I bring this up? Because Calliope was also a virgin that night (for a little while

longer at least). And she, too, had been inhaling hallucinogens. Ethylene was escaping from the
cedar swamp outside the shack. Dressed not in a diaphanous robe but a pair of overalls, Calliope
began to feel very funny indeed.
“Want another beer?” Jerome asked.
“Okay.”
He handed me a golden can of Stroh’s. I put the sweating can to my lips and drank. Then I
drank some more. Jerome and I both felt the weight of the obligation. We smiled at each other
nervously. I looked down and rubbedmyknee throughmyoveralls. Andwhen I looked up again
Jerome’s facewas close.His eyeswere shut, like the eyes of a boy jumping feet first off the high
dive. Before I knewwhatwas happening hewas kissingme.Kissing the girlwho had never been
kissed. (Not since Clementine Stark, anyway.) I didn’t stop him. I remained completely still
while he did his thing. Despite my lightheadedness, I could feel everything. The shocking
wetness of his mouth. The whiskery feel of his lips. His barging tongue. Certain flavors, too, the
beer, the dope, a lingering breath mint, and beneath all that the actual, animal taste of a boy’s
mouth. I could taste the gamy tang of Jerome’s hormones and the metal of his fillings. I opened
one eye. Here was the fine hair I’d spent so much time admiring on another head. Here were the
freckles on the forehead, on the bridge of the nose, along the ears. But it wasn’t the right face;
they weren’t the right freckles, and the hair was dyed black. Behind my impassive face my soul
curled up into a ball, waiting until the unpleasantnesswas over.
Jerome and I were still sitting up. He was pressing his face against mine. By maneuvering a
little, I could see across the room towhereRex and theObjectwere. Theywere lying downnow.
The tails of Rex’s blue shirt seemed to flap in the wavering light. Beneath him one of the
Object’s legs dangled off the bed, the cuff of her pants muddy. I heard them whispering and
laughing, then silence again. I
watched the Object’s mud-stained leg dancing. I concentrated on that leg, so that I hardly
noticed when Jerome began to pull me down on our cot. I let him; I gave in to our slow collapse,
all the while watching Rex Reese and the Object out of one eye. Rex’s hands were moving over
the Object’s body now. They were pulling up her shirt, moving under it. Then their bodies
shifted so that I saw their faces in profile. TheObject’s face, as still as a deathmask,waitedwith
eyes closed. Rex’s profile was rampant, flushed. Meanwhile Jerome’s hands were moving over
me. He was rubbing my overalls, but I was no longer in them exactly. My focus on the Object
was too intense.
Ecstasy. From the Greek Ekstasis. Meaning not what you think. Meaning not euphoria or
sexual climax or even happiness. Meaning, literally: a state of displacement, of being driven out
of one’s senses. Three thousand years ago in Delphi the Oracle became ecstatic every single
working hour. That night in a hunting cabin in northern Michigan, so did Calliope. High for my
first time, drunk for my first time, I felt myself dissolving, turning to vapor. Like the incense at
church my soul rose toward the dome of my skull—and then broke through. I drifted over the
plank floor. I floated above the little camp stove. Passing by the bourbon bottles, I hovered over
the other cot, looking down at the Object. And then, because I suddenly knew that I could, I
slipped into the body of Rex Reese. I entered him like a god so that it was me, and not Rex, who
kissed her.
An owl hooted in a tree somewhere. Bugs assailed the windows, attracted by the light. In my
Delphic state I was simultaneously aware of both make-out sessions. By way of Rex’s body I
was hugging theObscure Object, nuzzling her ear . . . while at the same time Iwas also aware of
Jerome’s hands ranging over my body, the one I’d left on the other cot. He was on top of me,
crushing one ofmy legs, so Imoved it, spreadmy legs apart, and he fell between them.Hemade
little sounds. I put my arms around him, appalled and moved by his thinness. He was even
skinnier than Iwas.Now Jeromewas kissingmyneck.Now, advised by somemagazine column,
he was paying attention to my earlobe. His hands moved up. They were heading for my chest.
“Don’t,” I said, scared he’d findmy tissues.And Jeromeobeyed . . .
. . . while on the other cot Rexwasmeetingwith no such resistance.With consummate skill he

had undone theObject’s brassierewith one hand.Because hewasmore experienced thanme I let
him
dealwith the shirt buttons, but it wasmyhands that took hold of her bra and, as if snapping up
a windowshade, let into the room the pale light of the Object’s breasts. I saw them; I touched
them; and since it wasn’t me who did this but Rex Reese I didn’t have to feel guilty, didn’t have
to ask myself if I was having unnatural desires. How could I be when I was on the other cot
fooling around with Jerome? . . . and so, just to be safe, I returned my attention to him. He was
now in some kind of agony. He was rubbing against me and then he stopped and reached down
to adjust himself. There was the sound of a zipper. I peeked at him through the corner of my
eyes. I sawhim thinking, concentrating on the puzzle of the overalls.
He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so once again I floated back across the room and
entered the body of Rex Reese. For a minute I could feel the Object responding to my touch, the
startled, eager wakefulness in her skin and muscles. And now I felt something else, Rex, or me,
lengthening, expanding. I felt that for only a second and then somethingwas pullingmeback . . .
Jerome had his hand on my bare stomach. While I’d been off inhabiting Rex’s body Jerome
had taken the opportunity to undo my shoulder straps. He had flicked open the silver buttons at
my waist. Now he was pulling down my overalls and I was trying to wake up. Now he was
tugging on my underpants and I was realizing how drunk I was. Now he was inside my
underpants and nowhewas . . . inside me!
And then: pain. Pain like a knife, pain like fire. It ripped into me. It spread up my belly all the
way tomynipples. I gasped; I openedmyeyes; I looked up and saw Jerome looking down atme.
Wegaped at each other and I knewhe knew. Jerome knewwhat Iwas, as suddenly I did, too, for
the first time clearly understood that I wasn’t a girl but something in between. I knew this from
how natural it had felt to enter Rex Reese’s body, how right it felt, and I knew this from the
shocked expression on Jerome’s face. All this was conveyed in an instant. Then I pushed Jerome
away.He pulled back, pulled out, and slid off the bed onto the floor.
Silence. Only the two of us, catching our breath. I lay on my back on the camp bed. Beneath
the newspaper clippings. With only a mounted pike as witness. I pulled up my overalls and felt
very sober indeed.
Itwas all over now.Therewas nothing I could do. Jeromewould
tell Rex. Rex would tell the Object. She would stop being my friend. By the time school
started, everyone at Baker & Inglis would know that Calliope Stephanides was a freak. I was
waiting for Jerome to jump up and run. I felt panicked and, at the same time, strangely calm. I
was putting things together in my head. Clementine Stark and kissing lessons; and spinning
together in a hot tub; an amphibian heart and a crocus blooming; blood and breasts that didn’t
come; and a crush on theObject that did, that had, that looked as if itwas here to stay.
A few moments of clarity and then panic again whined in my ears. I wanted to run myself.
Before Jerome had a chance to say anything. Before anyone found out. I could leave tonight. I
could find my way back through the cedar swamp to the house. I could steal the Object’s
parents’ car. I could drive north, through the Upper Peninsula to Canada, where Chapter Eleven
had once thought of going to escape the draft. As I contemplated my life on the run I peeked
over the edge of the cot to seewhat Jeromewas doing.
Hewas flat on his back, eyes closed.Andhewas smiling to himself.
Smiling? Smiling how? In ridicule? No. In shock? Wrong again. How then? In contentment.
Jerome had the smile of a boy who, on a summer night, had gone all the way. He had the smile
of a guywho couldn’twait to tell his friends.
Reader, believe this if you can: he hadn’t noticed a thing.

THEGUNONTHEWALL

I woke up back at the house. I had a vague memory of how I got there, of trudging back
through the bog. My overalls were still on. My crotch felt hot and spongy. The Object was
already out of bed or had slept somewhere else. I reached down and unstuckmyunderpants from
my skin. Something about this act, the little puff of air, the rising aroma, reiterated the brand-
new fact about myself. But it wasn’t a fact exactly. It was nothing as solid as a fact right then. It
was just an intuition I’d had about myself, to which the coming of morning brought no clarity. It
was just an idea that was already beginning to fade, to become part of the drunkenness in the
woods of the night before.
When the Oracle awoke after one of her wild, prophesying nights, she probably had no
memory of the things she’d said. Whatever truths she’d hit on were secondary to the immediate
sensations: the headache, the singed throat. It was the same for Calliope. I had a sense of having
been dirtied and initiated. I felt all grownup.Butmostly I felt sick and didn’twant to think about
what had happened at all.
In the shower I tried to rinse the experience away, scrubbing methodically, lifting my face to
the slanting water. Steam filled the air. The mirrors and the windows dripped. The towels grew
damp. I used every kind of soap within reach, Lifebuoy, Ivory, plus a local, rustic brand that felt
like sandpaper. I got dressed and camedown the
stairs quietly. As I crossed the living room I noticed an old hunting rifle over the mantel.
Another gun on the wall. I tiptoed by it. In the kitchen, the Object was eating cereal and reading
a magazine. She didn’t look up when I entered. I got a bowl myself and sat down across from
her.Maybe I grimaced in doing so.
“What’s the matter?” sneered the Object. “Sore?” Her sarcastic face rested on one palm. She
didn’t look so hot herself. She was puffy under the eyes. There were times when her freckles
were not sunny but like corrosion or rust.
“You’rethe one that should be sore,” I replied.
“I’mnot sore at all,” said theObject, “if youwant to know.”
“I forgot,” I said; “you’re used to it.”
Suddenly her face was full of anger, shaking. Cords stretched and pulled beneath her skin,
making lines. “Youwere a total slut last night,” she charged.
“Me?What about you?Youwere throwing yourself at Rex thewhole time.”
“Iwas not.Wedidn’t even do thatmuch.”
“Youcould have fooledme.”
“At least he’s not your brother.” She got to her feet, glaring. She looked like she might cry.
She hadn’twiped hermouth. Therewas jamon it, crumbs. Iwas struck dumbby the sight of this
beloved face working itself up into what looked like hatred. My own face must have been
reacting, too. I could feel my eyes going wide and scared. The Object was waiting for me to say
something but nothing came to mind. So finally she shoved her chair away and said, “Jerome’s
upstairs.Whydon’t you go climb in bedwith him.”And she stormed off.

A low moment followed. Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my
legs, it pooled in my heart. On top of panic that I’d lost my friend, I was suddenly beset by
worries about my reputation. Was I really a slut? I hadn’t even liked it. But I had done it, hadn’t
I? I had let him do it. Fear of retribution came next. What if I got pregnant? What then? My face
at the breakfast table was the face of all mathematical girls, counting days, measuring liquids. It
was at least a minute before I remembered that I couldn’t be pregnant. That was one good thing
about being a late bloomer. Still, I was upset. I was certain that the Object would never talk to
me again.
I climbed the stairs and got back into bed, pulling a pillow over my face to block out the
summer light. But there was no hiding from reality that morning. No more than five minutes
later the bedsprings sagged under newweight. Peeking out, I saw that Jeromehad come to visit.
He was lying on his back, looking cozy, already installed. Instead of a robe he had on a duck
hunting coat. The ends of his frayed boxer shorts were visible below. He had a mug of coffee in
one hand and I noticed that his fingernails were painted black. The morning light coming from
the side window showed stubble on his chin and above his upper lip. Against the flat, wasted,
dyed hair these orange shootswere like life returning to a scorched landscape.
“Goodmorning, dahling,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Feeling a little under theweather, arewe?”
“Yeah,”I said. “Iwas pretty drunk last night.”
“Youdidn’t seem that drunk tome, dahling.”
“Well, Iwas.”
Jerome now dropped the bit. He flopped back into the pillows and sipped his coffee and
sighed. With one finger he tapped his forehead for a while. Then he spoke. “Just in case you
were having any of the hackneyed worries, you should know that I still respect you and all that
shit.”
I didn’t respond. Responding would only confirm the facts of what had happened, whereas I
wanted to cast them in doubt. After a while Jerome set the coffee mug down and turned onto his
side. He wriggled over toward me and rested his head against my shoulder. He lay there
breathing. Then,with closed eyes, hemoved his head and tunneled under the pillowwithme.He
started to nuzzle me. He brought his hair across the skin of my neck and after that came the
sensitive organs.His eyelashesmade butterfly kisses onmy chin.His nose snuffled in the hollow
of my throat. And then his lips arrived, avid, clumsy. I wanted him off me. At the same time I
asked myself if I had brushed my teeth. Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt
like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their
intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid.And call it love.
For a minute it was tolerable. But soon the duck coat rode up and Jerome’s urgency was
pressing itself uponme.Hewas trying to reach
up under my shirt again. I didn’t have a bra on. After my shower I had gone without it,
flushing away the Kleenex. I was done with them. Jerome’s hands moved higher. I didn’t care. I
let him feel me up. For what it was worth. But if I was hoping to disappoint him, it didn’t work.
He stroked and squeezedwhile his lower half swished like a crocodile’s tail. And then he said an
unironic thing. Fervently hewhispered, “I’m really into you.”
His lips closed, seeking mine. His tongue entered. The first penetration that augured the next.
But not now, not this time.
“Stop,” I said.
“What?”
“Stop.”
“Why stop?”
“Because.”
“Becausewhy?”
“Because I don’t like you like that.”

He sat up. Like the guy in the old vaudeville skit, the guy in the folding cot that won’t stay
folded, Jerome flipped straight up,wide awake. Then he jumped off the bed.
“Don’t bemad atme,” I said.
“Who says I’mmad?” said Jerome, and left.

The rest of the day went slowly. I stayed in my room until I saw Jerome leave the house,
carrying his movie camera. I guessed that I was no longer in the cast. The Object’s parents
returned from their morning tennis foursome. Mrs. Object came up the stairs to the master
bathroom. From my window I saw Mr. Object climb into the backyard hammock with a book. I
waited for the shower to turn on and then came down the back stairs and out the kitchen door. I
walked down to the bay, feelingmelancholy.
The cedar swamp lay on one side of the house.On the otherwas a dirt and gravel road that led
through an open field, treeless, with high yellow grass. The absence of trees was noticeable, and
poking around out there I came upon a historical marker, nearly overgrown. It marked the site of
a fort or a massacre, I don’t remember which. Moss encroached upon the raised letters and I
didn’t read the whole plaque. I stood there for a while thinking about the first settlers and how
they had killed one another over beaver and fox pelts. I putmy
foot on the plaque, kicking off themosswithmy sneaker, until I got tired of that. Itwas almost
noon by now. The bay was bright blue. Over the rise I could sense the city of Petoskey, the
smoke of stoves and chimneys down there. The grass gotmarshy near thewater. I climbed up on
the breakwall and walked back and forth, keeping my balance. I held my arms out and pranced,
Olga Korbut style. But my heart wasn’t in it. And I was way too tall to be Olga Korbut.
Sometime later the whir of an outboard engine reached me. I shaded my eyes with my hand to
look out over the shimmering water. A speedboat was shooting past. At the wheel was Rex
Reese. Bare-chested, drinking a beer and wearing sunglasses, he gunned the throttle, towing a
water-skier. It was the Object, of course, in her shamrock bikini. She looked almost naked
against the expanse of water, only those two little strips, one above, one below, separating her
from Eden. Her red hair flapped like a gale warning. She wasn’t a beautiful skier. She leaned too
far forward, bowlegged on the pontoons. But she didn’t fall. Rex kept turning around to check on
herwhile he sipped his beer. Finally the boatmade a sharp turn and theObject crossed herwake,
whipping along past the shore.
A terrible thing happens when you water-ski. After you release the rope, you keep skimming
over the water for a while, free. But there comes an inevitable moment when your speed fails to
sustain your forward progress. The surface of the water breaks like glass. The depths open up to
claim you. That was how I felt on land, watching the Object ski past. That same plunging,
hopeless feeling, that emotional physics.
When I got back at dinnertime theObjectwas still not there.Hermotherwas angry, thinking it
rude of the Object to leave me alone. Jerome, too, was out with friends. So I ate dinner with the
Object’s parents. I felt too desolate to charm the grownups that night. I ate in silence and
afterward sat in the living room pretending to read. The clock ticked on. The night labored and
creaked. When I felt I might fall apart I went into the bathroom and threw water on my face. I
held a warm washcloth over my eyes and pressed my hands against my temples. I wondered
what the Object and Rex were doing. I pictured her socks in the air, her little tennis socks with
the balls at the heels, those ensanguined balls, bouncing.
Itwas obvious thatMr. andMrs.Objectwere staying up just to keep
me company. So finally I said good night and went up to bed myself. I got in and immediately
started crying. I cried for a long time, trying not to make any noise. While I sobbed I said things
in an aggrieved whisper. I cried, “Why don’t you like me?” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I didn’t
care what I sounded like. There was a poison in my system and I needed to purge it. While Iwas
carrying on like that, I heard the screen door bang shut downstairs. I wiped my nose on the
sheets and tried to settle down and listen. Footsteps climbed the stairs, and in another moment
the door of the bedroom opened and closed. The Object entered and stood there in darkness. She

might have been waiting for her eyes to adjust. I lay on my side, pretending to be asleep. The
floorboards creaked as she came over to my side of the bed. I felt her standing over me, looking
down. Then she went to the other side of the bed, took off her shoes and shorts, put on a T-shirt,
and got in.
The Object slept on her back. She told me once that back-sleepers were the leaders in life,
born performers or exhibitionists. Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to
dark perception and themeditative arts. This theory applied in our case. I lay prone,my nose and
eyes sore fromcrying. TheObject, supine, yawned and (like a born performer, perhaps) soon fell
asleep.
Iwaited ten or sominutes, just to be safe. Then, as though tossing inmy sleep, I rolled over so
that I was looking at the Object. The moon was gibbous and filled the room with blue light.
There upon thewicker bed theObscureObject slept. The top of herGrotonT-shirtwas visible. It
was an old one of her father’s, with a few holes. She had one arm crossed over her face, like a
slash on a sign that meant “No Touching.” So I looked instead. Over the pillow her hair was
spread out. Her lips were parted. Something glinted inside her ear, grains of sand from the beach
maybe. Beyond, the atomizers glowed on the dresser. The ceiling was up above somewhere. I
could feel the spidersworking in the corners. The sheetswere cool. The fat duvet rolled up at our
feet was leaking feathers. I’d grown up around the smell of new carpeting, of polyester shirts hot
from the dryer. Here the Egyptian sheets smelled like hedges, the pillows like water fowl.
Thirteen inches away, the Object was part of all this. Her colors seemed to agree with the
American landscape, her pumpkin hair, her apple cider skin. She made a sound and went still
again.
Gently, I pulled the covers off her. In the dimness her outline appeared, the rise of her breasts
beneath the T-shirt, the soft hill of her belly, and then the brightness of her underpants,
converging in theirV shape. She didn’t stir at all. Her chest rose and fellwith her breath. Slowly,
trying not to make a sound, I moved closer to her. Tiny muscles in my flank, muscles I hadn’t
known I possessed, suddenly made themselves available. They propelled me millimeter by
millimeter across the sheets. The old bedsprings gave me trouble. As I tried nonchalantly to
advance, they called out ribald encouragement. They cheered, they sang. I kept stopping and
starting. Itwas hardwork. I breathed throughmymouth, quieter thatway.
Over the course of ten minutes I slid nearer and nearer to her. Finally I felt the heat of her
body along my entire length. We were still not touching, only radiating against each other. She
was breathing deeply. So was I. We breathed together. Finally, gathering courage, I flung my
armacross herwaist.
Then nothingmore for a longwhile.Having achieved thismuch, Iwas scared to go further. So
I remained frozen, half hugging her. My arm grew stiff. It began to throb and finally went numb.
The Object might have been drugged or comatose. Still, I sensed an alertness in her skin, in her
muscles. After another long while I plunged ahead. I took hold of her T-shirt and lifted it up. I
gazed at her naked belly for a long while and, finally, with a kind of woefulness, bowed my
head. I bowed my head to the god of desperate longing. I kissed the Object’s belly and then
slowly, gathering confidence,workedmywayup.
Do you remember my frog heart? In Clementine Stark’s bedroom it had kicked off from a
muddy bank, moving between two elements. Now it did something even more amazing—it crept
up onto land. Squeezing millennia into thirty seconds, it developed consciousness. While kissing
the Object’s belly, I wasn’t just reacting to pleasurable stimuli, as I had been with Clementine. I
didn’t vacate my body, as I had with Jerome. Now I was aware of what was happening. I was
thinking about it.
I was thinking that this was what I’d always wanted. I was realizing that I wasn’t the only
faker around. Iwas wondering what would happen if someone discovered what we were doing. I
was thinking that itwas all very complicated andwould only getmore so.
I reached down and touched her hips. I hooked my fingers in the waistband of her underpants.
I began to slip them off. Just then, the Object lifted her hips, very slightly, to make it easier for

me.Thiswas her only contribution.

The next day we didn’t mention it. When I got up, the Object was already out of bed. She was in
the kitchen, observing her father’s preparation of scrapple. Making scrapple was Mr. Object’s
Sunday morning ritual. He presided over the bubbling fat and grease while the Object
periodically looked into the frying pan and said, “That is so disgusting.” Soon she was working
on a plate of it, andmademehave one, too. “I’mgoing to have theworst heartburn,” she said.
I understood the unspoken message immediately. The Object wanted no dramatics, no guilt.
No show of romance, either. She was going on about the scrapple to separate night from day, to
make it clear that what happened at night, what we did at night, had nothing to do with daylight
hours. She was a good actress, too, and at times I wondered if maybe she really had been
sleeping through thewhole thing.Ormaybe I had only been dreaming it.
She gave only two signs during the day that anything had changed between us. In the
afternoon Jerome’s film crew arrived. This consisted of two friends of his, carrying boxes and
cables and a long, fuzzy microphone like a dirty, rolled-up bathmat. Jerome was by this time
pointedly not speaking tome. They set up in a small equipment shed on the property. TheObject
and I decided to see what they were doing. Jerome had told us to stay away, so we couldn’t
resist. We crept up, moving from tree to tree. We had to stop often to fight off laugh attacks,
slapping at each other, avoiding each other’s eyes until we could control ourselves. At the back
window of the equipment shed we peeked in. Not much was happening. One of Jerome’s friends
was taping a light to thewall. It was hard for us both to see through the smallwindowat once, so
the Object got in front of me. She placed my hands on her belly and held my wrists. Still, her
attentionwas officially given over towhatwas going on inside the shed.
Jerome appeared, dressed as the preppy vampire. Inside the traditional Dracula waistcoat, he
wore a pink Lacoste shirt. Instead of a bow tie he had an ascot. His black hair was slicked back,
his face
whitened with a cosmetic, and he carried a cocktail shaker. One of his friends held a
broomstick dangling a rubber bat. Another operated the camera. “Action,” said Jerome. He lifted
the cocktail shaker.He shook itwith both hands.Meanwhile the bat swooped and fluttered above
his head. Jerome removed the lid and poured the blood into the martini glasses. He held one up
for his friend the bat, who promptly plopped into it. Jerome sipped his blood cocktail. “Just how
you like it,Muffie,” he said to the bat. “Very dry.”
Undermyhands theObject’s stomach jiggled as she laughed. She leaned back intome and her
flesh captured in my arms shook and yielded. I pressed my pelvis against her. All this went on
secretly behind the shed, like a game of footsie. But then the cameraman lowered his camera. He
pointed at us and Jerome turned around. His eyes fixed on my hands and then rose to my eyes.
He bared his fangs, burning me with a look. And then shouted in his regular voice, “Get the hell
out of here, you fuckers! We’re shooting.” He came up to the window and struck it, but we were
already running away.
Later, around evening, the phone rang. The Object’s mother answered it. “It’s Rex,” she said.
The Object got up from the sofa where we were playing backgammon. I restacked my chips to
have something to do. I tidied them up, over and over, while the Object talked to Rex. She had
her back to me. She moved around as she talked, playing with the cord. I kept looking down at
the chips, moving them. Meanwhile I paid close attention to the conversation. “Nothing much,
just playing backgammon . . . with Callie . . . He’s making his stupid film . . . I can’t, we’re
supposed to have dinner soon . . . I don’t know, maybe later . . . I’m sort of tired, actually.”
Suddenly she wheeled around to face me. With effort I looked up. The Object pointed at the
phone and then, opening hermouthwide, stuck her finger downher throat.Myheart brimmed.
Night came again. In bed we went through the preliminaries, plumping our pillows, yawning.
We tossed around to get comfortable. And then after an appropriate time of silence the Object
made a noise. It was a murmur, a cry caught in the throat, as if she were talking in her sleep.
After this, her breathing became deeper. And taking this as the okay, Calliope began the long

trek across the bed.
So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. There were
reasons onmy side for this aswell.
Whatever itwas that Iwaswas best revealed slowly, in flattering light.Whichmeant notmuch
light at all. Besides, that’s the way it goes in adolescence. Youtry things out in the dark. Youget
drunk or stoned and extemporize. Think back to your backseats, your pup tents, your beach
bonfire parties. Did you ever find yourself, without admitting it, tangled up with your best
friend? Or in a dorm room bed with two people instead of one, while Bach played on the chintzy
stereo, orchestrating the fugue? It’s a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. Before the routine
sets in, or the love. Back when the groping is largely anonymous. Sandbox sex. It starts in the
teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It’s all about learning to share. It’s about sharing your
toys.
Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move
to accommodate me, spreading her legs or throwing an arm aroundmyback. She swamup to the
surface of consciousness before diving again.Her eyelids fluttered. A responsiveness entered her
body, a flex of abdomen in rhythm with mine, her head thrown back to offer up her throat. I
waited for more. I wanted her to acknowledge what we were doing, but I was scared, too. So the
sleek dolphin rose, leapt through the ring ofmy legs, and disappeared again, leavingmebobbing,
trying to keep my balance. Everything was wet down there. From me or her I didn’t know. I laid
my head on her chest beneath the bunched-up T-shirt.Her underarms smelled like overripe fruit.
The hair there was very sparse. “You luck,” I would have said, back in our daytime life. “You
don’t even have to shave.” But the nighttime Calliope only stroked the hair, or tasted it. One
night, as I was doing this and other things, I noticed a shadow on the wall. I thought it was a
moth. But, looking closer, I saw that it was the Object’s hand, raised behind my head. Her hand
was completely awake. It clenched and unclenched, siphoning all the ecstasy from her body into
its secret flowerings.
What the Object and I did together was played out under these loose rules. We weren’t too
scrupulous about the details. What pressed on our attention was that it was happening, sex was
happening. That was the great fact. How it happened exactly, what went where, was secondary.
Plus, we didn’t have much to compare it to. Nothing but our night in the shack with Rex and
Jerome.
As far as the crocuswas concerned, itwasn’t somuch a piece ofme
as something we discovered and enjoyed together. Dr. Luce will tell you that female monkeys
exhibit mounting behavior when administered male hormones. They seize, they thrust. Not me.
Or at least not at first. The blooming of the crocuswas an impersonal phenomenon. It was a kind
of hook that fastened us together, more a stimulant to the Object’s outer parts than a penetration
of her inner. But, apparently, effective enough. Because after the first few nights, she was eager
for it. Eager, that is, while ostensibly remaining unconscious. As I hugged her, as we
languorously shifted and knotted, the Object’s attitudes of insensibility included favorable
positioning. Nothing was made ready or caressed. Nothing was aimed. But practice brought
about a fluid gymnastics to our sleep couplings. The Object’s eyes remained closed throughout;
her head was often turned slightly away. She moved under me as a sleeping girl might while
being ravished by an incubus. Shewas like somebody having a dirty dream, confusing her pillow
for a lover.
Sometimes, before or afterward, I switched on the bedside lamp. I pulled her T-shirt up as far
as it would go and slid her underpants down below her knees. And then I lay there, letting my
eyes have their fill. What else compares? Gold filings shifted around the magnet of her navel.
Her ribs were as thin as candy canes. The spread of her hips, so different from mine, looked like
a bowl offering up red fruit. And then there was my favorite spot, the place where her ribcage
softened into breast, the smooth,white dune there.
I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands,
adjusting her legs around my waist. I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my

body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was
swingingmadly on the rope.

Through all this I made no lasting conclusions about myself. I know it’s hard to believe, but
that’s the way it works. The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It’s a different thing to be
inside a body than outside. Fromoutside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no
comparison. In the past year the crocus had lengthened considerably.At itsmost demonstrative it
was nowabout two inches long.Most of this length, however,was concealed by the flaps of skin
fromwhich it issued. Then therewas the hair. In its quiet state, the
crocus was barely noticeable. What I saw looking down at myself was only the dark triangular
badge of puberty.When I touched the crocus it expanded, swelling untilwith a kind of pop it slid
free of the pouch itwas in. It poked its head up into the air. Not too far, though.Nomore than an
inch past the tree line. What did this mean? I knew from personal experience that the Object had
a crocus of her own. It swelled, too, when touched. Mine was just bigger, more effusive in its
feelings.My crocuswore its heart on its sleeve.
The crucial feature was this: the crocus didn’t have a hole at the tip. This was certainly not
what a boy had. Put yourself in my shoes, reader, and ask yourself what conclusion you would
have come to about your sex, if you hadwhat I had, if you looked theway I looked. To pee I had
to sit. The stream issued from underneath. I had an interior like a girl. It was tender inside,
almost painful if I inserted my finger. True, my chest was completely flat. But there were other
ironing boards at my school. And Tessie insisted I took after her in that department. Muscles?
Notmuch to speak of.Nohips either, nowaist.Adinner plate of a girl. The low-Cal special.
Why should I have thought I was anything other than a girl? Because I was attracted to a
girl? That happened all the time. It was happening more than ever in 1974. It was becoming a
national pastime. My ecstatic intuition about myself was now deeply suppressed. How long I
would have managed to keep it down is anybody’s guess. But in the end it wasn’t up to me. The
big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before
we’re born.

The following Thursday morning was hot. It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere
gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water. The Object
was draggy in any kind of heat. She claimed her ankles swelled. All morning she’d been a trying
companion, demanding, sullen. While I was dressing she’d come back from the bathroom to
accuseme from the doorway, “What did you dowith the shampoo?”
“I didn’t do anythingwith it.”
“I left it right on thewindowsill. You’rethe only other personwhouses it.”
I squeezed past her andwent down the hall. “It’s right here in the tub,” I said.
The Object took it from me. “I feel totally gross and sticky!” she said, by way of apology.
Then she got into the shower while I brushed my teeth. After a minute her oval face appeared,
the shower curtain snug around it. She looked bald and big-eyed like an alien. “Sorry I’m such a
bitch today,” she said.
I kept brushing,wanting her to suffer a little.
TheObject’s foreheadwrinkled and her eyes grew soft in appeal. “Doyouhateme?”
“I’m still deciding.”
“You’resomean!” she said, comically frowning, and snapped the curtain shut.
After breakfast, we were on the porch swing, drinking lemonade and gliding back and forth to
create a breeze. I had my feet up on the railing, pushing off from it. The Object was lying
sideways, her legs spread over my lap, her head resting against the arm of the swing. She had on
cutoffs, short enough to reveal the white lining of the pockets, and her bikini top. I was wearing
khaki shorts and awhite alligator shirt.
Out in front of us, the bay flashed silver. The bay had scales, like the fish beneath.
“Sometimes I get really sick of having a body,” theObject said.

“Me too.”
“Youtoo?”
“Especiallywhen it’s hot like this. It’s like torture justmoving around.”
“Plus I hate sweating.”
“I can’t stand to sweat,” I said. “I’d rather pant like a dog.”
The Object laughed. She was smiling at me, marveling. “You understand everything I say,”
she said. She shook her head. “Why can’t you be a guy?”
I shrugged, indicating that I had no answer. I was aware of no irony in this. Neither was the
Object.
She was looking at me, low-lidded. Her eyes in the brightness of day with heat currents rising
over the baking grass looked very green, even if they were only slits, crescents. Her head was
bent forward against the armof the swing; she had to look up to seeme. This gave her a vixenish
attitude.Without taking her eyes offmine, she adjusted her legs, spreading them slightly.
“Youhave themost amazing eyes,” she said.
“Youreyes are really green. They almost look fake.”
“They are fake.”
“You’vegot glass eyes?”
“Yeah,I’mblind. I’m Tiresias.”
This was a new way to do it. We’d just discovered it. Staring into each other’s eyes was
another way of keeping them closed, or off the details at hand, anyway. We locked onto each
other. Meanwhile the Object was very subtly flexing her legs. I was aware of the mound beneath
her cutoffs rising toward me, just a little, rising and suggesting itself. I put my hand on the
Object’s thigh, palm down. And as we continued to swing, looking at each other while crickets
played their fiddles in the grass, I slid my hand sideways up toward the place where the Object’s
legs joined. My thumb went under her cutoffs. Her face showed no reaction. Her green eyes
under the heavy lids remained fastened on mine. I felt the fluffiness of her underpants and
pressed down, sliding under the elastic. And then with our eyes wide open but confined in that
way my thumb slipped inside her. She blinked, her eyes closed, her hips rose higher, and I did it
again. And again after that. The boats in the bay were part of it, and the string section of crickets
in the baking grass, and the ice melting in our lemonade glasses. The swing moved back and
forth, creaking on its rusted chain, and it was like that old nursery rhyme, Little Jack Horner sat
in the corner eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum . . . After the
first roll of her eyes theObject resettled her gaze onmine, and thenwhat shewas feeling showed
only there, in the green depths her eyes revealed. Otherwise she was motionless. Only my hand
moved, and my feet on the rail, pushing the swing. This went on for three minutes, or five, or
fifteen. I have no idea. Time disappeared. Somehowwewere still not quite conscious ofwhatwe
were doing. Sensation dissolved straight into forgetting.
When the floor of the porch creaked behind us, I jumped. I withdrew my thumb from the
Object’s pants and sat up straight. I saw something in the corner of my eyes and turned. Perched
on the railing to our right was Jerome. He was in his vampire costume, despite the heat. The
powder on his face was burning off in spots but he still looked very pale. He was gazing down
onuswith his best haunted expression.His Turn of the Screw expression. The youngmaster led
astray by the gardener. The boy in the frock coat who’d drowned in the well. Everything was
dead except the eyes.His eyes fixed on us—on theObject’s bare legs lying inmy lap—while his
face remained embalmed.
Then the apparition spoke:
“Carpetmunchers.”
“Just ignore him,” theObject said.
“Carrrrpetmuncherrrrs,” Jerome repeated. It cameout in a croak.
“Shut up!”
Jerome remained still and ghoul-like on the rail. His hair wasn’t slicked back but fell limp on
either side of his face. He was very controlled and intent about what he was doing, as if

following a time-honored procedure. “Carpet muncher,” he said again. “Carpet muncher, carpet
muncher.” Singular now.Thiswas between himand his sister.
“I said quit it, Jerome.” The Object now tried to rise. She swung her legs off my lap and
started to roll out of the swing. But Jerome moved first. He spread his jacket like wings and
jumped off the railing.He swooped downon theObject. Still his facewas completely impassive.
No muscles moved except those of his mouth. Into the Object’s face, into her ears he kept
hissing and croaking. “Carpetmuncher, carpetmuncher, carpetmuncher, carpetmuncher.”
“Stop it!”
She tried to hit him but he caught her arms. He held both of her wrists in one hand. With his
other hand Jerome made a V with his fingers. He pressed this V to his mouth and between this
suggestive triangle flicked his tongue back and forth. At the crudity of this gesture the Object’s
calm began to crack. A sob rose in her. Jerome sensed its arrival. He had reduced his sister to
tears for over a decade; he knewhow to do it; hewas like a kid burning an antwith amagnifying
glass, focusing the beam in hotter and hotter.
“Carpetmuncher, carpetmuncher, carpetmuncher . . .”
And then it happened. The Object broke down. She began to bawl like a little girl. Her face
turned red and she swungher fistswildly before finally running away into the house.
At that point Jerome’s fierce activity ceased.He adjusted his jacket. He smoothed his hair and,
leaning against the porch rail, stared peacefully out at thewater.
“Don’tworry,” he said tome. “Iwon’t tell anyone.”
“Tell anyonewhat?”
“You’re lucky I’m such a liberal and freethinking type of guy,” he continued. “Most guys
wouldn’t be so happy to find out that they’d been two-timed by a lesbian with their own sister.
It’s sort of embarrassing, don’t you think? But I’m such a freethinker that I’m willing to
overlook your proclivities.”
“Whydon’t you shut up, Jerome?”
“I’ll shut up when I want to,” he said. Then he turned his head and looked at me. “Youknow
where you are now? Splitsville, Stephanides. Get out of here and don’t come back. And keep
your hands offmy sister.”
I was already jumping up. My blood rocketed. It shot up my spine and rang a bell in my head,
and I charged Jerome in a blaze of fury. He was bigger than me but unprepared. I hit him in the
face. He tried to move away but I crashed into him, my momentum knocking him to the floor. I
climbed on his chest, pinning his arms with my legs. Finally Jerome stopped resisting. He lay on
his back and tried to look amused.
“Any time you’re finished,” he said.
It was an exhilarating feeling to be on top of him. Chapter Eleven had pinned me all my life.
Thiswas the first time I’d done it to somebody else, especially a boy older thanme.My long hair
was falling into Jerome’s face. I swept it back and forth, tormenting him. Then I remembered
something elsemybrother used to do.
“No,” Jerome cried. “Comeon. Don’t!”
I let it fall. Like a raindrop. Like a tear. But neither of those things. The spit plopped right
between Jerome’s eyes. And then the earth opened up beneath us. With a roar Jerome rose up,
sendingmebackward.My supremacy had been brief.Now itwas time to run.
I took off across the porch. I jumped down the steps and tore across the back lawn, barefoot.
Jerome came after me in his Dracula getup. He stopped to fling off the coat and I increased the
distance between us. Through the backyards of the neighboring houses I ran, ducking under pine
branches. I dodged bushes and barbecues. The pine needles gave good traction under my feet.
Finally I reached the open field beyond and fled into it. When I looked back Jerome was gaining
onme.
Through the high, yellow grass along the bayshore we flew. I jumped over the historical
marker, grazing my foot, then hopped in pain and continued on. Jerome cleared it without a
hitch.On the other side of the fieldwas the road that led back to the house. If I could get over the

rise, I could double back without Jerome seeing me. The Object and I could barricade ourselves
in our room. I reached the hill and started up. Jerome came afterme, scowling, still gaining.
We were like runners in a frieze. In profile, with pumping thighs and knifing arms, we cut
through the shin-whipping grass. By the time I reached the bottom of the hill Jerome seemed to
be slowing down. He was waving his hand in defeat. He was waving it and shouting something I
couldn’t hear . . .
The tractor had justmade a turn onto the road.High in his seat, the farmer didn’t seeme. Iwas
looking back to check on Jerome. When I finally turned forward it was too late. Right in front of
me was the tractor tire. I hit it dead on. In the terra-cotta dust I was spun upward into the air. At
the apex of my arc I saw the raised plow blades behind, the corkscrewing metal covered with
mud, and then the racewas over.
I awoke later, in the backseat of a strange automobile. A rattletrap, with blankets covering the
seats. A decal of a hooked, flapping trout was pasted to the rear window. The driver wore a red
cap. The little space above the cap’s adjustable headband showed the buzzed hairline of his
seamed neck.
My head felt soft, as if covered in gauze. I was wrapped in an old blanket, stiff and spoked
with hay. I turnedmyhead and looked up and saw a beautiful sight. I saw theObject’s face from
below. My head was in her lap. My right cheek was flush against the warm upholstery of her
tummy. She was still in her bikini top and cutoffs. Her knees were spread and her red hair fell
over me, darkening things. I gazed up through this maroon or oxblood space and saw what I
could of her, the dark band of her swimsuit top, her clavicles set forward. She was chewing one
cuticle. Itwas going to bleed if she kept it up. “Hurry,” shewas saying, from the other side of the
falling hair. “Hurry up,Mr.Burt.”
It was the farmer who was driving. The farmer whose tractor I’d run into. I hoped he wasn’t
listening. I didn’twant him to hurry. I
wanted this ride to go on for as long as possible. The Object was stroking my head. She’d
never done this in daylight before.
“I beat up your brother,” I said out of the blue.
With one hand theObject swept her hair away. The light knifed in.
“Callie!Are you okay?”
I smiled up at her. “I got himgood.”
“Oh God,” she said. “I was so scared. I thought you were dead. Youwere just ly—ly”—her
voice broke—“lying there in the road!”
The tears came on, tears of gratitude now, not anger like before. The Object sobbed. With awe
I beheld the storm of emotion racking her. She dipped her head. She pressed her snuffling, wet
face against mine and, for the first and last time, we kissed. We were hidden by the backrest, by
the wall of hair, and who was the farmer to tell anyway? The Object’s anguished lips met mine,
and therewas a sweet taste and a taste of salt.
“I’m all snotty,” she said, lifting her face up again. Shemanaged to laugh.
But already the car was stopping. The farmer was jumping out, shouting things. He swung
open the back door. Two orderlies appeared and lifted me onto a stretcher. They wheeled me
across the sidewalk into the hospital doors. The Object remained at my side. She took my hand.
For a moment she seemed to register her near nakedness. She looked down at herself when her
bare feet hit the cold linoleum. But she shrugged this off. All the way down the hall, until the
orderlies told her to stop, she held on to my hand. As though it were a string of Piraeus yarn.
“Youcan’t come in, miss,” the orderlies said. “Youhave to wait here.” And so she did. But still
she didn’t let go of my hand. Not for a while longer yet. The stretcher was wheeled down the
corridor and my arm stretched out toward the Object. I had already left on my voyage. I was
sailing across the sea to another country. Now my arm was twenty feet long, thirty, forty, fifty. I
lifted my head from the stretcher to gaze at the Object. To gaze at the Obscure Object. For once
more she was becoming a mystery to me. What ever happened to her? Where is she now? She
stood at the end of the hall, holding my unraveling arm. She looked cold, skinny, out of place,

lost. It was almost as if she knew we would never see each other again. The stretcher was
picking up speed.Myarmwas only a
thin ribbon now, curling through the air. Finally the inevitable moment came. The Object let
go.Myhand flewup, free, empty.
Lights overhead, bright and round, as at my birth. The same squeaking ofwhite shoes. But Dr.
Philobosianwas nowhere to be found. The doctorwho smiled down atmewas young and sandy-
haired.He had a country accent. “I’mgonna ask you a fewquestions, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Start offwith your name.”
“Callie.”
“Howold are you,Callie?”
“Fourteen.”
“Howmany fingers am I holding out?”
“Two.”
“Iwant you to count backward forme. Start from ten.”
“Ten, nine, eight . . .”
And all thewhile, hewas pressingme, feeling for breaks. “Does this hurt?”
“No.”
“This?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Howabout here?”
Suddenly it did hurt. A bolt, a cobra bite, beneath my navel. The cry I let out was answer
enough.
“Okay, okay,we’re gonna go easy here. I just need to take a look. Lie still now.”
The doctor signaled the intern with his eyes. From either side they began to undress me. The
intern pulled my shirt over my head. There was my chest, green and bleak. They paid no notice.
Neither did I. Meanwhile the doctor had unfastened my belt. He was undoing the clasp of my
khakis: I let him. Down came the pants. I watched as if from far away. I was thinking about
something else. I was remembering how the Object would lift her hips to help me get her
underpants off. That little signal of compliance, of desire. I was thinking how much I loved it
when she did that.Now the internwas reaching underme.And so I liftedmyhips.
They took hold of my underpants. They tugged them down. The elastic caught on my skin,
then gave.
The doctor bent closer, mumbling to himself. The intern, rather unprofessionally, raised one
hand to her throat and then pretended to fix her collar.
Chekhov was right. If there’s a gun on the wall, it’s got to go off. In real life, however, you
never know where the gun is hanging. The gun my father kept under his pillow never fired a
shot. The rifle over the Object’s mantel never did either. But in the emergency room things were
different. Therewas no smoke, no gunpowder smell, absolutely no sound at all. Only theway the
doctor and nurse reactedmade it clear thatmybodyhad lived up to the narrative requirements.

One scene remains to be described in this portion of my life. It took place a week later, back on
Middlesex, and featured me, a suitcase, and a tree. I was in my bedroom, sitting on the window
seat. It was just before noon. I was dressed in traveling clothes, a gray pantsuit with a white
blouse. I was reaching out my window, picking berries off the mulberry tree that grew outside.
For the last hour I’d been eating the berries to distract myself from the sound coming from my
parents’ bedroom.
The mulberries had ripened in the last week. They were fat and juicy. The berries stained my
hands. Outside, the sidewalk was splotched purple, as was the grass itself, and the rocks in the
flower beds. The sound inmyparents’ bedroomwasmymotherweeping.
I got up. I went over to the open suitcase and checked again to see if I’d packed everything.
My parents and I were leaving in an hour. We were going to New York City to see a famous

doctor. I didn’t know how long we’d be gone or what was wrong with me. I didn’t pay much
attention to the details. I only knew Iwas no longer a girl like other girls.
Orthodox monks smuggled silk out of China in the sixth century. They brought it to Asia
Minor. From there it spread to Europe, and finally traveled across the sea to North America.
Benjamin Franklin fostered the silk industry in Pennsylvania before the American Revolution.
Mulberry treeswere planted all over theUnited States.As I picked those berries outmybedroom
window, however, I had no idea that our mulberry tree had anything to do with the silk trade, or
thatmygrandmother had had trees just like it behind her house in
Turkey. That mulberry tree had stood outside my bedroom on Middlesex, never divulging its
significance to me. But now things are different. Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell
my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough. So I can’t possibly finish up this
section ofmy lifewithoutmentioning the following fact:
The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the Bombyx mori, no longer exists
anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: “The legs of the larvae have
degenerated, and the adults do not fly.”

BOOKFOUR

THEORACULARVULVA

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to
my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once,
my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. Some people inherit
houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a
famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels
indeed.
My parents had at first refused to believe the emergency room doctor’s wild claim about my
anatomy. The diagnosis, delivered over the phone to a largely uncomprehending Milton and then
bowdlerized by him forTessie’s benefit, amounted to a vague concern about the formation ofmy
urinary tract along with a possible hormonal deficiency. The doctor in Petoskey hadn’t
performed a karyotype. His job was to treat my concussion and contusions, and when he was
donewith that, he letme go.
My parents wanted a second opinion. At Milton’s insistence I had been taken one last time to
seeDr. Phil.
In 1974, Dr. Nishan Philobosian was eighty-eight years old. He still wore a bow tie, but his
neck no longer filled out the collar of his shirt. He was reduced in all his parts, freeze-dried.
Nevertheless, green golf slacks extended from the hem of his white coat and a pair of tinted
aviator-style glasses gripped his hairless head.
“Hello, Callie, howare you?”
“Fine,Dr. Phil.”
“Starting school again?What grade are you in now?”
“I’ll be in ninth this year.High school.”
“High school?Already? Imust be getting old.”
His courtly manner was no different than it had ever been. The foreign sounds he still made,
the evidence of the Old World in his teeth, put me somewhat at ease. All my life dignified
foreigners had petted and pampered me. I was a sucker for the soft-handed Levantine affections.
As a little girl I had sat on Dr. Philobosian’s knee while his fingers climbed my spinal column,
counting off the vertebrae. Now I was taller than he was, gangly, freak-haired, a Tiny Tim of a
girl, sitting in gown, bra, and underpants on the edge of an old-fashionedmedical tablewith step-
drawers of vulcanized rubber. He listened to my heart and lungs, his bald head dipping on the
long neck like that of a brontosaurus, sampling leaves.
“How’s your father, Callie?”
“Fine.”
“How’s the hot dog business?”
“Good.”
“Howmanyhot dog places your dad has now?”
“Like fifty or something.”
“There’s one not too far fromwhereNurseRosalee and I go in thewinter. PompanoBeach.”

He examined my eyes and ears and then politely asked me to stand and lower my underpants.
Fifty years earlier, Dr. Philobosian had made his living treating Ottoman ladies in Smyrna.
Proprietywas an old habitwith him.
My mind was not fuzzy, as it had been up in Petoskey. I was fully aware of what was
happening and where the focus of medical scrutiny lay. After I had pulled my panties down to
my knees, a hot wave of embarrassment swept through me and by reflex I covered myself with
my hand. Dr. Philobosian, not entirely gently, moved this aside. There was something of the
impatience of the old in this. He forgot himself momentarily, and behind his aviator lenses his
eyes glared. Still, he didn’t look down at me. He gazed gallantly off at the far wall while feeling
for information with his hands. We were as close as dancing. Dr. Phil’s breathing was noisy; his
hands shook. I
glanced down myself only once. My embarrassment had retracted me. From my angle I was a
girl again, white belly, dark triangle, foreshortened legs shaved smooth. My brassiere was
bandoliered acrossmy chest.
It took only a minute. The old Armenian, crouching, lizard-backed, ran his yellowed fingers
over my parts. It was no surprise that Dr. Philobosian had never noticed anything. Even now,
alerted to the possibility, he didn’t seem towant to know.
“Youcan get dressed now,” was all he said. He turned and walked very carefully to the sink.
He turned on the water and thrust his hands into the stream. They seemed to be trembling more
than ever. Liberally he squirted out the antibacterial soap. “Say hello to your dad,” he said before
I left the room.
Dr. Phil referred me to an endocrinologist at Henry Ford Hospital. The endocrinologist tapped
a vein in my arm, filling an alarming number of vials with my blood. Why all this blood was
needed he didn’t say. I was too frightened to ask. That night, however, I put my ear to my
bedroom wall in hopes of finding out what was going on. “So what did the doctor say?” Milton
was asking. “He said Dr. Phil should have noticed when Callie was born,” Tessie answered.
“This whole thing could have been fixed back then.” And then Milton again: “I can’t believe
he’dmiss something like that.” (“Likewhat?” I silently asked thewall, but it didn’t specify.)
Three days laterwe arrived inNewYork.
Milton had booked us into a hotel called the Lochmoor in the East Thirties. He had stayed
there twenty-three years earlier as a navy ensign. Always a thrifty traveler, Milton was also
encouraged by the room rates. Our stay in New York was open-ended. The doctor Milton had
spoken to—the specialist—refused to discuss details before he’d had a chance to examine me.
“You’ll like it,”Milton assured us. “It’s pretty swank, as I remember.”
It was not. We arrived from La Guardia in a taxi to find the Lochmoor fallen from its former
glory. The desk clerk and cashier worked behind bulletproof glass. The Viennese carpeting was
wet beneath the dripping radiators and the mirrors had been removed, leaving ghostly rectangles
of plaster and ornamental screws. The elevator was prewar, with gilded, curving bars like a
birdcage.Once upon a time, there had been an operator; no longer.We crammedour suitcases
into the small space and I slid the gate closed. It kept coming off its track. I had to do it three
times before the electrical current would flow. Finally the contraption rose and through the
spray-painted bars we watched the floors pass by, each dim and identical except for the variation
of a maid in uniform, or a room service tray outside a door, or a pair of shoes. Still, there was a
feeling of ascension in that old box, of rising up out of a pit, and it was a letdown to get to our
floor, number eight, and find it just as drab as the lobby.
Our room had been carved out of a once-bigger suite. Now the angles of the walls were
skewed. Even Tessie, pint-sized, felt constricted. For some reason the bathroom was nearly as
large as the bedroom.The toilet stood stranded on loose tiles and ran continuously. The tub had a
skidmarkwhere thewater drained out.
There was a queen-size bed for my parents and, in the corner, a cot set up for me. I hauled my
suitcase up onto it.My suitcasewas a bone of contention betweenTessie andme. She had picked
it out for me before our trip to Turkey. It had a floral pattern of turquoise and green blossoms

which I found hideous. Since going off to private school—and hanging around the Object—my
tastes had been changing, becoming refined, I thought. Poor Tessie no longer knew what to buy
me. Anything she chose was greeted by wails of horror. I was adamantly opposed to anything
synthetic or with visible stitching. My parents found my new urge for purity amusing. Often my
fatherwould rubmy shirt between his thumb and fingers and ask, “Is this preppy?”
With the suitcase Tessie had had no time to consult me, and so there it was, bearing a design
like a place mat’s. Unzipping the suitcase and flipping it open, I felt better. Inside were all the
clothes I’d chosenmyself: the crewneck sweaters in primary colors, theLacoste shirts, thewide-
wale corduroys. My coat was from Papagallo, lime green with horn-shaped buttons made from
bone.
“Dowehave to unpack or canwe leave everything in our suitcases?” I asked.
“Webetter unpack and put our suitcases in the closet,”Milton answered. “Give us a littlemore
room in here.”
I put my sweaters neatly in the dresser drawers, my socks and underpants, too, and hung my
pants up. I took my toiletry case into the bathroom and put it on the shelf. I had brought lip gloss
and perfumewithme. Iwasn’t certain that theywere obsolete.
I closed the bathroom door, locked it, and bent close to the mirror to examine my face. Two
dark hairs, still short, were visible abovemyupper lip. I got tweezers out ofmy case and plucked
them. This made my eyes water. My clothes felt tight. The sleeves of my sweater were too short.
I combedmyhair and, optimistically, desperately, smiled atmyself.
I knew that my situation, whatever it was, was a crisis of some kind. I could tell that from my
parents’ false, cheery behavior and from our speedy exit from home. Still, no one had said a
word to me yet. Milton and Tessie were treating me exactly as they always had—as their
daughter, in other words. They acted as though my problem was medical and therefore fixable.
So I began to hope so, too. Like a person with a terminal illness, I was eager to ignore the
immediate symptoms, hoping for a last-minute cure. I veered back and forth between hope and
its opposite, a growing certainty that something terrible was wrong with me. But nothing made
memore desperate than looking in themirror.
I opened the door and stepped back into the room. “I hate this hotel,” I said. “It’s gross.”
“It’s not too nice,” Tessie agreed.
“It used to be nicer,” saidMilton. “I don’t understandwhat happened.”
“The carpet smells.”
“Let’s open awindow.”
“Maybewewon’t have to be here that long,”Tessie said, hopefully,wearily.
In the evening we ventured outside, looking for something to eat, and then returned to the
room to watch TV.Later, after we switched off the lights, I asked from my cot, “What are we
doing tomorrow?”
“Wehave to go the doctor’s in themorning,” saidTessie.
“After that we have to see about some Broadway tickets,” said Milton. “What do you want to
see,Cal?”
“I don’t care,” I said gloomily.
“I thinkwe should see amusical,” saidTessie.
“I saw Ethel Merman in Hello, Dolly!” Milton recalled. “She came down this big, long
staircase, singing. When she finished, the place went wild. She stopped the show. So she just
went right back up the staircase and sang the song over again.”
“Would you like to see amusical, Callie?”
“Whatever.”
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” saidMilton. “That EthelMerman can really belt it out.”
Noone spoke after that.We lay in the dark, in our strange beds, untilwe fell asleep.

The nextmorning after breakfastwe set off to see the specialist.Myparents tried to seemexcited
as we left the hotel, pointing out sights from the taxi window. Milton exuded the boisterousness

he reserved for all difficult situations. “This is some place,” he said as we drove up to New York
Hospital. “River view! Imight just checkmyself in.”
Like any teenager, Iwas largely oblivious to the clumsy figure I cut.My storkmovements,my
flapping arms,my long legs kicking outmyundersized feet in their fawn-coloredWallabees—all
that machinery clanked beneath the observation tower of my head, and I was too close to see it.
My parents did. It pained them to watch me advance across the sidewalk toward the hospital
entrance. It was terrifying to see your child in the grip of unknown forces. For a year now they
had been denying how I was changing, putting it down to the awkward age. “She’ll grow out of
it,” Milton was always telling my mother. But now they were seized with a fear that I was
growing out of control.
We found the elevator and rode up to the fourth floor, then followed the arrows to something
called the Psychohormonal Unit. Milton had the office number written out on a card. Finally we
found the right room. The gray door was unmarked except for an extremely small, unobtrusive
sign halfway down that read:
SexualDisorders andGender IdentityClinic
If my parents saw the sign, they pretended not to. Milton lowered his head, bull-like, and pushed
the door open.
The receptionist welcomed us and told us to have a seat. Thewaiting roomwas unexceptional.
Chairs lined the walls, divided evenly by magazine tables, and there was the usual rubber tree
expiring in the corner. The carpeting was institutional, with a hectic, stain-camouflaging pattern.
There was even a reassuringly medicinal smell in the air. After my mother filled out the
insurance forms,wewere
shown into the doctor’s office. This, too, inspired confidence. An Eames chair stood behind
the desk. By the window was a Le Corbusier chaise, made of chrome and cowhide. The
bookshelves were filled with medical books and journals and the walls tastefully hung with art.
Big-city sophistication attuned to a European sensibility. The surround of a triumphant
psychoanalytic world-view. Not to mention the East River view out the windows. We were a
longway fromDr. Phil’s officewith its amateur oils andMedicaid cases.
It was two or three minutes before we noticed anything out of the ordinary. At first the curios
and etchings had blended in with the scholarly clutter of the office. But as we sat waiting for the
doctor, we became aware of a silent commotion all around us. It was like staring at the ground
and realizing, suddenly, that it is swarming with ants. The restful doctor’s office was churning
with activity. The paperweight on his desk, for instance, was not a simple, inert rock but a tiny
priapus carved from stone. Theminiatures on thewalls revealed their subject matter under closer
observation. Beneath yellow silk tents, on paisley pillows, Mughal princes acrobatically
copulated with multiple partners, keeping their turbans in place. Tessie blushed, looking; while
Milton squinted; and I hid insidemyhair as usual.We tried to look someplace else and so looked
at the bookshelves. But here it wasn’t safe either. Amid a dulling surround of issues of JAMA
and The New England Journal of Medicine were some eye-popping titles. One, with entwining
snakes on the spine,was called Erotosexual Pair Bonding. Therewas a purple, pamphlety thing
entitled Ritualized Homosexuality: Three Field Studies. On the desk itself, with a bookmark in
it, was a manual called Hap-Penis: Surgical Techniques in Female-to-Male Sex Reassignment.
If the sign on the front door hadn’t already, Luce’s office made it clear just what kind of
specialistmy parents had broughtme to see. (And,worse, to seeme.) Therewere sculptures, too.
Reproductions from the temple at Kujaraho occupied corners of the room along with huge jade
plants. Against the waxy green foliage, melon-breasted Hindu women bent over double, offering
up orifices like prayers to the well-endowed men who answered them. An overloaded
switchboard, a dirty gameofTwister everywhere you turned.
“Will you look at this place?”Tessiewhispered.
“Sort of unusual decor,” saidMilton.

And I: “What arewedoing here?”
Itwas right then that the door opened andDr. Luce presented himself.
At that stage, I didn’t know about his glamour status in the field. I had no idea of the
frequency with which Luce’s name appeared in the relevant journals and papers. But I saw right
away that Luce wasn’t your normal-looking doctor. Instead of a medical coat he wore a suede
vest with fringe. Silver hair touched the collar of his beige turtleneck. His pants were flared and
on his feet were a pair of ankle boots with zippers on the sides. He had eyeglasses, too, silver
wire-rims, and a graymustache.
“Welcome to New York,” he said. “I’m Dr. Luce.” He shook my father’s hand, then my
mother’s, and finally came tome. “Youmust beCalliope.”Hewas smiling, relaxed. “Let’s see if
I can remembermymythology.Calliopewas one of theMuses, right?”
“Right.”
“In charge ofwhat?”
“Epic poetry.”
“Youcan’t beat that,” said Luce. He was trying to act casual, but I could see he was excited. I
was an extraordinary case, after all. Hewas taking his time, savoringme. To a scientist like Luce
I was nothing less than a sexual or genetic Kaspar Hauser. There he was, a famous sexologist, a
guest on Dick Cavett, a regular contributor to Playboy, and suddenly on his doorstep, arriving
out of the woods of Detroit like the Wild Boy of Aveyron, was me, Calliope Stephanides, age
fourteen. I was a living experiment dressed in white corduroys and a Fair Isle sweater. This
sweater, pale yellow, with a floral wreath at the neck, told Luce that I refuted nature in just the
way his theory predicted.Hemust have hardly been able to contain himself,meetingme.Hewas
a brilliant, charming, work-obsessed man, and watched me from behind his desk with keen eyes.
While he chatted, speaking primarily to my parents, gaining their confidence, Luce was
nevertheless making mental notes. He registered my tenor voice. He noted that I sat with one leg
tucked under me. He watched how I examined my nails, curling my fingers into my palm. He
paid attention to the way I coughed, laughed, scratched my head, spoke; in sum, all the external
manifestations ofwhat he calledmygender identity.
He kept up the calm manner, as if I had come to the Clinic with nothing more than a sprained
ankle. “The first thing I’d like to do is give Calliope a short examination. If you’d care to wait
here in my office, Mr. and Mrs. Stephanides.” He stood up. “Would you come with me please,
Calliope?”
I got up frommychair. Lucewatched as the various segments, like those of a collapsible ruler,
unfolded themselves, and I attainedmy full height, an inch taller than hewas himself.
“We’ll be right here, honey,”Tessie said.
“We’re not going anywhere,” saidMilton.

Peter Lucewas considered theworld’s leading authority on human hermaphroditism. The Sexual
Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic, which he founded in 1968, had become the foremost
facility in the world for the study and treatment of conditions of ambiguous gender. He was the
author of a major sexological work, The Oracular Vulva, which was standard in a variety of
disciplines ranging from genetics and pediatrics to psychology. He had written a column by the
same name for Playboy from August 1972 to December 1973 in which the conceit was that a
personified and all-knowing female pudendum answered the queries of male readers with witty
and sometimes sibylline responses. Hugh Hefner had come across Peter Luce’s name in the
papers in connectionwith a demonstration for sexual freedom. SixColumbia students had staged
an orgy in a tent on the main green, which the cops broke up, and when asked what he thought
about such activity on campus, Prof. Peter Luce, 46, had been quoted as saying, “I’m in favor of
orgies wherever they happen.” That caught Hef’s eye. Not wanting to replicate Xaviera
Hollander’s “Call Me Madam” column in Penthouse, Hefner saw Luce’s contribution as being
devoted to the scientific and historical side of sex. Thus, in her first three issues, the Oracular
Vulva delivered disquisitions on the erotic art of the Japanese painter Hiroshi Yamamoto, the

epidemiology of syphilis, and the sex life of St. Augustine. The column proved popular, though
intelligent queries were always hard to come by, the readership being more interested in the
“Playboy Advisor”’s cunnilingus tips or remedies for premature ejaculation. Finally, Hefner told
Luce towrite his ownquestions,which hewas only too glad to do.
Peter Luce had appeared on Phil Donahue along with two hermaphrodites and a transsexual
to discuss both the medical and psychological aspects of these conditions. On that program, Phil
Donahue said, “Lynn Harris was born and raised a girl. You won the Miss Newport Beach
Contest in 1964 in good old Orange County, California? Boy, wait till they hear this. You lived
as a woman to the age of twenty-nine and then you switched to living as a man. He has the
anatomical characteristics of both aman and awoman. If I’m lyin’, I’mdyin’.”
He also said, “Here’s what’s not so funny. These live, irreplaceable sons and daughters of
God, human beings all, want you to know, among other things, that that’s exactly what they are,
humanbeings.”
Because of certain genetic and hormonal conditions, it was sometimes very difficult to
determine the sex of a newborn baby. Confronted with such a child, the Spartans had left the
infant on a rocky hillside to die. Luce’s own forebears, the English, didn’t even like to mention
the subject, and might never have done so had the nuisance of mysterious genitalia not thrown a
wrench into the smooth workings of inheritance law. Lord Coke, the great British jurist of the
seventeenth century, tried to clear up thematter ofwhowould get the landed estates by declaring
that a person should “be either male or female, and it shall succeed according to the kind of sex
which doth prevail.” Of course, he didn’t specify any precise method for determining which sex
did prevail. For most of the twentieth century, medicine had been using the same primitive
diagnostic criterion of sex formulated by Klebs way back in 1876. Klebs had maintained that a
person’s gonads determined sex. In cases of ambiguous gender, you looked at the gonadal tissue
under the microscope. If it was testicular, the person was male; if ovarian, female. The hunch
here was that a person’s gonads would orchestrate sexual development, especially at puberty.
But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Klebs had begun the task, but the world had
towait another hundred years for Peter Luce to come along and finish it.
In 1955, Luce published an article called “Many Roads Lead to Rome: Sexual Concepts of
Human Hermaphroditism.” In twenty-five pages of forthright, high-toned prose, Luce argued
that gender is determined by a variety of influences: chromosomal sex; gonadal sex; hormones;
internal genital structures; external genitals; and,most
important, the sex of rearing.Drawing on studies of patients at the pediatric endocrine clinic at
New York Hospital, Luce was able to compile charts demonstrating how these various factors
came into play, and showing that a patient’s gonadal sex often didn’t determine his or her gender
identity. The article made a big splash. Within months, pretty much everyone had given up
Klebs’s criterion for Luce’s criteria.
On the strength of this success, Luce was given the opportunity to open the Psychohormonal
Unit at New YorkHospital. In those days he saw mostly kids with adrenogenital syndrome, the
most common form of female hermaphroditism. The hormone cortisol, recently synthesized in
the lab, had been found to arrest the virilization these girls normally underwent, allowing them to
develop as normal females. The endocrinologists administered the cortisol and Luce oversaw the
girls’ psychosexual development. He learned a lot. In a decade of solid, original research, Luce
made his second great discovery: that gender identity is established very early on in life, about
the age of two. Gender was like a native tongue; it didn’t exist before birth but was imprinted in
the brain during childhood, never disappearing. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way
they learn to speakEnglish or French.
He published this theory in 1967, in an article in the The New England Journal of Medicine
entitled “Early Establishment of Gender Identity: The Terminal Twos.” After that, his reputation
reached the stratosphere. The funding flowed in, from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, and theN.I.S. Itwas a great time to be a sexologist. TheSexualRevolution provided
new opportunities for the enterprising sex researcher. It was a matter of national interest, for a

few years there, to examine the mechanics of the female orgasm. Or to plumb the psychological
reasonswhy certainmen exhibited themselves on the street. In 1968,Dr. Luce opened the Sexual
Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic. Luce treated everybody: the webbed-necked girl teens
with Turner’s syndrome, who had only one sex chromosome, a lonely X; the leggy beauties with
Androgen Insensitivity; or the XYY boys, who tended to be dreamers and loners. When babies
with ambiguous genitalia were born at the hospital, Dr. Luce was called in to discuss the matter
with the bewildered parents. Luce got the transsexuals, too. Everyone came to the Clinic, with
the
result that Luce had at his disposal a body of research material—of living, breathing
specimens—no scientist had ever had before.

And now Luce had me. In the examination room, he told me to get undressed and put on a paper
gown. After taking some blood (only one vial, thankfully), he had me lie down on a table with
my legs up in stirrups. There was a pale green curtain, the same color as my gown, that could be
pulled across the table, dividing my upper and lower halves. Luce didn’t close it that first day.
Only later,when therewas an audience.
“This shouldn’t hurt but itmight feel a little funny.”
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 betweenmy legs as he pressed and proddedme.
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 butmade no small talk.His concentrationwas 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 throughme. I jerked back, crying out.
“Sorry.”
Nevertheless, he kept on.He placed one hand onmypelvis to steadyme.He probed in farther,
though he avoided the painful area.My eyeswerewellingwith tears.
“Almost finished,” he said.
But hewas only getting started.

The chief imperative in cases like mine was to show no doubt as to the gender of the child in
question.Youdid not tell the parents of a newborn, “Yourbaby is a hermaphrodite.” Instead, you
said, “Yourdaughterwas bornwith 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 surewhat the prevailing genderwas.
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 amicroscope.
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 hewas friendly again, smiling and pattingme 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’tmean irremediable.Wehave 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.”
Miltonwas already nodding. “What kind of time line arewe 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 familymovies youmight have.”
Milton turned toTessie. “When doesCallie start school?”
Tessie didn’t hear him. Shewas distracted byLuce’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.”
“Youthink it’s somekind of hormone thing?”Milton asked. “Ahormone imbalance?”
“We’ll knowafter I’ve had time to dowhat I need to do,” saidLuce.
Milton stood up and shook handswith the doctor. The consultationwas 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 convinceTessie.
I had my own resistance. “Why does he have to do a psychological evaluation?” I asked. “It’s
not like I’mcrazy.”
“The doctor said itwas routine.”
“Butwhy?”
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
aroundme, squeezed hard, and roughly kissed the side ofmyhead.
Milton was so convinced that everything was going to be okay that on Tuesday morning he
flewdown toFlorida on business. “No sense coolingmyheels in this hotel,” he told us.
“Youjustwant 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 takeCallie toDelmonico’s, Tess.”
“What’sDelmonico’s?” I asked.
“It’s a steak joint.”
“Iwant lobster.AndbakedAlaska,” I said.
“BakedAlaska!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, andwhen shewent to the bathroom I drank herwinemyself.
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 often 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
openedwide, and therewere her front teeth, riven and ascendant.
Every night at the Italian restaurant I tried tomake this happen.
In themornings, Tessie tookme to theClinic formy appointments.

“What are your hobbies, Callie?”
“Hobbies?”
“Is there anything you especially like to do?”
“I’mnot really a hobby-type person.”
“What about sports?Doyou 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 tomy 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 stifledmy reflex.
He put downhis pen and knit his fingers together.He leaned forward and spoke softly. “Iwant
you to know that this is all between us, Callie. I’m not going to tell your parents anything that
you tellme 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 thiswas all private.
“Yourmother says you have a close relationshipwith 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 relationswith 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 atme.And then I found awayout:
“I had sexwith 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. “Anddid you enjoy it?”
Here I could tell the truth. “It hurt,” I said. “Plus Iwas scared about getting pregnant.”
Luce smiled to himself, jotting in his notebook. “Not toworry,” 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 theywere 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 thewords “Myname isCalliope Stephanides. I am fourteen years
old.Going on fifteen.” I beganwith the facts and followed themas 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 theWite-Out of surgery. Sing of theweird smell the typewriter gave off,
likeWD-40 and salami, and of theDay-Glo flower decal the last personwho’d used it
had applied, and of the brokenFkey,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 ofmypsychological 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 SmithCorona 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
mydeep 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 daughtermyparentswantedme 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 truthmade 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,

mygirls’ school propriety. These allweighed 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
sprocketwheel.
“Are you going to showmemydad’smovie again? Fromwhen Iwas little?”
“Today I’ve got something a little different,” saidLuce.
I took upmycustomary position on the chaise,my arms folded
behindmeon the cowhide.Dr. Luce switched off the lights and soon themovie began.
It was about a pizza delivery girl. The title was, in fact, Annie Delivers to YourDoor. 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 downnext 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 voiceLuce asked from the darkness, “Which one turns you on?”
“Excuseme?”
“Which one turns you on?Thewomanor theman?”
The true answerwas neither. But truthwould not do.
Sticking tomy cover story, Imanaged 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 tits,” he said. “Youlike 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. Lucewanted towatch 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 tomeetDr.Craig andDr.Winters.”
The doctors shookmyhand. Itwas their first bit of data:my
handshake.Dr. Craig squeezed hard,Winters less so. Theywere 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 aweek now.”
“Howdoyou likeNewYork?”askedDr.Craig.
“I’ve hardly seen it.”
The doctors gaveme sightseeing suggestions. The atmospherewas 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 handwas nowproclaiming:Here she is.My star attraction. The terrible thingwas
that I responded to it; I liked the feel of Luce’s hand onmyback. I liked the attention. Herewere
all these peoplewhowanted tomeetme.
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 fromwhere, Peter?”
“Turkey.Originally.”
“I’monly acquaintedwith the PapuaNewGuinea study,” saidCraig.
“Among the Sambia, right?” askedWinters.
“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 asmuch as possible. Themen 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 thingwhich is truly no good.’ ”
Soft chuckling came from the other side of the screen.
I came out, feeling awkward. I was taller than everyone else in the room, though I weighed
much less. The floor felt cold againstmybare feet as I crossed to the exam table and jumped up.
I lay back. Without having to be told, I lifted my legs and fit my heels in the gynecological
stirrups. The room had gone ominously silent. The three doctors came forward, staring down.
Their heads formed a trinity aboveme. Luce pulled the curtain across the table.
They bent over me, studying my parts, while Luce led a guided tour. I didn’t know what most
of the words meant but after the third or fourth time I could recite the list by heart. “Muscular
habitus . . . no gynecomastia . . . hypospadias . . . urogenital sinus . . . blind vaginal pouch . . .”
These were my claim to fame. I didn’t feel famous, however. In fact, behind the curtain, I no
longer felt as if Iwere in the room.
“Howold is she?”Dr.Winters asked.
“Fourteen,” Luce answered. “She’ll be fifteen in January.”
“So your position is that chromosomal status has been completely overridden by rearing?”
“I think that’s pretty clear.”
As I lay there, letting Luce, in rubber gloves, do what he had to do, I got a sense of things.
Lucewanted to impress themenwith the importance of hiswork.He needed funding to keep the
clinic running. The surgery he performed on transsexuals wasn’t a selling point over at the
March of Dimes. To get them interested you had to pull at the heartstrings. Youhad to put a face
on suffering. Luce was trying to do that with me. I was perfect, so polite, so midwestern. No
unseemliness attached itself to me, no hint of cross-dresser bars or ads in the back of louche
magazines.
Dr. Craigwasn’t convinced. “Fascinating case, Peter. No question. Butmypeoplewill want to
know the applications.”
“It’s a very rare condition,” Luce admitted. “Exceedingly rare. But in terms of research, its
importance can’t be overstated. For the reasons I outlined in my office.” Luce remained vague
for my benefit, but still persuasive enough for theirs. He hadn’t gotten where he was without
certain lobbyist gifts. Meanwhile I was there and not there, cringing at Luce’s touch, sprouting
goose bumps, andworrying that I hadn’twashed properly.
I remember this, too. A long narrow room on a different floor of the hospital. A riser set up at
one end before a butterfly light. The photographer putting film in his camera.
“Okay, I’m ready,” he said.
I dropped my robe. Almost used to it now, I climbed up on the riser before the measuring
chart.
“Hold your arms out a little.”
“Like this?”
“That’s good. I don’twant a shadow.”
He didn’t tell me to smile. The textbook publishers would make sure to cover my face. The
black box: a fig leaf in reverse, concealing identitywhile leaving shame exposed.

Every night Milton called us in our room. Tessie put on a bright voice for him. Milton tried to
sound happywhen I got on the line. But I took the opportunity towhine and complain.
“I’m sick of this hotel.When canwegohome?”
“Soon as you’re better,”Milton said.
When itwas time for sleep,we drew thewindowcurtains and turned off the lights.
“Goodnight, honey. See you in themorning.”
“Night.”
But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that word: “better.” What did my father mean?
What were they going to do to me? Street sounds made it up to the room, curiously distinct,
echoing off the stone building opposite. I listened to the police sirens, the angry horns. My
pillow was thin. It smelled like a smoker. Across the strip of carpet my mother was already
asleep. Before my conception, she had agreed to my father’s outlandish plan to determine my
sex. She had done this so that she wouldn’t be alone, so that she would have a girlfriend in the
house. And I had been that friend. I had always been close to my mother. Our temperaments
were alike. We liked nothing better than to sit on park benches and watch the faces go by. Now
the face IwaswatchingwasTessie’s in the other bed. It lookedwhite, blank, as if her cold cream
had removed not only hermakeup but her personality. Tessie’s eyesweremoving, though; under
the lids they skated back and forth. Callie couldn’t imagine the things Tessie was seeing in her
dreams back then. But I can. Tessie was dreaming a family dream. A version of the nightmares
Desdemona had after listening to Fard’s sermons. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling,
dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Tessie didn’t allow herself to think
about such things during the day, so they came to her at
night. Was it her fault? Should she have resisted Milton when he tried to bend nature to his
will? Was there really a God after all, and did He punish people on Earth? These Old World
superstitions had been banished from my mother’s conscious mind, but they still operated in her
dreams. From the other bed I watched the play of these dark forces on my mother’s sleeping
face.

LOOKINGMYSELFUPINWEBSTER’S

Itossed and turned every night, unable to sleep straight through. I was like the princess and the
pea. A pellet of disquiet kept unsettling me. Sometimes I awoke with the feeling that a spotlight
had been trained onmewhile I slept. Itwas as ifmy ether body had been conversingwith angels,
somewhere up near the ceiling. When I opened my eyes they fled. But I could hear the traces of
the communication, the fading echoes of the crystal bell. Some essential information was rising
from the depths of my being. This information was on the tip of my tongue and yet never
surfaced. One thing was certain: it was all connected with the Object somehow. I lay awake
thinking about her,wondering how shewas, and pining, grieving.
I thought of Detroit, too, of its vacant lots of pale Osiris grass springing up between the
condemned houses and those not yet condemned, and of the river with its iron runoff, the dead
carp floating on the surface, white bellies flaking. I thought of fishermen standing on the
concrete freighter docks with their bait buckets and tallboys, the baseball game on the radio. It’s
often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line,
saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.” My time at the Clinic did that to me. I feel a direct line
extending from that girl with her knees steepled beneath the hotel blankets to this person writing
now in an Aeron chair. Hers was the duty to live out a mythical life in the actual world, mine to
tell about it now. I didn’t have the resources at fourteen, didn’t know
enough, hadn’t been to the Anatolian mountain the Greeks call Olympus and the Turks
Uludag, just like the soft drink. I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a
person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to
commune with the dead. Youget older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father.
From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-
traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It’s always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses
who can tell you something about theEtruscans.
In the end, it took Luce two weeks to make his determination about me. He scheduled an
appointmentwithmyparents for the followingMonday.
Milton had been jetting around during the twoweeks, checking on hisHercules franchises, but
on the Friday preceding the appointment he flew back to New York. We spent the weekend
spiritlessly sightseeing, assailed by unspoken anxieties. On Monday morning my parents
droppedmeoff at theNewYorkPublic Librarywhile theywent to seeDr. Luce.
My father had dressed thatmorningwith special care.Despite an outward showof tranquillity,
Milton was beset by an unaccustomed feeling of dread, and so armored himself in his most
commanding clothes: over his plump body, a charcoal pinstripe suit; around his bullfrog neck, a
Countess Mara necktie; and in the buttonholes of his shirtsleeves, his “lucky” Greek Drama cuff
links. Like our Acropolis night-light, the cuff links had come from Jackie Halas’s souvenir shop
in Greektown. Milton wore them whenever he met with bank loan officers or auditors from the
IRS. ThatMondaymorning, however, he had trouble putting the cuff links in; his handswere not
steady enough. In exasperation he askedTessie to do it. “What’s thematter?” she asked tenderly.

But Milton snapped, “Just put the cuff links in, will you?” He held out his arms, looking away,
embarrassed by his body’sweakness.
Silently Tessie inserted the links, tragedy in one sleeve, comedy in the other. As we came out
of the hotel thatmorning they glittered in the earlymorning sun, and under the influence of those
two-sided accessories, what happened next took on contrasting tones. There was tragedy,
certainly, inMilton’s expression as they leftme off at the library.DuringMilton’s time away, his
image ofmehad reverted to
the girl I’d been a year earlier. Now he faced the real me again. He saw my ungainly
movements as I climbed the library steps, the broadness of my shoulders inside my Papagallo
coat. Watching from the cab, Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is
something determined before you’re born, something you can’t escape or do anything about, no
matter how hard you try. And Tessie, so used to feeling the world through her husband, saw that
my problem was getting worse, was accelerating. Their hearts were wrung with anguish, the
anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood
brings, in a cuff link set all its own . . .
. . . But now the cabwas driving away,Miltonwaswiping his browwith his handkerchief; and
the grinning face in his right sleeve came into view, for there was a comic aspect to events that
day, too. There was comedy in the way Milton, while still worrying about me, kept one eye on
the rocketing taxi meter. At the Clinic, there was comedy in the way Tessie, idly picking up a
waiting-room magazine, found herself reading about the juvenile sexual rehearsal play of rhesus
monkeys. There was even a brand of harsh satire in my parents’ quest itself, because it typified
the American belief that everything can be solved by doctors. All this comedy, however, is
retrospective. As Milton and Tessie prepared to see Dr. Luce, a hot foam was rising in their
stomachs. Milton was thinking back to his early navy days, to his time in the landing craft. This
was just like that. Any minute the door was going to drop away and they would have to plunge
into the churning night surf . . .
In his office Luce got straight to the point. “Let me review the facts of your daughter’s case,”
he said. Tessie noted the change at once.Daughter.He had said “daughter.”
The sexologist was looking reassuringly medical that morning. Over his cashmere turtleneck
hewore an actualwhite coat. In his hand he held a sketchpad.His ballpoint pen bore the name of
a pharmaceutical company. The blinds were drawn, the light low. The couples in the Mughal
miniatures had modestly covered themselves in shadow. Sitting in his designer chair, with tomes
and journals rising behind him, Dr. Luce appeared serious, full of expertise, as was his speech.
“What I’m drawing here,” he began, “are the fetal genital structures. In other words, this is what
a baby’s genitals look like in
thewomb, in the first fewweeks after conception.Male or female, it’s all the same. These two
circles here are what we call the all-purpose gonads. This little squiggle here is a Wolffian duct.
And this other squiggle is a Müllerian duct. Okay? The thing to keep in mind is that everybody
starts out like this. We’re all born with potential boy parts and girl parts. You,Mr. Stephanides,
Mrs. Stephanides, me—everybody. Now”—he started drawing again—“as the fetus develops in
the womb, what happens is that hormones and enzymes are released—let’s make them arrows.
What do these hormones and enzymes do? Well, they turn these circles and squiggles into either
boy parts or girl parts. See this circle, the all-purpose gonad? It can become either an ovary or a
testis. And this squiggly Müllerian duct can either wither up”—he scratched it out—“or grow
into a uterus, fallopian tubes, and the inside of the vagina. This Wolffian duct can either wither
away or grow into a seminal vesicle, epididymis, and vas deferens. Depending on the hormonal
and enzymatic influences.” Luce looked up and smiled. “You don’t have to worry about the
terminology. The main thing to remember is this: every baby has Müllerian structures, which are
potential girl parts, and Wolffian structures, which are potential boy parts. Those are the internal
genitalia. But the same thing goes for the external genitalia. A penis is just a very large clitoris.
They grow from the same root.”
Dr. Luce stopped once more. He folded his hands. My parents, leaning forward in the chairs,

waited.
“As I explained, any determination of gender identity must take into account a host of factors.
The most important, in your daughter’s case”—there it was again, confidently proclaimed—“is
that she has been raised for fourteen years as a girl and indeed thinks of herself as female. Her
interests, gestures, psychosexualmakeup—all these are female.Are youwithme so far?”
Milton andTessie nodded.
“Due to her 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, Callie’s body does not produce dihydrotestosterone.
What this means is that, in utero, she followed a primarily female line of development.
Especially in terms of the external genitalia. That, coupled with her being brought up as a girl,
resulted in her thinking, acting, and looking like a girl. The problem camewhen she started to go
through puberty.At puberty, the other androgen—testosterone—started to exert a strong effect.
The simplest way to put it is like this: Callie is a girl who has a little too much male hormone.
Wewant to correct that.”
Neither Milton nor Tessie said a word. They weren’t following everything the doctor was
saying but, as people do with doctors, they were attentive to his manner, trying to see how
serious things were. Luce seemed optimistic, confident, and Tessie and Milton began to be filled
with hope.
“That’s the biology. It’s a very rare genetic condition, by the way. The only other populations
where we know of this mutation expressing itself are in the Dominican Republic, Papua New
Guinea, and southeastern Turkey. Not that far from the village your parents came from. About
three hundred miles, in fact.” Luce removed his silver glasses. “Do you know of any family
memberwhomayhave had a similar genital appearance to your daughter’s?”
“Not thatwe knowof,” saidMilton.
“When did your parents immigrate?”
“Nineteen twenty-two.”
“Doyouhave any relatives still living inTurkey?”
“Not anymore.”
Luce looked disappointed. He had one arm of his glasses in his mouth, and was chewing on it.
Possibly he was imagining what it would be like to discover a whole new population of carriers
of the 5-alpha-reductasemutation.He had to content himselfwith discoveringme.
He put his glasses back on. “The treatment I’d recommend for your daughter is twofold. First,
hormone injections. Second, cosmetic surgery. The hormone treatments will initiate breast
development and enhance her female secondary sex characteristics. The surgerywillmakeCallie
look exactly like the girl she feels herself to be. In fact, she will be that girl. Her outside and
inside will conform. She will look like a normal girl. Nobody will be able to tell a thing. And
thenCallie can go on and enjoy her life.”
Milton’s brow was still furrowed with concentration but from his eyes there was light
appearing, rays of relief.He turned towardTessie and patted her leg.
But in a timid, breaking voiceTessie asked, “Will she be able to have children?”
Luce paused only a second. “I’mafraid not,Mrs. Stephanides. Calliewill nevermenstruate.”
“But she’s beenmenstruating for a fewmonths now,”Tessie objected.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. Possibly therewas somebleeding fromanother source.”
Tessie’s eyes filledwith tears. She looked away.
“I just got a postcard from a former patient,” Luce said consolingly. “She had a condition
similar to your daughter’s. She’s married now. She and her husband adopted two kids and
they’re as happy as can be. She plays in theClevelandOrchestra. Bassoon.”
There was a silence, until Milton asked, “Is that it, Doctor? You do this one surgery and we
can take her home?”
“We may have to do additional surgery at a later date. But the immediate answer to your
question is yes.After the procedure, she can go home.”
“How longwill she be in the hospital?”
“Only overnight.”

It was not a difficult decision, especially as Luce had framed it. A single surgery and some
injections would end the nightmare and give my parents back their daughter, their Calliope,
intact. The same enticement that had led my grandparents to do the unthinkable now offered
itself toMilton andTessie.Noonewould know.Noonewould ever know.

While my parents were being given a crash course in gonadogenesis, I—still officially
Calliope—was doing some homework myself. In the Reading Room of the New York Public
Library I was looking up something in the dictionary. Dr. Luce was correct in thinking that his
conversations with colleagues and medical students were over my head. I didn’t know what “5-
alpha-reductase” meant, or “gynecomastia,” or “inguinal canal.” But Luce had underestimated
my abilities, too.He didn’t take into consideration the rigorous curriculumatmyprep school.He
didn’t allow for my excellent research and study skills. Most of all, he didn’t factor in the power
of my Latin teachers, Miss Barrie and Miss Silber. So now, as my Wallabees made squishing
sounds between the reading tables, as a few men looked up from their books to see what was
coming and then looked down (theworldwas no longer full of eyes), I heardMissBarrie’s voice
inmy ear. “Infants, define thisword forme: hypospadias. Use yourGreek orLatin roots.”
The little schoolgirl in my head wriggled in her desk, hand raised high. “Yes,Calliope?” Miss
Barrie called onme.
“Hypo. Belowor beneath. Like ‘hypodermic.’ ”
“Brilliant. And spadias?”
“Umum . . .”
“Can anyone come to our poormuse’s aid?”
But, in the classroom of my brain, no one could. So that was why I was here. Because I knew
that I had something belowor beneath but I didn’t knowwhat that somethingwas.
I had never seen such a big dictionary before. The Webster’s at the New YorkPublic Library
stood in the same relation to other dictio-naries of my acquaintance as the Empire State Building
did to other buildings. It was an ancient, medieval-looking thing, bound in brown leather that
brought tomind a falconer’s gauntlet. The pageswere gilded like theBible’s.
Flipping pages through the alphabet, past cantabile to eryngo, past fandango to formicate
(that’swith an m), past hypertonia to hyposensitivity, and there itwas:
hypospadias  New Latin, from Greek, man with hypospadias fr. hypo- + prob from spadon,
eunuch, fr. span, to tear, pluck, pull, draw.—An abnormality of the penis in which the urethra
opens on its under surface. See synonyms at eunuch.
I did as instructed and got
eunuch  —1. Acastrated man; especially, one of those whowere employed as harem attendants
or functionaries in certain Oriental courts. 2. A man whose testes have not developed. See
synonyms at HERMAPHRODITE.
Followingwhere the trail led, I finally reached
hermaphrodite  —1. One having the sex organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics
of both male and female. 2. Anything comprised of a combination of diverse or contradictory
elements. See synonyms at MONSTER.
And that is where I stopped. And looked up, to see if anyone was watching. The vast Reading
Room thrummedwith silent energy:
people thinking, writing. The painted ceiling bellied overhead like a sail, and down below the
green desk lamps glowed, illuminating faces bent over books. I was stooping over mine, my hair
falling onto the pages, covering up the definition of myself. My lime green coat was hanging
open. I had an appointment with Luce later in the day and my hair was washed, my underpants
fresh. My bladder was full and I crossed my legs, putting off a trip to the bathroom. Fear was
stabbing me. I longed to be held, caressed, and that was impossible. I laid my hand on the
dictionary and looked at it. Slender, leaf-shaped, it had a braided rope ring on one finger, a gift
from the Object. The rope was getting dirty. I looked at my pretty hand and then pulled it away
and faced theword again.

There it was, monster, in black and white, in a battered dictionary in a great city library. A
venerable, old book, the shape and size of a headstone, with yellowing pages that bore marks of
the multitudes who had consulted them before me. There were pencil scrawls and ink stains,
dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain.
Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of
present social conditions. The chain suggested that some library visitors might take it upon
themselves to see that the dictionary circulated. The dictionary contained every word in the
English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe,
purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence. Callie
herself was holding on to this chain now. She was tugging on it, winding it around her hand so
that her fingers went white, as she stared down at that word. Monster. Still there. It had not
moved. And she wasn’t reading this word on the wall of her old bathroom stall. There was
graffiti in Webster’s but the synonym wasn’t part of it. The synonym was official, authoritative;
it was the verdict that the culture gave on a person like her. Monster. That was what she was.
That was what Dr. Luce and his colleagues had been saying. It explained so much, really. It
explained her mother crying in the next room. It explained the false cheer in Milton’s voice. It
explainedwhyher parents had brought her toNewYork,so that the doctors couldwork in secret.
It explained the photographs, too. What did people dowhen they came uponBigfoot or the Loch
Ness Monster? They tried to get a picture. For a second Callie saw herself that way. As a
lumbering, shaggy creature pausing at the edge ofwoods.As a humped convolvulus
rearing its dragon’s head from an icy lake. Her eyes were filling now, making the print swim,
and she turned away and hurried out of the library.
But the synonym pursued her. All the way out the door and down the steps between the stone
lions, Webster’s Dictionary kept calling after her, Monster, Monster! The bright banners
hanging from the tympanum proclaimed the word. The definition inserted itself into billboards
and the ads on passing buses. On Fifth Avenue a cab was pulling up. Her father jumped out,
smiling and waving. When Callie saw him, her heart lifted. The voice of Webster’s stopped
speaking in her head. Her father wouldn’t be smiling like that unless the news from the doctor
had been good.Callie laughed and sprinted down the library steps, almost tripping.Her emotions
soared for the time it took to reach the street, maybe five or eight seconds. But coming closer to
Milton, she learned something about medical reports. The more people smile, the worse the
news. Milton grinned at her, perspiring in pinstripes, and once again the tragedy cuff link glinted
in the sun.
They knew. Her parents knew she was a monster. And yet here was Milton, opening the car
door for her; here was Tessie, inside, smiling as Callie climbed in. The cab took them to a
restaurant and soon the three of themwere looking overmenus and ordering food.
Miltonwaited until the drinkswere served. Then, somewhat formally, he began. “Yourmother
and I had a little chat with the doctor this morning, as you are aware. The good news is that
you’ll be back at home this week. Youwon’t miss much school. Now for the bad news. Are you
ready for the bad news,Cal?”
Milton’s eyeswere saying that the bad newswas not all that bad.
“The bad news is you have to have a little operation. Veryminor. ‘Operation’ isn’t really the
rightword. I think the doctor called it a ‘procedure.’ They have to knock you out and you have to
stay overnight in the hospital. That’s it. There’ll be some pain but they can give you painkillers
for it.”
With that, Milton rested. Tessie reached out and patted Callie’s hand. “It’ll be okay, honey,”
she said in a thickened voice.Her eyeswerewatery, red.
“What kind of operation?”Callie asked her father.
“Just a little cosmetic procedure. Like getting amole removed.”
He reached out and playfully caughtCallie’s nose between his knuckles. “Or getting your nose
fixed.”
Callie pulled her head away, angry. “Don’t do that!”

“Sorry,” saidMilton.He cleared his throat, blinking.
“What’s wrongwith me?” Calliope asked, and nowher voice broke. Tears were running down
her cheeks. “What’swrongwithme,Daddy?”
Milton’s face darkened. He swallowed hard. Callie waited for him to say the word, to quote
Webster’s, but he didn’t. He only looked at her across the table, his head low, his eyes dark,
warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Milton’s eyes that it was impossible to
look for truth.
“It’s a hormonal thing, what you’ve got,” he said. “I was always under the impression that
men had male hormones and women had female hormones. But everybody has both,
apparently.”
Still Calliewaited.
“What you’ve got, see, is you’ve got a little too much of the male hormones and not quite
enough of the female hormones. Sowhat the doctorwants to do is give you a shot every nowand
then to get everythingworking right.”
He didn’t say theword. I didn’tmake him.
“It’s a hormonal thing,”Milton repeated. “In the grand schemeof things, no big deal.”

Luce believed that a patient of my age was capable of understanding the essentials. And so, that
afternoon, he did not mince words. In his mellow, pleasing, educated voice, looking directly into
my eyes, Luce declared that I was a girl whose clitoris was merely larger than those of other
girls. He drew the same charts for me as he had for my parents. When I pressed him on the
details of my surgery, he said only this: “We’re going to do an operation to finish your genitalia.
They’re not quite finished yet andwewant to finish them.”
He never mentioned anything about hypospadias, and I began to hope that the word didn’t
apply to me. Maybe I had taken it out of context. Dr. Luce may have been referring to another
patient. Webster’s had said that hypospadias was an abnormality of the penis. But Dr. Luce was
telling me that I had a clitoris. I understood that both these things grew out of the same fetal
gonad, but that didn’tmatter.
If I had a clitoris—and a specialistwas tellingme that I did—what could I be but a girl?
The adolescent ego is a hazy thing, amorphous, cloudlike. It wasn’t difficult to pour my
identity into different vessels. In a sense, I was able to take whatever form was demanded of me.
I only wanted to know the dimensions. Luce was providing them. My parents supported him.
The prospect of having everything solved was wildly attractive to me, too, and while I lay on the
chaise I didn’t ask myself where my feelings for the Object fit in. I only wanted it all to be over.
I wanted to go home and forget it had ever happened. So I listened to Luce quietly and made no
objections.
He explained the estrogen injections would induce my breasts to grow. “Youwon’t be Raquel
Welch, but you won’t be Twiggy either.” My facial hair would diminish. My voice would rise
from tenor to alto. But when I asked if I would finally get my period, Dr. Luce was frank. “No.
You won’t. Ever. You won’t be able to have a baby yourself, Callie. If you want to have a
family, you’ll have to adopt.”
I received this news calmly. Having children wasn’t something I thought much about at
fourteen.
There was a knock on the door, and the receptionist stuck her head in. “Sorry, Dr. Luce. But
could I bother you aminute?”
“That depends on Callie.” He smiled at me. “You mind taking a little break? I’ll be right
back.”
“I don’tmind.”
“Sit there a fewminutes and see if any other questions occur to you.”He left the room.
While he was gone, I didn’t think of any other questions. I sat in my chair, not thinking
anything at all. My mind was curiously blank. It was the blankness of obedience. With the
unerring instinct of children, I had surmised what my parents wanted from me. They wanted me

to stay theway Iwas.And thiswaswhatDr. Luce nowpromised.
I was brought out of my abstracted state by a salmon-colored cloud passing low in the sky. I
got up and went to the window to look out at the river. I pressed my cheek against the glass to
see as far south as possible, where the skyscrapers rose. I told myself that I would live in New
Yorkwhen I grew up. “This is the city for me,” I said. I had begun to cry again. I tried to stop.
Dabbing atmy eyes, Iwandered around the office and finally foundmyself in front of one
of the Mughal miniatures. In the small, ebony frame, two tiny figures were making love.
Despite the exertion implied by their activity, their faces looked peaceful. Their expressions
showed neither strain nor ecstasy. But of course the faces weren’t the focal point. The geometry
of the lovers’ bodies, the graceful calligraphy of their limbs led the eye straight to the fact of
their genitalia. The woman’s pubic hair was like a patch of evergreen against white snow, the
man’s member like a redwood sprouting from it. I looked. I looked once again to see how other
peopleweremade.As I looked, I didn’t take sides. I understood both the urgency of theman and
the pleasure of thewoman.Mymindwas no longer blank. Itwas fillingwith a dark knowledge.
I swung around. I wheeled and looked at Dr. Luce’s desk. A file sat open there. He had left it
when he hurried off.

PRELIMINARY STUDY:
GENETICXY(MALE)RAISEDASFEMALE
The following illustrative case indicates that there is no preordained correspondence between genetic and genital structure, or
betweenmasculine or feminine behavior and chromosomal status.
SUBJECT: Calliope Stephanides
INTERVIEWER:Peter Luce,M.D.
INTRODUCTORY DATA: The patient is fourteen years old. She has lived as a female all her life. At birth, somatic appearance
was of a penis so small as to appear to be a clitoris. The subject’s XY karyotype was not discovered until puberty, when she
began to virilize. The girl’s parents at first refused to believe the doctor who delivered the news and subsequently asked for two
other opinions before coming to theGender IdentityClinic andNewYorkHospital Clinic.
During examination, undescended testes could be palpated. The “penis”was slightly hypospadiac,with the urethra opening on
the underside. The girl has always sat to urinate like other girls. Blood tests confirmed an XY chromosomal status. In addition,
blood tests revealed that the subject
was suffering from5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome.An exploratory laparotomywas not performed.
A family photograph (see case file) shows her at age twelve. She appears to be a happy, healthy girl with no visible signs of
tomboyishness, despite herXYkaryotype.
FIRST IMPRESSION: The subject’s facial expression, though somewhat stern at times, is overall pleasant and receptive, with
frequent smiling. The subject often casts her eyes downward in a modest or coy manner. She is feminine in her movements and
gestures, and the slight gracelessness of her walk is in keeping with females of her generation. Though due to her height some
people may find the subject’s gender at first glance somewhat indeterminate, any prolonged observation would result in a
decision that she was indeed a girl. Her voice, in fact, has a soft, breathy quality. She inclines her head to listen when another
person speaks and does not hold forth or assert her opinions in a bullying manner characteristic of males. She often makes
humorous remarks.
FAMILY: The girl’s parents are fairly typical Midwesterners of the World War II generation. The father identifies himself as a
Republican. Themother is a friendly, intelligent, and caring person, perhaps slightly prone to depression or neurosis. She accedes
to the subservient wifely role typical of women of her generation. The father only came to the Clinic twice, citing business
obligations, but from those two meetings it is apparent that he is a dominating presence, a “self-made” man and former naval
officer. In addition, the subject has been raised in theGreekOrthodox tradition, with its strongly sex-defined roles. In general the
parents seem assimilationist and very “all-American” in their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not
be overlooked.
SEXUAL FUNCTION: The subject reports engaging in childhood sexual play with other children, in every case of which she
acted as the feminine partner, usually pulling up her dress and letting a boy simulate coition atop her. She experienced
pleasurable erotosexual sensations by positioning herself by the water jets of a neighbor’s swimming pool. She masturbated
frequently fromayoung age.
The subject has had no serious boyfriends, but this may be due to her attending an all-girls school or from a feeling of shame
about her body. The subject is aware of the abnormal appearance of her genitalia and has gone to great lengths in the locker room
and other communal dressing areas to avoid being seen naked. Nevertheless, she reports having had sexual intercourse, one time
only, with the brother of her best friend, an experience she found painful but which was successful from the point of view of
teenage romantic exploration.
INTERVIEW: The subject spoke in rapid bursts, clearly and articulately but with the occasional breathlessness associated with
anxiety. Speech patterning and characteristics appeared to be feminine in terms of oscillation of pitch and direct eye contact. She
expresses sexual interest inmales exclusively.
CONCLUSION: In speech, mannerisms, and dress, the subject manifests a feminine gender identity and role, despite a contrary
chromosomal status.
It is clear by this that sex of rearing, rather than genetic determinants, plays a greater role in the establishment of gender
identity.

As the girl’s gender identity was firmly established as female at the time her condition was discovered, a decision to
implement feminizing surgery along with corresponding hormonal treatments seems correct. To leave the genitals as they are
today would expose her to all manner of humiliation. Though it is possible that the surgery may result in partial or total loss of
erotosexual sensation, sexual pleasure is only one factor in a happy life. The ability to marry and pass as a normal woman in
society are also important goals, both ofwhichwill not be possiblewithout feminizing surgery and hormone treatment. Also, it is
hoped that new methods of surgery will minimize the effects of erotosexual dysfunction brought about by surgeries in the past,
when feminizing surgerywas in its infancy.
That evening, when my mother and I got back to the hotel, Milton had a surprise. Tickets to a
Broadway musical. I acted excited but later, after dinner, crawled into my parents’ bed, claiming
Iwas too tired to go.
“Too tired?”Milton said. “What do youmean you’re too tired?”
“That’s okay, honey,” saidTessie. “Youdon’t have to go.”
“Supposed to be a good show,Cal.”
“Is EthelMerman in it?” I asked.
“No, smart-ass,”Milton said, smiling. “EthelMerman is not in it. She’s not onBroadway right
now. So we’re seeing something with Carol Channing. She’s pretty good, too. Why don’t you
come along?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Okay, then.You’remissing out.”
They started to go. “Bye, honey,”mymother said.
Suddenly I jumped out of bed and ran toTessie, hugging her.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
My eyes brimmed with tears. Tessie took them to be tears of relief at everything we’d been
through. In the narrow entryway carved from a former suite, cockeyed, dim, the two of us stood
hugging and crying.
When they were gone, I got my suitcase from the closet. Then, looking at the turquoise
flowers, I exchanged it for my father’s suitcase, a gray Samsonite. I left my skirts and my Fair
Isle sweater in the dresser drawers. I packed only the darker garments, a blue crew neck, the
alligator shirts, and my corduroys. The brassiere I abandoned, too. For the time being, I held on
to my socks and panties, and I tossed in my toiletry case entire. When I was finished, I searched
in Milton’s garment bag for the cash he’d hidden there. The wad was fairly large and came to
nearly three hundred dollars.
It wasn’t all Dr. Luce’s fault. I had lied to him about many things. His decision was based on
false data. But he had been false in turn.
On a piece of stationery, I left a note formyparents.
DearMomandDad,
I know you’re only trying to do what’s best for me, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure
what’s best. I love you and don’twant to be a problem, so I’ve decided to go away. I
know you’ll say I’m not a problem, but I know I am. If you want to know why I’m doing this,
you should askDr. Luce, who is a big liar! I am not a girl. I’m a boy. That’s what I found out
today. So I’mgoingwhere no one knowsme. Everyone inGrosse Pointewill talkwhen they find
out.
Sorry I took yourmoney,Dad, but I promise to pay you back someday,with interest.
Please don’tworry aboutme. Iwill be ALLRIGHT!
Despite its content, I signed this declaration tomyparents: “Callie.”
Itwas the last time Iwas ever their daughter.

GOWEST,YOUNGMAN

Once again, in Berlin, a Stephanides lives among the Turks. I feel comfortable here in
Schöneberg. The Turkish shops along Hauptstrasse are like those my father used to take me to.
The food is the same, the dried figs, the halvah, the stuffed grape leaves. The faces are the same,
too, seamed, dark-eyed, significantly boned. Despite family history, I feel drawn to Turkey. I’d
like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a request to be transferred there. It would
bringme full circle.
Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the döner restaurant
downstairs. He bakes bread in a stone oven like those they used to have in Smyrna. He uses a
long-handled spatula to shift and retrieve the bread. All day long he works, fourteen, sixteen
hours, with unflagging concentration, his sandals leaving prints in the flour dust on the floor. An
artist of bread baking. Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish
immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Hauptstrasse here in the year
2001.We’re allmade up ofmany parts, other halves.Not justme.

The bell on the door of Ed’s Barbershop in the Scranton bus station merrily rang. Ed, who had
been reading the newspaper, lowered it to greet his next customer.
Therewas a pause.And thenEd said, “What happened?Youlose a bet?”
Standing inside the door but looking as though he might flee back out of it was a teenage kid,
tall, stringy, and an odd mix if ever Ed saw one. His hair was a hippie’s and came down past his
shoulders. But he was wearing a dark suit. The jacket was baggy and the trousers were too short,
riding high above his chunky tan, square-toed shoes. Even from across the shop Ed detected a
musty, thrift-store smell.Yet the kid’s suitcasewas big and gray, a businessman’s.
“I’m just tired of the style,” the kid answered.
“Youandmeboth,” saidEd the barber.
He directed me to a chair. I—the easily rechristened Cal Stephanides, teen runaway—set my
suitcase down and hung my jacket on the rack. I walked across the room, concentrating as I did
on walking like a boy. Like a stroke victim, I was having to relearn all the simple motor skills.
As far as walking went, this wasn’t too difficult. The time when Baker & Inglis girls had
balanced books on their heads was long gone. The slight gracelessness of my walk, which Dr.
Luce had commented on, predisposed me to join the graceless sex. My skeleton was a male’s,
with its higher center of gravity. It promoted a tidy, forward thrust. It wasmyknees that gaveme
trouble. I had a tendency to walk knock-kneed, which made my hips sway and my back end
twitch. I tried to keepmypelvis steady now. Towalk like a boy you let your shoulders sway, not
your hips. And you kept your feet farther apart. All this I had learned in a day and a half on the
road.

I climbed into the chair, glad to stop moving. Ed the barber tied a paper bib around my neck.
Next he draped an apron overme.All thewhile hewas takingmymeasure and shaking his head.
“I never understood what it was with you young people and the long hair. Nearly ruined my
business. I get mostly retired fellas in here. Guys who come in my shop for a haircut, they don’t
have any hair.” He chuckled, but only briefly. “Okay, so nowadays the hairstyles are a little bit
shorter. I think, good, maybe I can make a living. But no. Now everyone wants to go unisex.
Theywant to be shampooed.”He leaned towardme, suspicious. “Youdon’twant a shampoo, do
you?”
“Just a haircut.”
He nodded, satisfied. “Howdoyouwant it?”
“Short,” I ventured.
“Short short?” he asked.
“Short,” I said, “but not too short.”
“Okay. Short but not too short.Good idea. See how the other half lives.”
I froze, thinking hemeant something by this. But hewas only joking.
As for himself, Ed kept a neat head. What hair he had was slicked back. He had a brutal,
pugnacious face. His nostrils were dark and fiery as he labored around me, pumping up the chair
and stropping his razor.
“Yourfather let you keep your hair like this?”
“Upuntil now.”
“So the old man is finally straightening you out. Listen, you won’t regret it. Women don’t
want a guy looks like a girl. Don’t believe what they tell you, they want a sensitive male.
Bullshit!”
The swearing, the straight razors, the shaving brushes, all these were my welcome to the
masculine world. The barber had the football game on the TV. The calendar showed a vodka
bottle and a pretty girl in a white fur bikini. I planted my feet on the waffle iron of the footrest
while he swiveledmeback and forth before the flashingmirrors.
“Holymackerel,when’s the last time you had a haircut anyway?”
“Remember themoon landing?”
“Yeah.That’s about right.”
He turned me to face the mirror. And there she was, for the last time, in the silvered glass:
Calliope. She still wasn’t gone yet. Shewas like a captive spirit, peeking out.
Ed the barber put a comb in my long hair. He lifted it experimentally, making snipping sounds
with his scissors. The blades weren’t touching my hair. The snipping was only a kind of mental
barbering, a limbering up. This gave me time for second thoughts. What was I doing? What if
Dr. Luce was right? What if that girl in the mirror really was me? How did I think I could
defect to the other side so easily? What did I know about boys, about men? I didn’t even like
them thatmuch.
“This is like taking down a tree,” opined Ed. “First you gotta go in and lop off the branches.
Then you chop down the trunk.”
I closedmy eyes. I refused to returnCalliope’s gaze any longer. I
gripped the armrests and waited for the barber to do his work. But in the next second the
scissors clinked onto the shelf. With a buzz, the electric clippers switched on. They circled my
head like bees. Again Ed the barber lifted my hair with his comb and I heard the buzzer dive in
towardmyhead. “Herewego,” he said.
My eyes were still closed. But I knew there was no going back now. The clippers raked across
my scalp. I held firm.Hair fell away in strips.
“I should charge you extra,” saidEd.
Now I did openmyeyes, alarmed about the cost. “Howmuch is it?”
“Don’t worry. Same price. This is my patriotic deed today. I’m making the world safe for
democracy.”
My grandparents had fled their home because of a war. Now, some fifty-two years later, I was

fleeing myself. I felt that I was saving myself just as definitively. I was fleeing without much
money in my pocket and under the alias of my new gender. A ship didn’t carry me across the
ocean; instead, a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person,
too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new
world towhich I’d come.
I was also scared. I had never been out on my own before. I didn’t know how the world
operated or how much things cost. From the Lochmoor Hotel I had taken a cab to the bus
terminal, not knowing the way. At Port Authority I wandered past the tie shops and fast-food
stalls, looking for the ticket booths. When I found them I bought a ticket for a night bus to
Chicago, paying the fare as far as Scranton, Pennsylvania, which was as much as I thought I
could afford. The bums and druggies occupying the scoop benches looked me over, sometimes
hissing or smacking their lips. They scared me, too. I nearly gave up the idea of running away. If
I hurried, I could make it back to the hotel before Milton and Tessie returned from seeing Carol
Channing. I sat in the waiting area, considering this, the edge of the Samsonite clamped between
my knees as though any minute someone might try to snatch it away. I played out scenes in my
head where I declared my intention of living as a boy and my parents, at first protesting but then
breaking down, acceptedme.Apoliceman passed by.When hewas gone Iwent to sit
next to a middle-aged woman, hoping to be taken for her daughter. Over the loudspeaker a
voice announced that my bus was boarding. I looked up at the other passengers, the poor
traveling by night. There was an aging cowboy carrying a duffel bag and a souvenir Louis
Armstrong statuette; there were two Sri Lankan Catholic priests; there were no less than three
overweight mothers loaded down with children and bedding, and a little man who turned out to
be a horse jockey, with cigarette wrinkles and brown teeth. They lined up to board the bus while
the scene inmy head began to go off on its own, to stop takingmydirectorial notes. NowMilton
was shaking his head no, andDr. Lucewas putting on a surgicalmask, andmy schoolmates back
inGrosse Pointewere pointing atme and laughing, their faces litwithmalicious joy.
In a trance of fear, dazed yet trembling, I proceeded onto the dark bus. For protection I took a
seat next to the middle-aged lady. The other passengers, accustomed to these night journeys,
were already taking out thermoses and unwrapping sandwiches. The smell of fried chicken
began to waft from the back seats. I was suddenly very hungry. I wished that I were back at the
hotel, ordering room service. I would have to get new clothes soon. I needed to look older and
less like prey. I had to start dressing like a boy. The bus pulled out of Port Authority and I
watched, terrified at what I was doing but unable to stop myself, as we made our way out of the
city and through the long yellow-lit dizzy tunnel that led to New Jersey. Going underground,
through the rock, with the filthy river bottom above us, and fish swimming in the black water on
the other side of the curving tiles.
At a SalvationArmyoutlet in Scranton, not far from the bus station, Iwent looking for a suit. I
pretended I was shopping for my brother, though no one asked any questions. Male sizes baffled
me. I held the jackets discreetly against me to see what might fit. Finally I found a suit roughly
my size. It was sturdy-looking and all-weather. The label inside said “Durenmatt’s Men’s
Clothiers, Pittsburgh.” I took off my Papagallo. Checking to see if anyone was watching, I tried
the jacket on. I didn’t feel what a boy would feel. It wasn’t like putting on your father’s jacket
and becoming aman. It was like being cold and having your date give you his jacket towear. As
it settled onmy shoulders, the jacket felt big, warm, comforting, alien. (Andwhowas my date in
this case?The football captain?No.My steadywas
the World War II vet, dead of heart disease. My guy was the Elks Lodge member who had
moved toTexas.)
The suit was only part of my new identity. It was the haircut that mattered most. Now, in the
barbershop, Ed was going at me with a whisk brush. The bristles cast a powder in the air and I
closedmy eyes. I feltmyself beingwheeled around again and the barber said, “Okay, that’s it.”
I openedmy eyes.And in themirror I didn’t seemyself. Not theMonaLisawith the enigmatic
smile any longer.Not the shy girl with the tangled black hair in her face, but instead her fraternal

twin brother. With the screen of my hair removed, the recent changes in my face were far more
evident. My jaw looked squarer, broader, my neck thicker, with a bulge of Adam’s apple in the
center. It was unquestionably a male face, but the feelings inside that boy were still a girl’s. To
cut off your hair after a breakup was a feminine reaction. It was a way to start over, to renounce
vanity, to spite love. I knew that I would never see the Object again. Despite bigger problems,
greater worries, it was heartbreak that seized me when I first saw my male face in the mirror. I
thought: it’s over. By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I
was trying to be stronger.
By the time I came out of Ed’s Barbershop, I was a new creation. The other people passing
through the bus station, to the extent they noticed me at all, took me for a student at a nearby
boarding school. A prep school kid, a touch arty,wearing an oldman’s suit and no doubt reading
Camus orKerouac. Therewas a kind of beatnik quality to theDurenmatt’s suit. The trousers had
a sharkskin sheen. Because of my height I could pass for older than I was, seventeen, maybe
eighteen. Under the suit was a crew neck sweater, under the sweater was an alligator shirt, two
protective layers of parental money next to my skin, plus the golden Wallabees on my feet. If
anyone noticedme, they thought Iwas playing dress-up, as teenagers do.
Inside these clothes my heart was still beating like mad. I didn’t know what to do next.
Suddenly I had to pay attention to things I’d never paid any attention to. To bus schedules and
bus fares, to budgeting money, to worrying about money, to scanning amenu for the absolutely
cheapest thing that would fill me up, which that day in Scranton turned out to be chili. I ate a
bowl of it, stirring inmultiple
packets of crackers, and looked over the bus routes. The best thing to do, it being fall, was to
head south or west for the winter, and because I didn’t want to go south I decided to go west. To
California.Whynot? I checked to seewhat the farewould be.As I feared, itwas toomuch.
Throughout the morning it had drizzled on and off, but now the clouds were breaking up.
Across the desperate eatery, through the rain-greased windows and beyond the access road that
bounded a strip of sloping littered grass, ran the Interstate. I watched the traffic whizzing along,
feeling less hungry nowbut still lonely and scared. Thewaitress came over and asked if Iwanted
coffee. Though I had never had a cup of coffee before, I said yes. After she served it to me, I
doctored it with two packets of creamer and four of sugar. When it tasted roughly like coffee ice
cream, I drank it.
From the terminal buses were steadily pulling out, leaving gassy trails. Down on the highway
cars sped along. Iwanted to take a shower. Iwanted to lie down in clean sheets and go to sleep. I
could get a motel room for $9.95, but I wanted to be farther away before I did that. I sat in the
booth for a long time. I couldn’t see my way to the next step. Finally, an idea occurred to me.
Paying my bill, I left the bus terminal. I crossed the access road and shuffled down the slope. I
set down my suitcase on the shoulder and, stepping out to face the oncoming traffic, tentatively
stuck outmy thumb.
My parents had always cautioned me against hitchhiking. Sometimes Milton pointed out
stories in the newspaper detailing the gruesome ends of coeds who had made that mistake. My
thumb was not very high in the air. Half of me was against the idea. Cars sped past. No one
stopped.My reluctant thumbwas shaking.
I had miscalculated with Luce. I thought that after talking to me he would decide that I was
normal and leave me alone. But I was beginning to understand something about normality.
Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it
alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people—and especially
doctors—had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up to the job. And so
they felt inclined to give it a boost.
As for my parents, I held them blameless. They were only trying to save me from humiliation,
lovelessness, even death. I learned later
that Dr. Luce had emphasized the medical risk in letting my condition go untreated. The
“gonadal tissue,” as he referred to my undescended testes, often became cancerous in later years.

(I’m forty-one now, however, and so far nothing has happened.)
A semi appeared around the bend, blowing black smoke from an upright exhaust pipe. In the
window of the red cab the driver’s head was bouncing like the head of a doll on a spring. His
face turned in my direction, and as the huge truck roared past, he engaged the brakes. The rear
wheels of the cab smoked a little, squealed, and then twenty yards ahead of me the truck was
waiting.
Lifting my suitcase, with a wild excitement, I ran up to the truck. But when I reached it I
stopped. The door looked so high up. The huge vehicle sat rumbling, shuddering. I couldn’t see
the driver from my vantage point and stood paralyzed with indecision. Then suddenly the
trucker’s face appeared in thewindow, startlingme.He opened the door.
“Youcoming up orwhat?”
“Coming,” I said.
The cab was not clean. He had been traveling for some time and there were food containers
and bottles strewn around.
“Yourjob is to keepme awake,” the trucker said.
When I didn’t respond right away he looked over at me. His eyes were red. Red, too, were the
FuManchumustache and the long sideburns. “Just keep talking,” he said.
“What do youwant to talk about?”
“Fuck-all if I know!” he shouted angrily. But just as suddenly: “Indians! Youknow anything
about Indians?”
“American Indians?”
“Yeah. I pick up a lot of Injuns when I drive out west. Those are some of the craziest
motherfuckers I ever heard. They got all kinds of theories and shit.”
“Likewhat?”
“Like some of ’em say they didn’t come over the Bering land bridge. Are you familiar with
the Bering land bridge? That’s up there in Alaska. Called the Bering Strait now. It’s water. Little
sliver of water between Alaska and Russia. Long time ago, though, it was land, and that’s where
the Indians cameover from. From likeChina orMongolia. Indians are reallyOrientals.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. I was feeling less scared now than before. The trucker was
apparently takingme at face value.
“But some of these Indians I pick up, they say their people didn’t come over the land bridge.
They say they come froma lost island, likeAtlantis.”
“Join the club.”
“Youknowwhat else they say?”
“What?”
“They say itwas Indianswrote the Constitution. TheU.S. Constitution!”
As it turned out, he did most of the talking. I said very little. But my presence was enough to
keep him awake. Talking about Indians reminded him about meteors; there was a meteor in
Montana that the Indians considered sacred, and soon hewas telling me about the celestial sights
a trucker’s life acquainted a personwith, the shooting stars and comets and green rays. “Youever
seen a green ray?” he askedme.
“No.”
“They say you can’t take a picture of a green ray, but I got one. I always keep a camera in the
cab in case I come across some mind-blowing shit like that. And one time I saw this green ray
and I grabbedmycamera and I got it. I’ve got the picture at home.”
“What is a green ray?”
“It’s the color the sunmakes when it rises and sets. For two seconds. Youcan see it best in the
mountains.”
He took me as far as Ohio and let me off in front of a motel. I thanked him for the ride and
carried my suitcase up to the office. Here the suit also came in useful. Plus the expensive
luggage. I didn’t look like a runaway. The motel clerk may have had doubts about my age, but I
laidmoney on the counter right away, and the keywas forthcoming.

After Ohio came Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. I rode in station wagons, sport cars,
rented vans. Single women never picked me up, only men, or men with women. A pair of Dutch
tourists stopped for me, complaining about the frigidity of American beer, and sometimes I got
rides from couples who were fighting and tired of each other. In every case, people took me for
the teenage boy Iwas every
minute more conclusively becoming. Sophie Sassoon wasn’t around to wax my mustache, so it
began to fill in, a smudge above my upper lip. My voice continued to deepen. Every jolt in the
road droppedmyAdam’s apple another notch inmyneck.
If people asked, I told them I was on my way to California for my freshman year at college. I
didn’t know much about the world, but I knew something about colleges, or at least about
homework, and so claimed that I was going to Stanford to live in a dorm. To be honest, my
drivers weren’t too suspicious. They didn’t care one way or another. They had their own
agendas. Theywere bored, or lonely, andwanted someone to talk to.
Like a convert to a new religion, I overdid it at first. Somewhere near Gary, Indiana, I adopted
a swagger. I rarely smiled. My expression throughout Illinois was the Clint Eastwood squint. It
was all a bluff, but so was it on most men. We were all walking around squinting at each other.
My swagger wasn’t that different from what lots of adolescent boys put on, trying to be manly.
For that reason it was convincing. Its very falseness made it credible. Now and then I fell out of
character. Feeling something stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I kicked up my heel and looked
back overmy shoulder to seewhat it was, rather than crossingmy leg in front ofme and twisting
upmy shoe. I picked correct change frommyopen palm instead ofmy trouser pocket. Such slips
mademe panic, but needlessly. No one noticed. Iwas aided by that: as a rule people don’t notice
much.
It would be a lie to tell you I understood everything I was feeling. Youdon’t, at fourteen. An
instinct for self-preservation told me to run, and I was running. Dread pursued me. I missed my
parents. I felt guilty for making them worry. Dr. Luce’s report haunted me. At night, in various
motels, I cried myself to sleep. Running away didn’t make me feel any less of a monster. I saw
ahead ofmeonly humiliation and rejection, and Iwept formy life.
But in themornings Iwoke up feeling better. I leftmymotel roomandwent out to stand in the
air of the world. I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me
to take a dark view too long. Somehow I was able to forget about myself for long stretches. I ate
doughnuts for breakfast. I kept drinking very sweet, milky coffee. To lift my mood, I did things
myparentswouldn’t have letme do, ordering two and sometimes three desserts
and never eating salads. I was free now to let my teeth rot or to put my feet up on the backs of
seats. Sometimes while I was hitching I saw other runaways. Under overpasses or in runoff
drains they congregated, smoking cigarettes, the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled up. They were
tougher than I was, scroungier. I steered clear of their packs. They were from broken homes, had
been physically abused and now abused others. I wasn’t anything like them. I had brought my
family’s upwardmobility out onto the road. I joined no packs butwentmyway alone.
And now, amid the prairie, appears the recreation vehicle belonging to Myron and Sylvia
Bresnick, of Pelham, New York. Like a modern-day covered wagon, it rolls out of the waving
grasslands and stops. A door opens, like the door of a house, and standing inside is a perky
woman in her late sixties.
“I thinkwe’ve got room for you,” she says.
A moment before, I had been on Route 80 in western Iowa. But now as I carry my suitcase
onto this ship of the prairie, I am suddenly in theBresnicks’ living room. Framed photographs of
their children hang on thewalls, alongwithChagall prints. The history ofWinstonChurchill that
Myron isworking hisway through at night at the hookups sits on the coffee table.
Myron is a retired parts salesman, Sylvia a former social worker. In profile she resembles a
cute Punchinello, her cheeks expressive, painted, and the nose carved for comic effect. Myron
works his lips around his cigar, foul and intimatewith his own juices.

While Myron drives, Sylvia gives me a tour of the beds, the shower, the living area. What
school do I go to?What do Iwant to be? She peppersmewith questions.
Myron turns from thewheel and booms, “Stanford!Good school!”
And it is right then that it happens.At somemoment onRoute 80 something clicks inmyhead
and suddenly I feel I am getting the hang of it. Myron and Sylvia are treating me like a son.
Under this collective delusion I become that, for a littlewhile at least. I becomemale-identified.
But something daughterly must cling to me, too. For soon Sylvia has taken me aside to
complain about her husband. “I know it’s tacky. ThiswholeRV thing.Youshould see the people
wemeet in these camps. They call it the ‘RV lifestyle.’Oh, they’re nice enough—but
bor-ing. I miss going to cultural events. Myron says he spent his life traveling around the
country too busy to see it. So he’s doing it over again—slowly. And guess who gets dragged
along?”
“My heart?” Myron is calling to her. “Could you bring your husband an iced tea, please? He’s
parched.”
They let me off in Nebraska. I counted my money and found I had two hundred and thirty
dollars left. I found a cheap room in a kind of boardinghouse and stayed the night. I was still too
scared to hitchhike in the dark.
On the road there was time for minor adjustments. Many of the socks I’d brought were the
wrong color—pink, white, or covered with whales. Also my underpants weren’t the right kind.
At a Woolworth’s in Nebraska City I bought a three-pack of boxer shorts. As a girl, I had worn
size large. As a boy, medium. I trolled through the toiletries section, too. Instead of row upon
row of beauty products there was only a single rack of hygienic essentials. The explosion in
men’s cosmetics hadn’t happened yet. There were no pampering unguents disguised by rugged
names. No Heavy-Duty Skin Repair. No Anti-Burn Shave Gel. I selected deodorant, disposable
razors, and shaving cream. The colorful cologne bottles attracted me, but my experience with
after-shaves was not favorable. Cologne made me think of voice coaches, of maître d’s, of old
men and their unwanted embraces. I picked out a man’s wallet, too. At the register, I couldn’t
look the cashier in the face, as embarrassed as if I were buying condoms. The cashier wasn’t
much older than Iwas,with blond, feathered hair. That heartland look.
At restaurants I began to use the men’s rooms. This was perhaps the hardest adjustment. I was
scandalized by the filth ofmen’s rooms, the rank smells and pig sounds, the grunting and huffing
from the stalls. Urine was forever puddled on the floors. Scraps of soiled toilet paper adhered to
the commodes. When you entered a stall, more often than not a plumbing emergency greeted
you, a brown tide, a soup of dead frogs. To think that a toilet stall had once been a haven forme!
That was all over now. I could see at once that men’s rooms, unlike the ladies’, provided no
comfort. Often there wasn’t even a mirror, or any hand soap. And while the closeted, flatulent
men showed no shame, at the urinals men acted nervous. They looked straight ahead like horses
with blinders.
I understood at those timeswhat Iwas leaving behind: the solidarity
of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its
difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They
tend them in private, even in public.
A word on penises. What was Cal’s official position on penises? Among them, surrounded by
them, his feelings were the same as they had been as a girl: by equal measures fascinated and
horrified. Penises had never really done that much for me. My girlfriends and I had a comical
opinion of them. We hid our guilty interest by giggling or pretending disgust. Like every
schoolgirl on a field trip, I’d had my blushing moments among the Roman antiquities. I’d stolen
peeks when the teacher’s back was turned. It’s our first art lesson as kids, isn’t it? The nudes are
dressed. They’re dressed in high-mindedness. Being six years older,mybrother had never shared
a bathtub with me. The glimpses of his genitals I’d had over the years were fleeting. I’d
studiously looked away. Even Jerome had penetrated me without my seeing what went on.
Anything so long concealed couldn’t fail to intrigue me. But the glimpses those men’s rooms

afforded were on the whole disappointing. The proud phallus was nowhere in evidence, only the
feed bag, the dry tuber, the snail that had lost its shell.
And I was scared to death of being caught looking. Despite my suit, my haircut, and my
height, every time I went into a men’s room a shout rang out in my head: “You’re in the men’s!”
But the men’s was where I was supposed to be. Nobody said a word. Nobody objected to my
presence.And so I searched for a stall that looked halfway clean. I had to sit to urinate. Still do.
At night, on the fungal carpets of motel rooms, I did exercises, push-ups and sit-ups. Wearing
nothing but my new boxers, I examined my physique in the mirror. Not long ago I’d fretted over
my failure to develop. That worry was gone now. I didn’t have to live up to that standard
anymore. The impossible demands had been removed and I felt a vast relief. But there were also
moments of dislocation, staring at my changing body. Sometimes it didn’t feel like my own. It
was hard, white, bony. Beautiful in its own way, I supposed, but Spartan. Not receptive or pliant
at all. Contents under pressure, rather.
Itwas in thosemotel rooms that I learned aboutmynewbody, its
specific instructions and contraindications. The Object and I had worked in the dark. She had
never really explored my apparatus much. The Clinic had medicalized my genitals. During my
time there they were numb or slightly tender from the constant examinations. My body had shut
down in order to get through the ordeal. But traveling woke it up. Alone, with the door locked
and the chain on, I experimented with myself. I put pillows between my legs. I lay on top of
them. Half paying attention, while I watched Johnny Carson, my hand prospected. The anxiety
I’d always felt about how I was made had kept me from exploring the way most kids did. So it
was only now, lost to the world and everyone I knew, that I had the courage to try it out. I can’t
discount the importance of this. If I had doubts about my decision, if I sometimes thought about
turning back, running back to my parents and the Clinic and giving in, what stopped me was this
private ecstasy between my legs. I knew itwould be taken fromme. I don’twant to overestimate
the sexual. But it was a powerful force for me, especially at fourteen, with my nerves bright and
jangling, ready to launch into a symphony at the slightest provocation. That was how Cal
discovered himself, in voluptuous, liquid, sterile culmination, couchant upon two or three
deformed pillows, with the shades drawn and the drained swimming pool outside and the cars
passing, endlessly, all night.
Outside Nebraska City, a silver Nova hatchback pulled over. I ran up with my suitcase and
opened the passenger door. At the wheel was a good-looking man in his early thirties. He wore a
tweed coat and yellow V-necksweater. His plaid shirt was open at the collar, but the wings were
crisp with starch. The formality of his clothes contrasted with his relaxed manner. “Hello deh,”
he said, doing aBrooklyn accent.
“Thanks for stopping.”
He lit a cigarette and introduced himself, extending his hand. “BenScheer.”
“Myname’sCal.”
He didn’t ask the usual questions about my origin and destination. Instead, as we drove off, he
asked, “Where did you get that suit?”
“SalvationArmy.”
“Real nice.”
“Really?” I said.And then reconsidered. “You’reteasing.”
“No, I’mnot,” said Scheer. “I like a suit somebody died in. It’s very existential.”
“What’s that?”
“What’swhat?”
“Existential?”
Hegaveme a direct look. “An existentialist is someonewho lives for themoment.”
No one had ever talked to me like this before. I liked it. As we drove on through the yellow
country, Scheer told me other interesting things. I learned about Ionesco and the Theater of the
Absurd. Also about Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. It’s hard to express the
excitement such phrases instilled in a kid like me from the cultural sticks. The Charm Bracelets

wanted to pretend theywere from theEast, and I guess I had picked up that urge, too.
“Did you ever live inNewYork?”I asked.
“Used to.”
“Iwas just there. Iwant to live there someday.”
“I lived there ten years.”
“Whydid you leave?”
Again the direct look. “Iwoke up onemorning and realized, if I didn’t, I’d be dead in a year.”
This, too, seemedmarvelous.
Scheer’s facewas handsome, pale, with anAsiatic cast to his gray eyes.His light brown frizzy
hair was scrupulously brushed, and parted by fiat. After a while I noticed other niceties of his
dress, the monogrammed cuff links, the Italian loafers. I liked him immediately. Scheer was the
kind ofman I thought Iwould like to bemyself.
Suddenly, from the rear of the car there erupted amagnificent,weary, soul-emptying sigh.
“Howya doin’, Franklin?” Scheer called.
On hearing his name, Franklin lifted his troubled, regal head from the recesses of the
hatchback, and I saw the black-and-white markings of an English setter. Ancient, rheumy-eyed,
he gaveme the once-over and dropped back out of sight.
Scheer was meanwhile pulling off the highway. He had a breezy highway driving style, but
when making any kind of maneuver he snapped into military action, pummeling the wheel with
strong
hands.He pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store. “Back in aminute.”
Holding a cigarette at his hip like a riding crop, he walked with clipped steps into the store.
While he was gone I looked around the car. It was immaculately clean, the floor mats freshly
vacuumed. The glove box contained orderlymaps and tapes ofMabelMercer. Scheer reappeared
with two full shopping bags.
“I think road drinks are in order,” he said.
He had a twelve-pack carton of beer, two bottles of Blue Nun, and a bottle of Lancers rosé, in
a faux clay bottle.He set all of these on the backseat.
This was part of being sophisticated, too. You drank cheap Liebfraumilch in plastic cups,
calling it cocktails, and carved off hunks of Cheddar cheese with a Swiss Army knife. Scheer
had assembled a nice hors d’oeuvre platter from meager sources. There were also olives. We
headed back out across the no-man’s-land, while Scheer directed me to open the wine and serve
him snacks. I was now his page. He had me put in the Mabel Mercer tape and then enlightened
me about hermeticulous phrasing.
Suddenly he raised his voice. “Cops.Keep your glass down.”
I quickly loweredmyBlueNun andwedrove on, acting cool as the state trooper passed on our
left.
By now Scheer was doing the cop’s voice. “I know city slickers when I see ’em and them
thar’s twoof the slickest of ’emall. I’dwager they’re up to no good.”
To all this I respondedwith laughter, happy to be in league against theworld of hypocrites and
rulemongers.
When it began to grow dark, Scheer chose a steak house. I was worried it might be too
expensive, but he toldme, “Dinner’s onme tonight.”
Inside, itwas busy, a popular place, the only table open a small one near the bar.
To thewaitress Scheer said, “I’ll have a vodkamartini, very dry, two olives, andmy son here
will have a beer.”
Thewaitress looked atme.
“He got any ID?”
“Not onme,” I said.
“Can’t serve you, then.”
“Iwas there at his birth. I can vouch for him,” said Scheer.
“Sorry, no ID, no alcohol.”

“Okay, then,” said Scheer. “Changed mymind. I’ll have a vodkamartini, very dry, two olives,
and a beer chaser.”
Through her tight lips the waitress said, “You gonna let your friend drink that beer I can’t
serve it to you.”
“They’re both for me,” Scheer assured her. He deepened his voice a little, opened the tone a
little, injecting it with an Eastern or Ivy League authority whose influence did not entirely
dissipate even all the way out here in the steak house on the plains. The waitress, resentful,
complied.
She walked off and Scheer leaned toward me. He did his hick voice again. “Nothing wrong
with that gal that a good poke in the hay barn wouldn’t fix. And you’re just the stud for the job.”
He didn’t seem drunk, but this crudeness was new; he was a little less precise in his movements
now, his voice louder. “Yeah,” said Scheer, “I think she’s sweet on you. Youand Mayella could
be happy together.” I was feeling the wine strongly, too, my head like a mirrored ball, flashing
lights.
Thewaitress brought the drinks, setting themdemonstratively onScheer’s side of the table.As
soon as she disappeared, he pushed the beer towardme and said, “There you go.”
“Thanks.” I drank the beer in gulps, pushing it back across the table whenever the waitress
passed by. Itwas fun to be sneaking it like this.
But I was not unobserved. A man at the bar was watching me. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and
sunglasses, he looked as though he disapproved. But then his face broke into a big, knowing
smile. The smilemademeuncomfortable and I looked away.
When we came out again, the sky was completely dark. Before leaving, Scheer opened the
hatch of the Nova to get Franklin out. The old dog could no longer walk, and Scheer had to lift
him bodily out of the car. “Let’s go, Franks,” Scheer said, gruffly affectionate, and with a lit
cigarette between his teeth, angled up in a patrician manner not unlike that of Franklin Roosevelt
himself, in Gucci loafers and side-vented, gold-hued tweed jacket, his strong polo player’s legs
braced under theweight, he carried the aged beast into theweeds.
Before going back to the highway, he stopped at a convenience store to getmore beer.
We drove for another hour or so. Scheer consumedmany beers; Iworkedmyway through one
or two. Iwas not at all sober and feeling sleepy. I leaned againstmydoor, blearily looking out.A
long white car came alongside us. The driver looked at me, smiling, but I was already falling
asleep.
Sometime later, Scheer shookme awake. “I’m toowrecked to drive. I’mpulling over.”
I said nothing to this.
“I’mgoing to find amotel. I’ll get you a room, too.Onme.”
I didn’t object. Soon I saw hazy motel lights. Scheer left the car and returned with my room
key. He led me to my room, carrying my suitcase, and opened the door for me. I went to the bed
and collapsed.
Myheadwas spinning. Imanaged to pull down the bedspread and get at the pillows.
“Yougonna sleep in your clothes?” Scheer asked as if amused.
I felt his hand on my back, rubbing it. “You shouldn’t sleep in your clothes,” he said. He
started to undressme, but I rousedmyself. “Just letme sleep,” I said.
Scheer bent closer. In a thick voice he said, “Your parents kick you out, Cal? Is that it?” He
sounded suddenly very drunk, as if all the day’s and night’s drinking had finally hit him.
“I’mgoing to sleep,” I said.
“Comeon,”whisperedScheer. “Letme take care of you.”
I curled up protectively, keeping my eyes closed. Scheer nuzzled me, but when I didn’t
respond, he stopped. I heard himopen the door and then close it behind him.
When I awoke again, it was early in the morning. Light was coming in the windows. And
Scheer was right next to me. He was hugging me clumsily, his eyes squeezed shut. “Just wanna
sleep here,” he said, slurring. “Just wanna sleep.” My shirt had been unbuttoned. Scheer was
wearing only his underwear. The televisionwas on, and therewere empty beers on it.

Scheer clutched me, pressing his face into mine, making sounds. I tolerated this, feeling
obliged for some reason. But when his drunken attentions became more avid, more targeted, I
pushed himoffme.He didn’t protest.He crumpled into a ball and quickly passed out.
I got up andwent into the bathroom. For a longwhile I sat on the toilet lid, huggingmyknees.
When I peeked out again, Scheer
was still sound asleep. There was no lock on the door, but I was desperate for a shower. I took
a quick one, keeping the curtain open and my eyes on the door. Then I changed into a new shirt,
putmy suit back on, and letmyself out of the room.
It was very early. No traffic was passing along the road. I walked away from the motel and sat
on my Samsonite, waiting. Big open sky. A few birds in it. I was hungry again. My head hurt. I
got out my wallet and counted my dwindling money. I contemplated calling home for the
hundredth time. I started to cry but stopped myself. Then I heard a car coming. From the motel
parking lot a white Lincoln Continental emerged. I put out my thumb. The car stopped alongside
me and the power window slowly went down. At the wheel was the man from the restaurant the
day before.
“Where you headed?”
“California.”
That smile again. Like something bursting. “Well then, this is your lucky day. That’s where
I’mheaded, too.”
I hesitated only a moment. Then I opened the back door of the big car and slid my suitcase in.
I didn’t have, at that point,much choice in thematter.

GENDERDYSPHORIAINSANFRANCISCO

His name was Bob Presto. He had soft, white, fat hands and a plump face and wore a white
guayabera shotwith gold threads.Hewas vain of his voice, had been a radio announcer formany
years before getting into his present line of business. What that was he didn’t specify. But its
lucrative nature was evident in the white Continental with red leather seats and in Presto’s gold
watch and jeweled rings, his newscaster’s hair. Despite these grown-man touches, there was
much of the mama’s boy to Presto. He had the body of a little fatty, though he was big, close to
two hundred pounds. He reminded me of the Big Boy at the Elias Brothers’ chain of restaurants,
only older, coarsened and bloated by adult vices.
Our conversation began the usual way, Presto asking me about myself and I giving the
standard lies.
“Where you off to inCalifornia?”
“College.”
“What school?”
“Stanford.”
“I’m impressed. I’ve got a brother-in-law went to Stanford. Big muckety-muck. Where is that
again?”
“Stanford?”
“Yeah,what city?”
“I forget.”
“Youforget? I thought Stanford studentswere supposed to be
smart.Howare you going to get there if you don’t knowwhere it is?”
“I’mmeetingmy friend.He’s got all the details and stuff.”
“It’s nice to have friends,” Presto said. He turned and winked at me. I didn’t know how to
interpret thiswink. I kept quiet, staring forward at the road ahead.
On the buffet-like front seat between us were many supplies, soft drink bottles and bags of
chips and cookies. Presto offered me whatever I wanted. I was too hungry to refuse, and took a
fewcookies, trying not towolf themdown.
“I’ll tell you,” Presto said, “the older I get, the younger college kids look. If you asked me, I’d
say youwere still in high school.What year you in?”
“Freshman.”
Again Presto’s face broke into the candy-apple grin. “I wish I were in your shoes. College is
the best time of life. I hope you’re ready for all the girls.”
A chuckle accompanied this, to which I was obliged to add one of my own. “I had a lot of
girlfriends in college, Cal,” Presto said. “I worked for the college radio station. I used to get all
kinds of free records. And if I liked a girl, I used to dedicate songs to her.” He gave me a sample
of his style, crooning low: “This one goes out to Jennifer, queen of Anthro 101. I’d love to study
your culture, baby.”
Presto’s jowly head bowed and his eyebrows rose in modest recognition of his vocal gifts.

“Let me give you a little advice about women, Cal. Voice. Voice is a big turn-on for women.
Never discount voice.” Presto’s was indeed deep, dimorphically masculine. The fat of his throat
increased its resonance as he explained, “Take my ex-wife, for example. When we first met, I
could say anything to her and she’d go bananas. We’d be fucking and I’d say ‘English
muffin’—and she’d come.”
When I didn’t reply, Presto said, “I’m not offending you, am I? You’re not one of those
Mormonkids on yourmission, are you? In that suit of yours?”
“No.”
“Good. You had me worried for a minute. Let’s hear your voice again,” Presto said. “Come
on, givemeyour best shot.”
“What do youwantme to say?”
“Say ‘Englishmuffin.’ ”
“Englishmuffin.”
“I don’t work in radio anymore, Cal. I am not a professional broadcaster. But my humble
opinion is that you are not DJ material. What you’ve got is a thin tenor. If you want to get laid,
you’d better learn to sing.” He laughed, grinning at me. His eyes showed no merriment,
however, but were hard, examining me closely. He drove one-handed, eating potato chips with
the other.
“Yourvoice has an unusual quality, actually. It’s hard to place.”
It seemed best to keep quiet.
“Howold are you,Cal?”
“I just told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I just turned eighteen.”
“Howold do you think I am?”
“I don’t know. Sixty?”
“Okay, you can get out now. Sixty! I’m fifty-two, forChrist’s sake.”
“Iwas going to say fifty.”
“It’s all this weight.” He was shaking his head. “I didn’t look old until I gained all this weight.
Skinny kid like you wouldn’t know about that, would you? I thought you were a chick at first,
when I saw you standing by the road. I didn’t register the suit. I just saw your outline. And I
thought, Jesus,what’s a young chick like that doing hitchhiking?”
I was unable to meet Presto’s gaze now. I was beginning to feel scared again and very
uncomfortable.
“That’s when I recognized you. I saw you before. At that steak house. You were with that
queer.” Therewas a pause. “I had him for a chicken hawk.Are you gay,Cal?”
“What?”
“Youcan tellme if youwant. I’mnot gay but I’ve got nothing against it.”
“I’d like to get out now.Could you letme out?”
Presto let go of the wheel and held his palms up in the air. “I’m sorry. I apologize. No more
third degree. Iwon’t say anotherword.”
“Just letme out.”
“If that’swhat youwant, okay.But it doesn’tmake sense.We’re
going the sameway,Cal. I’ll take you to SanFrancisco.”He didn’t slowdown and I didn’t ask
him to. He was true to his word and from then on remained mostly quiet, humming along to the
radio. Every hour hemade a pit stop to relieve himself and to buymore economy-sized bottles of
Pepsi, more chocolate chip cookies, more red licorice and corn chips. Back on the road, he
tanked up. He tilted his head back while he chewed, wary about getting crumbs on his shirtfront.
Soft drinks glugged down his throat. Our conversation remained general. We drove up through
the Sierra, out of Nevada and into California. We got lunch at a drive-thru. Presto paid for the
hamburgers and milk shakes and I decided he was all right, friendly enough, and not after
anything physical fromme.

“Time for my pills,” he said after we had eaten. “Cal, can you hand me my pill bottles?
They’re in the glove compartment.”
There were five or six different bottles. I handed them to Presto and he tried to read their
labels, slanting his eyes. “Here,” he said, “steer for a minute.” I leaned over to take hold of the
wheel, closer to Bob Presto than I wanted to be, while he struggled with the caps and shook out
pills. “My liver’s all fucked up. Because of this hepatitis I picked up in Thailand. Fucking
country almost killed me.” He held up a blue pill. “This is the one for the liver. I’ve got a blood
thinner, too. And one for blood pressure. My blood’s all fucked up. I’m not supposed to eat so
much.”
In thiswaywe drove all day, reaching San Francisco in the evening.When I saw the city, pink
and white, a wedding cake arrayed on hills, a new anxiety took hold of me. All the way across
the country I had absorbed myself in reaching my destination. Now I was there and I didn’t
knowwhat Iwould do or how Iwould survive.
“I’ll drop you wherever you want,” Presto said. “You got an address where you’re staying,
Cal?Yourfriend’s place?”
“Anywhere’s fine.”
“I’ll take you up to theHaight. That’ll be a good place for you to get your bearings.”Wedrove
into the city and finallyBobPresto pulled his car over and I openedmydoor.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Sure, sure,” said Presto.He held out his hand. “Andby theway, it’s PaloAlto.”
“What?”
“Stanford’s in Palo Alto. Youshould get that straight if you want anyone to believe you’re in
college.” He waited for me to speak. Then in a surprisingly tender voice, a professional trick,
too, no doubt, but notwithout effect, Presto asked, “Listen, guy, you got any place to stay?”
“Don’tworry aboutme.”
“Can I ask you something,Cal?What are you, anyway?”
Without answering I got out of the car and opened the back door to get my suitcase. Presto
turned around in his seat, a difficult maneuver for him. His voice remained soft, deep, fatherly.
“Comeon. I’m in the business. Imight be able to help you out.Youa tranny?”
“I’mgoing now.”
“Don’t get offended. I knowall about pre-op and post-op and all that stuff.”
“I don’t knowwhat you’re talking about.” I pulledmy suitcase off the seat.
“Hey, not so fast. Here.At least takemynumber. I could use a kid like you.Whatever you are.
Youneed some money, don’t you? Youneed an easy way to make some good money, you give
your old friendBobPresto a call.”
I took the number to get rid of him. Then I turned and walked off as though I knew where I
was going.
“Watch out in the park at night,” Presto called after me in his booming voice. “Lot of lowlifes
in there.”

My mother used to say that the umbilical cord attaching her to her children had never been
completely cut. As soon as Dr. Philobosian had severed the cord of flesh, another, spiritual
connection had grown up in its place. After I went missing, Tessie felt that this fanciful idea was
truer than ever. In the nights, while she lay in bed waiting for the tranquilizers to take effect, she
often put her hand to her navel, like a fisherman checking his line. It seemed to Tessie that she
felt something. Faint vibrations reached her. From these she could tell that I was still alive,
though far away, hungry, and possibly unwell. All this came in a kind of singing along the
invisible cord, a singing such aswhales do, crying out to one another in the deep.
For almost a week after I disappeared, my parents had remained at the Lochmoor Hotel,
hoping Imight return. Finally, theNYPD
detective assigned to the case told them that the best thing to do was return home. “Your
daughter might call. Or turn up there. Kids usually do. If we find her, we’ll let you know.

Believe me. The best thing to do is go home and stay by the phone.” Reluctantly, my parents
took this advice.
Before leaving, however, they had made an appointment with Dr. Luce. “A little knowledge is
a dangerous thing,” Dr. Luce told them, offering an explanation for my disappearance. “Callie
may have stolen a look at her file while I was out of my office. But she didn’t understand what
shewas reading.”
“Butwhatwouldmake her run away?”Tessie asked.Her eyeswerewide, imploring.
“Shemisconstrued the facts,” Luce answered. “She oversimplified them.”
“I’ll be honest with you, Dr. Luce,” said Milton. “Our daughter called you a liar in that note
she left. I’d like an explanationwhy shemight say something like that.”
Luce smiled tolerantly. “She’s fourteen.Distrustful of adults.”
“Canwe take a look at that file?”
“It won’t help you to see the file. Gender identity is very complex. It’s not a matter of sheer
genetics. Neither is it a matter of purely environmental factors. Genes and environment come
together at a criticalmoment. It’s not di-factorial. It’s tri-factorial.”
“Let me get one thing straight,” Milton interrupted. “Is it, or is it not, still your medical
opinion thatCallie should stay theway she is?”
“From the psychological assessment Iwas able tomake during the brief time I treatedCallie, I
would say yes,myopinion is that she has a female gender identity.”
Tessie’s composure broke and she sounded frantic. “Whydoes she say she’s a boy, then?”
“She never said that tome,” saidLuce. “That’s a newpiece of the puzzle.”
“Iwant to see that file,” demandedMilton
“I’m afraid that’s not possible. The file is formyownprivate research purposes.You’refree to
seeCallie’s bloodwork and the other test results.”
Milton exploded then. Shouting, swearing at Dr. Luce. “I hold you responsible. Youhear me?
Our daughter isn’t the kind to just run off like that. Youmust have done something to her. Scared
her.”
“Her situation scared her, Mr. Stephanides,” said Luce. “And let me emphasize something to
you.” He rapped his knuckles against his desk. “It is of tantamount importance that you find her
as soon as possible. The repercussions could be severe.”
“What are you saying?”
“Depression.Dysphoria. She’s in a very delicate psychological state.”
“Tessie,” Milton looked at his wife, “you want to see the file or should we get out of here and
let this bastard go screwhimself.”
“I want to see the file.” She was sniffling now. “And watch your language, please. Let’s try to
be cordial.”
Finally, Luce had given in and let them see it. After they had read the file, he offered to
reevaluatemy case at a future time, and expressed hope that Iwould soon be found.
“I’d never takeCallie back to him in amillion years,”mymother said as they left.
“I don’t knowwhat he did to upsetCallie,” saidmy father, “but he did something.”
They returned to Middlesex in late September. The leaves were falling from the elms, robbing
the street of shelter. The weather began to turn colder, and from her bed at night Tessie listened
to the wind and the rustling leaves, wondering where I was sleeping and if I was safe. The
tranquilizers didn’t subdue her panic so much as displace it. Under their sedation Tessie
withdrew into an inner core of herself, a kind of viewing platform from which she could observe
her anxiety. The fearwas a little lesswith her at those times. The pillsmade hermouth dry. They
made her head feel as though it were wrapped in cotton, and turned the periphery of her vision
starry. Shewas supposed to take only one pill at a time, but she often took two.
There was a place halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness where Tessie did her
best thinking.During the day she busied herselfwith company—peoplewere constantly stopping
by the house with food, and she had to set out trays and clean up after them—but in the nights,
approaching stupefaction, she had the courage to try to come to terms with the note I’d left

behind.
It was impossible for my mother to think of me as anything but her daughter. Her thoughts
went in the same circle again and again. With her eyes half-open, Tessie gazed out across the
dark bedroomglinting and sparking in the corners, and sawbefore her all the items
I had ever worn or possessed. They all seemed to be heaped at the foot of her bed—the
beribboned socks, the dolls, the hair clips, the full set of Madeline books, the party dresses, the
red Mary Janes, the jumpers, the Easy-Bake Oven, the hula hoop. These objects were the trail
that led back tome.Howcould such a trail lead to a boy?
And yet now, apparently, it did. Tessie went back over the events of the last year and a half,
looking for signs she might have missed. It wasn’t so different from what any mother would do,
confronted with a shocking revelation about her teenage daughter. If I had died of a drug
overdose or joined a cult,mymother’s thinkingwould have taken essentially the same form. The
reappraisal was the same but the questions were different. Was that why I was so tall? Did it
explain why I hadn’t gotten my period? She thought about our waxing appointments at the
Golden Fleece and my husky alto—everything, really: the way I never filled out dresses right,
the way women’s gloves no longer fit me. All the things Tessie had accepted as part of the
awkward age suddenly seemed ominous to her. How could she not have known! She was my
mother, she had given birth to me, she was closer to me than I was to myself. My pain was her
pain, my joy her joy. But didn’t Callie’s face have a strange look sometimes? So intense, so . . .
masculine. And no fat on her, nowhere at all, all bones, no hips. But it wasn’t possible . . . and
Dr. Luce had said that Callie was a . . . and why hadn’t he mentioned anything about
chromosomes . . . and how could it be true? So ran my mother’s thoughts, as her mind darkened
and the glinting stopped. And after she had thought all these things, Tessie thought about the
Object, about my close friendship with the Object. She remembered that day when the girl had
died during the play, recalled rushing backstage to find me hugging the Object, comforting her,
stroking her hair, and thewild look onmy face, not really sadness at all . . .
From this last thought Tessie turned back.
Milton, on the other hand, didn’t waste time reevaluating the evidence. On hotel stationery
Callie had proclaimed, “I am not a girl.” But Callie was just a kid. What did she know? Kids
said all kinds of crazy things. My father didn’t understand what had made me flee my surgery.
He couldn’t fathom why I wouldn’t want to be fixed, cured. And he was certain that speculating
about my reasons for running away was beside the point. First they had to find me. They had to
get
meback safe and sound. They could dealwith themedical situation later.
Milton now dedicated himself to that end. He spent much of every day on the phone, calling
police departments across the country. He pestered the detective in New York, asking if there
was any progress in my case. At the public library he consulted telephone books, writing down
the numbers and addresses of police departments and runaway shelters, and then hemethodically
went down this list, calling every number and asking if anyone had seen someone who fit my
description. He sent my photograph to these police stations and he sent a memo to his franchise
operators, asking them to post my picture at every Hercules restaurant. Long before my naked
body appeared inmedical textbooks,my face appeared on bulletin boards and inwindows across
the nation. The police station in San Francisco received one of the photographs, but there was
little chance of my being recognized by it now. Like a real outlaw, I had already changed my
appearance.Andbiologywas perfectingmydisguise day by day.
Middlesex began to fill up with friends and relatives again. Aunt Zo and our cousins came
over to give my parents moral support. Peter Tatakis closed his chiropractic office early one day
and drove in from Birmingham to have dinner with Milt and Tessie. Jimmy and Phyllis Fioretos
brought koulouria and ice cream. It was as if the Cyprus invasion had never happened. The
women congregated in the kitchen, preparing food, while the men sat in the living room,
conversing in low tones. Milton got the dusty bottles from the liquor cabinet. He removed the
bottle of Crown Royal from its purple velvet sack and set it out for the guests. Our old

backgammon set came out from under a stack of board games, and a few of the older women
began to count their worry beads. Everyone knew that I had run away but no one knew why.
Privately, they said to each other, “Do you think she’s pregnant?” And, “Did Callie have a
boyfriend?” And, “She always seemed like a good kid. Never would have thought she’d pull
something like this.” And, “Always crowing about their kid with the straight A’s at that hoity-
toity school.Well, they’re not crowing now.”
Father Mike held Tessie’s hand as she lay suffering on the bed upstairs. Removing his jacket,
wearing only his black short-sleeved shirt
and collar, he told her that hewould pray formy return.He advisedTessie to go to church and
light a candle for me. I ask myself now what Father Mike’s face looked like as he held my
mother’s hand in the master bedroom. Was there any hint of Schadenfreude? Of taking pleasure
in the unhappiness of his former fiancée? Of enjoyment at the fact that his brother-in-law’s
money couldn’t protect him from this misfortune? Or of relief that for once, on the ride home,
his wife, Zoë, wouldn’t be able to compare him unfavorably with Milton? I can’t answer these
questions. As for my mother, she was tranquilized, and remembers only that the pressure in her
eyesmadeFatherMike’s face appear oddly elongated, like a priest in a painting byElGreco.
At night Tessie slept fitfully. Panic kept waking her up. In the morning she made the bed but,
after breakfast, sometimes went to lie on it again, leaving her tiny white Keds neatly on the
carpet and closing the shades. The sockets of her eyes darkened and the blue veins at her temples
visibly throbbed.When the telephone rang, her head felt as if itwould explode.
“Hello?”
“Anyword?” ItwasAuntZo. Tessie’s heart sank.
“No.”
“Don’tworry. She’ll turn up.”
They spoke for aminute beforeTessie said she had to go. “I shouldn’t tie up the line.”

Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at
sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto
Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early
morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass
Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the
Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian
mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up
and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells
sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in
on theMission,where themariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of
San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better
than anything else why that city is what it is. After the Second World War, San Francisco was
the main point of reentry for sailors returning from the Pacific. Out at sea, many of these sailors
had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed
in San Francisco, growing in number and attracting others, until the city became the gay capital,
the homosexual Hauptstadt. (Further evidence of life’s unpredictability: the Castro is a direct
outcome of the military-industrial complex.) It was the fog that appealed to those sailors because
it lent the city the shifting, anonymous feeling of the sea, and in such anonymity personal change
was that much easier. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the fog was rolling in over the city
or whether the city was drifting out to meet it. Back in the 1940s, the fog hid what those sailors
did from their fellow citizens. And the fog wasn’t done. In the fifties it filled the heads of the
Beats like the foam in their cappuccinos. In the sixties it clouded theminds of the hippies like the
pot smoke rising in their bongs. And in the seventies, when Cal Stephanides arrived, the fog was
hidingmynew friends andme in the park.
On my third day in the Haight, I was in a café, eating a banana split. It was my second. The
kick of my new freedom was wearing off. Gorging on sweets didn’t chase away the blues as it

had aweek earlier.
“Spare some change?”
I looked up. Slouching beside my small marble-topped table was a type I knew well. It was
one of the underpass kids, the scroungy runaways I kept my distance from. The hood of his
sweatshirtwas up, framing a flushed face, ripewith pimples.
“Sorry,” I said.
The boy bent over, his face getting closer tomine. “Spare some change?” he said again.
His persistence annoyed me. So I glowered at him and said, “I should ask you the same
question.”
“I’mnot the one pigging out on a sundae.”
“I told you I don’t have any spare change.”
He glanced behind me and asked more affably, “How come you’re carrying that humongous
suitcase around?”
“That’smybusiness.”
“I sawyouyesterdaywith that thing.”
“I have enoughmoney for this ice creambut that’s it.”
“Don’t you have any place to stay?”
“I’ve got tons of places.”
“Youbuyme a burger I’ll showyou a good place.”
“I said I’ve got tons.”
“I knowagoodplace in the park.”
“I can go into the parkmyself. Anyone can go into the park.”
“Not if they don’t want to get rolled they can’t. You don’t know what’s up, man. There’s
places in the Gate that are safe and places that aren’t. Me and my friends got a nice place. Real
secluded. The cops don’t even knowabout it, sowe can just party all the time.Might let you stay
there but first I need that double cheese.”
“Itwas a hamburger aminute ago.”
“Yousnooze, you lose. Price is going up all the time.Howold are you, anyway?”
“Eighteen.”
“Yeah, right, like I’ll believe that. Youain’t no eighteen. I’m sixteen and you’re not any older
thanme.YoufromMarin?”
I shook my head. It had been a while since I had spoken to anyone my age. It felt good. It
mademe less lonely. But I still hadmyguard up.
“You’rea rich kid, though, right?Mr.Alligator?”
I didn’t say anything. And suddenly he was all appeal, full of kid hungers, his knees shaking.
“Come on,man. I’mhungry.Okay, forget the double cheese. Just a burger.”
“All right.”
“Cool. A burger. And fries. You said fries, right? Youwon’t believe this, man, but I got rich
parents, too.”
So began my time in Golden Gate Park. It turned out my new friend, Matt, wasn’t lying about
his parents. He was from the Main Line. His father was a divorce lawyer in Philadelphia. Matt
was the fourth child, the youngest. Stocky, with a lug’s jaw, a throaty, smoke-roughened voice,
he had left home to follow the Grateful Dead the summer before but had never stopped. He sold
tie-dyed T-shirts at their concerts, and dope or acid when he could. Deep in the park, where he
ledme, I found his cohorts.
“This isCal,”Matt told them. “He’s going to crash here for awhile.”
“That’s cool.”
“Youan undertaker,man?”
“I thought itwasAbeLincoln at first.”
“Nah, these are just Cal’s traveling clothes,” Matt said. “He’s got some others in that suitcase.
Right?”
I nodded.

“Youwant to buy a shirt? I got some shirts.”
“All right.”
The campwas located in a grove ofmimosa trees. The fuzzy red flowers on the brancheswere
like pipe cleaners. Stretching over the dunes were huge evergreen bushes that formed natural
huts. They were hollow inside, the soil dry underneath. The bushes kept the wind out and, most
of the time, the rain. Inside, therewas enough room to sit up. Each bush contained a few sleeping
bags; you chose whichever one happened to be empty when you wanted to sleep. Communal
ethics applied. Kids were always leaving the camp or showing up. It was equipped with all the
stuff they abandoned: a camping stove, a pasta pot, miscellaneous silverware, jelly jar glasses,
bedding, and a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee the guys tossed around, sometimes enlisting me to even
out the sides. (“Jesus, Gator, you throw like a girl, man.”) They were well stocked with gorp,
bongs, pipes, vials of amyl nitrate, but understocked on towels, underwear, toothpaste. Therewas
a ditch thirty or so yards distant thatwe employed as a latrine. The fountain by the aquariumwas
good forwashing oneself, but you had to do it at night to avoid the police.
If one of the guys had a girlfriend therewould be a girl around for awhile. I stayed away from
them, feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into
someone from the old country. I didn’t want to be found out, so remained tight-lipped. But I
would have been laconic in that company in any case. They were all Deadheads, and that was
what the talkwas.Who saw Jerry onwhich night.Who had a bootleg ofwhich concert.Matt had
flunked out of high school but had an impressive mind when it came to cataloguing Dead trivia.
He carried the dates and cities of their tour in his head. He knew the lyrics of every song, when
andwhere theDead had played it, howmany times, andwhat songs they
had played only once. He lived in expectation of certain songs being performed as the faithful
await the Messiah. Someday the Dead were going to play “Cosmic Charlie” and Matt Larson
wanted to be there to see creation redeemed. He had once met Mountain Girl, Jerry’s wife. “She
was so fucking cool,” he said. “I would fucking love a woman like that. If I found a lady as cool
asMountainGirl, I’dmarry her and have kids and all that shit like that.”
“Get a job, too?”
“Wecould follow the tour.Keep our babies in little sacks. Papoose style.And sellweed.”
We weren’t the only ones living in the park. Occupying some dunes on the other side of the
field were homeless guys, with long beards, their faces brown from sun and dirt. They were
known to ransack other people’s camps, so we never left ours unattended. That was pretty much
the only rulewe had. Someone always had to stand guard.
I hung around the Deadheads because I was scared alone. My time on the road made me see
the benefits of being in a pack. We had left home for different reasons. They weren’t kids I
would ever have been friends with in normal circumstances, but for that brief time I made do,
because I had nowhere else to go. I was never at ease around them. But they weren’t especially
cruel. Fights broke outwhen kids had been drinking, but the ethoswas nonviolent. Everyonewas
reading Siddhartha. An old paperback got passed around the camp. I read it, too. It’s one of the
things I remember most about that time: Cal, sitting on a rock, reading Hermann Hesse and
learning about theBuddha.
“I heard theBuddha dropped acid,” said oneHead. “That’swhat his enlightenmentwas.”
“They didn’t have acid back then,man.”
“No, itwas like, you know, a ’shroom.”
“I think Jerry’s theBuddha,man.”
“Yeah!”
“Like when I fucking saw Jerry play that forty-five-minute space jam on ‘Truckin’ in Santa
Fe,’ I knew hewas theBuddha.”
In all these conversations I took no part. See Cal in the far under-hang of the bushes, as all the
Deadheads drift off to sleep.
I had run awaywithout thinkingwhatmy lifewould be like. I had
fled without having anywhere to run to. Now I was dirty, I was running out of money. Sooner

or later I would have to call my parents. But for the first time in my life, I knew that there was
nothing they could do to helpme.Nothing anyone could do.
Every day I took the band toAli Baba’s and bought themveggie burgers for seventy-five cents
each. I opted out on the begging and the dope dealing. Mostly I hung around the mimosa grove,
in growing despair. A few times I walked out to the beach to sit by the sea, but after a while I
stopped doing that, too. Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere to go
thatwouldn’t beme.

It was the opposite for my parents. Wherever they went, whatever they did, what greeted them
was my absence. After the third week of my vanishing, friends and relatives stopped coming
over to Middlesex in such numbers. The house got quieter. The phone didn’t ring. Milton called
Chapter Eleven, who was now living in the Upper Peninsula, and said, “Your mother’s going
through a rough period. We still don’t know where your sister is. I’m sure your mother would
feel a little better if she could see you. Why don’t you come down for the weekend?” Milton
didn’t mention anything about my note. Throughout my time at the Clinic he had kept Chapter
Eleven apprised of the situation in only the simplest terms. Chapter Eleven heard the seriousness
in Milton’s voice and agreed to start coming down on weekends and staying in his old bedroom.
Gradually, he learned the details of my condition, reacting to them in a milder way than my
parents had, which allowed them, or at least Tessie, to begin to accept the new reality. It was
during those weekends that Milton, desperate to cement his restored relationship with his son,
urged him once again to go into the family business. “You’re not still going with that Meg, are
you?”
“No.”
“Well, you dropped out of your engineering studies. Sowhat are you doing now?Yourmother
and I don’t have a very clear idea of your life up there inMarquette.”
“Iwork in a bar.”
“Youwork in a bar?Doingwhat?”
“Short-order cook.”
Milton paused only amoment. “Whatwould you rather do, stay
behind the grill or run Hercules Hot Dogs someday? You’re the one that invented them
anyway.”
Chapter Eleven did not say yes. But he did not say no. He had once been a science geek, but
the sixties had changed that. Under the imperatives of that decade, Chapter Eleven had become a
lacto-vegetarian, a Transcendental Meditation student, a chewer of peyote buttons. Once, long
ago, he had sawed golf balls in half, trying to find out what was inside; but at some point in his
life my brother had become fascinated with the interior of the mind. Convinced of the essential
uselessness of formalized education, he had retreated from civilization. Both of us had our
moments of getting back to nature, Chapter Eleven in the U.P. and me in my bush in Golden
Gate Park. By the time my father made his offer, however, Chapter Eleven had begun to tire of
thewoods.
“Comeon,”Milton said, “let’s go have aHercules right now.”
“I don’t eatmeat,”Chapter Eleven said. “Howcan I run the place if I don’t eatmeat?”
“I’ve been thinking about putting in salad bars,” said Milton. “Lotta people eating a low-fat
diet these days.”
“Good idea.”
“Yeah? You think so? That can be your department, then.” Milton elbowed Chapter Eleven,
kidding, “We’ll start you off as vice president in charge of salad bars.”
They drove to the Hercules downtown. It was busy when they arrived. Milton greeted the
manager,GusZaras. “Yahsou.”
Gus looked up and, a second late, began to smile broadly. “Hey there,Milt. Howyoudoing?”
“Fine, fine. I brought the future boss down to see the place.”He indicatedChapter Eleven.
“Welcome to the family dynasty,” Gus joked, spreading his arms. He laughed too loudly.

Seeming to realize this, he stopped. There was an awkward silence. Then Gus asked, “So, Milt,
what’ll it be?”
“Twowith everything.Andwhat dowegot that’s vegetarian?”
“Wegot bean soup.”
“Okay.Getmykid here a bowl of bean soup.”
“Yougot it.”
Milton and Chapter Eleven chose stools and waited to be served. After another long silence,
Milton said, “Youknowhowmanyof these places your oldmanowns right now?”
“Howmany?” saidChapter Eleven.
“Sixty-six.Got eight in Florida.”
That was as far as the hard sell went. Milton ate his Hercules hot dogs in silence. He knew
perfectly well why Gus was acting so overfriendly. It was because he was thinking what
everyone thinks when a girl disappears. He was thinking the worst. There were moments when
Milton did, too. He didn’t admit it to anyone. He didn’t admit it to himself. But whenever Tessie
spoke about the umbilical cord, when she claimed that she could still feel me out there
somewhere,Milton found himselfwanting to believe her.
One Sunday as Tessie left for church, Milton handed her a large bill. “Light a candle for
Callie.Get a bunch.”He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
But after she was gone he shook his head. “What’s the matter with me? Lighting candles!
Christ!” He was furious at himself for giving in to such superstition. He vowed again that he
would find me; he would get me back. Somehow or other. A chance would come his way, and
when it did,MiltonStephanideswouldn’tmiss it.

The Dead came to Berkeley. Matt and the other kids trooped off to the concert. I was given the
job to look after the camp.
It is midnight in the mimosa grove. I awaken, hearing noises. Lights are moving through the
bushes. Voicesare murmuring. The leaves over my head turn white and I can see the scaffolding
of branches. Light speckles the ground, my body, my face. In the next second a flashlight comes
blazing through the opening inmy lair.
The men are on me at once. One shines his flashlight in my face as the other jumps onto my
chest, pinningmyarms.
“Rise and shine,” says the onewith the flashlight.
It is two homeless guys from the dunes opposite. While the one sits on top of me, the other
begins searching the camp.
“What kind of goodies you little fuckers got in here?”
“Look at him,” says the other. “Little fucker’s gonna shit his pants.”
I squeezemy legs together, the girlish fears still operating inme.
They are looking for drugs mainly. The one with the flashlight shakes out the sleeping bags
and searchesmy suitcase.After awhile he comes back and gets downonone knee.
“Where are all your friends,man?They go off and leave you all alone?”
He has begun to go through my pockets. Soon he finds my wallet and empties it. As he does,
my school ID falls out.He shines the flashlight on it.
“What’s this?Yourgirlfriend?”
He stares at the photo, grinning. “Yourgirlfriend like to suck cock? I bet she does.” He picks
up the ID and holds it over the front of his pants, thrusting his hips. “Ohyeah, she does!”
“Letme see that,” says the one on top ofme.
The guy with the flashlight tosses the ID onto my chest. The guy pinning me lowers his face
close to mine and says in a deep voice, “Don’t you move, motherfucker.” He lets go of my arms
and picks up the ID.
I can see his face now. Grizzled beard, bad teeth, nose askew, showing septum. He
contemplates the snapshot. “Skinny bitch.” He looks from me to the ID and his expression
changes.

“It’s a chick!”
“Quick on the uptake,man. I always say that about you.”
“No, I mean him.” He is pointing down at me. “It’s her! He’s a she.” He holds up the ID for
the other one to see. The flashlight is again trained onCalliope in her blazer and blouse.
At length the kneeling man grins. “You holding out on us? Huh? You got the goods stashed
away under those pants? Hold her,” he orders. The man astride me pins my arms again while the
other one undoesmybelt.
I tried to fight them off. I squirmed and kicked. But they were too strong. They got my pants
down tomyknees. The one aimed the flashlight and then sprang away.
“JesusChrist!”
“What?”
“Fuck!”
“What?”
“It’s a fucking freak.”
“What?”
“I’mgonna puke,man. Look!”
No sooner had the other one done so than he let go of me as though I were contaminated. He
stood up, enraged. By silent agreement, they then began to kick me. As they did, they uttered
curses. The onewhohad pinnedmedrove his toe intomy side. I grabbed his leg and hung on.
“Let go ofme, you fucking freak!”
The other onewas kickingme in the head.He did it three or four times before I blacked out.
When I came to, everything was quiet. I had the impression they had gone. Then somebody
chuckled. “Cross swords,” a voice said. The twin yellow streams, scintillant, intersected, soaking
me.
“Crawl back into the hole you cameout of, freak.”
They leftme there.

It was still dark out when I found the public fountain by the aquarium and bathed in it. I didn’t
seem to be bleeding anywhere. My right eye was swollen shut. My side hurt if I took a deep
breath. I had my dad’s Samsonite with me. I had seventy-five cents to my name. I wished more
than anything that I could call home. Instead, I calledBobPresto.He said hewould be right over
to pickmeup.

HERMAPHRODITUS

It’s no surprise that Luce’s theory of gender identity was popular in the early seventies. Back
then, as my first barber put it, everybody wanted to go unisex. The consensus was that
personality was primarily determined by environment, each child a blank slate to be written on.
My own medical story was only a reflection of what was happening psychologically to everyone
in those years. Women were becoming more like men and men were becoming more like
women. For a little while during the seventies it seemed that sexual difference might pass away.
But then another thing happened.
It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into
hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of
hominids dating from 20,000 B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in
magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can’t men communicate? (Because they had
to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to
one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the
house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women
find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.)
Why can’t women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won’t
men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never
showweakness.) This iswherewe are today.Men
andwomen, tired of being the same,want to be different again.
Therefore, it’s also no surprise thatDr. Luce’s theory had comeunder attack by the 1990s. The
child was no longer a blank slate; every newborn had been inscribed by genetics and evolution.
My life exists at the center of this debate. I am, in a sense, its solution. At first when I
disappeared, Dr. Luce was desperate, feeling that he had lost his greatest find. But later, possibly
realizingwhy I had run away, he came to the conclusion that Iwas not evidence in support of his
theory but against it. He hoped Iwould stay quiet. He published his articles aboutme and prayed
that Iwould never showup to refute them.
But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t fit into any of these theories. Not the evolutionary
biologists’ and not Luce’s either. My psychological makeup doesn’t accord with the essentialism
popular in the intersex movement, either. Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites
who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl. I still don’t feel
entirely at home among men. Desire made me cross over to the other side, desire and the
facticity of my body. In the twentieth century, genetics brought the Ancient Greek notion of fate
into our very cells. This new century we’ve just begun has found something different. Contrary
to all expectations, the code underlying our being iswoefully inadequate. Instead of the expected
200,000 genes,we have only 30,000.Notmanymore than amouse.
And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely
obliterated: freewill ismaking a comeback.Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into amind.
At any rate, in SanFrancisco in 1974, lifewasworking hard to givemeone.

There it is again: the chlorine smell. Under the nasally significant odor of the girl sitting astride
his lap, distinct, even, from the buttery popcorn smell that still pervades the old movie seats, Mr.
Go can detect the unmistakable scent of a swimming pool. In here? In Sixty-Niners? He sniffs.
Flora, the girl on his lap, says, “Do you like my perfume?” But Mr. Go does not answer. Mr. Go
has awayof ignoring the girls he pays towiggle in his lap.What he likes best is to have
one girl frog-kicking on top of him while he watches another girl dancing around the glittery
firemen’s pole on the stage. Mr. Go is multitasking. But tonight he is unable to divide his
attentions. The swimming pool smell is distracting him. It has done so for over a week. Turning
his head, which is gently bobbing under Flora’s exertions, Mr. Go looks at the line forming
before the velvet rope. The fifty or so theater seats here in the Show Room are almost entirely
empty. In the blue light only a few men’s heads are visible, some alone facing the stage, a few
likeMr.Gowith a companion riding them: those peroxide equestriennes.
Behind the velvet rope rises a flight of stairs edged with blinking lights. To climb these stairs
you must pay a separate admission of five dollars. Upon reaching the club’s second floor (Mr.
Go has been told), your only option is to enter a booth, where it is then necessary to insert
tokens,which youmust buy downstairs for a quarter each. If you do all this, youwill be afforded
brief glimpses of something Mr. Go does not quite understand. Mr. Go’s English is more than
adequate. He has lived in America for fifty-two years. But the sign advertising the attractions
upstairs doesn’t make much sense to him. For that reason he is curious. The chlorine smell only
makes himmore so.
Despite the increased traffic going upstairs in recent weeks, Mr. Go has not yet gone himself.
He has remained faithful to the first floor where, for the single admission price of ten dollars, he
has a choice of activities. Mr. Go might, if he so desires, quit the Show Room and go into the
Dark Room at the end of the hall. In the Dark Room there are flashlights with pinpoint beams.
There are huddled men, wielding said flashlights. If you work your way in far enough, you will
find a girl, or sometimes two, lying on a riser carpeted in foam rubber. Of course it is in some
sense an act of faith to postulate the existence of an actual girl, or even two. You never see a
complete girl in the Dark Room. Yousee only pieces. You see what your flashlight illuminates.
A knee, for instance, or a nipple. Or, of particular interest to Mr. Go and his fellows, you see the
source of life, the thing of things, purified as itwere,without the clutter of a person attached.
Mr. Go might also venture into the Ball Room. In the Ball Room there are girls who long to
slow-dance with Mr. Go. He doesn’t care for disco music, however, and at his age tires easily. It
is too much effort to press the girls up against the padded walls of the Ball Room. Mr. Go much
prefers to sit in the ShowRoom, in the stainedArt
Deco theater seats that originally belonged to amovie house inOakland, nowdemolished.
Mr. Go is seventy-three years old. Every morning, to retain his virility, he drinks a tea
containing rhinoceros horn. He also eats the gall bladders of bears when he can get them at the
Chinese apothecary shop near his apartment. These aphrodisiacs appear to work. Mr. Go comes
into Sixty-Niners nearly every night. He has a joke he likes to tell the girls who sit on his lap.
“Mr.Gogo for go-go.”That is the only time he laughs or smiles,when he tells them that joke.
If the club is not crowded—which it rarely is downstairs anymore—Flora will sometimes give
Mr. Go her company for three or four songs. For a dollar she will ride him for one song, but she
will sit through one or two more songs for free. This is one of Flora’s recommendations in Mr.
Go’smind. She is not young, Flora, but she has nice, clear skin.Mr.Go feels she is healthy.
Tonight, however, after only two songs, Flora slides off Mr. Go, grumbling. “I’m not a credit
bureau, you know.” She stalks off. Mr. Go rises, adjusting his pants, and right then the
swimming pool smell hits him again and his curiosity gets the better of him. He shuffles out of
the ShowRoomandgazes up the stairs at the printed sign:

And now Mr. Go’s curiosity has gotten the better of him. He buys a ticket and a handful of
tokens and waits in line with the others. When the bouncer lets him through, he climbs up the
blinking stairs. The booths on the second floor have no numbers, only lights indicating whether
they are occupied. He finds an empty one, closes the door behind him, and puts a token in the
slot. Immediately, the screen slides away to reveal a porthole looking onto underwater depths.
Music plays froma speaker in the roof and a deep voice begins narrating a story:
“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to
Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming
there.” The voice continues, but Mr. Go is no longer paying attention. He is looking into the
pool, which is blue and empty. He is wondering where the girls are. He is beginning to regret
buying a ticket toOctopussy’sGarden.But just then the voice intones:
“Ladies andGentlemen, behold the godHermaphroditus!Halfwoman, halfman!”
There is a splash from above. The water in the pool goes white, then pink. Only inches away
on the other side of the porthole’s glass is a body, a living body. Mr. Go looks. He squints. He
presses his face right up to the porthole. He has never seen anything like what he is seeing now.
Not in all his years of visiting the Dark Room. He isn’t sure he likes what he sees. But the sight
makes him feel strange, lightheaded, weightless, and somehow younger. Suddenly the screen
slides shut.Without hesitationMr.Godrops another token in the slot.

San Francisco’s Sixty-Niners, Bob Presto’s club: it stood in North Beach, within view of the
skyscrapers downtown. It was a neighborhood of Italian cafés, pizza restaurants, and topless
bars. In North Beach you had the glitzy strip palaces like Carol Doda’s with her famous bust
outlined on themarquee. Barkers on the sidewalks collared passersby: “Gentlemen!Come in and
see the show! Just have a look. Doesn’t cost anything to have a look.” While the guy outside the
next clubwas shouting, “Our girls are the best, right thisway through the curtain!”And the next,
“Live erotic show, gentlemen! Plus in our establishment you canwatch the football game!”The
barkers were all interesting guys, poets manqués, most of them, and spent their time off in City
Lights Bookstore, leafing through New Directions paperbacks. They wore striped pants, loud

ties, sideburns, goatees. They tended to resemble Tom Waits, or maybe it was the other way
around. Like Mamet characters, they populated an America that had never existed, a kid’s idea
of sharpies and hucksters and underworld life.
It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire. And though it would certainly add
color to my story to present a descent into a seamy underworld, I can’t fail to mention that the
North Beach Strip is only a few blocks long. The geography of San Francisco is too beautiful to
allow seaminess to get much of a foothold, and so along with these barkers there were many
tourists afoot, tourists carrying loaves of sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolates. In the
daytime there were roller-skaters and hackey sack players in the parks. But at night things got a
little seamy at last, and from9p.m. to three in themorning themen streamed into Sixty-Niners.
Which waswhere, obviously enough, Iwas nowworking. Five nights aweek, six hours a day,
for the next four months—and, fortunately, never again—I made my living by exhibiting the
peculiar way I am formed. The Clinic had prepared me for it, benumbing my sense of shame,
and besides, I was desperate for money. Sixty-Niners also had a perfect venue for me. I worked
with twoother girls, so called:Carmen andZora.
Presto was an exploiter, a porn dog, a sex pig, but I could have done worse. Without him I
might never have found myself. After he had picked me up in the park, bruised and battered,
Presto tookme back to his apartment. HisNamibian girlfriend, Wilhelmina, dressedmywounds.
At some point I passed out again and they undressed me to put me in bed. It was then that Presto
realized the extent of hiswindfall.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, catching bits ofwhat they said to each other.
“I knew it. I knew itwhen I sawhimat the steak house.”
“Youdidn’t knowa thing,Bob.Youthought hewas a sexchange.”
“I knewhewas a goldmine.”
And later,Wilhelmina: “Howold is he?”
“Eighteen.”
“He doesn’t look eighteen.”
“He says he is.”
“Andyouwant to believe him, don’t you,Bob?Youwant him towork in the club.”
“He called me. So Imade himanoffer.”
And later still: “Whydon’t you call his parents, Bob?”
“The kid ran away fromhome.He doesn’twant to call his parents.”

Octopussy’s Garden predated me. Presto had come up with the idea six months earlier. Carmen
and Zora had been working there from the beginning, as Ellie and Melanie respectively. But
Presto was always on the lookout for ever-freakier performers and knew I’d give him an edge
over his competitors on the Strip. Therewas nothing likeme around.
The tank itself was not that large. Not much bigger than an above-ground swimming pool in
someone’s backyard. Fifteen feet in length, maybe ten feet wide. We climbed down a ladder into
the warm water. From the booths, you looked directly into the tank; it was impossible to see
above the surface. So we could keep our heads out of the water, if we wanted, and talk to one
another while we worked. As long as we submerged ourselves from the waist down the
customerswere content. “They don’t come here to see your pretty face,”was howPresto put it to
me. All this made it much easier. I don’t think I could have performed in a regular peep show,
face-to-face with the voyeurs. Their gaze would have sucked my soul out of me. But in the tank
when Iwas underwatermy eyeswere closed. I undulated in the deep-sea silence.When I pressed
myself against a porthole’s glass, I lifted my face up out of the water and so was unaware of the
eyes studying my mollusk. How did I say it before? The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting
divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the creatures of air; down below, those of water. One
planet, containing two worlds. The customers were the sea creatures; Zora, Carmen, and I
remained essentially creatures of air. In her mermaid costume, Zora lay on the wet strip of
outdoor carpeting, waiting to go on after me. Sometimes she held a joint to my lips so that I

could smokewhile I grabbed the rimof the pool.Aftermy tenminutes
were elapsed I clambered up onto the carpet and dried off. Over the sound system Bob Presto
was saying, “Let’s hear it for Hermaphroditus, ladies and gentlemen! Only here at Octopussy’s
Garden, where gender is always on a bender! I’m telling you, folks, we put the glam rock in the
rock lobsters,we put theAC/DC in themahimahi . . .”
Beached on her side, Zorawith blue eyes and golden hair askedme, “Am I zipped?”
I checked.
“This tank ismakingme all congested. I’m always congested.”
“Youwant something from the bar?”
“Getme aNegroni, Cal. Thanks.”
“Ladies andGentlemen, it’s time for our next attraction here atOctopussy’sGarden.Yes, I see
now that the boys from Steinhardt Aquarium are just bringing her in. Put those tokens in the
boxes, ladies and gentlemen, this is something you won’t want to miss. May I have a drum roll,
please?On second thought,make that a sushi roll.”
Zora’smusic started.Her overture.
“Ladies and gentlemen, since time immemorial mariners have told stories of seeing incredible
creatures, half woman, half fish, swimming in the seas. We here at Sixty-Niners did not give
credence to such stories. But a tuna fisherman of our acquaintance brought us an amazing catch
the other day. And now we know those stories are true. Ladies and gentlemen,” crooned Bob
Presto, “does . . . anyone . . . smell . . . fish?”
At that cue, Zora in her rubber suit with the flashing green sequin scaleswould tumble into the
tank. The suit came up to her waist and left her chest and shoulders bare. Into the aquatic light
Zora streamed, opening her eyes underwater as I did not, smiling at the men and women in the
booths, her long blond hair flowing behind her like seaweed, tiny air bubbles beading her breasts
like pearls, as she kicked her glittering emerald fish tail. She performed no lewdness. Zora’s
beautywas so great that everyone was content merely to look at her, thewhite skin, the beautiful
breasts, the taut belly with its winking navel, the magnificent curve of her swaying backside
where flesh merged with scales. She swam with her arms at her sides, voluptuously fluctuating.
Her face was serene, her eyes a light Caribbean blue. Downstairs a constant disco beat throbbed,
but up
here inOctopussy’sGarden themusicwas ethereal, a kind ofmelodious bubbling itself.
Viewed from a certain angle, there was a kind of artistry to it. Sixty-Niners was a smut
pavilion, but up in the Garden the atmosphere was exotic rather than raunchy. It was the sexual
equivalent of Trader Vic’s. Viewers got to see strange things, uncommon bodies, but much of
the appeal was the transport involved. Looking through their portholes, the customers were
watching real bodies do the things bodies sometimes did in dreams. There were male customers,
married heterosexual men, who sometimes dreamed of making love to women who possessed
penises, not male penises, but thin, tapering feminized stalks, like the stamens of flowers,
clitorises that had elongated tremendously from abundant desire. There were gay customers who
dreamed of boys who were almost female, smoothskinned, hairless. There were lesbian
customers who dreamed of women with penises, not male penises but womanly erections,
possessing a sensitivity and aliveness no dildo ever had. There is no way to tell what percentage
of the population dreams such dreams of sexual transmogrification. But they came to our
underwater garden every night and filled the booths towatch us.
After Melanie the Mermaid came Ellie and Her Electrifying Eel. This eel was not at first
apparent.What splashed down through the aquamarine depths appeared to be a slenderHawaiian
girl, clad in a bikini of water lilies. As she swam, her top came off and she remained a girl. But
when she stood on her head, in graceful water ballet, pulling her bikini bottom to her knees—ah,
then it was the eel’s moment to shock. For there it was on the slender girl’s body, there it was
where it should not have been, a thin brown ill-tempered-looking eel, an endangered species, and
asEllie rubbed against the glass the eel grew longer and longer; it stared at the customerswith its
cyclopean eye; and they looked back at her breasts, her slim waist, they looked back and forth

fromEllie to eel, fromeel toEllie, andwere electrified by thewedding of opposites.
Carmen was a pre-op, male-to-female transsexual. She was from the Bronx. Small, delicately
boned, she was fastidious about eyeliner and lipstick. She was always dieting. She stayed away
frombeer, fearing a belly. I thought she overdid the femme routine. There was entirely toomuch
hip swaying and hair flipping inCarmen’s airspace.
She had a pretty naiad’s face, a girl on the surface with a boy holding his breath just beneath.
Sometimes the hormones she tookmade her skin break out. Her doctor (themuch-in-demandDr.
Mel of SanBruno) had to constantly adjust her dosage. The only features that gaveCarmen away
were her voice, which remained husky despite the estrogen and progestin, and her hands. But the
men never noticed that. And they wanted Carmen to be impure. That was the whole turn-on,
really.
Her story followed the traditional lines better than mine. From an early age Carmen had felt
that she had been born into the wrong body. In the dressing room one day, she told me in her
South Bronx voice: “I was like, yo! Who put this dick on me? I never asked for no dick.” It was
still there, however, for the time being. It was what the men came to see. Zora, given to
analytical thought, felt that Carmen’s admirers were motivated by latent homosexuality. But
Carmen resisted this notion. “Myboyfriends are all straight. Theywant a woman.”
“Obviously not,” saidZora.
“Soon as I save my money I’m having my bottom done. Then we’ll see. I’ll be more of a
woman than you, Z.”
“Finewithme,” repliedZora. “I don’twant to be anything in particular.”
Zora had Androgen Insensitivity. Her body was immune to male hormones. Though XY like
me, she had developed along female lines. But Zora had done it far better than I had. Aside from
being blond, she was shapely and full-lipped. Her prominent cheekbones divided her face in
Arctic planes. When Zora spoke you were aware of the skin stretching over these cheekbones
and hollowing out between her jaws, the tight mask it made, banshee-like, with her blue eyes
piercing through above. And then there was her figure, the milkmaid breasts, the swim champ
stomach, the legs of a sprinter or a Martha Graham dancer. Even unclothed, Zora appeared to be
all woman. There was no visible sign that she possessed neither womb nor ovaries. Androgen
Insensitivity Syndrome created the perfect woman, Zora told me. A number of top fashion
models had it. “How many chicks are six two, skinny, but with big boobs? Not many. That’s
normal for someone likeme.”
Beautiful or not, Zora didn’twant to be awoman. She preferred
to identify herself as a hermaphrodite. She was the first one I met. The first person like me.
Even back in 1974 she was using the term “intersexual,” which was rare then. Stonewall was
only five years in the past. The Gay Rights Movement was under way. It was paving a path for
all the identity struggles that followed, including ours. The Intersex Society of North America
wouldn’t be founded until 1993, however. So I think of Zora Khyber as an early pioneer, a sort
of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. Writ large, that wilderness was America, even the
globe itself, but more specifically it was the redwood bungalow Zora lived in in Noe Valleyand
where I was now living, too. After Bob Presto had satisfied himself on the details of my
manufacture, he had called Zora and arranged for me to stay with her. Zora took in strays like
me. It was part of her calling. The fog of San Francisco provided cover for hermaphrodites, too.
It’s no surprise that ISNA was founded in San Francisco and not somewhere else. Zora was part
of all this at a very disorganized time.Beforemovements emerge there are centers of energy, and
Zora was one of these. Mainly, her politics consisted of studying and writing. And, during the
months I lived with her, in educating me, in bringing me out of what she saw as my great
midwestern darkness.
“You don’t have to work for Bob if you don’t want,” she told me. “I’m going to quit soon
anyway. This is just temporary.”
“I need themoney. They stole allmymoney.”
“What about your parents?”

“I don’twant to ask them,” I said. I looked down and admitted, “I can’t call them.”
“What happened,Cal? If you don’tmindme asking.What are you doing here?”
“They tookme to this doctor inNewYork.Hewantedme to have an operation.”
“So you ran away.”
I nodded.
“Consider yourself lucky. I didn’t knowuntil Iwas twenty.”
All this happened onmy first day in Zora’s house. I hadn’t started working at the club yet. My
bruises had to heal first. I wasn’t surprised to be where I was. When you travel like I did, vague
about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your
character. It’s the reason the first philosophers
were peripatetic. Christ, too. I see myself that first day, sitting crosslegged on a batik floor
pillow, drinking green tea out of a fired raku cup, and looking up at Zora with my big, hopeful,
curious, attentive eyes. With my hair short, my eyes looked even bigger now, more than ever the
eyes of someone in a Byzantine icon, one of those figures ascending the ladder to heaven,
upward-gazing, while his fellows fall to the fiery demons below. After all my troubles, wasn’t it
my right to expect some reward in the form of knowledge or revelation? In Zora’s rice-paper
house, with misty light coming in at the windows, I was like a blank canvas waiting to be filled
withwhat she toldme.
“There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original
human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one
male, one female. Then these got separated. That’s why everybody’s always searching for their
other half. Except for us.We’ve got both halves already.”
I didn’t say anything about theObject.
“Okay, in some cultures we’re considered freaks,” she went on. But in others it’s just the
opposite. The Navajo have a category of person they call a berdache. What a berdache is,
basically, is someone who adopts a gender other than their biological one. Remember, Cal. Sex
is biological. Gender is cultural. The Navajo understand this. If a person wants to switch her
gender, they let her. And they don’t denigrate that person—they honor her. The berdaches are
the shamans of the tribe. They’re the healers, the greatweavers, the artists.”
I wasn’t the only one! Listening to Zora, that was mainly what hit home with me. I knew right
then that I had to stay in SanFrancisco for awhile. Fate or luck had broughtme here and I had to
take from it what I needed. It didn’t matter what I might be compelled to do to make money. I
just wanted to stay with Zora, to learn from her, and to be less alone in the world. I was already
stepping through the charmed door of those druggy, celebratory, youthful days. By that first
afternoon the soreness in my ribs was already lessening. Even the air seemed on fire, subtly
aflamewith energy as it doeswhen you are young,when the synapses are firingwildly and death
is far away.
Zorawaswriting a book. She claimed itwas going to be published
by a small press in Berkeley. She showed me the publisher’s catalogue. The selections were
eclectic, books on Buddhism, on the mystery cult of Mithras, even a strange book (a hybrid
itself) mixing genetics, cellular biology, and Hindu mysticism. What Zora was working on
would certainly have fit this list. But I was never clear how actual her publishing plans were. In
the years since, I’ve looked out for Zora’s book, which was called The Sacred Hermaphrodite.
I’ve never found it. If she never finished it, it wasn’t a question of ability. I readmost of the book
myself. At my age then, I wasn’t much of a judge of literary or academic quality, but Zora’s
learning was real. She had gone into her subject and had much of it by heart. Her bookshelves
were full of anthropology texts and works by French structuralists and deconstructionists. She
wrote nearly every day. She spread her papers and books out on her desk and took notes and
typed.
“I’ve got one question,” I askedZora one day. “Whydid you ever tell anybody?”
“What do youmean?”
“Look at you.Noonewould ever know.”

“Iwant people to know,Cal.”
“Howcome?”
Zora folded her long legs under herself. With her fairy’s eyes, paisley-shaped, blue and glacial
looking intomine, she said, “Becausewe’rewhat’s next.”

“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to
Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming
there.”
Here I lowered my feet into the pool. I lolled them back and forth as the narration continued.
“Salmacis looked upon the handsome boy and her lust was kindled. She swam nearer to get a
closer look.”Now I began to lowermyownbody into thewater inch by inch: shin, knees, thighs.
If I paced it the way Presto had instructed me, the peepholes slid shut at this point. Some
customers left, but many dropped more tokens into the slots. The screens lifted from the
portholes.
“The water nymph tried to control herself. But the boy’s beauty was too much for her.
Lookingwas not enough. Salmacis swam
nearer and nearer. And then, overpowered by desire, she caught the boy from behind,
wrapping her arms around him.” I began to kick my legs, churning up water so that it was hard
for the customers to see. “Hermaphroditus struggled to free himself from the tenacious grip of
the water nymph, ladies and gentlemen. But Salmacis was too strong. So unbridled was her lust
that the two became one. Their bodies fused, male into female, female into male. Behold the god
Hermaphroditus!”Atwhich point I plunged into the pool entire, all ofme exposed.
And the peepholes slid shut.
Noone ever left a booth at this point. Everyone extended his or hermembership to theGarden.
Underwater I could hear the tokens clinking into the change boxes. It reminded me of being at
home, submerging my head under bathwater and hearing the pinging in the pipes. I tried to think
of things like that. It made everything seem far away. I pretended I was in the bathtub on
Middlesex. Meanwhile faces filled the portholes, gazing with amazement, curiosity, disgust,
desire.
We were always stoned for work. That was a prerequisite. As we got into our costumes Zora
and I would fire up a joint to start the night. Zora brought a thermos of Averna and ice, which I
drank likeKool-Aid.What you aimed forwas a state of half oblivion, a private partymood. This
made the men less real, less noticeable. If it hadn’t been for Zora I don’t know what I would
have done. Our little bungalow in the mist and trees, neatly surrounded by low-lying California
ground cover, the tiny koi pond full of pet-store goldfish, the outdoor Buddhist shrine made of
blue granite—it was a refuge for me, a halfway house where I stayed, getting ready to go back
into the world. My life during those months was as divided as my body. Nights we spent at
Sixty-Niners, waiting around the tank, bored, high, giggling, unhappy. But you got used to that.
Youlearned tomedicate yourself against it and put it out of yourmind.
In the daytime Zora and I were always straight. She had one hundred and eighteen pages of
her book written. These were typed on the thinnest onionskin paper I had ever seen. The
manuscript was therefore perishable. You had to be careful in handling it. Zora made me sit at
the kitchen table while she brought it out like a librarian with a Shakespeare folio. Otherwise,
Zora didn’t treatme like a kid.
She let me keep my own hours. She asked me to help with the rent. We spent most days
padding around the house in our kimonos. Z. had a stern expression when she was working. I sat
out on the deck and read books from her shelves, Kate Chopin, Jane Bowles, and the poetry of
Gary Snyder. Though we looked nothing alike, Zora was always emphatic about our solidarity.
We were up against the same prejudices and misunderstandings. I was gladdened by this, but I
never felt sisterly around Zora. Not completely. I was always aware of her figure under the robe.
I went around averting my eyes and trying not to stare. On the street people took me for a boy.
Zora turned heads.Menwhistled at her. She didn’t likemen, however.Only lesbians.

She had a dark side. She drank to extremes and sometimes acted ugly. She raged against
football,male bonding, babies, breeders, politicians, andmen in general. Therewas a violence in
Zora at such times that set me on edge. She had been the high school beauty. She had submitted
to caresses that had done nothing for her and to sessions of painful lovemaking. Like many
beauties, Zora had attracted the worst guys. The varsity stooges. The herpetic section leaders. It
was no surprise that she held a low opinion of men. Me she exempted. She thought I was okay.
Not a realman at all.Which I feltwas prettymuch right.

Hermaphroditus’s parents were Hermes and Aphrodite. Ovid doesn’t tell us how they felt after
their child went missing. As formy own parents, they still kept the telephone nearby at all times,
refusing to leave the house together. But now they were scared to answer the phone, fearing bad
news. Ignorance seemed preferable to grief. Whenever the phone rang, they paused before
answering it. Theywaited until the third or fourth peal.
Their agony was harmonious. During the months I was missing, Milton and Tessie
experienced the same spikes of panic, the same mad hopes, the same sleeplessness. It had been
years since their emotional life had been so in sync and this had the result of bringing back the
timeswhen they first fell in love.
They began tomake lovewith a frequency they hadn’t known for years. If Chapter Elevenwas
out, they didn’t wait to go upstairs but used whatever room they happened to be in. They tried
the red
leather couch in the den; they spread out on the bluebirds and red berries of the living room
sofa; and a few times they even lay down on the heavy-duty kitchen carpeting, which had a
pattern of bricks. The only place they didn’t use was the basement because there was no
telephone there. Their lovemaking was not passionate but slow and elegiac, carried out to the
magisterial rhythms of suffering. They were not young anymore; their bodies were no longer
beautiful. Tessie sometimes wept afterward. Milton kept his eyes squeezed shut. Their exertions
resulted in no flowering of sensation, no release, or only seldom.
Then one day, three months after I was gone, the signals coming over my mother’s spiritual
umbilical cord stopped. Tessie was lying in bed when the faint purring or tingling in her navel
ceased. She sat up. She put her hand to her belly.
“I can’t feel her anymore!”Tessie cried.
“What?”
“The cord’s cut! Somebody cut the cord!”
Milton tried to reason with Tessie, but it was no use. From that moment, my mother became
convinced that something terrible had happened tome.
And so: into the harmony of their suffering entered discord. While Milton fought to keep up a
positive attitude, Tessie increasingly gave in to despair. They began to quarrel. Every now and
thenMilton’s optimismwould swaymymother and shewould become cheerful for a day or two.
She would tell herself that, after all, they didn’t know anything definite. But such moods were
temporary.When shewas aloneTessie tried to feel something coming in over the umbilical cord,
but therewas nothing, not even a sign of distress.
I had been missing four months by this time. It was now January 1975. My fifteenth birthday
had passed without my being found. On a Sunday morning while Tessie was at church, praying
formy return, the phone rang.Milton answered.
“Hello?”
At first there was no response. Milton could hear music in the background, a radio playing in
another roommaybe. Then amuffled voice spoke.
“I bet youmiss your daughter,Milton.”
“Who is this?”
“Adaughter is a special thing.”
“Who is this?”Milton demanded again, and the linewent dead.
He didn’t tell Tessie about the call. He suspected it was a crank. Or a disgruntled employee.

The economy was in recession in 1975 and Milton had been forced to close a few franchises.
The following Sunday, however, the phone rang again. This time Milton answered on the first
ring.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Milton. I have a question for you this morning. Would you like to know the
question,Milton?”
“Youtellmewho this is or I’mhanging up.”
“I doubt you’ll do that,Milton. I’m the only chance you have to get your daughter back.”
Milton did a characteristic thing right then. He swallowed, squared his shoulders, and with a
small nod prepared himself tomeetwhateverwas coming.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m listening.”
And the caller hung up.

“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool . . .” I could do it in my sleep
now. I was asleep, considering our backstage festivities, the flowing Averna, the tranquilizing
smoke. Halloween had come and gone. Thanksgiving, too, and then Christmas. On New Year’s,
Bob Presto threw a big party. Zora and I drank champagne. When it was time for my act, I
plunged into the pool. I was high, drunk, and so that night did something I didn’t normally do. I
opened my eyes underwater. I saw the faces looking back at me and I saw that they were not
appalled. I had fun in the tank that night. It was all beneficial in some way. It was therapeutic.
Inside Hermaphroditus old tensions were roiling, trying to work themselves out. Traumas of the
locker room were being released. Shame over having a body unlike other bodies was passing
away. The monster feeling was fading. And along with shame and self-loathing another hurt was
healing.Hermaphrodituswas beginning to forget about theObscureObject.
In my last weeks in San Francisco I read everything Zora gave me, trying to educate myself. I
learned what varieties we hermaphrodites came in. I read about hyperadrenocorticism and
feminizing testes and something called cryptorchidism,which applied tome. I read
aboutKlinefelter’s Syndrome,where an extraX chromosome renders a person tall, eunuchoid,
and temperamentally unpleasant. I was more interested in historical than medical material. From
Zora’s manuscript I became acquainted with the hijras of India, the kwoluaatmwols of the
Sambia in Papua New Guinea, and the guevedoche of the Dominican Republic. Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs,writing inGermany in 1860, spoke of das dritte Geschlecht, the third gender.He called
himself a Uranist and believed that he had a female soul in a male body. Many cultures on earth
operated not with two genders but with three. And the third was always special, exalted,
endowedwithmystical gifts.
One cold drizzly night I gave it a try. Zora was out. It was a Sunday and we were off work. I
sat in a half-lotus position on the floor and closedmy eyes. Concentrating, prayerful, Iwaited for
my soul to leave my body. I tried to fall into a trance state or become an animal. I did my best,
but nothing happened. As far as special powers went, I didn’t seem to have any. A Tiresias I
wasn’t.
All of which brings me to a Friday night in late January. It was after midnight. Carmen was in
the tank, doing her EstherWilliams. Zora and Iwere in the dressing room,maintaining traditions
(thermos, cannabis). In the mermaid suit, Z. was none too mobile and stretched out across the
couch, a Piscean odalisque.Her tail hung over the armbolsters, dripping. Shewore aT-shirtover
her top. It hadEmilyDickinson on it.
Sounds from the tank were piped into the dressing room. Bob Presto was giving his spiel:
“Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for a truly electrifying experience?”
Zora and Imouthed alongwith the next line: “Are you ready for somehigh voltage?”
“I’ve had enough of this place,” saidZora. “I really have.”
“Shouldwequit?”
“We should.”
“Whatwouldwedo instead?”

“Mortgage banking.”
There was a splash in the tank. “But where is Ellie’s eel today? It seems to be hiding, ladies
and gentlemen. Could it be extinct? Maybe a fisherman caught it. That’s right, ladies and
gentleman,maybeEllie’s eel is for sale out onFisherman’sWharf.”
“Bob thinks he’s awitty person,” saidZora.
“Banish suchworries, ladies and gentlemen. Elliewouldn’t let us down.Here it is, folks.Have
a look at Ellie’s electric eel!”
A strange noise came over the speaker. A door banging. Bob Presto shouted: “Hey, what the
hell?You’renot allowed in here.”
And then the sound systemwent dead.
Eight years earlier, policemen had raided a blind pig on Twelfth Street in Detroit. Now, at the
start of 1975, they raided Sixty-Niners. The action provoked no riot. The patrons quickly
emptied the booths, fanning out into the street and hurrying off. We were led downstairs and
lined upwith the other girls.
“Well, hello there,” said the officerwhen he came tome. “Andhowoldmight you be?”
From the police station I was allowed one call. And so I finally broke down, gave in, and did
it: I called home.
My brother answered. “It’s me,” I said. “Cal.” Before Chapter Eleven had time to respond, it
all rushed out ofme. I told himwhere Iwas andwhat had happened. “Don’t tell MomandDad,”
I said.
“I can’t,” said Chapter Eleven. “I can’t tell Dad.” And then in an interrogative tone that
showed he could hardly believe it himself, my brother told me that there had been an accident
and thatMiltonwas dead.

AIR-RIDE

In my official capacity as assistant cultural attaché, but on an unofficial errand, I attended the
Warhol opening at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Within the famous Mies van der Rohe building, I
passed by the famous silk-screened faces of the famous pop artist. The Neue Nationalgalerie is a
wonderful artmuseumexcept for one thing: there’s nowhere to hang the art. I didn’t caremuch. I
stared out the glass walls at Berlin and felt stupid. Did I think there would be artists at an art
opening?Therewere only patrons, journalists, critics, and socialites.
After accepting a glass of wine from a passing waiter, I sat down in one of the leather and
chrome chairs that line the perimeter. The chairs are byMies, too.Yousee knockoffs everywhere
but these are original, worn-out by now, the black leather browning at the edges. I lit a cigar and
smoked, trying tomakemyself feel better.
The crowd chattered, circulating among the Maos and Marilyns. The high ceiling made the
acoustics muddy. Thin men with shaved heads darted by. Gray-haired women draped in natural
shawls showed their yellow teeth. Out the windows, the Staatsbibliotek was visible across the
way. The new Potsdamer Platz looked like a mall in Vancouver. In the distance construction
lights illuminated the skeletons of cranes. Traffic surged in the street below. I took a drag on my
cigar, squinting, and caught sight ofmy reflection in the glass.
I said before I look like aMusketeer. But I also tend to resemble
(especially inmirrors late at night) a faun. The arched eyebrows, thewicked grin, the flames in
the eyes. The cigar jutting up frombetweenmy teeth didn’t help.
Ahand tappedmeon the back. “Cigar faddist,” said awoman’s voice.
InMies’s black glass I recognized JulieKikuchi.
“Hey, this is Europe,” I countered, smiling. “Cigars aren’t a fad here.”
“Iwas into cigarsway back in college.”
“Ohyeah,” I challenged her. “Smoke one, then.”
She sat down in the chair next to mine and held out her hand. I took another cigar from my
jacket and handed it to her along with the cigar cutter and matches. Julie held the cigar under her
nose and sniffed. She rolled it between her fingers to test its moistness. Clipping off the end, she
put it in hermouth, struck amatch, and got it going, puffing serially.
“Mies van derRohe smoked cigars,” I said, bywayof promotion.
“Have you ever seen a picture ofMies van derRohe?” said Julie.
“Point taken.”
We sat side by side, not speaking, only smoking, facing the interior of the museum. Julie’s
right knee was jiggling. After a while I swiveled around so I was facing her. She turned her face
towardme.
“Nice cigar,” she allowed.
I leaned toward her. Julie leaned toward me. Our faces got closer until finally our foreheads
were almost touching. We stayed like that for ten or so seconds. Then I said, “Let me tell you
why I didn’t call you.”

I took a long breath and began: “There’s something you should knowaboutme.”

My story began in 1922 and there were concerns about the flow of oil. In 1975, when my story
ends, dwindling oil supplies again had people worried. Two years earlier the Organization of
Arab Oil Exporting Countries had begun an embargo. There were brownouts in the U.S. and
long lines at the pumps. The President announced that the lights on the White House Christmas
treewould not be lit, and the gas-tank lockwas born.
Scarcity was weighing on everybody’s mind in those days. The economy was in recession.
Across the nation families were eating dinner in the dark, the way we used to do on Seminole
under one lightbulb. My father, however, took a dim view of conservation policies. Milton had
come a long way from the days when he counted kilowatts. And so, on the night he set out to
ransomme, he remained at thewheel of an enormous, gas-guzzlingCadillac.
My father’s last Cadillac: a 1975 Eldorado. Painted a midnight blue that looked nearly black,
the car bore a strong resemblance to the Batmobile. Milton had all the doors locked. It was just
past 2 a.m. The roads in this downriver neighborhood were full of potholes, the curbs choked
with weeds and litter. The powerful high beams picked up sprays of broken glass in the street, as
well as nails, shards of metal, old hubcaps, tin cans, a flattened pair of men’s underpants.
Beneath an overpass a car had been stripped, tires gone, windshield shattered, all the chrome
detailing peeled away, and the engine missing. Milton stepped on the gas, ignoring the scarcity
not only of petroleum but of many other things as well. There was, for instance, a scarcity of
hope on Middlesex, where his wife no longer felt any stirrings in her spiritual umbilicus. There
was a scarcity of food in the refrigerator, of snacks in the cupboards, and of freshly ironed shirts
and clean socks in his dresser. There was a scarcity of social invitations and phone calls, as my
parents’ friends grew afraid to call a house that existed in a limbo between exhilaration and grief.
Against the pressure of all this scarcity, Milton flooded the Eldorado’s engine, and when that
wasn’t enough, he opened the briefcase on the seat beside him and stared in dashboard light at
the twenty-five thousand dollars in cash bundled inside.
Mymother had been awakewhenMilton slipped out of bed less than an hour earlier. Lying on
her back, she heard him dressing in the dark. She hadn’t asked him why he was getting up in the
middle of the night. Once upon a time, she would have, but not anymore. Since my
disappearance, daily routines had crumbled. Milton and Tessie often found themselves in the
kitchen at four in the morning, drinking coffee. Only when Tessie heard the front door close had
she become concerned. Next Milton’s car started up and began backing down the drive. My
mother listened until the engine faded away. She thought to herself with surprising calmness,
“Maybe he’s leaving for good.” To her list of runaway father and runaway daughter she now
added a further possibility: runaway husband.
Milton hadn’t told Tessiewhere hewas going for a number of reasons. First, hewas afraid she
would stop him. She would tell him to call the police, and he didn’t want to call the police. The
kidnapper had told him not to involve the law. Besides, Milton had had enough of cops and their
blasé attitude. The only way to get something done was to do it yourself. On top of all that, this
whole thing might be a wild-goose chase. If he told Tessie about it she would only worry. She
might call Zoë and then he’d get an earful from his sister. In short, Milton was doing what he
always didwhen it came to important decisions. Like the time he joined theNavy, or the time he
moved us all toGrosse Pointe,Milton didwhatever hewanted, confident that he knewbest.
After the last mysterious phone call, Milton had waited for another. The following Sunday
morning it came.
“Hello?”
“Goodmorning,Milton.”
“Listen,whoever you are. Iwant some answers.”
“I didn’t call to hearwhat youwant,Milton.What’s important iswhat Iwant.”

“Iwantmydaughter.Where is she?”
“She’s herewithme.”
The music, or singing, was still perceptible in the background. It reminded Milton of
something long ago.
“Howdo I knowyouhave her?”
“Whydon’t you askme a question? She’s toldme a lot about her family.Quite a lot.”
The rage surging through Milton at that moment was nearly unbearable. It was all he could do
to keep from smashing the phone against the desk. At the same time, he was thinking,
calculating.
“What’s the nameof the village her grandparents came from?”
“Just aminute.” The phonewas covered. Then the voice said, “Bithynios.”
Milton’s kneeswentweak.He sat down at the desk.
“Doyoubelievemeyet,Milton?”
“We went to these caverns in Tennessee once. A real rip-off tourist trap. What were they
called?”
Again the phonewas covered. In amoment the voice replied, “TheMammothonicsCaves.”
At that Milton shot up out of his chair again. His face darkened and he tugged at his collar to
help himself breathe.
“Now I have a question,Milton.”
“What?”
“Howmuch is itworth to you to get your daughter back?”
“Howmuchdoyouwant?”
“Is this business, now?Arewenegotiating a deal?”
“I’m ready tomake a deal.”
“Howexciting.”
“What do youwant?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“All right.”
“No,Milton,” the voice corrected, “you don’t understand. Iwant to bargain.”
“What?”
“Haggle,Milton. This is business.”
Milton was perplexed. He shook his head at the oddity of this request. But in the end he
fulfilled it.
“Okay. Twenty-five’s toomuch. I’ll pay thirteen thousand.”
“We’re talking about your daughter,Milton.Not hot dogs.”
“I haven’t got that kind of cash.”
“Imight take twenty-two thousand.”
“I’ll give you fifteen.”
“Twenty is as lowas I can go.”
“Seventeen ismy final offer.”
“Howabout nineteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen five.”
“Deal.”
The caller laughed. “Oh, that was fun, Milt.” Then, in a gruff voice: “But I want twenty-five.”
Andhe hung up.
Back in 1933, a disembodied voice had spoken to my grandmother through the heating grate.
Now, forty-twoyears later, a disguised voice spoke tomy father over the phone.
“Goodmorning,Milton.”
Therewas themusic again, the faint singing.
“I’ve got themoney,” saidMilton. “Now Iwantmygirl.”
“Tomorrownight,” the kidnapper said.And then he toldMilton

where to leave themoney, andwhere towait forme to be released.

Across the lowland downriver plainGrandTrunk rose beforeMilton’s Cadillac. The train station
was still in use in 1975, though just barely. The once-opulent terminal was now only a shell.
False Amtrak façades concealed the flaking, peeling walls. Most corridors were blocked off.
Meanwhile, all around the operative core, the great old building continued to fall into ruin, the
Guastavino tiles in the Palm Court falling, splintering on the ground, the immense barbershop
now a junk room, the skylights caved in, heaped with filth. The office tower attached to the
terminal was now a thirteen-story pigeon coop, all five hundred of its windows smashed, as if
with diligence. At this same train station my grandparents had arrived a half century earlier.
Lefty andDesdemona, one time only, had revealed their secret here to Sourmelina; and now their
son,whonever learned it,was pulling in behind the station, also secretly.
A scene like this, a ransom scene, calls for a noirish mood: shadows, sinister silhouettes. But
the sky wasn’t cooperating. We were having one of our pink nights. They happened every so
often, depending on temperature and the level of chemicals in the air. When particulate matter in
the atmosphere was sufficient, light from the ground got trapped and reflected back, and the
entire Detroit sky would become the soft pink of cotton candy. It never got dark on pink nights,
but the light was nothing like daytime. Our pink nights glowed with the raw luminescence of the
night shift, of factories running around the clock. Sometimes the sky would become as bright as
Pepto-Bismol, but more often it was a muted, a fabric-softener color. Nobody thought it was
strange. Nobody said anything about it. We had all grown up with pink nights. They were not a
natural phenomenon, but theywere natural to us.
Under this strange nocturnal skyMilton pulled his car as close to the train platform as possible
and stopped. He shut off the engine. Taking the briefcase, he got out into the still, crystalline
winter air of Michigan. All the world was frozen, the distant trees, the telephone lines, the grass
in the yards of the downriver houses, the ground itself. Out on the river a freighter bellowed.
Here therewere no sounds, the station completely deserted at night.Milton had on his
tasseled black loafers. Dressing in the dark, he had decided theywere the easiest to slip on.He
was also wearing his car coat, beige and dingy, with a muff of fur at the collar. Against the cold
he had worn a hat, a gray felt Borsalino, with a red feather in the black band. An old-timer’s hat
now in 1975. With hat, briefcase, and loafers, Milton might have been on his way to work. And
certainly he was walking quickly. He climbed the metal steps to the train platform. He headed
along it, looking for the trash can where he was supposed to drop the briefcase. The kidnapper
said itwould have an X chalked on the lid.
Milton hurried along the platform, the tassels on his loafers bouncing, the tiny feather in his
hat rippling in the cold wind. It would not be strictly truthful to say that he was afraid. Milton
Stephanides did not admit to being afraid. The physiological manifestations of fear, the racing
heart, the torched armpits, went on in him without official acknowledgment. He wasn’t alone
among his generation in this. There were lots of fathers who shouted when they were afraid or
scolded their children to deflect blame from themselves. It’s possible that such qualities were
indispensable in the generation thatwon thewar. A lack of introspection was good for bolstering
your courage, but in the last months and weeks it had done damage to Milton. Throughout my
disappearance Milton had kept up a brave front while doubts worked invisibly inside him. He
was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his
thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the
few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply,
had ceased to think things through.Whatwas he doing out there on the dark train platform?Why
did he go out there alone?Wewould never be able to explain it adequately.
It didn’t take him long to find the trash can marked with chalk. Swiftly Milton lifted its
triangular green lid and laid the briefcase inside. But when he tried to pull his arm back out,
something wouldn’t let him: it was his hand. Since Milton had stopped thinking things through,
his body was now doing the work for him. His hand seemed to be saying something. It was

voicing reservations. “What if the kidnapper doesn’t set Callie free?” the hand was saying. But
Milton answered, “There’s no time to think about that now.”Again he tried to pull his armout of
the trash can, but his hand stubbornly resisted:
“What if the kidnapper takes this money and then asks for more?” asked the hand. “That’s the
chance we’ll have to take,” Milton snapped back, and with all his strength pulled his arm out of
the trash can. His hand lost its grip; the briefcase fell onto the refuse inside. Milton hurried back
across the platform (dragging his handwith him) and got into theCadillac.
He started the engine. He turned on the heat, warming the car up for me. He leaned forward
staring through the windshield, expecting me to appear any minute. His hand was still smarting,
muttering to itself. Milton thought about the briefcase lying out in the trash can. His mind filled
with the image of the money inside. Twenty-five grand! He saw the individual stacks of
hundred-dollar bills; the repeating face of Benjamin Franklin in the doubled mirrors of all that
cash. Milton’s throat went dry; a spasm of anxiety known to all Depression babies gripped his
body; and in the next second hewas jumping out of the car again, running back to the platform.
This guywanted to do business?ThenMiltonwould showhimhow to do business!Hewanted
to negotiate? How about this! (Milton was climbing the steps now, loafers ringing against the
metal.) Instead of leaving twenty-five thousand bucks, why not leave twelve thousand five
hundred? This way I’ll have some leverage. Half now, half later. Why hadn’t he thought of this
before?What the hell was thematterwith him?Hewas under toomuch strain . . . No sooner had
he reached the platform, however, than my father stopped cold. Less than twenty yards away, a
dark figure in a stocking cap was reaching into the trash can. Milton’s blood froze. He didn’t
know whether to retreat or advance. The kidnapper tried to pull the briefcase out, but it wouldn’t
fit through the swinging door. He went behind the can and lifted up the entire metal lid. In the
chemical brightness Milton saw the patriarchal beard, the pale, waxen cheeks, and—most
tellingly—the tiny five-foot-four frame. FatherMike.
Father Mike? FatherMikewas the kidnapper? Impossible. Incredible! But therewas no doubt.
Standing on the platformwas themanwho had once been engaged tomymother andwho, atmy
father’s hands, had had her stolen away. Taking the ransom was the former seminarian who had
married Milton’s sister, Zoë, instead, a choice that had sentenced him to a life of invidious
comparisons, of Zoë always askingwhyhe hadn’t invested in the stockmarketwhenMilton
had, or bought goldwhenMilton had, or stashedmoney away in theCayman Islands asMilton
had; a choice that had condemned Father Mike to being a poor relation, forced to endure
Milton’s lack of respect while accepting his hospitality, and compelling him to carry a dining
room chair into the living room if he wanted to sit. Yes, it was a great shock for Milton to
discover his brother-in-law on the train platform. But it also made sense. It was clear now why
the kidnapper had wanted to haggle over the price, why he wanted to feel like a businessman for
once, and, alas, how he had known about Bithynios. Explained, too, were why the telephone
calls had come on Sundays, whenever Tessie was at church, and the music in the background,
which Milton now identified as the priests chanting the liturgy. Long ago, my father had stolen
Father’s Mike’s fiancée and married her himself. The child of the union, me, had poured salt in
thewoundbybaptizing the priest in reverse.NowFatherMikewas trying to get even.
But not if Milton could help it. “Hey!” he shouted, putting his hands on his hips. “Just what
the hell are you trying to pull, Mike?” Father Mike didn’t answer. He looked up and, out of
priestly habit, smiled benignantly at Milton, his white teeth appearing in the great bush of black
beard. But already he was backing away, stepping on crushed cups and other litter, hugging the
briefcase to his chest like a packed parachute. Three or four steps backward, smiling that gentle
smile, before he turned and fled in earnest. He was small but quick. Like a shot he disappeared
down a set of stairs on the other side of the platform. In pink light Milton saw him crossing the
train tracks to his car, a bright green (“Grecian green” according to the catalogue), fuel-efficient
AMCGremlin.AndMilton ran back to theCadillac to followhim.
It wasn’t like a car chase in the movies. There was no swerving, no near collisions. It was,
after all, a car chase between a Greek Orthodox priest and a middle-aged Republican. As they

sped (relatively speaking) away from Grand Trunk, heading in the direction of the river, Father
Mike and Milton never exceeded the limit by more than ten miles per hour. Father Mike didn’t
want to attract the police. Milton, realizing that his brother-in-law had nowhere to go, was
content to followhim to thewater. So theywent along in their pokey fashion, theweirdly shaped
Gremlinmaking rolling stops at traffic signs
and the Eldorado, a little bit later, doing the same. Down nameless streets, past junk houses,
across a dead-end piece of land created by the freeways and the river, Father Mike unwisely
attempted to escape. It was just like always; Aunt Zo should have been there to holler at Father
Mike, because only an idiot would have headed toward the river instead of the highway. Every
street he could possibly take would go nowhere. “I got you now,” Milton exulted. The Gremlin
made a right. The Eldorado made a right. The Gremlin made a left, and so did the Cadillac.
Milton’s tankwas full.He could trackFatherMike all night if he had to.
Feeling confident, Milton adjusted the heat, which was a little too high. He turned on the
radio. He let a little more space get between the Gremlin and the Eldorado. When he looked up
again, the Gremlin was making another right. Thirty seconds later, when Milton turned the same
corner, he saw the sweeping expanse of the Ambassador Bridge. And his confidence crumbled.
This was not just like always. Tonight, his brother-in-law the priest, who spent his life in the
fairy taleworld of theChurch, dressed up like Liberace, had figured things out for once.As soon
as Milton saw the bridge strung like a giant, glittering harp over the river, panic seized his soul.
With horror Milton understood Father Mike’s plan. As Chapter Eleven had intended when he
threatened to dodge the draft, Father Mike was heading for Canada! Like Jimmy Zizmo the
bootlegger, he was heading for the lawless, liberal hideaway to the north! He was planning to
take themoney out of the country.Andhewas no longer going slow.
Yes, despite its thimble-sized engine that sounded like a sewing machine, the Gremlin was
managing to accelerate. Leaving the noman’s-land around Grand Trunk Station, it had now
entered the bright, Customs-controlled, high-traffic area of the United States–Canada border.
Tall, carbon-gas streetlights irradiated the Gremlin, whose bright green color now looked even
more acid than ever. Putting distance between itself and theEldorado (like the Joker’s car getting
away from the Batmobile), the Gremlin joined the trucks and cars converging around the
entrance to the great suspension bridge. Milton stepped on it. The huge engine of the Cadillac
roared; white smoke spumed from the tailpipe. At this point the two cars had become exactly
what cars are supposed to be; they were extensions of their owners. The Gremlin was small and
nimble, as FatherMike
was; it disappeared and reappeared in traffic much as he did behind the icon screen at church.
The Eldorado, substantial and boat-like—as was Milton—proved difficult to maneuver in the
late-night bridge traffic. There were huge semis. There were passenger cars heading for the
casinos and strip clubs in Windsor. In all this traffic Milton lost sight of the Gremlin. He pulled
into a line and waited. Suddenly, six cars ahead, he saw Father Mike dart out of line, cutting off
another car and slipping into a toll booth.Milton rolled downhis automaticwindow. Sticking his
head out into the cold, exhaust-clouded air, he shouted, “Stop that man! He’s got my money!”
TheCustoms officer didn’t hear him, however.Milton could see the officer asking FatherMike a
few questions and then—No! Stop!—he was waving Father Mike through. At that point Milton
started hammering on his horn.
The blasts erupting from beneath the Eldorado’s hood might have been emanating from
Milton’s own chest. His blood pressure was surging, and inside his car coat his body began to
drip with sweat. He had been confident of bringing Father Mike to justice in the U.S. courts. But
who knew what would happen once he got to Canada? Canada with its pacifism and its
socialized medicine! Canada with its millions of French speakers! It was like . . . like . . . like a
foreign country! Father Mike might become a fugitive over there, living it up in Quebec. He
might disappear into Saskatchewan and roam with the moose. It wasn’t only losing the money
that enraged Milton. In addition to absconding with twenty-five thousand dollars and giving
Milton false hopes of my return, Father Mike was abandoning his own family. Brotherly

protectiveness mixed with financial and paternal pain in Milton’s heaving breast. “Youdon’t do
this to my sister, you hear me?” Milton fruitlessly shouted from the driver’s seat of his huge,
boxed-in car. Next he called after Father Mike, “Hey, dumbass. Haven’t you ever heard of
commissions? Soon as you change that money you’re going to lose five percent!” Fulminating at
the wheel, his progress curtailed by semis in front and strip-clubbers behind, Milton squirmed
and hollered, his fury unbearable.
My father’s honking hadn’t gone unnoticed, however. Customs agents were used to the horn-
blowing of impatient drivers. They had a way of handling them. As soon as Milton pulled up to
the booth, the official signaled him to pull over.
Through his openwindowMilton shouted, “There’s a guywho
just came through. He stole some money of mine. Can you have him stopped at the other end?
He’s driving aGremlin.”
“Pull your car over there, sir.”
“He stole twenty-five thousand dollars!”
“We can talk about that as soon as you pull over and get out of your car, sir.”
“He’s trying to take it out of the country!” Milton explained one last time. But the Customs
agent continued to direct him to the inspection area. Finally Milton gave up. Withdrawing his
face from the open window, he took hold of the steering wheel and obediently began pulling
over to the empty lane. As soon as he was clear of the Customs booth, however, he stomped a
tasseled loafer downon the accelerator and the squealingCadillac rocketed away.
Now it was something like a car chase. For out on the bridge, Father Mike, too, had stepped
on the gas. Snaking between the cars and trucks, he was racing toward the international divide,
while Milton pursued, flashing his brights to get people out of the way. The bridge rose up over
the river in a graceful parabola, its steel cables strung with red lights. The Cadillac’s tires
hummed over its striated surface. Milton had his foot to the floor, engaging what he called the
goose gear. And now the difference between a luxury automobile and a newfangled cartoon car
began to show itself. The Cadillac engine roared with power. Its eight cylinders fired, the
carburetor sucking in vast quantities of fuel. The pistons thumped and jumped and the drive
wheel spun like mad, as the long, superhero car passed others as if they were standing still.
Seeing the Eldorado coming so fast, other drivers moved aside. Milton cut straight through the
traffic until he spotted the greenGremlin up ahead. “Somuch for your high gasmileage,”Milton
cried. “Sometimes you need a little power!”
By this time Father Mike saw the Eldorado looming, too. He floored the accelerator, but the
Gremlin’s engine was already working at capacity. The car vibrated wildly but picked up no
speed. On and on came the Cadillac. Milton didn’t take his foot off the pedal until his front
bumper was nearly touching the Gremlin’s rear. They were traveling now at seventy miles per
hour. Father Mike looked up to see Milton’s avenging eyes filling the rearview mirror. Milton,
gazing ahead into the Gremlin’s interior, saw a slice of Father Mike’s face. The priest seemed to
be asking for forgiveness, or explaining his actions.
Therewas a strange sadness in his eyes, aweakness,whichMilton could not interpret.
. . . And now I have to enter Father Mike’s head, I’m afraid. I feel myself being sucked in and
I can’t resist. The front part of his mind is a whirl of fear, greed, and desperate thoughts of
escape. All to be expected. But going deeper in, I discover things about him I never knew.
There’s no serenity, for instance, none at all, no closeness to God. The gentleness Father Mike
had, his smiling silence at family meals, the way he would bend down to be face-to-face with
children (not far for him, but still)—all these attributes existed apart from any communication
with a transcendent realm. They were just a passiveaggressive method of survival, the result of
having a wife with a voice as loud as Aunt Zo’s. Yes, echoing inside Father Mike’s head is all
the shouting Aunt Zo has done over the years, ever since she was pregnant nonstop in Greece
without a washer or dryer. I can hear: “Do you call this a life?” And: “If you’ve got the ear of
God, tellHim to sendme a check for the drapes.”And: “Maybe theCatholics have the right idea.
Priests shouldn’t have families.” At church Michael Antoniou is called Father. He is deferred to,

catered to. At church he has the power to forgive sins and consecrate the host. But as soon as he
steps through the front door of their duplex in Harper Woods, Father Mike suffers an immediate
drop in status. At home he is nobody. At home he is bossed around, complained about, ignored.
And so it was not so difficult to see why Father Mike decided to flee his marriage, and why he
neededmoney . . .
. . . none of which, however, could Milton read in his brother-in-law’s eyes. And in the next
moment those eyes changed again. FatherMike had shifted his gaze back to the road,where they
met a terrifying sight. The red brake lights of the car in front of him were flashing. Father Mike
was going much too fast to stop in time. He stomped on his brakes, but it was too late: the
Grecian green Gremlin slammed into the car ahead. The Eldorado came next. Milton braced
himself for the impact. But it was then an amazing thing happened. He heard metal crunching
and glass shattering, but this was coming from the cars ahead. As for the Cadillac itself, it never
stopped moving forward. It climbed right up Father Mike’s car. The weird, slanted back end of
theGremlin acted as a kind of ramp, and in the next secondMilton realized hewas airborne. The
midnight
blue Eldorado rose above the accident on the bridge. It sailed up over the guardrails, through
the cables, plunging off themiddle span of theAmbassadorBridge.
The Eldorado fell hood first, gathering speed. Through the tinted windshield Milton could see
theDetroit River below; but only briefly. In those last seconds, as life prepared to leave his body,
it withdrew its laws, too. Instead of falling into the river, the Cadillac swooped upward and
leveled itself. Milton was surprised but very pleased. He didn’t remember the salesman’s having
mentioned anything about a flight feature. Even better, Milton hadn’t paid extra for it. As the car
floated away from the bridge he was smiling. “Now, this is what I call an Air-Ride,” he said to
himself. The Eldorado was flying high above the river, wasting who knew how much gas. The
sky outside was pink while the lights on the dashboard were green. There were all sorts of
switches and gauges. Milton had never noticed most of them before. It looked more like an
airplane cockpit than a car, and Milton was at the controls, Milton was flying his last Cadillac
over the Detroit River. It didn’t matter what eyewitnesses saw, or that the newspapers reported
the next day that the Cadillac was part of the ten-car pileup on the bridge. Sitting back in the
comfortable leather bucket seat, Milton Stephanides could see the downtown skyline
approaching. Music was playing on the radio, an old Artie Shaw tune, why not, and Milton
watched the red light on the Penobscot Building blinking on and off. After a certain amount of
trial and error, he learned how to steer the flying car. It wasn’t a matter of turning the wheel but
of willing it, as in a lucid dream. Milton brought the car in over land. He passed above Cobo
Hall. He circled the Top of the Pontch, where he had once taken me to lunch. For some reason
Milton was no longer afraid of heights. He guessed that this was because his death was
imminent; there was nothing left to fear. Without vertigo or perspiration, he gazed down at
Grand Circus Park until he spotted what was left of the wheels of Detroit; and after that he
headed for the West Side to look for the old Zebra Room. Back on the bridge, my father’s head
had been crushed against the steering wheel. The detective who later informed my mother of the
accident, when asked about the condition of Milton’s body, said only, “It was consistent with a
crash of a vehicle going at seventy-plus miles an hour.” Milton no longer had any brain waves,
so itwas understandablewhy, hovering in theCadillac, hemight have forgotten that the
Zebra Room had burned down long ago. He was mystified at not being able to find it. All that
was left of the old neighborhood was empty land. It seemed that most of the city was gone, as he
gazed down. Empty lot followed empty lot. But Milton was wrong about this, too. Corn was
sprouting up in some places, and grass was coming back. It looked like farmland down there.
“Might as well give it back to the Indians,” Milton thought. “Maybe the Potowatomies would
want it. They could put up a casino.” The sky had turned to cotton candy and the city had
become a plain again. But another red light was blinking now. Not on the Penobscot Building;
inside the car. Itwas one of the gaugesMilton had never seen before.He knewwhat it indicated.
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 hewas 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 getmeback and still Iwasmissing.
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 thewater 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 toFloridawithAunt Zo.Andhe got out threemonths beforeCadillac, inApril 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 ofAmerican 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 Iwill always remain a girl. There’s a kind of purity in that, the purity of childhood.

THELASTSTOP

It sort of still applies,” said JulieKikuchi.
“It does not,” I said.
“It’s in the sameballpark.”
“What I told you about myself has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay or closeted. I’ve
always liked girls. I liked girlswhen I was a girl.”
“Iwouldn’t be somekind of last stop for you?”
“More like a first stop.”
Julie laughed. She still had notmade a decision. Iwaited. 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 aminute,” I said. “Are you turning off the lights because of you or because ofme?”
“Because ofme.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ma shy,modestOriental lady. Just don’t expectme to bathe you.”
“Nobathing?”
“Not unless you do aZorba 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 toomuch.Wegot under the covers and held each other, petrified, happy.
“Imight be your last stop, too,” I said, clinging to her. “Did you ever think of that?”
And JulieKikuchi answered, “It crossedmymind.”

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, andwanted 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? Yearsago, 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 towitnessme so changed.Chapter Eleven’s eyeswidened.
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 bellbottoms, his granny glasses. Now he wore
brown hip-huggers. Hiswide-lapel shirt shimmered under the fluorescent lights. The sixties have
never really come to an end. They’re still going on right now inGoa. But by 1975 the sixties had
finally ended formybrother.
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,”mybrother repeated inmy 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’sMom?”
“She’s all right. She’s holding up. She’s pissed atMilt.”
“Pissed?”
“For going out there. For not telling her. She’s glad you’re coming home. That’s what she’s
focusing on.Youcoming 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 askedmenothing aboutmy time in SanFrancisco or at
Sixty-Niners. Only when we were on the plane and Chapter Eleven had had a few beers did he
allude tomy condition. “So, I guess I can’t call youCallie anymore.”
“Callmewhatever youwant.”
“Howabout ‘bro’?”
“Finewithme.”
He was quiet, blinking. There was the usual lag time while he thought. “I never heard much
aboutwhat happened out there at that
clinic. Iwas up inMarquette. Iwasn’t talking toMomandDad thatmuch.”
“I ran away.”
“Why?
“Theywere going to cutmeup.”
I could feel him staring at me, with that outer glaze that concealed considerable mental
activity. “It’s a little bitweird forme,” he said.
“It’sweird forme, too.”
Amoment later he let out a laugh. “Hah!Weird! Pretty fuckingweird.”
Iwas shakingmyhead in comic despair. “Youcan 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.”
“Whynot?”
“Youhave to haveDHT to go bald.”
“Huh,” said Chapter Eleven, feeling his scalp. “I guess I’m a little heavy on the DHT. I guess
I’mwhat they’d callDHT-rich.”
We reached Detroit a little after six in the morning. The smashedup Eldorado had been towed
to a police yard. Waiting in the airport parking lot was our mother’s car, the “Florida Special.”
The lemoncolored Cadillac was all we had left ofMilton. It was already beginning to take on the
attributes of a relic. The driver’s seat was sunken from the weight of his body. Youcould 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.Wepassed the giantUniroyal tire and the threadywoods 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 toldmybrother.
“It’ll take too long.”
“We’ve got time. Iwant 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 theLodgeFreeway 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’tmockmygrief by being sparkling orwinsome.
Downtown looked the same, only emptier. Youcouldn’t knock down the skyscraperswhen 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
mybrother humoredme. Soonwe 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 blockwould 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.
“Arewehaving a makaria forDad?” I asked.
“Yeah.Thewhole deal.”
“Where?At theGrecianGardens?”
Chapter Eleven laughed. “Youkidding?Nobodywanted to comedownhere.”

“I like it here,” I said. “I loveDetroit.”
“Yeah?Well,welcomehome.”
He had turned back onto Jefferson for the long miles through the blighted East Side. A wig
shop. VanityDancing, 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
shopswere closed,Kresge’s,Woolworth’s, Sanders IceCream. Itwas cold out.Notmany 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 takemy 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 amanwithout becomingTheMan. Even if I didn’twant 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 inwinter, so thatwe could see all theway to the frozen river. Iwas thinking howamazing 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 andwere dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time,
unnoticed, and itwas the thing that reallymattered.
What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death. Seen this way, my bodily
metamorphosiswas a small event.Only the pimpmight 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.Mybodywas reacting to the sight of home.Happy sparkswere shooting off insideme. It
was a canine feeling, full of eager love, and dumb to tragedy.Herewasmyhome,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.
Youcould 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-fimagazines.
“Let’s not get carried away,” I answered. “Feel free to carrymy 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 tome and nursedme and broughtme up. She had knownmebefore I knewmyself 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 abovemyupper lip.
There was a criminal aspect to my appearance, in Tessie’s eyes. She couldn’t help herself
thinking thatmy arrivalwas part of some settling of accounts, thatMilton 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’mhome.”
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 bywhat had happened tomebut shewas going to endure it formy 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: “Whydid you run away, honey?”
“I had to.”
“Don’t you think itwould have been easier just to stay thewayyouwere?”
I liftedmy face and looked intomymother’s eyes.And I told her: “This is theway Iwas.”

Youwill want to know: How did we get used to things? What happened to our memories? Did
Calliope have to die in order to make room for Cal? To all these questions I offer the same
truism: it’s amazing what you can get used to. After I returned from San Francisco and started
living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that
important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels
from infancy to adulthood. In most ways I remained the person I’d always been. Even now,
though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter. I’m still the one who
remembers to call her every Sunday. I’m the one she recounts her growing list of ailments to.
Like any good daughter, I’ll be the one to nurse her in her old
age. We still discuss what’s wrong with men; we still, on visits back home, have our hair done
together. Bowing to the changing times, the Golden Fleece now cuts men’s hair as well as
women’s. (And I’ve finally let dear old Sophie giveme that short haircut she alwayswanted.)
But all that came later. Right then, we were in a hurry. It was almost ten. The limousine from
the funeral parlor would be arriving in thirty-five minutes. “You better get cleaned up,” Tessie
said to me. The funeral did what funerals are supposed to do: it gave us no time to dwell on our
feelings. Hooking her arm in mine, Tessie led me into the house. Middlesex, too, was in
mourning. The mirror in the den was covered by a black cloth. There were black streamers on
the sliding doors. All the old immigrant touches. Aside from that, the house seemed unnaturally
still and dim. As always, the enormous windows brought the outdoors in, so that it was winter in
the living room; snow lay all around us.
“I guess you canwear that suit,”Chapter Eleven said tome. “It looks pretty appropriate.”
“I doubt you even have a suit.”
“I don’t. I didn’t go to a stuck-up private school. Where did you get that thing, anyway? It
smells.”
“At least it’s a suit.”
While my brother and I teased each other, Tessie watched closely. She was picking up the cue
from my brother that this thing that had happened to me might be handled lightly. She wasn’t
sure she could do this herself, but shewaswatching how the younger generation pulled it off.
Suddenly there was a strange noise, like an eagle’s cry. The intercom on the living room wall
crackled.Avoice shrieked, “Yoo-hoo!Tessie honey!”
The immigrant touches, of course, weren’t around the house because of Tessie. The person

shrieking over the intercomwas none other thanDesdemona.
Patient reader, you may have been wondering what happened to my grandmother. You may
have noticed that, shortly after she climbed into bed forever, Desdemona began to fade away.
But that was intentional. I allowed Desdemona to slip out of my narrative because, to be honest,
in the dramatic years ofmy transformation, she
slipped out of my attention most of the time. For the last five years she had remained
bedridden in the guest house. During my time at Baker & Inglis, while I was falling in love with
the Object, I had remained aware of my grandmother only in the vaguest of ways. I saw Tessie
preparing her meals and carrying trays out to the guest house. Every evening I saw my father
make a dutiful visit to her perpetual sickroom with its hot-water bottles and pharmaceutical
supplies. At those times Milton spoke to his mother in Greek, with increasing difficulty. During
the war Desdemona had failed to teach her son to write Greek. Now in her old age she
recognized with horror that he was forgetting how to speak it as well. Occasionally, I brought
Desdemona’s food trays out and for a few minutes would reacquaint myself with her time-
capsule life. The framed photograph of her burial plot still stood on her bedside table for
reassurance.
Tessiewent to the intercom. “Yes, yia yia,” she said. “Did you need something?”
“My feet they are terrible today.Did you get theEpsomsalts?”
“Yes.I’ll bring them to you.”
“WhyGodno let yia yia die, Tessie? Everybody’s dead! Everybody but yia yia! Yia yia she
is too old to live now.Andwhat doesGoddo?Nothing.”
“Are you finishedwith your breakfast?”
“Yes, thank you, honey.But the prunes theywere not good ones today.”
“Those are the sameprunes you always have.”
“Somethingmaybe it happen to them.Get a newbox, please, Tessie. TheSunkist.”
“Iwill.”
“Okay, honey mou. Thank you, honey.”
My mother silenced the intercom and turned back to me. “Yia yia’s not doing so good
anymore. Her mind’s going. Since you’ve been away she’s really gone downhill. We told her
about Milt.” Tessie faltered, near tears. “About what happened. Yia yia couldn’t stop crying. I
thought shewas going to die right then and there.And then a fewhours later she askedmewhere
Miltwas. She forgot the entire thing.Maybe it’s better thatway.”
“Is she going to the funeral?”
“She can barelywalk.Mrs. Papanikolas is coming towatch her.
She doesn’t know where she is half the time.” Tessie smiled sadly, shaking her head. “Who
would have thought shewould outliveMilt?” She teared up again and forced the tears back.
“Can I go and see her?”
“Youwant to?”
“Yes.”
Tessie looked apprehensive. “Whatwill you tell her?”
“What should I tell her?”
For another few seconds my mother was silent, thinking. Then she shrugged. “It doesn’t
matter.Whatever you say shewon’t remember. Take this out to her. Shewants to soak her feet.”
Carrying the Epsom salts and a piece of the baklava wrapped in cellophane, I came out of the
house and walked along the portico past the courtyard and bathhouse to the guesthouse behind.
The door was unlocked. I opened it and stepped in. The only light in the room came from the
television,whichwas turned up extremely loud. Facingmewhen I enteredwas the old portrait of
Patriarch Athenagoras that Desdemona had saved from the yard sale years ago. In a birdcage by
thewindow, a green parakeet, the last survivingmember ofmy grandparents’ former aviary,was
moving back and forth on its balsa wood perch. Other familiar objects and furnishings were still
in evidence, Lefty’s rebetika records, the brass coffee table, and, of course, the silkworm box,
sitting in the middle of the engraved circular top. The box was now so stuffed with mementos it

wouldn’t shut. Inside were snapshots, old letters, precious buttons, worry beads. Somewhere
below all that, I knew, were two long braids of hair, tied with crumbling black ribbons, and a
wedding crownmade of ship’s rope. Iwanted to look at these things, but as I stepped farther into
the roommyattentionwas diverted by the grand spectacle on the bed.
Desdemona was propped up, regally, against a beige corduroy cushion known as a husband.
The arms of this cushion encircled her. Protruding from the elastic pocket on the outside of one
arm was an aspirator, along with two or three pill bottles. Desdemona was in a pale white
nightgown, the bedcovers pulled up to her waist, and in her lap sat one of her Turkish atrocity
fans. None of this was surprising. It was what Desdemona had done with her hair that shocked
me.Onhearing aboutMilton’s death, she had removed her hairnet,
tearing at the masses of hair that tumbled down. Her hair was completely gray but still very
fine and, in the light coming from the television, it appeared to be almost blond. The hair fell
over her shoulders and spread out over her body like the hair of Botticelli’s Venus. The face
framed by this astonishing cascade, however, was not that of a beautiful young woman but that
of an old widow with a square head and dried-out mouth. In the unmoving air of the room and
the smell ofmedicine and skin salves I could feel theweight of the time she had spent in this bed
waiting and hoping to die. I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a
true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness. The lesson of
Desdemona’s suffering and rejection of life insisted that old agewould not continue themanifold
pleasures of youth but would instead be a long trial that slowly robbed life of even its smallest,
simplest joys. Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the
thing that lets us say goodbye.
As I was standing there taking my grandmother in, Desdemona suddenly turned her head and
noticed me. Her hand went up to her breast. With a frightened expression she reared back into
her pillows and shouted, “Lefty!”
Now Iwas the onewhowas shocked. “No, yia yia. It’s not papou. It’sme.Cal.”
“Who?”
“Cal.” I paused. “Yourgrandson.”
This wasn’t fair, of course. Desdemona’s memory was no longer sharp. But I wasn’t helping
her out any.
“Cal?”
“They calledmeCalliopewhen Iwas little.”
“Youlook likemyLefty,” she said.
“I do?”
“I thought youweremyhusband coming to takeme to heaven.” She laughed for the first time.
“I’mMilt andTessie’s kid.”
As quickly as it had come, the humor left Desdemona’s face and she looked sad and
apologetic. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you, honey.”
“I brought you these.” I held out theEpsomsalts and baklava.
“WhyTessie isn’t coming?”
“She has to get dressed.”
“Dressed forwhy?”
“For the funeral.”
Desdemona gave a cry and clutched her breast again. “Whodied?”
I didn’t answer. Instead I turned down the volume on the television. Then, pointing at the
birdcage, I said, “I rememberwhen you used to have about twenty birds.”
She looked over at the cage but said nothing.
“You used to live in the attic. On Seminole. Remember? That’s when you got all the birds.
Yousaid they reminded you ofBursa.”
At the sound of the name, Desdemona smiled again. “In Bursa we have all kind of birds.
Green, yellow, red.All kind. Little birds but very beautiful. Likemade fromglass.”
“Iwant to go there. Remember that church there? Iwant to go and fix it up someday.”

“Milton is going to fix it. I keep telling him.”
“If he doesn’t do it, Iwill.”
Desdemona looked atme amoment as ifmeasuringmy ability to fulfill this promise. Then she
said, “I don’t remember you, honey, but please can you fix for yia yia theEpsomsalts?”
I got the foot basin and filled it with warm water from the bathtub faucet. I sprinkled in the
soaking salts and brought it back into the bedroom.
“Put it next the chair, dolly mou.”
I did so.
“Nowhelp yia yia to get out of bed.”
Coming closer, I bent down. I slid each of her legs out of the covers, turning her. Putting her
armovermy shoulder, I pulled her to her feet for the shortwalk to the chair.
“I can’t do nothing anymore,” she lamented on theway. “I’m too old, honey.”
“You’redoing okay.”
“No, I can’t remember nothing. I have aches and pains.Myheart it is not good.”
We had reached the chair now. I maneuvered around behind her to ease her down. Coming
around to the front again, I lifted her swollen, blue-veined feet into the sudsy water. Desdemona
murmuredwith pleasure. She closed her eyes.
For the next few minutes Desdemona was silent, luxuriating in the warm foot bath. Color
returned to her ankles and rose up her legs. This rosiness disappeared under the hem of her
nightgown but, a minute later, peeked out the collar. The flush spread up to her face, and when
she opened her eyes therewas a clarity in them that had been absent before. She stared straight at
me.And then she shouted, “Calliope!”
She held her hand to hermouth. “Mana! What happen to you?”
“I grew up,” was all I said. I hadn’t intended to tell her but now it was out. I had an idea it
wouldn’tmake any difference. Shewouldn’t remember this conversation.
She was still examining me, the lenses of her glasses magnifying her eyes. Had she had all her
wits, Desdemona could not possibly have fathomed what I was saying. But in her senility she
somehow accommodated the information. She lived now amid memories and dreams, and in this
state the old village stories grewnear again.
“You’rea boy now,Calliope?”
“More or less.”
She took this in. “My mother she use to tell me something funny,” she said. “In the village,
long time ago, they use to have sometimes babies who were looking like girls. Then—fifteen,
sixteen—they are looking like boys!Mymother tellme this but I never believe.”
“It’s a genetic thing. The doctor I went to says it happens in little villages. Where everyone
marries each other.”
“Dr. Phil he used to talk about this, too.”
“He did?”
“It’s allmy fault.” She shook her head grimly.
“Whatwas?Whatwas your fault?”
She was not crying exactly. Her tear ducts were dried up and no moisture rolled down her
cheeks. But her facewas going through themotions, her shoulders quaking.
“The priests say even first cousins never shouldmarry,” she said. “Second cousins is okay, but
you have to ask first the archbishop.” She was looking away now, trying to remember it all.
“Even if you want to marry your godparents’ son, you can’t. I thought it was only something for
the Church. I didn’t know it was because what can happen to the babies. I was just stupid girl
from village.” She went on in that vein for a while, castigating herself. She had momentarily
forgotten
that I was there or that she was speaking aloud. “And then Dr. Phil he tell me terrible things. I
was so scared I had an operation!Nomore babies. ThenMilton he have children and again Iwas
scared.But nothing happen. So I think, after so long time, everythingwas okay.”
“What are you saying, yia yia? Papou was your cousin?”

“Third cousin.”
“That’s all right.”
“Not third cousin only.Also brother.”
Myheart skipped. “Papou was your brother?”
“Yes,honey,”Desdemona saidwith infiniteweariness. “Long time ago. In another country.”
Right then the intercom sounded:
“Callie?”Tessie coughed, correcting herself: “Cal?”
“Yeah.”
“Youbetter get cleaned up. The car’s coming in tenminutes.”
“I’mnot going.” I paused. “I’mgoing to stay herewith yia yia.”
“Youneed to be there, honey,” saidTessie.
I crossed to the intercom and put my mouth against the speaker and said in a deep voice, “I’m
not going into that church.”
“Whynot?”
“Have you seenwhat they charge for those goddamn candles?”
Tessie laughed. She needed to. So I kept going, lowering my voice to sound like my father’s.
“Two bucks for a candle? What a racket! Maybe you could convince somebody from the old
country to shell out for that kind of thing, but not here in theU.S.A.!”
It was infectious to do Milton. Now Tessie lowered her voice in the speaker: “Total rip-off!”
she said, and laughed again. We understood then that this was how we were going to do it. This
was howwewere going to keepMilton alive.
“Are you sure you don’twant to go?” she askedme.
“It’ll be too complicated, Mom. I don’t want to have to explain everything to everybody. Not
yet. It’ll be too big of a distraction. It’ll be better if I’mnot there.”
In her heart Tessie agreed, and so she soon relented. “I’ll tell Mrs. Papanikolas she doesn’t
need to come staywith yia yia.”
Desdemona was still looking at me but her eyes had gone dreamy. She was smiling. And then
she said, “My spoonwas right.”
“I guess so.”
“I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry this happen to you.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, honey mou.”
“I like my life,” I told her. “I’m going to have a good life.” She still looked pained, so I took
her hand.
“Don’tworry, yia yia. Iwon’t tell anyone.”
“Who’s to tell? Everybody’s dead now.”
“You’renot. I’llwait until you’re gone.”
“Okay.When I die, you can tell everything.”
“Iwill.”
“Bravo, honey mou. Bravo.”

At Assumption Church, no doubt against his wishes, Milton Stephanides was given a full
Orthodox funeral. Father Greg performed the service. As for Father Michael Antoniou, he was
later convicted of attempted grand larceny and served two years in prison.Aunt Zo divorced him
and moved to Florida with Desdemona. Where to exactly? New Smyrna Beach. Where else? A
fewyears later, whenmymotherwas forced to sell our house, shemoved to Florida, too, and the
three of them lived together as they once had on Hurlbut Street, until Desdemona’s death in
1980. Tessie andZoë are still in Florida today, twowomen living on their own.
Milton’s casket remained closed during the funeral. Tessie had given Georgie Pappas, the
undertaker, her husband’s wedding crown, so that it could be buried along with him. When it
came time to give the deceased the final kiss, the mourners filed past Milton’s coffin and kissed
its burnished lid. Fewer people came to my father’s funeral than we expected. None of the

Hercules franchise owners showed up, not one of the men Milton had socialized with for years
and years; and so we realized that, despite his bonhomie, Milton had never had any friends, only
business associates. Family members turned out instead. Peter Tatakis, the chiropractor, arrived
in his wine-dark Buick, and Bart Skiotis paid his respects at the church whose foundation he had
laid with substandard materials. Gus and Helen Panos were there and, because it was a funeral,
Gus’s tracheotomy made his voice sound even more like the voice of death. Aunt Zo and our
cousins didn’t sit in front. That pewwas reserved formymother and brother.
And so it was I who, upholding an old Greek custom no one remembered anymore, stayed
behind on Middlesex, blocking the door, so that Milton’s spirit wouldn’t reenter the house. It
was always amanwhodid this, and now I qualified. Inmyblack suit, withmydirtyWallabees, I
stood in the doorway, which was open to the winter wind. The weeping willows were bare but
still massive and threw up their twisted arms like women in grief. The pastel yellow cube of our
modern house sat cleanly on the white snow. Middlesex was now almost seventy years old.
Though we had ruined it with our colonial furniture, it was still the beacon it was intended to be,
a place with few interior walls, divested of the formalities of bourgeois life, a place designed for
a new type of human being, who would inhabit a new world. I couldn’t help feeling, of course,
that that personwasme,me and all the others likeme.
After the funeral service, everyone got back into the cars for the drive to the cemetery. Purple
pennants flew from the antennas as the procession drove slowly through the streets of the old
East Side where my father had grown up, where he had once serenaded my mother from his
bedroom window. The motorcade came down Mack Avenue and when they passed Hurlbut,
Tessie looked out the limousine window to see the old house. But she couldn’t find it. Bushes
had grown up all around, the yards were littered, and the decrepit houses now all looked the
same to her. A little later, the hearse and limousines encountered a line of motorcycles and my
mother noticed that the drivers were all wearing fezzes. They were Shriners, in town for a
convention.Respectfully, they pulled over to let the funeral procession pass.
On Middlesex, I remained in the front doorway. I took my duty seriously and didn’t budge,
despite the freezing wind. Milton, the child apostate, would have been confirmed in his
skepticism, because his spirit never returned that day, trying to get past me. The mulberry tree
had no leaves. The wind swept over the crusted snow into my Byzantine face, which was the
face of my grandfather and of the American girl I had once been. I stood in the door for an hour,
maybe two. I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking
aboutwhatwas next.

The History of Sexuality
Volume I: An Introduction

By the same author
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
The Archaeology of Knowledge (and The Discourse on Language)
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my
brother . . . A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The History of Sexuality
Volume I: An Introduction
by Michel Foucault
Translated from the French
by Robert Hurley
Pantheon Books
New York

English translation Copyright © 1978 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy
right Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon
Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simul
taneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto. Originally published in France as La Volante de sa voir
by Editions Gallimard, Paris. Copyright © 1976 by Editions
Gallimard.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication
Foucault, Michel.
The History of Sexuality.
Translation of Histoire de la sexualite.
CONTENTS: v. I. An introduction (translation of La Volonte
de savoir)
I. Sex customs–History–Collected works.
I. Title.
HQI2.F6813 1978 301. 41’7 78-51804
ISBN 0-394-41775-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Doubleday & Com
pany, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from a
poem by Gottfried August BUrger cited by Arthur Seho
penhauer in The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes,
from The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Scho
pen hauer, edited by Richard Taylor.

Contents
PART ONE We “Other Victorians” 1
PART TWO The Repressive Hypothesis 15
Chapter 1 The Incitement to Discourse 17
Chapter 2 The Perverse Implantation 36
PART THREE Scientia Sexualis 51
PART FOUR The Deployment of Sexuality 75
Chapter 1 Objective 8 1
Chapter 2 Method 92
Chapter 3 Domain 103
Chapter 4 Periodization 115
PART FIVE Right of Death and Power over Life 133
Index 1 6 1

PART ONE
Jte “Other Victorians”

For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian
regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today.
Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our
restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain
frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices
had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue
reticence, and things were done without too much conceal
ment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. Codes
regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were
quite lax compared to those ofthe nineteenth century. It was
a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open
transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermin
gled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the
laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies “made a
display of themselves.”
But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the
monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality
was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal
family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious
function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence be
came the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid
down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced
the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to
speak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus
of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at
the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and
fertile one: the parents’ bedroom. The rest had only to re
main vague; proper demeanor avoided contact with other
bodies, and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech. And ster-
3

4 The History of Sexuality
ile behavior carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on
making itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly
and would have to pay the penalty .
Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or
transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor
did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied, and
reduced to silence. Not only did it not exist, it had no right
to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least mani
festation-whether in acts or in words. Everyone knew, for
example, that children had no sex, which was why they were
forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes and
stopped one’s ears whenever they came to show evidence to
the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was
imposed. These are the characteristic features attributed to
repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibi
tions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sen
tence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an
affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admis
sion that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing
to.see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our
bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was forced to
make a few concessions, however. If it was truly necessary
to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let
them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where
they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of produc
tion, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental
hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute,
the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and
his hysteric-those “other Victorians,” as Steven Marcus
would say-seem to have surreptitiously transferred the
pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are
counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be
exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would
untrammeled sex have a right to (safely insularized) forms of
reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded
types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism im-

We “Other Victorians” 5
posed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence.
But have we not liberated ourselves from those two long
centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first
of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression? Only to
a slight extent, we are told. Perhaps some progress was made
by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical pru
dence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many
precautions in order to contain everything, with no fear of
“overflow,” in that safest and most discrete of spaces, be
tween the couch and discourse: yet another round of whis
pering on a bed. And could things have been otherwise? We
are informed that if repression has indeed been the funda
mental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since
the e1assical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able
to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: noth
ing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions,
an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within real
ity, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power
will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned
by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired
results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical
discourse, however rigorously pursued. Thus, one denounces
Freud’s conformism, the normalizing functions of psychoa
nalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Reich’s vehemence,
and all the effects of integration ensured by the “science” of
sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology.
This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well,
owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. A solemn histori
cal and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent
of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after
hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one
adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it
becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor
chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremoni
ous history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect
fades from view. A principle of explanation emerges after the

6 The History of Sexuality
fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is
incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative.
At a time when labor capacity was being systematically ex
ploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself
in pleasurable pursuits, except in those-reduced to a mini
mum-that enabled it to reproduce itself? Sex and its effects
are perhaps not so easily deciphered; on the other hand, their
repression, thus reconstructed, is easily analyzed. And the
sexual cause-the demand for sexual freedom, but also for
the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak
about it-becomes legitimately associated with the honor of
a political cause: sex too is placed on the agenda for the
future. A suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many
precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impres
sive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness :
a s if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such
a discourse could be formulated or accepted.
But there may be another reason that makes it so gratify
ing for us to define the relationship between sex and power
in terms of repression: something that one might call the
speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to
prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact
that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliber
ate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language
places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power;
he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the com
ing freedom. This explains the solemnity with which one
speaks of sex nowadays. When they had to allude to it, the
first demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth cen
tury thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking
their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base. But for
decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the
subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of
defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we
know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away
the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be

We “Other Victorians” 7
hastened by the contribution we believe we are making.
Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the
coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse
on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of
prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good
agll.(n. Because this repression is affirmed, one can discreetly
bring into coexistence concepts which the fear of ridicule or
the bitterness of history prevents most of us from putting side
by side: revolution and happiness; or revolution and a differ
ent body, one that is newer and more beautiful; or indeed,
revolution and pleasure. What sustains our eagerness to
speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportu
nity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths
and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation,
and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that com
bines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change
the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.
This is perhaps what also explains the market value at
tributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but
also to the mere fact of lending an ear to those who would
eliminate the effects of repression. Ours is, after all, the only
civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and
sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk
about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so,
have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that
some individuals have even offered their ears for hire.
But it appears to me that the essential thing is not this
economic factor, but rather the existence in our era of a
discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturn
ing of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come,
and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together.
Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form
-so familiar and important in the West-of preaching. A
great sexual sermon-which has had its subtle theologians
and its popular voices-has swept through our societies over
the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced

8 The History of Sexuality
hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the
real; it has made people dream of a New City. The Francis
cans are called to mind. And we might wonder how it is
possible that the lyricism and religiosity that long accom
panied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial
societies, been largely carried over to sex.
The notion of repressed sex is not, therefore, only a theo
retical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality that has never
been more rigorously subj ugated than during the age of the
hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled
with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal
the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality, sub
vert the law that governs it, and change its future. The
statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer
back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing. To say
that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship be
tween sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to
risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to
a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy
and all the discursive “interests” that underlie this argument.
This is the point at which I would like to situate the series
of historical analyses that will follow, the present volume
being at the same time an introduction and a first attempt at
an overview: it surveys a few historically significant points
and outlines certain theoretical problems. Briefly, my aim is
to examine the case of a society which has been loudly casti
gating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which
speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate
in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it
exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws
that have made it function. I would like to explore not only
these discourses but also the will that sustains them and the
strategic intention that supports them. The question I would
like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why
do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment
against our most recent past, against our present, and against

We “Other Victorians” 9
ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come
to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostenta
tiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something
we silence? And we do all this by formulating the matter in
the most explicit terms, by trying to reveal it in its most
naked reality, by affirming it in the positivity of its power and
its effects. It is certainly legitimate to ask why sex was as
sociated with sin for such a long time-although it would
remain to be discovered how this association was formed,
and one would have to be careful not to state in a summary
and hasty fashion that sex was “condemned” -but we must
also ask why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt
for having once made sex a sin. What paths have brought us
to the point where we are “at fault” with respect to our own
sex? And how have we come to be a civilization so peculiar
as to tell itself that, through an abuse of power which has not
ended, it has long “sinned” against sex? How does one ac
count for the displacement which, while claiming to free us
from the sinful nature of sex, taxes us with a great historical
wrong which consists precisely in imagining that nature to
be blameworthy and in drawing disastrous consequences
from that belief?
It will be said that if so many people today affirm this
repression, the reason is that it is historically evident. And
if they speak of it so abundantly, as they have for such a long
time now, this is because repression is so firmly anchored,
having solid roots and reasons, and weighs so heavily on sex
that more than one denunciation will be required in order to
free ourselves from it; the job will be a long one. All the
longer, no doubt, as it is in the nature of power-particularly
the kind of power that operates in our society-to be repres
sive, and to be especially careful in repressing useless
energies, the intensity of pleasures, and irregular modes of
behavior. We must not be surprised, then, if the effects of
liberation vis-a-vis this repressive power are so slow to mani
fest themselves; the effort to speak freely about sex and ac-

1 0 The History o f Sexuality
cept it in its reality is so alien to a historical sequence that
has gone unbroken for a thousand years now, and so inimical
to the intrinsic mechanisms of power, that it is bound to
make little headway for a long time before succeeding in its
mission.
One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall
term the “repressive hypothesis . ” First doubt: Is sexual re
pression truly an established historical fact? Is what first
comes into view-and consequently permits one to advance
an initial hypothesis-really the accentuation or even the
establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in
the seventeenth century? This is a properly historical ques
tion. Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in partic
ular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies
such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of re
pression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the
forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if
not in every society, most certainly in our own? This is a
historico-theoretical question. A third and final doubt: Did
the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come
to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had ope
rated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part
of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and
doubtless misrepresents) by calling it “repression”? Was
there really a historical rupture between the age of repression
and the critical analysis of repression? This is a historico
political question. My purpose in introducing these three
doubts is not merely to construct counterarguments that are
symmetrical and contrary to those outlined above; it is not
a matter of saying that sexuality, far from being repressed in
capitalist and bourgeois societies, has on the contrary benefit
ted from a regime of unchanging liberty; nor is it a matter
of saying that power in societies such as ours is more tolerant
than repressive, and that the critique of repression, while it
may give itself airs of a rupture with the past, actually forms
part of a much older process and, depending on how one

We “Other Victorians” II
chooses to understand this process, will appear either as a
new episode in the lessening of prohibitions, or as a more
devious and discreet form of power.
The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hy
pothesis are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at
putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex
in modern societies since the seventeenth century. Why has
sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said
about it? What were the effects of power generated by what
was said? What are the links between these discourses, these
effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by
them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this
linkage? The object, in short, is to define the regime of power
knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human
sexuality in our part of the world. The central issue, then (at
least in the first instance), is not to determine whether one
says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or
permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its
effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate
it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to
discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints
from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people
to speak about it and which store and distribute the things
that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all “discur
sive fact,” the way in which sex is “put into discourse. ”
Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of
power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates
in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of
behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely
perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls
everyday pleasure-all this entailing effects that may be
those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incite
ment and intensification: in short, the “polymorphous tech
niques of power.” And finally, the essential aim will not be
to determine whether these discursive productions and these
effects of power lead one to formulate the truth about sex, or

1 2 The History of Sexuality
on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal that truth,
but rather to bring out the “will to knowledge” that serves
as both their support and their instrument.
Let there be no misunderstanding: I do not claim that sex
has not been prohibited or barred or masked or misap
prehended since the classical age; nor do I even assert that
it has suffered these things any less from that period on than
. before. I do not maintain that the prohibition of sex is a ruse;
but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and con
stitutive element from which one would be able to write the
history of what has been said concerning sex starting from
the modern epoch. All these negative elements-defenses,
censorships, denials-which the repressive hypothesis
groups together in one great central mechanism destined to
say no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local
and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse,
a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far
from being reducible to the former.
In short, I would like to disengage my analysis from the
privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and
the principles of rarefaction, to search instead for instances
of discursive production (which also administer silences, to
be sure), of the production of power (which sometimes have
the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge
(which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconcep
tions to circulate); I would like to write the history of these
instances and their transformations. A first survey made
from this viewpoint seems to indicate that since the end of
the sixteenth century, the “putting into discourse of sex,” far
from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has
been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that
the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed
a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemina
tion and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that
the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of
a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constitut-

We “Other Victorians” 1 3
ing-despite many mistakes, o f course-a science o f sexual
ity. It is these movements that I will now attempt to bring
into focus in a schematic way, bypassing as it were the repres
sive hypothesis and the facts of interdiction or exclusion it
invokes, and starting from certain historical facts that serve
as guidelines for research.

PART TWO
The Repressive
Hypothesis

I
The Incitement
to Discourse
The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age
of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois soci
eties, an age which perhaps we still have not completely left
behind. Calling sex by its name thereafter became more diffi
cult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery over it
in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the
level of language, control its free circulation in speech, ex
punge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the
words that rendered it too visibly present. And even these
prohibitions, it seems, were afraid to name it. Without even
having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able
to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the
interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another:
instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, im
posed silence. Censorship.
Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries
with their continual transformations, things appear in a very
different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable
discursive explosion. We must be clear on this point, how
ever. It is quite possible that there was an expurgation-and
a very rigorous one-of the authorized vocabulary. It may
indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor
was codified. Without question, new rules of propriety
1 7

1 8 The History of Sexuality
screened out some words: there was a policing of statements.
A control over enunciations as well: where and when it was
not possible to talk about such things became much more
strictly defined; in which circumstances, among which
speakers, and within which social relationships. Areas were
thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of tact and
discretion: between parents and children, for instance, or
teachers and pupils, or masters and domestic servants. This
almost certainly constituted a whole restrictive economy,
one that was incorporated into that politics of language and
speech-spontaneous on the one hand, concerted on the
other-which accompanied the social redistributions of the
classical period.
At the level of discourses and their domains, however,
practically the opposite phenomenon occurred. There was a
steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex-spe
cific discourses, different from one another both by their
form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered
momentum from the eighteenth century onward. Here I am
thinking not so much of the probable increase in “illicit”
discourses, that is, discourses of infraction that crudely
named sex by way of insult or mockery of the new code of
decency; the tightening up of the rules of decorum likely did
produce, as a countereffect, a valorization and intensification
of indecent speech. But more important was the multiplica
tion of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of
power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and
to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the
agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to
speak through explicit articulation and endlessly ac
cumulated detail.
Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral and the
sacrament of penance after the Council of Trent. Little by
little, the nakedness of the questions formulated by the con
fession manuals of the Middle Ages, and a good number of
those still in use in the seventeenth century, was veiled. One

The Repressive Hypothesis 1 9
avoided entering into that degree of detail which some au
thors, such as Sanchez or Tamburini, had for a long time
believed indispensable for the confession to be complete:
description of the respective positions of the partners, the
postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the pre
cise moment of pleasure-an entire painstaking review of the
sexual act in its very unfolding. Discretion was advised, with
increasing emphasis. The greatest reserve was counseled
when dealing with sins against purity: “This matter is similar
to pitch, for, however one might handle it, even to cast it far
from oneself, it sticks nonetheless, and always soils. “l And
later, Alfonso de’ Liguori prescribed starting-and possibly
going no further, especially when dealing with children
with questions that were “roundabout and vague.”2
But while the language may have been refined, the scope
of the confession-the confession of the flesh-continually
increased. This was partly because the Counter Reformation
busied itself with stepping up the rhythm of the yearly con
fession in the Catholic countries, and because it tried to
impose meticulous rules of self-examination; but above all,
because it attributed more and more importance in penance
-and perhaps at the expense of some other sins-to all the
insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous ima
ginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and
the soul; henceforth all this had to enter, in detail, into the
process of confession and guidance. According to the new
pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects,
its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their
slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image
too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between
the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: every
thing had to be told. A twofold evolution tended to make the
flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important
moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings
IPaolo Segneri, L’Instruction du penitent (French trans. 1695), p. 301.
‘Alfonso de’ Liguori, Pratique des confesseurs (French trans. 1854), p. 140.

20 The History of Sexuality
-so difficult to perceive and formulate-of desire. For this
was an evil that afflicted the whole man, and in the most
secret of forms: “Examine diligently, therefore, all the facul
ties of your soul: memory, understanding, and will. Examine
with precision all your senses as well. . . . Examine, more
over, all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your
actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once
awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally,
do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this,
there is anything trivial or insignificant. “3 Discourse, there
fore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul,
following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins,
it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh. Under
the authority of a language that had been carefully expur
gated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken
charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed
to allow it no obscurity, no respite.
It was here, perhaps, that the injunction, so peculiar to the
West, was laid down for the first time, in the form of a
general constraint. I am not talking about the obligation to
admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by tradi
tional penance; but of the nearly infinite task of telling
telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything
that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures,
sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the
soul, had some affinity with sex. This scheme for transform
ing sex into discourse had been devised long before in an
ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made
it into a rule for everyone. It would seem in actual fact that
it could scarcely have applied to any but a tiny elite; the great
majority of the faithful who only went to confession on rare
occasions in the course of the year escaped such complex
prescriptions. But the important point no doubt is that this
obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good
‘Segneri, L’/nstruction du penitent, pp. 30 1-2.

The Repressive Hypothesis 2 1
Christian. A n imperative was established: Not only will you
confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to
transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse. In
sofar as possible, nothing was meant to elude this dictum,
even if the words it employed had to be carefully neutralized.
The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the
task of passing everything having to do with sex through the
endless mill of speech.4 The forbidding of certain words, the
decency of expressions, all the censorings of vocabulary,
might well have been only secondary devices compared to
that great sUbjugation: ways of rendering it morally accept
able and technically useful.
One could plot a line going straight from the seventeenth
century pastoral to what became its projection in literature,
“scandalous” literature at that. “Tell everything,” the direc
tors would say time and again: “not only consummated acts,
but sensual touchings, all impure gazes, all obscene remarks
. . . all consenting thoughts.”j Sade takes up the injunction
in words that seem to have been retranscribed from the
treatises of spirtual direction: “Your narrations must be
decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the
precise way and extent to which we may j udge how the
passion you describe relates to human manners and man’s
character is determined by your willingness to disguise no
circumstance; and what is more, the least circumstance is apt
to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that
kind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories . “6 And
again at the end of the nineteenth century, the anonymous
author of My Secret Life submitted to the same prescription;
outwardly, at least, this man was doubtless a kind of tradi
‘The reformed pastoral also laid down rules, albeit in a more discreet way, for
putting sex into discourse. This notion will be developed in the next volume, The
Body and the Flesh.
‘Alfonso de’ Liguori, Preceptes sur Ie sixieme commandement (French trans. 1835),
p. 5.
‘Donatien-Alphonse de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom. trans. Austryn Wainhouse
and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 271.

22 The History of Sexuality
tional libertine; but he conceived the idea of complementing
his life-which he had almost totally dedicated to sexual
activity-with a scrupulous account of every one of its epi
sodes. He sometimes excuses himself by stressing his concern
to educate young people, this man who had eleven volumes
published, in a printing of only a few copies, which were
devoted to the least adventures, pleasures, and sensations of
his sex. It is best to take him at his word when he lets into
his text the voice of a pure imperative: “I recount the facts,
just as they happened, insofar as I am able to recollect them;
this is all that I can do”; “a secret life must not leave out
anything; there is nothing to be ashamed of . . . one can never
know too much concerning human nature. “7 The solitary
author of My Secret Life often says, in order to justify his
describing them, that his strangest practices undoubtedly
were shared by thousands of men on the surface of the earth.
But the guiding principle for the strangest of these practices,
which was the fact of recounting them all, and in detail, from
day to day, had been lodged in the heart of modern man for
over two centuries. Rather than seeing in this singular man
a courageous fugitive from a “Victorianism” that would have
compelled him to silence, I am inclined to think that, in an
epoch dominated by (highly prolix) directives enjoining dis
cretion and modesty, he was the most direct and in a way the
most naive representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk
about sex. The historical accident would consist rather of the
reticences of “Victorian puritanism”; at any rate, they were
a digression, a refinement, a tactical diversion in the great
process of transforming sex into discourse.
This nameless Englishman will serve better than his queen
as the central figure for a sexuality whose main features were
already taking shape with the Christian pastoral. Doubtless,
in contrast to the latter, for him it was a matter of augment
ing the sensations he experienced with the details of what he
‘Anonymous, My Secret Life. (New York: Grove Press, 1966).

The Repressive Hypothesis 23
said about them; like Sade, he wrote “for his pleasure alone,”
in the strongest sense of the expression; he carefully mixed
the editing and rereading of his text with erotic scenes which
those writer’s activities repeated, prolonged, and stimulated.
But after all, the Christian pastoral also sought to produce
specific effects on desire, by the mere fact of transforming it
-fully and deliberately-into discourse: effects of mastery
and detachment, to be sure, but also an effect of spiritual
reconversion, of turning back to God, a physical effect of
blissful suffering from feeling in one’s body the pangs of
temptation and the love that resists it. This is the essential
thing: that Western man has been drawn for three centuries
to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since
the classical age there has been a constant optimization and
an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that
this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multi
ple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and
modification of desire itself. Not only were the boundaries of
what one could say about sex enlarged, and men compelled
to hear it said; but more important, discourse was connected
to sex by a complex organization with varying effects, by a
deployment that cannot be adequately explained merely by
referring it to a law of prohibition. A censorship of sex?
There was installed rather an apparatus for producing an
ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of func
tioning and taking effect in its very economy.
This technique might have remained tied to the destiny of
Christian spirituality ifit had not been supported and relayed
by other mechanisms. In the first place, by a “public inter
est . ” Not a collective curiosity or sensibility; not a new men
tality; but power mechanisms that functioned in such a way
that discourse on sex-for reasons that will have to be exam
ined-became essential. Toward the beginning of the eigh
teenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and
technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so much in
the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of

24 The History of Sexuality
analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of
quantitative or causal studies. This need to take sex “into
account, ” to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not
derive from morality alone but from rationality as well, was
sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought
apologies for its own existence. How could a discourse based
on reason speak of that? “Rarely have philosophers directed
a steady gaze to these objects situated between disgust and
ridicule, where one must avoid both hypocrisy and scan
dal.”g And nearly a century later, the medical establishment,
which one might have expected to be less surprised by what
it was about to formulate, still stumbled at the moment of
speaking: “The darkness that envelops these facts, the shame
and disgust they inspire, have always repelled the observer’s
gaze . . . . For a long time I hesitated to introduce the loath
some picture into this study. “9 What is essential is not in all
these scruples, in the “moralism” they betray, or in the hy
pocrisy one can suspect them of, but in the recognized neces
sity of overcoming this hesitation. One had to speak of sex;
one had to speak publicly and in a manner that was not
determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the
speaker maintained the distinction for himself (which is what
these solemn and preliminary declarations were intended to
show): one had to speak of it as of a thing to be not simply
condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems
of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to
function according to an optimum. Sex was not something
one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. It was
in the nature of a public potential; it called for management
procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical dis
courses. In the eighteenth century, sex became a “police”
matter-in the full and strict sense given the term at the time:
not the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization
‘Condorcet, cited by Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families: parente, maison, sexualite dans
l’ancienne societe, (Paris: Hachette, 1976).
‘Auguste Tardieu, Etude medico-legale sur les attentats aux moeurs (1857), p. 114.

The Repressive Hypothesis 2 5
of collective and individual forces: “We must consolidate and
augment, through the wisdom of its regulations, the internal
power of the state; and since this power consists not only in
the Republic in general, and in each of the members who
constitute it, but also in the faculties and talents of those
belonging to it, it follows that the police must concern them
selves with these means and make them serve the public
welfare. And they can only obtain this result through the
knowledge they have of those different assets. “lO A policing
of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of
regulating sex through useful and public discourses.
A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations
in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the
emergence of “population” as an economic and political
problem : population as wealth, population as manpower or
labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth
and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived
that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with
a “people, ” but with a “popUlation,” with its specific
phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates,
life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of ill
nesses, patterns of diet and habitation. All these variables
were situated at the point where the characteristic move
ments of life and the specific effects of institutions inter
sected: “States are not populated in accordance with the
natural progression of propagation, but by virtue of their
industry, their products, and their different institutions.
. . . Men multiply like the yields from the ground and in
proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their
labors.”ll At the heart of this economic and political problem
of population was sex: it was necessary to analyze the birth
rate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate
births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the
ways of making them fertile or sterile, the effects of un mar
IOJohann von Justi, Elements gene�aux de police (French trans. 1769), p. 20.
llClaude-Jacques Herbert, Essai sur fa police generafe des grains (1753), pp. 320-1.

26 The History of Sexuality
ried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive
practices-of those notorious “deadly secrets” which
demographers on the eve of the Revolution knew were al
ready familiar to the inhabitants of the countryside.
Of course, it had long been asserted that a country had to
be populated if it hoped to be rich and powerful; but this was
the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant way,
that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the
number and the uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage
rules and family organization, but to the manner in which
each individual made use of his sex. Things went from ritual
lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich, bache
lors, and libertines to a discourse in which the sexual conduct
of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and
as a target of intervention; there was a progression from the
crudely populationist arguments of the mercantilist epoch to
the much more subtle and calculated attempts at regulation
that tended to favor or discourage-according to the objec
tives and exigencies of the moment-an increasing birthrate.
Through the political economy of population there was
formed a whole grid of observations regarding sex. There
emerged the analysis of the modes of sexual conduct, their
determinations and their effects, at the boundary line of the
biological and the economic domains. There also appeared
those systematic campaigns which, going beyond the tradi
tional means-moral and religious exhortations, fiscal meas
ures-tried to transform the sexual conduct of couples into
a concerted economic and political behavior. In time these
new measures would become anchorage points for the differ
ent varieties of racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centu
ries. It was essential that the state know what was happening
with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also
that each individual be capable of controlling the use he
made of it. Between the state and the individual, sex became
an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses,
special know ledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it.

The R epressive Hypothesis 27
The situation was similar in the case of children’s sex. It
is often said that the classical period consigned it to an
obscurity from which it scarcely emerged before the Three
Essays or the beneficent anxieties of Little Hans. It is true
that a longstanding “freedom” of language between children
and adults, or pupils and teachers, may have disappeared.
No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly ad
vised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the
choice of a good prostitute. And the boisterous laughter that
had accompanied the precocious sexuality of children for so
long-and in all social classes, it seems-was gradually
stifled. But this was not a pl�in and simple imposition of
silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any
less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said
in a different way; it was different people who said them,
from different points of view, and in order to obtain different
results. Silence itself-the things one declines to say, or is
forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between
different speakers-is less the absolute limit of discourse, the
other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary,
than an element that functions alongside the things said, with
them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There
is no binary division to be made between what one says and
what one does not say; we must try to determine the different
ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those
who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of
discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is re
quired in either case. There is not one but many silences, and
they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and
permeate discourses.
Take the secondary schools of the eighteenth century, for
example. On the whole, one can have the impression that sex
was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions. But one only
has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of disci
pline, and their whole internal organization: the question of
sex was a constant preoccupation. The builders considered it

2 8 The History o f Sexuality
explicitly. The organizers took it permanently into account.
All who held a measure of authority were placed in a state
of perpetual alert, which the fixtures, the precautions taken,
the interplay of punishments and responsibilities, never
ceased to reiterate. The space for classes, the shape of the
tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution
of the dormitories (with or without partitions, with or with
out curtains), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep
periods-all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the
sexuality of children.12 What one might call the internal
discourse of the institution-the one it employed to address
itself, and which circulated among those who made it func
tion-was largely based on the assumption that this sexuality
existed, that it was precocious, active, and ever present. But
this was not all: the sex of the schoolboy became in the course
of the eighteenth century-and quite apart from that of
adolescents in general-a public problem. Doctors counseled
the directors and professors of educational establishments,
but they also gave their opinions to families; educators de
signed projects which they submitted to the authorities;
schoolmasters turned to students, made recommendations to
them, and drafted for their benefit books of exhortation, full
of moral and medical examples. Around the schoolboy and
his sex there proliferated a whole literature of precepts, opin
ions, observations, medical advice, clinical cases, outlines for
reform, and plans for ideal institutions. With Basedow and
the German “philanthropic” movement, this transformation
of adolescent sex into discourse grew to considerable dimen
sions. Salzmann even organized an experimental school
12Reglement de police pour les lycees (1809). art. 67: “There shall always be, during
class and study hours, an instructor watching the exterior, so as to prevent students
who have gone out to relieve themselves from stopping and congregating.
art. 68: “After the evening prayer, the students will be conducted back to the
dormitory, where the schoolmasters will put them to bed at once.
art. 69: “The masters will not retire except after having made certain that every
student is in bed.
art. 70: “The beds shall be separated by partitions two meters in height. The
dormitories shall be illuminated during the night.”

The R epressive Hypothesis 29
which owed its exceptional character to a supervision and
education of sex so well thought out that youth’s universal
sin would never need to be practiced there. And with all
these measures taken, the child was not to be simply the mute
and unconscious object of attentions prearranged between
adults only; a certain reasonable, limited, canonical, and
truthful discourse on sex was prescribed for him-a kind of
discursive orthopedics. The great festival organized at the
Philanthropinum in May of 1 776 can serve as a vignette in
this regard. Taking the form of an examination, mixed with
floral games, the awarding of prizes, and a board of review,
this was the first solemn communion of adolescent sex and
reasonable discourse. In order to show the success of the sex
education given the students, Basedow had invited all the
dignitaries that Germany could muster (Goethe was one of
the few to decline the invitation). Before the assembled pub
lic, one of the professors, a certain Wolke, asked the students
selected questions concerning the mysteries of sex, birth, and
procreation. He had them comment on engravings that de
picted a pregnant woman, a couple, and a cradle. The replies
were enlightened, offered without shame or embarrassment.
No unseemly laughter intervened to disturb them-except
from the very ranks of an adult audience more childish than
the children themselves, and whom Wolke severely repri
manded. At the end, they all applauded these cherub-faced
boys who, in front of adults, had skillfully woven the gar�
lands of discourse and sex.1J
It would be less than exact to say that the pedagogical
institution has imposed a ponderous silence on the sex of
children and adolescents. On the contrary, since the eigh
teenth century it has multiplied the forms of discourse on the
subject; it has established various points of implantation for
sex; it has coded contents and qualified speakers. Speaking
IJ Johann Gottlieb Schum mel. Fritzens Reise nach Dessau (1776), cited by Auguste
Pinloche, La Reforme de l’education en Allemagne au XVIII’ siecle (1889), pp.
125-9.

30 The History of Sexuality
about children’s sex, inducing educators, physicians, ad
ministrators, and parents to speak of it, or speaking to them
about it, causing children themselves to talk about it, and
enclosing them in a web of discourses which sometimes ad
dress them, sometimes speak about them, or impose canoni
cal bits of knowledge on them, or use them as a basis for
constructing a science that is beyond their grasp-all this
together enables us to link an intensification of the interven
tions of power to a multiplication of discourse. The sex of
children and adolescents has become, since the eighteenth
century, an important area of contention around which innu
merable institutional devices and discursive strategies have
been deployed. It may well be true that adults and children
themselves were deprived of a certain way of speaking about
sex, a mode that was disallowed as being too direct, crude,
or coarse. But this was only the counterpart of other dis
courses, and perhaps the condition necessary in order for
them to function, discourses that were interlocking, hier
archized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power
relations.
One could mention many other centers which in the eigh
teenth or nineteenth century began to produce discourses on
sex. First there was medicine, via the “nervous disorders”;
next psychiatry, when it set out to discover the etiology of
mental illnesses, focusing its gaze first on “excess,” then
onanism, then frustration, then “frauds against procrea
tion,” but especially when it annexed the whole of the sexual
perversions as its own province; criminal j ustice, too, which
had long been concerned with sexuality, particularly in the
form of “heinous” crimes and crimes against nature, but
which, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, broad
ened its jurisdiction to include petty offenses, minor indecen
cies, insignificant perversions; and lastly, all those social
controls, cropping up at the end of the last century, which
screened the sexuality of couples, parents and children, dan
gerous and endangered adolescents-undertaking to protect,

The Repressive Hypothesis 3 1
separate, and forewarn, signaling perils everywhere, awaken
ing people’s attention, calling for diagnoses, piling up re
ports, organizing therapies. These sites radiated discourses
aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a con
stant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to
talk about it.
One day in 1 867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt,
who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then
there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from
a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor,
sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities.
At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from
a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the
village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood,
or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they
would play the familiar game called “curdled milk. ” So he
was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the
village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the
gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him
over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only
wrote their report but also had it published. 14 What is the
significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the
fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexual
ity, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become,
from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intoler
ance but of a j udicial action, a medical intervention, a careful
clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.
The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the
brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for
possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this person
age who up to that moment had been an integral part of
village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned
him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations,
and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they
\4 H. Bonnet and J. Bulard, Rapport medico-legal sur l ‘etat mental de Ch. -J. Jouy.
January 4, 1968.

32 The History of Sexuality
decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine
and knowledge-an object to be shut away till the end of his
life in the hospital at Mareville, but also one to be made
known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis.
One can be fairly certain that during this same period the
Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to
mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud.
But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the
institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday
bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our
society-and it was doubtless the first in history to take such
measures-assembled around these timeless gestures, these
barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and
alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyz
ing, and investigating.
Between the licentious Englishman, who earnestly re
corded for his own purposes the singular episodes of his
secret life, and his contemporary, this village halfwit who
would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the older
ones refused him, there was without doubt a profound con
nection : in any case, from one extreme to the other, sex
became something to say, and to say exhaustively in accord
ance with deployments that were varied, but all, in their own
way, compelling. Whether in the form of a subtle confession
in confidence o� an authoritarian interrogation, sex-be it
refined or rustic-had to be put into words. A great polymor
phous injunction bound the Englishman and the poor Lor
rainese peasant alike. As history would have it, the latter was
named Jouy. *
Since the eighteenth century, sex has not ceased to pro
voke a kind of generalized discursive erethism. And these
discourses on sex did not multiply apart from or against
power, but in the very space and as the means of its exercise.
Incitements to speak were orchestrated from all quarters,
“Jouy sounds like the past participle of jouir, the French verb meaning to enjoy,
to delight in (something), but also to have an orgasm, to come. (Translator’s note)

The Repressive Hypothesis 3 3
apparatuses everywhere for listening and recording, proce
dures for observing, questioning, and formulating. Sex was
driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive
existence. From the singular imperialism that compels every
one to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse,
to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy,
pedagogy, medicine, and j ustice, incite, extract, distribute,
and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbos
ity is what our civilization has required and organized.
Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated-and
in such a relatively short span of time-a similar quantity of
discourses concerned with sex. It may well be that we talk
about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the
task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough
on the subj ect, that, through inertia or submissiveness, we
conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what
is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out
once again in search of it. It is possible that where sex is
concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of soci
eties is our own.
But as this first overview shows, we are dealing less with
a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses
produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in diff
erent institutions. The Middle Ages had organized around
the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance a discourse
that was markedly unitary. In the course of recent centuries,
this relative uniformity was broken apart, scattered, and
multiplied in an explosion of distinct discursivities which
took form in demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry,
psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism. More
precisely, the secure bond that held together the moral theol
ogy of concupiscence and the obligation of confession (equiv
alent to the theoretical discourse on sex and its first-person
formulation) was, if not broken, at least loosened and diver
sified: between the obj ectification of sex in rational dis
courses, and the movement by which each individual was set

34 The History of Sexuality
to the task of recounting his own sex, there has occurred,
since the eighteenth century, a whole series of tensions, con
flicts, efforts at adjustment, and attempts at retranscription.
So it is not simply in terms of a continual extension that we
must speak of this discursive growth; it should be seen rather
as a dispersion of centers from which discourses emanated,
a diversification of their forms, and the complex deployment
of the network connecting them. Rather than the uniform
concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of
language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the
variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for
speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing
it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and
tedistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole
network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into
discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with
the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what
was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement
to discourse.
The objection will doubtless be raised that if so many
stimulations and constraining mechanisms were necessary in
order to speak of sex, this was because there reigned over
everyone a certain fundamental prohibition; only definite
n�essities-economic pressures, political requirements
were able to lift this prohibition and open a few approaches
to the discourse on sex, but these were limited and carefully
coded; so much talk about sex, so many insistent devices
contrived for causing it to be talked about-but under strict
conditions: does this not prove that it was an object of se
crecy, and more important, that there is still an attempt to
keep it that way? But this often-stated theme, that sex is
outside of discourse and that only the removing of an obsta
cle; the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it,
is precisely what needs to be examined. Does it not partake
of the injunction by which discourse is provoked? Is it not
with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made

The Repressive Hypothesis 3 5
t o mirror, a t the outer limit o f every actual discourse, some
thing akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing
abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult
and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge? We must
not forget that by making sex into that which, above all else,
had to be confessed, the Christian pastoral always presented
it as the disquieting enigma: not a thing which stubbornly
shows itself, but one which always hides, the insidious pres
ence that speaks in a voice so muted and often disguised that
one risks remaining deaf to it. Doubtless the secret does not
reside In that basic reality in relation to which all the incite
ments to speak of sex are situated-whether they try to force
the secret, or whether in some obscure way they reinforce it
by the manner in which they speak of it. It is a question
rather of a theme that forms part of the very mechanics of
these incitements: a way of giving shape to the requirement
to speak about the matter, a fable that is indispensable to the
endlessly proliferating economy of the discourse on sex.
What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they
consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated
themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it
as the secret.

2
The Perverse
Implantation
A possible objection: it would be a mistake to see in this
proliferation of discourses merely a quantitative phe}1ome
non, something like a pure increase, as if what was said in
them were immaterial, as if the fact of speaking about sex
were of itself more important than the forms of imperatives
that were imposed on it by speaking about it. For was this
transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the
endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that
were n� amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to
say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures,
to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procrea
tion? Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against
minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was
annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm
of sexual development was defined and all the possible devia
tions were carefully described; pedagogical controls and
medical treatments were organized; around the least fanta
sies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole
emphatic vocabulary of abomination. Were these anything
more than means employed to absorb, for the benefit of a
genitally centered sexuality, all the fruitless pleasures? All
this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality,
is it not motivated by one basic concern : to ensure popula-
36

The Repressive Hypothesis 37
tion, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of
social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is
economically useful and politically conservative?
I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective.
But this much is certain : reduction has not been the means
employed for trying to achieve it. The nineteenth century
and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a
dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate
forms, a mUltiple implantation of “perversions. ” Our epoch
has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century, three major explic
it codes-apart from the customary regularities and con
straints of opinion-governed sexual practices: canonical
law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law. They determined,
each in its own way, the division between licit and illicit.
They were all centered On matrimonial relations: the marital
obligation, the ability to fulfill it, the manner in which one
complied with it, the requirements and violences that accom
panied it, the useless or unwarranted caresses for which it
was a pretext, its fecundity or the way one went about mak- ,
ing it sterile, the moments when one demanded it (dangerous
periods of pregnancy or breast-feeding, forbidden times of
Lent or abstinence), its frequency or infrequency, and so on.
It was this domain that was especially saturated with pre
scriptions. The sex of husband and wife was beset by rules
and recommendations. The marriage relation was the most
intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than
anything else; more than any other relation, it was required
to give a detailed accounting of itself. It was under constant
surveillance: if it was found to be lacking, it had to come
forward and plead its case before a witness. The “rest” re
mained a good deal more confused: one only has to think of
the uncertain status of “sodomy,” or the indifference regard
ing the sexuality of children.
Moreover, these different codes did not make a clear dis
tinction between violations of the rules of marriage and

3 8 The History o f Sexuality
deviations with respect to genitality. Breaking the rules of
marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal meas
ure of condemnation. On the list of grave sins, and separated
only by their relative importance, there appeared debauchery
(extramarital relations), adultery, rape, spiritual or carnal
incest, but also sodomy, or the mutual “caress. ” As to the
courts, they could condemn homosexuality as well as infi
delity, marriage without parental consent, or bestiality.
What was taken into account in the civil and religious juris
dictions alike was a general unlawfulness. Doubtless acts
“contrary to nature” were stamped as especially abominable,
but they were perceived simply as an extreme form of acts
“against the law”; they were infringements of decrees which
were just as sacred as those of marriage, and which had been
established for governing the order of things and the plan of
beings. Prohibitions bearing on sex were essentially of a
juridical nature. The “nature” on which they were based was
still a kind of law. For a long time hermaphrodites were
criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical dispo
sition, their very being, confounded the law that distin
guished the sexes and prescribed their union.
The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries caused this system centered on legitimate alliance
to undergo two modifications. First, a centrifugal movement
with respect to heterosexual monogamy. Of course, the array
of practices and pleasures continued to be referred to it as
their internal standard; but it was spoken of less and less, or
in any case with a growing moderation. Efforts to find out
its secrets were abandoned; nothing further was demanded
of it than to define itself from day to day. The legitimate
couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discre
tion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter,
perhaps, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under
scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women,
and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the
opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great tran-

The Repressive Hypothesis 39
sports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely
noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the
difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were
condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if
regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it
was through a reflux movement, originating in these periph
eral sexualities.
Whence the setting apart of the “unnatural” as a specific
dimension in the field of sexuality. This kind of activity
assumed an autonomy with regard to the other condemned
forms such as adultery or rape (and the latter were con
demned less and less): to marry a close relative or practice
sodomy, to seduce a nun or engage in sadism, to deceive
one’s wife or violate cadavers, became things that were essen
tially different. The area covered by the Sixth Command
ment began to fragment. Similarly, in the civil order, the
confused category of “debauchery, ” which for more than a
century had been one of the most frequent reasons for ad
ministrative confinement, came apart. From the debris, there
appeared on the one hand infractions against the legislation
(or morality) pertaining to marriage and the family, and on
the other, offenses against the regularity of a natural function
(offenses which, it must be added, the law was apt to punish).
Here we have a likely reason, among others, for the prestige
of Don Juan, which three centuries have not erased. Under
neath ,the great violator of the rules of marriage-stealer of
wives, seducer of virgins, the shame of families, and an insult
to husbands and fathers-another personage can be
glimpsed: the individual driven, in spite of himself, by the
somber madness of sex. Underneath the libertine, the per
vert. He deliberately breaks the law, but at the same time,
something like a nature gone awry transports him far from
all nature; his death is the moment when the supernatural
return of the crime and its retribution thwarts the flight into
counternature. There were two great systems conceived by
the West for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order

40 The History of Sexuality
of desires-and the life of Don Juan overturned them both.
We shall leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate whether he
was homosexual, narcissistic, or impotent.
Although not without delay and equivocation, the natural
laws of matrimony and the immanent rules of sexuality
began to be recorded on two separate registers. There
emerged a world of perversion which partook of that of legal
or moral infraction, yet was not simply a variety of the latter.
An entire sub-race race was born, different-despite certain
kinship ties-from the libertines of the past. From the end
of the eighteenth century to our own, they circulated through
the pores of society; they were always hounded, but not
always by laws; were often locked up, but not always in
prisons; were sick perhaps, but scandalous, dangerous vic
tims, prey (0 a strange evil that also bore the name of vice
and sometimes crime. They were children wise beyond their
years, precocious little girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious
servants and educators, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary
collectors, ramblers with bizarre impulses; they haunted the
houses of correction, the penal colonies, the tribunals, and
the asylums; they carried their infamy to the doctors and
their sickness to the judges. This was the numberless family
of perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and
akin to madmen. In the course of the century they succes
sively bore the stamp of “moral folly,” “genital neurosis,”
“aberration of the genetic instinct,” “degenerescence,” or
“physical imbalance. ”
What does the appearance of all these peripheral sexuali
ties signify? Is the fact that they could appear in broad day
light a sign that the code had become more lax? Or does the
fact that they were given so much attention testify to a
stricter regime and to its concern to bring them under close
supervision? In terms of repression, things are unclear. There
was permissiveness, if one bears in mind that the severity of
the codes relating to sexual offenses diminished considerably
in the nineteenth century and that law itself often deferred

The Repressive Hypothesis 4 1
t o medicine. But an additional ruse of severity, if one thinks
of all the agencies of control and all the mechanisms of
surveillance that were put into operation by pedagogy or
therapeutics. It may be the case that the intervention of the
Church in conjugal sexuality and its rejection of “frauds”
against procreation had lost much of their insistence over the
previous two hundred years. But medicine made a forceful
entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire
organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of “in
complete” sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of
related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of
“development” and instinctual “disturbances”; and it under
took to manage them.
J
Perhaps the point to consider is not the level of indulgence
or the quantity of repression but the form of power that was
exercised. When this whole thicket of disparate sexualities
was labeled, as if to disentangle them from one another, was
the object to exclude them from reality? It appears, in fact,
that the function of the power exerted in this instance was
not that of interdiction, and that it involved four operations
quite different from simple prohibition.
1 . Take the ancient prohibitions of consanguine marriages
(as numerous and complex as they were) or the condemna
tion of adultery, with its inevitable frequency of occurrence;
or on the other hand, the recent controls through which,
since the nineteenth century, the sexuality of children has
been subordinated and their “solitary habits” interfered
with. It is clear that we are not dealing with one and the same
power mechanism. Not only because in the one case it is a
question of law and penality, and in the other, medicine and
regimentation; but also because the tactics employed is not
‘ the same. On the surface, what appears in both cases is an
effort at elimination that was always destined to fail and
always constrained to begin again. But the prohibition of
“incests” attempted to reach its objective through an asymp
totic decrease in the thing it condemned, whereas the control

42 The History of Sexuality
of infantile sexuality hoped to reach it through a simulta
neous propagation of its own power and of the object on
which it was brought to bear. It proceeded in accordance
with a twofold increase extended indefinitely. Educators and
doctors combatted children’s onanism like an epidemic that
needed to be eradicated. What this actually entailed,
throughout this whole secular campaign that mobilized the
adult world around the sex of children, was using these
tenuous pleasures as a prop, constituting them as secrets
(that is, forcing them into hiding so as to make possible their
discovery), tracing them back to their source, tracking them
from their origins to their effects, searching out everything
that might cause them or simply enable them to exist. Wher
ever there was the chance they might appear, devices of
surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compelling
admissions; inexhaustible and corrective discourses were im
posed; parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the
suspicion that all children were guilty, and with the fear of
being themselves at fault if their suspicions were not suffi
ciently strong; they were kept in readiness in the face of this
recurrent danger; their conduct was prescribed and their
pedagogy recodified; an entire medico-sexual regime took
hold of the family milieu. The child’s “vice” was not so much
an enemy as a support; it may have been designated as the
evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went
into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that
what was demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to
the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to
disappear for good. Always relying on this support, power
advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target
expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further
into reality at the same pace. In appearance, we are dealing
with a barrier system; but in fact, all around the child, indefi
nite lines of penetration were disposed.
2. This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities en
tailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification

The Repressive Hypothesis 43
of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical
codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpe
trator was nothing more than the j uridical subject of them.
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a
past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a
type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet
anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that
went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexual
ity. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his
actions because it was their insidious and indefi!l.itely active
principle; written immodestly on his face and body because
it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consub
stantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular
nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiat
ric, medical category qf homosexuality was constituted from
the moment it was characterized-Westphal’s famous article
of 1 870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date
of birth I-less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain
quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the
masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality ap
peared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was tran
sposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had
been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a
species.
So too were all those minor perverts whom nineteenth
century psychiatrists entomologized by giving them strange
baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and
zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixo
scopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic in
verts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies
referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not
so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more
species, even where there was no order to fit them into. The
‘Carl Westphal, Archiv for Neurologie, 1 870.

44 The History of Sexuality
machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain
did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical,
visible, and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies,
slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle
of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison
d ‘hre and a natural order of disorder. Not the exclusion of
these thousand aberrant sexualities, but the specification, the
regional solidification of each one of them. The strategy
behind this dissemination was to strew reality with them and
incorporate them into the individual.
3. More than the old taboos, this form of power demanded
constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it
presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination
and insistent observation; it required an exchange of dis
courses, through questions that extorted admissions, and
confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked.
It implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense
sensations. The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was
both the effect and the instrument of this. Imbedded in bod
ies, becoming deeply characteristic of individuals, the oddi
ties of sex relied on a technology of health and pathology.
And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicaliz
able object, one had to try and detect it-as a lesion, a
dysfunction, or a symptom-in the depths of the organism,
or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of
behavior. The power which thus took charge of sexuality set
about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, inten
sifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled mo
ments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. There was
undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of
the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and
a gain of pleasure. This produced a twofold effect: an impetus
was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion
rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further; the
intensity of the confession renewed the quC(stioner’s curios
ity; the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encir-

The R epressive Hypothesis 45
eled it. But so many pressing questions singularized the
pleasures felt by the one who had to reply. They were fixed
by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they re
ceived. Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew
out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure
spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the
pleasure it uncovered.
The medical examination, the psychiatric inves.!igation,
the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the
over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward
or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function
as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power.
The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions,
monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to
light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at
having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty
it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is
pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleas
ure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and
seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents
and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students,
doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and
his perverts, all have played this game continually since the
nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these
circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes,
not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of
power and pleasure.
4. Whence those devices of sexual saturation so character
istic of the space and the social rituals of the nineteenth
century. People often say that modern society has attempted
to reduce sexuality to the _couple-the heterosexual and, in
sofar as possible, legitimate couple. There are equal grounds
for saying that it has, if not created, at least outfitted and
made to proliferate, groups with multiple elements and a
circulating sexuality: a distribution of points of power, hier
arc hi zed and placed opposite to one another; “pursued”

46 The History of Sexuality
pleasures, that is, both sought after and searched out; com
partmental sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged;
proximities that serve as surveillance procedures, and func
tion as mechanisms of intensification; contacts that operate
as inductors. This is the way things worked in the case of the
family, or rather the household, with parents, children, and
in some instances, servants. Was the nineteenth-century fam
ily really a monogamic and conjugal cell? Perhaps to a cer
tain extent. But it was also a network of pleasures and powers
linked together at multiple points and according to trans
formable relationships. The separation of grown-ups and
children, the polarity established between the parents’ bed
room and that of the children (it became routine in the
course of the century when working-class housing construc
tion was undertaken), the relative segregation of boys and
. girls, the strict instructions as to the care of nursing infants
(maternal breast-feeding, hygiene), the attention focused on
infantile sexuality, the supposed dangers of masturbation,
the importance attached to puberty, the methods of surveil
lance suggested to parents, the exhortations, secrets, and
fears, the presence-both valued and feared–of servants: all
this made the family, even when brought down to its smallest
dimensions, a complicated network, saturated with multiple,
fragmentary, and mobile sexualities. To reduce them to the
conjugal relationship, and then to project the latter, in the
form of a forbidden desire, onto the children, cannot account
for this apparatus which, in relation to these sexualities, was
less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying
mechanism. Educational or psychiatric institutions, with
their large populations, their hierarchies, their spatial ar
rangements, their surveillance systems, constituted, along
side the family, another way of distributing the interplay of
powers and pleasures; but they too delineated areas of ex-
. treme sexual saturation, with privileged spaces or rituals
such as the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the con
sultation. The forms of a nonconjugal, nonmonogamous sex
uality were drawn there and established.

The Repressive Hypothesis 47
Nineteenth-century “bourgeois” society-and it is doubt
less still with us-was a society of blatant and fragmented
perversion. And this was not by way of hypocrisy, for noth
ing was more manifest and more prolix, or more manifestly
taken over by discourses and institutions. Not because, hav
ing tried to erect too rigid or too general a barri�r · against
sexuality, society succeeded only in giving rise to a whole
perverse outbreak and a long pathology of the sexual instinct.
At issue, rather, is the type of power it brought to bear on
the body and on sex. In point of fact, this power had neither
the form of the law, nor the effects of the taboo. On the
contrary, it acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It
did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various
forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefi
nite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it
in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It did
not seek to avoid it; it attracted its varieties by means of
spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another.
It did not set up a barrier; it provided places of maximum
saturation. It produced and determined the sexual mosaic.
Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or
as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual
fact, and directly, perverse.
In actual fact. The manifold sexualities-those which ap
pear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the
child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or
practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the
fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relation
ships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and stu
dent, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt
spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)
all form the correlate of exact procedures of power. We must
not imagine that all these things that were formerly tolerated
attracted notice and received a pejorative designation when
the time came to give a regulative role to the one type of
sexuality that was capable of reproducing labor power and
the form of the family. These polymorphous conducts were

48 The History of Sexuality
actually extracted from people’s bodies and from their pleas
ures; or rather, they were solidified in them; they were drawn
out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by mul
tifarious power devices. The growth of perversions is not a
moralizing theme that obssessed the scrupulous minds of the
Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a
type of power on bodies and their pleasures. It is possible that
the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleas
ures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices.
But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and
pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a
fixture of this game.
Directly. This implantation of multiple perversions is not
a mockery of sexuality taking revenge on a power that has
thrust on it an excessively repressive law. Neither are we
dealing with ‘paradoxical forms of pleasure that turn back on
power and invest it in the form of a “pleasure to be endured. ”
The implantation of perversions i s an instrument-effect: i t is
through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of
peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and
pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body,
and penetrated modes of conduct. And accompanying this
encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified, be
came stuck to an age, a place, a type of practice. A prolifera
tion of sexualities through the extension of power; an optimi
zation of the power to which each of these local sexualities
gave a surface of intervention: this concatenation, particu
larly since the nineteenth century, has been ensured and
relayed by the countless economic interests which, with the
help of medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography,
have tapped into both this analytical multiplication of pleas
ure and this optimization of the power that controls it. Pleas
ure and power do not cancel or turn back against
one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one an
other. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and
devices of excitation and incitement.

The Repressive Hypothesis 49
We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern
industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual
repression. We have not only witnessed a visible exp1osion of
unorthodox sexualities; but-and this is the important point
-a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is
locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured,
through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the pro
liferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of dis
parate sexualities. It is said that no society has been more
prudish; never have the agencies of power taken such care to
feign ignorance of the thing they prohibited, as if they were
determined to have nothing to do with it. But it is the oppo
site that has become apparent, at least after a general review
of the facts: never have there existed more centers of power;
never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more
circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the
intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch
hold, only to spread elsewhere.

PART T H RE E
Scientia Sexua]is

I suppose that the first two points will be granted me; I
imagine that people will accept my saying that, for two cen
turies now, the discourse on sex has been multiplied rather
than rarefied; and that if it has carried with it taboos and
prohibitions, it has also, in a more fundamental way, ensured
the solidification and implantation of an entire sexual mo
saic. Yet the impression remains that all this has by and large
played only a defensive role. By speaking about it so much,
by discovering it multiplied, partitioned off, and specified
precisely where one had placed it, what one was seeking
essentially was simply to conceal sex: a screen-discourse, a
dispersion-avoidance. Until Freud at least, the discourse on
sex-the discourse of scholars and theoreticians-never
ceased to hide the thing it was speaking about. We could take
all these things that were said, the painstaking precautions
and detailed analyses, as so many procedures meant to evade
the unbearable, too hazardous truth of sex. And the mere
fact that one claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied
and neutral viewpoint of a science is in itself significant. This
was in fact a science made up of evasions since, given its
inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself
primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities,
pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations. It was by
the same token a science subordinated .in the main to the
imperatives of a morality whose divisions it reiterated under
the guise of the medical norm. Claiming to speak the truth,
it stirred up people’s fears; to the least oscillations of sexual
ity, it ascribed an imaginary dynasty of evils destined to be
passed on for generations; it declared the furtive customs of
the timid, and the moSt solitary of petty manias, dangerous
5 3

5 4 T h e History of Sexuality
for the whole society; strange pleasures, it warned, would
eventually result in nothing short of death: that of individu
als, generations, the species itself.
It thus became associated with an insistent and indiscreet
medical practice, glibly proclaiming its aversions, quick to
run to the rescue of law and public opinion, more servile with
respect to the powers of order than amenable to the require
ments of truth. Involuntarily naive in the best of cases, more
often intentionally mendacious, in complicity with what it
denounced, haughty and coquettish, it established an entire
pornography of the morbid, which was characteristic of the
fin de siecle society. In France, doctors like Garnier, Pouillet,
and Ladoucette were its unglorified scribes and Rollinat its
poet. But beyond these troubled pleasures, it assumed other
powers; it set itself up as the supreme authority in matters
of hygienic necessity, taking up the old fears of venereal
affliction and combining them with the new themes of asep
sis, and the great evolutionist myths with the recent institu
tions of public health; it claimed to ensure the physical vigor
and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to
eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized
populations. In the name of a biological and historical ur
gency, it j ustified the racisms of the state, which at the time
were on the horizon. It grounded them in “truth . ”
When w e compare these discourses o n human sexuality ·
with what was known at the time about the physiology of
animal and plant reproduction, we are struck by the incon
gruity. Their feeble content from the standpoint of elemen
tary rationality, not to mention scientificity, earns them a
place apart in the history of knowledge. They form a
strangely muddled zone. Throughout the nineteenth cen
tury, sex seems to have been incorporated into two very
distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction,
which developed continuously according to a general scien
tific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite
different rules of formation. From one to the other, there was

Scientia Sexualis 5 5
no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration; the role of the
first with respect to the second was scarcely more than as a
distant and quite fictitious guarantee: a blanket guarantee
under cover of which moral obstacles, economic or political
options, and traditional fears could be recast in a scientific
sounding vocabulary. It is as if a fundamental resistance
blocked the development of a rationally formed discourse
concerning human sex, its correlations, and its effects. A
disparity of this sort would indicate that the aim of such a
discourse was not to state the truth but to prevent its very
emergence. Underlying the difference between the physiol
ogy of reproduction and the medical theories of sexuality, we
would have to see something other and something more than
an uneven scientific development or a disparity in the forms
of rationality; the one would partake of that immense will to
knowledge which has sustained the establishment of scien
tific discourse in the West, whereas the other would derive
from a stubborn will to nonknowledge.
This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that
was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with
age-old delusions, but also with systematic blindnesses: a
refusal to see and to understand; but further-and this is the
crucial point-a refusal concerning the very thing that was
brought to light and whose formulation was urgently solic
ited. For there can be no misunderstanding that is not based
on a fundamental relation to truth. Evading this truth, bar
ring access to it, masking it: these were so many local tactics
which, as if by superimposition and through a last-minute
detour, gave a paradoxical form to a fundamental petition to
know. Choosing not to recognize was yet another vagary of
the will to truth. Let Charcot’s Salpetriere serve as an exam
ple in this regard: it was an enormous apparatus for observa
tion, with its examinations, interrogations, and experiments,
but it was also a machinery for incitement, with its public
presentations, its theater of ritual crises, carefully staged
with the help of ether or amyl nitrate, its interplay of dia-

56 The History of Sexuality
logues, palpations, laying on of hands, postures which the
doctors elicited or obliterated with a gesture or a word, its
hierarchy of personnel who kept watch, organized, pro
voked, monitored, and reported, and who accumulated an
immense pyramid of observations and dossiers. It is in the
context of this continuous incitement to discourse and to
truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding (mecon
naissance) operated: thus Charcot’s gesture interrupting a
public consultation where it began to be too manifestly a
question of “that”; and the more frequent practice of delet
ing from the succession of dossiers what had been said and
demonstrated by the patients regarding sex, but also what
had been seen, provoked, solicited by the doctors themselves,
things that were almost entirely omitted from the published
observations.l The important thing, in this affair, is not that
these men shut their eyes or stopped their ears, or that they
were mistaken; it is rather that they constructed around and
apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth,
even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment. The
essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation
and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and false
hood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental,
useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that
sex was constituted as a problem of truth. What needs to be
situated, therefore, is not the threshold of a new rationality
whose discovery was marked by Freud-or someone else
but the progressive formation (and also the transformations)
lCf. . for example, Desire Bourneville, lconographie photographique de fa Safperriere
(1878-1881), pp. 110 If. The unpublished documents dealing with the lessons of
Charcot, which can still be found at the Salpetriere, are again more explicit on this
point than the published texts. The interplay of incitement and elision is clearly
evident in them. A handwritten note gives an account of the session of November
25, 1877. The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an attack by
placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman’s ovaries. He with
draws the baton, and there is a fresh attack, which he accelerates by administering
inhalations of amyl nitrate. The afflicted woman then cries out for the sex-baton in
words that are devoid of any metaphor: “G. is taken away and her delirium
continues. ”

Scientia Sexualis 5 7
of that “interplay of truth and sex” which was bequeathed
to us by the nineteenth century, and which we may have
modified, but, lacking evidence to the contrary, have not rid
ourselves of. Misunderstandings, avoidances, and evasions
were only possible, and only had their effects, against the
background of this strange endeavor: to tell the truth of sex.
An endeavor that does not date from the nineteenth century,
even if it was then that a nascent science lent it a singular
form. It was the basis of all the aberrant, naive, and cunning
discourses where knowledge of sex seems to have strayed for
such a long time.
Historically, there have been two great procedures for
producing the truth of sex.
On the one hand, the societies-and they are numerous:
China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies
which endowed themselves with an ars erotica. In the erotic
art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a
practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not con
sidered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and
the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but
first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as
pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific qual
ity, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.
Moreover, this knowledge must be deflected back into the
sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as though from
within and amplify its effects. In this way, there is formed a
knowledge that must remain secret, not because of an ele
ment of infamy that might attach to its object, but because
of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according
to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by
being divulged. Consequently, the relationship to the master
who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he,
working alone, can transmit this art in an esoteric manner
and as the culmination of an initiation in which he guides the
disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and sev�rity. The

5 8 The History o f Sexuality
effects of this masterful art, which are considerably more
generous than the spareness of its prescriptions would lead
one to imagine, are said to transfigure the one fortunate
enough to receive its privileges: an absolute mastery of the
body, a singular bliss, obliviousness to time and limits, the
elixir of life, the exile of death and its threats.
On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars
erotica. In return, it is undoubtedly the only civilization to
practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to
have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the
truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power
strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful
secret: I have in mind the confession.
Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have
established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely
on for the production of truth: the codification of the sacra
ment of penance by the Lateran Council in 1215, with the
resulting development of confessional techniques, the declin
ing importance of accusatory procedures in criminal j ustice,
the abandonment of tests of guilt (sworn statements, duels,
judgments of God) and the development of methods of inter
rogation and inquest, the increased participation of the royal
administration in the prosecution of infractions, at the ex
pense of proceedings leading to private settlements, the set
ting up of tribunals of Inquisition: all this helped to give the
confession a central role in the order of civil and religious
powers. The evolution of the word avowal and of the legal
function it designated is itself emblematic of this develop
ment: from being a guarantee of the status, identity, and
value granted to one person by another, it came to signify
someone’s acknowledgment of his own actions and thoughts.
For a long time, the individual was vouched for by the refer
ence of others and the demonstration of his ties to the com
monweal (family, allegiance, protection); then he was
authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged
to pronounce concerning himself. The truthful confession

Scientia Sexualis 59
was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualiza
tion by power.
In any case, next to the testing rituals, next to the testi
mony of witnesses, and the learned methods of observation
and demonstration, the confession became one of the West’s
most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have
since become a singularly confessing society. The confession
has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice,
medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations,
in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most
solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s
thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes
about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most
difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to
one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one
loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things
it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people
write books about. One confesses-or is forced to confess.
When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal
imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by vio
lence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul,
or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture
has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it
could go no further: the dark twins.2 The most defenseless
tenderness ‘and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need
of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
Whence a metamorphosis in literature: we have passed
from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the
heroic or marvelous narration of “trials” of bravery or saint
hood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of
extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words,
a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like
a shimmering mirage. Whence too this new way of philo
sophizing: seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not
‘Greek law had already coupled torture and confession, at least where slaves were
concerned, and Imperial Roman law had widened the practice.

60 The History of Sexuality
simply in oneself-in some forgotten knowledge, or in a
certain primal trace-but in the self-examination that yields,
through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic cer
tainties of consciousness. The obligation to confess is now
relayed through so many different points, ‘is so deeply in
grained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of
a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us
that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only
to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint
holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and
it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of
liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to si
lence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares
an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in phi
losophy, which a “political history of truth” would have to
overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free-nor
error servile-but that its production is thoroughly imbued
with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.
One has to be completely taken in by this internal ruse of
confession in order to attribute a fundamental role to censor
ship, to taboos regarding speaking and thinking; one has to
have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all
these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization
repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and
what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgot
ten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not
thinking-are speaking to us of freedom. An immense labor
to which the West has submitted generations in order to
produce-while other forms of work ensured the accumula
tion of capital-men’s subj ection: their constitution as sub
jects in both senses of the word. Imagine how exorbitant
must have seemed the order given to all Christians at the
beginning of the thirteenth century, to kneel at least once a
year and confess to all their transgressions, without omitting
a single one. And think of that obscure partisan, seven centu
ries later, who had come to rejoin the Serbian resistance deep

Scientia Sexualis 6 1
in the mountains; his superiors asked him to write his life
story; and when he brought them a few miserable pages,
scribbled in the night, they did not look at them but only said
to him, ” Start over, and tell the truth.” Should those much
discussed language taboos make us forget this millennial
yoke of confession?
From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a
privileged theme of confession. A thing that was hidden, we
are told. But what if, on the contrary, it was what, in a quite
particular way, one confessed? Suppose the obligation to
conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it
(concealing it all the more and with greater care as the
confession of it was more important, requiring a stricter
ritual and promising more decisive effects)? What if sex in
our society, on a scale of several centuries, was something
that was placed within an unrelenting system of confession?
The transformation of sex into discourse, which I spoke of
earlier, the dissemination and reinforcement of heterogene
ous sexualities, are perhaps two elements of the same deploy
ment: they are linked together with the help of the central
element of a confession that compels individuals to articulate
their sexual peculiarity-no matter how extreme. In Greece,
truth and sex were linked, in the form of pedagogy, by the
transmission of a precious knowledge from one body to an
other; sex served as a medium for initiations into learning.
For us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined,
through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an indi
vidual secret. But this time it is truth that serves as a medium
for sex and its manifestations.
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speak
ing subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a
ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does
not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a
partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority
who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it,
and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console,

62 The History of Sexuality
and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by
the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order
to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression
alone, independently of its external consequences, produces
intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it
exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of
his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. For
centuries, the truth of sex was, at least for the most part,
caught up in this discursive form. Moreover, this form was
not the same as that of education (sexual education confined
itself to general principles and rules of prudence); nor was it
that of initiation (which remained essentially a silent prac
tice, which the act of sexual enlightenment or deflowering
merely rendered laughable or violent). As we have seen, it is
a form that is far removed from the one governing the “erotic
art . ” By virtue of the power structure immanent in it, the
confessional discourse cannot come from above, as in the ars
erotica, through the sovereign will of a master, but rather
from below, as an obligatory act of speech which, under some
imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion or for
getfulness. What secrecy it presupposes is not owing to the
high price of what it has to say and the small number of those
who are worthy of its benefits, but to its obscure familiarity
and it§ general baseness. Its veracity is not guaranteed by the
lofty authority of the magistery, nor by the tradition it trans
mits, but by the bond, the basic intimacy in discourse, be
tween the dne who speaks and what he is speaking about. On
the other hand, the agency of domination does not reside in
the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in
the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who
knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not
supposed to know. And this discourse of truth finally takes
effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from
whom it is wrested. With these confessed truths, we are a
long way from the learned initiations into pleasure, with
their technique and their mystery. On the other hand, we

Scien tia Sexualis 63
belong to a society which has ordered sex’s difficult knowl
edge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but
around the slow surfacing of confidential statements.
The confession was, and still remains, the general standard
governing the production of the true discourse on sex. It has
undergone a considerable transformation, however. For a
long time, it remained firmly entrenched in the practice of
penance. But with the rise of Protestantism, the Counter
Reformation, eighteenth-century pedagogy, and nineteenth
century medicine, it gradually lost its ritualistic and exclu
sive localization; it spread; it has been employed in a whole
series of relationships: children and parents, students and
educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and ex
perts. The motivations and effects it is expected to produce
have varied, as have the forms it has taken : interrogations,
consultations, autobiographical narratives, letters; they have
been recorded, transcribed, assembled into dossiers, pub
lished, and commented on. But more important, the confes
sion lends itself, if not to other domains, at least to new ways
of exploring the existing ones. It is no longer a question
simply of saying what was done-the sexual act-and how
it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the
thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accom
panied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the
pleasure that animated it. For the first time no doubt, a
society has taken upon itself to solicit and hear the imparting
of individual pleasures.
A dissemination, then, of procedures of confession, a mul
tiple localization of their constraint, a widening of their do
main: a great archive of the pleasures of sex was gradually
constituted. For a long time this archive dematerialized as it
was formed. It regularly disappeared without a trace (thus
suiting the purposes of the Christian pastoral) until medi
cine, psychiatry, and pedagogy began to solidify it: Campe,
Salzmann, and especially Kaan, Krafft-Ebing, Tardieu,
Molle, and Havelock Ellis carefully assembled this whole

64 The History of Sexuality
pitiful, lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic. Western
societies thus began to keep an indefinite record of these
people’s pleasures. They made up a herbal of them and estab
lished a system of classification. They described their every
day deficiencies as well as their oddities or exasperations.
This was an important time. It is easy to make light of these
nineteenth-century psychiatrists, who made a point of apolo
gizing for the horrors they were about to let speak, evoking
“immoral behavior” or “aberrations of the genetic senses, ”
but I a m more inclined t o applaud their seriousness: they had
a feeling for momentous events. It was a time when the most
singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse
of truth concerning themselves, a discourse which had to
model itself after that which spoke, not of sin and salvation,
but of bodies and life processes-the discourse of science. It
was enough to make one’s voice tremble, for an improbable
thing was then taking shape: a confessional science, a science
which relied on a many-sided extortion, and took for its
object what was unmentionable but admitted to nonetheless.
The scientific discourse was scandalized, or in any case re
pelled, w�en it had to take charge of this whole discourse
from below. It was also faced with a theoretical and method
ological paradox: the long discussions concerning the possi
bility of constituting a science of the subject, the validity of
introspection, lived experience as evidence, or the presence
of consciousness to itself were responses to this problem that
is inherent in the functioning of truth in our society: can one
articulate the production of truth according to the old j uridi
co-religious model of confession, and the extortion of confi
dential evidence according to the rules of scientific discourse?
Those who believe that sex was more rigorously elided in the
nineteenth century than ever before, through a formidable
mechanism of blockage and a deficiency of discourse, can say
what they please. There was no deficiency, but rather an
excess, a redoubling, too much rather than not enough dis
course, in any case an interference between two modes of

Scientia Sexualis 65
production of truth: procedures of confession, and scientific
discursivity.
And instead of adding up the errors, naivetes, and moral
isms that plagued the nineteenth-century discourse of truth
concerning sex, we would do better to locate the procedures
by which that will to knowledge regarding sex, which cha
racterizes the modern Occident, caused the rituals of confes
sion to function within the norms of scientific regularity: how
did this immense and traditional extortion of the sexual con
fession come to be constituted in scientific terms?
1 . Through a clinical codification of the inducement to
speak. Combining confession with examination, the personal
history with the deployment of a set of decipherable signs
and symptoms; the interrogation, the exacting questionnaire,
and hypnosis, with the recollection of memories and free
association: all were ways of reinscribing the procedure of
confession in a field of scientifically acceptable observations.
2. Through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality.
Having to tell everything, being able to pose questions about
everything, found their justification in the principle that en
dowed sex with an inexhaustible and polymorphous causal
power. The most discrete event in one’s sexual behavior
whether an accident or a deviation, a deficit or an excess
was deemed capable of entailing the most varied conse
quences throughout one’s existence; there was scarcely a
malady or physical disturbance to which the nineteenth cen
tury did not impute at least some degree of sexual etiology.
From the bad habits of children to the phthises of adults, the
apoplexies of old people, nervous maladies, and the degener
ations of the race, the medicine of that era wove an entire
network of sexual causality to explain them. This may well
appear fantastic to us, but the principle of sex as a “cause of
any and everything” was the theoretical underside of a con
fession that had to be thorough, meticulous, and constant,

66 The History of Sexuality
and at the same time operate within a scientific type of
practice. The limitless dangers that sex carried with it jus
tified the exhaustive character of the inquisition to which it
was subjected.
3. Through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality.
If it was necessary to extract the truth of sex through the
technique of confession, this was not simply because it was
difficult to tell, or stricken by the taboos of decency, but
because the ways of sex were obscure; it was elusive by
nature; its energy and its mechanisms escaped observation,
and its causal power was partly clandestine. By integrating
it into the beginnings of a scientific discourse, the nineteenth
century altered the scope of the confession; it tended no
longer to be concerned solely with what the subject wished
to hide, but with what was hidden from himself, being inca
pable of coming to light except gradually and through the
labor of a confession in which the questioner and the ques
tioned each had a part to play. The principle of a latency
essential to sexuality made it possible to link the forcing of
a difficult confession to a scientific practice. It had to be
exacted, by force, since it involved something that tried to
stay hidden.
4. Through the method of interpretation. If one had to
confess, this was not merely because the person to whom one
confessed had the power to forgive, console, and direct, but
because the work of producing the truth was obliged to pass
through this relationship if it was to be scientifically vali
dated. The truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by
confessing, would reveal it wholly formed. It was constituted
in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the
one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one
who assimilated and recorded it. It was the latter’s function
to verify this obscure truth: the revelation of confession had
to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said. The one

Scientia Sexualis 67
who listened was not simply the forgiving master, the judge
who condemned or acquitted; he was the master of truth. His
was a hermaneutic function. With regard to the confession,
his power was not only to demand it before it was made, or
decide what was to follow after it, but also to constitute a
discourse of truth on the basis of its decipherment. By no
longer making the confession a test, but rather a sign, and by
making sexuality something to be interpreted, the nineteenth
century gave itself the possibility of causing the procedures
of confession to operate within the regular formation of a
scientific discourse.
5. Through the medicalization of the effects of confession.
The obtaining of the confession and its effects were recodified
as therapeutic operations. Which meant first of all that the
sexual domain was no longer accounted for simply by the
notions of error or sin, excess or transgression, but was
placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological
(which, for that matter, were the transposition of the former
categories); a characteristic sexual morbidity was defined for
the first time; sex appeared as an extremely unstable patho
logical field: a surface of repercussion for other ailments, but
also the focus of a specific nosography, that of instincts,
tendencies, images, pleasure, and conduct. This implied fur
thermore that sex would derive its meaning and its necessity
from medical interventions: it would be required by the doc
tor, necessary for diagnosis, and effective by nature in the
cure. Spoken in time, to the proper party, and by the person
who was both the bearer of it and the one responsible for it,
the truth healed.
Let us consider things in broad historical perspective:
breaking with the traditions of the ars erotica, our society has
equipped itself with
.
a scientia sex ua lis. To be more precise,
it has pursued the task of producing true discourses concern
ing sex, and this by adapting-not without difficulty-the

68 The History of Sexuality
ancient procedure of confession to the rules of scientific dis
course. Paradoxically, the scientia sexualis that emerged in
the nineteenth century kept as its nucleus the singular ritual
of obligatory and exhaustive confession, which in the Chris
tian West was the first technique for producing the truth of
sex. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this rite gradually
detached itself from the sacrament of penance, and via the
guidance of souls and the direction of conscience-the ars
artium-emigrated toward pedagogy, relationships between
adults and children, family relations, medicine, and psychia
try. In any case, nearly one hundred and fifty years have gone
into the making of a complex machinery for producing true
discourses on sex: a deployment that spans a wide segment
of history in that it connects the ancient inj unction of confes
sion to clinical listening methods. It is this deployment that
enables something called “sexuality” to embody the truth of
sex and its pleasures.
“Sexuality” : the correlative of that slowly developed dis
cursive practice which constitutes the scien tia sexualis. The
essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of
a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or
of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to
the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce
its truth. Situated at the point of intersection of a technique
of confession and a scientific discursivity, where certain
major mechanisms had to be found for adapting them to one
another (the listening technique, the postulate of causality,
the principle of latency, the rule of interpretation, the imper
ative of medicalization), sexuality was defined as being “by
. nature” : a domain susceptible to pathological processes, and
hence one calling for therapeutic or normalizing interven
tions; a field of meanings to decipher; the site of processes
concealed by specific mechanisms; a focus of indefinite causal
relations; and an obscure speech (parole) that had to be
ferreted out and listened to. The “economy” of discourses
their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation,

Scien tia Sexuahs 69
the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie
them and which they transmit-this, and not a system of
representations, is what determines the essential features of
what they have to say. The history of sexuality-that is, the
history of what functioned in the nineteenth century as a
specific field of truth-must first be written from the view
point of a history of discourses.
Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The
society that emerged in the nineteenth century-bourgeois,
capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will-did not
confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On
the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for
producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it
speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to
formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of
harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this produc
tion of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not
only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of
knowledge. Thus sex gradually became an object of great
suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades
our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point
of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the
fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general
signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear
that never ends. And so, in this “question” of sex (in both
senses: as interrogation and problematization, and as the
need for confession and integration into a field of rationality),
two processes emerge, the one always conditioning the other:
we demand that sex speak the truth (but, since it is the secret
and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for ourselves
the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and
deciphered at last), and we demand that it tell us our truth,
or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about our
selves which we think we possess in our immediate con
sciousness. We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us
about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part

70 The History of Sexuality
of it that escaped us. From this interplay there has evolved,
over several centuries, a knowledge of the subject; a knowl
edge not so much of his form, but of that which divides him,
determines him perhaps, but above all causes him to be
ignorant of himself. As unlikely as this may seem, it should
not surprise us when we think of the long history of the
Christian and juridical confession, of the shifts and transfor
mations this form of knowledge-power, so important in the
West, has undergone: the project of a science of the subject
has gravitated, in ever narrowing circles, around the question
of sex. Causality in the subject, the unconscious of the sub
ject, the truth of the subject in the other who knows, the
knowledge he holds unbeknown to him, all this found an
opportunity to deploy itself in the discourse of sex. Not,
however, by reason of some natural property inherent in sex
itself, but by virtue of the tactics of power immanent in this
discourse.
Scien tia sexualis versus ars erotica, no doubt. But it should
be noted that the ars erotica did not disappear altogether
from Western civilization; nor has it always been absent from
the movement by which one sought to produce a science of
sexuality. In the Christian confession, but especially in the
direction and examination of conscience, in the search for
spiritual union and the love of God, there was a whole series
of methods that had much in common with an erotic art:
guidance by the master along a path of initiation, the inten
sification of experiences extending down to their physical
components, the optimization of effects by the discourse that
accompanied them. The phenomena of possession and ec
stasy, which were quite frequent in the Catholicism of the
Counter Reformation, were undoubtedly effects that had got
outside the control of the erotic technique immanent in this
subtle science of the flesh. And we must ask whether, since
the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis-under the
guise of its decent positivism-has not functioned, at least to

Scien tia Sexualis 7 1
a certain extent, as an ars erotica. Perhaps this production
of truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model,
multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic
pleasures. It is often said that we have been incapable of
imagining any new pleasures. We have at least invented a
different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure,
the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and expos
ing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating
and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring
it out in the open-the specific pleasure of the true discourse
on pleasure.
The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our
knowledge about sexuality are not to be sought in the ideal,
promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the
humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality, and
certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings
of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utiliza
tion), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleas
ures connected to the production of the truth about sex. The
learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and
examinations; the anguish of answering questions and the
delights of having one’s words interpreted; all the stories told
to oneself and to others, so much curiosity, so many confi
dences offered in the face of scandal, sustained-but not
without trembling a little-by the obligation of truth; the
profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to
whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the
formidable “pleasure of analysis” (in the widest sense of the
latter term) which the West has cleverly been fostering for
several centuries: all this constitutes something like the er
rant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by
confession and the science of sex. Must we conclude that our
scientia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars
erotica, and that it is the Western, sublimated version of that
seemingly lost tradition? Or must we suppose that all these
pleasures are only the by-products of a sexual science, a

72 The History of Sexuality
bonus that compensates for its many stresses and strains?
In any case, the hypothesis of a power of repression ex
erted by our society on sex for economic reasons appears to
me quite inadequate if we are to explain this whole series of
reinforcements and intensifications that our preliminary in
quiry has discovered: a proliferation of discourses, carefully
tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the
sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not
only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of
forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure;
the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent
establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an
economy of manifold pleasures. We are dealing not nearly so
much with a negative mechanism of exclusion as with the
operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowl
edges, pleasures, and powers. At issue is not a movement
bent on pushing rude sex back into some obscure and inac
cessible region;but on the contrary, a process that spreads
it over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it
out and bids it speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to
tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array, reflected in a
myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the
interplay of knowledge and pleasure.
All this is an illusion, it will be said, a hasty impression
behind which a more discerning gaze will surely discover the
same great machinery of repression. Beyond these few phos
phorescences, are we not sure to find once more the somber
law that always says no? The answer will have to come out
of a historical inquiry. An inquiry concerning the manner in
which a knowledge of sex has been forming over the last
three centuries; the manner in which the discourses that take
it as their obj ect have multiplied, and the reasons for which
we have come to attach a nearly fabulous price to the truth
they claimed to produce. Perhaps these historical analyses
will end by dissipating what this cursory survey seems to
suggest. But the postulate I started out with, and would like

Scientia Sexualis 7 3
to hold to as long as possible, is that these deployments of
power and knowledge, of truth and pleasures, so unlike those
of repression, are not necessarily secondary and derivative;
and further, that repression is not in any case fundamental
and overriding. We need to take these mechanisms seriously,
therefore, and reverse the direction of our analysis: rather
than assuming a generally acknowledged repression, and an
ignorance measured against what we are supposed to know,
we must begin with these positive mechanisms, insofar as
they produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleas
ure, and generate power; we must investigate the conditions
of their emergence and operation, and try to discover how
the related facts of interdiction or concealment are dis
tributed with respect to them. In short, we must define the
strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowl
edge. As far as sexuality is concerned, we shall attempt to
constitute the “political economy” of a will to knowledge.

PART F OU R
The Deploy ment
of Sexuality

The aim of this series of studies? To transcribe into history
the fable of Les Bijoux indiscrets.
Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the
talking sex. The sex which one c�tches unawares and ques
tions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time,
endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was
so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this
sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion,
and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about
itself and others as well. For many years, we have all been
living in the realm of Prince Mangogul: under the spell of an
immense curiosity about sex, bent on questioning it, with an
insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about, quick
to invent all sorts of magical rings that might force it to
abandon its discretion. As if it were essential for us to be able
to draw from that little piece of ourselves not only pleasure
but knowledge, and a whole subtle interchange from one to
the other: a knowledge of pleasure, a pleasu’re that comes of
knowing pleasure, a knowledge-pleasure; and as if that fan
tastic animal we accommodate had itself such finely tuned
ears, such searching eyes, so gifted a tongue and mind, as to
know much and be quite willing to tell it, provided we em
ployed a little skill in urging it to speak. Between each of us
and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for
truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth
is beyond its grasp; it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since
sex is what holds it in darkness. But is sex hidden from us,
concealed by a new sense of decency, kept under a bushel by
the grim necessities of bourgeois society? On the contrary, it
shines forth; it is incandescent. Several centuries ago, it was
77

78 The History of Sexuality
placed at the center of a formidable petition to know. A
double petition, in that we are compelled to know how things
are with it, while it is suspected of knowing how things are
with us.
In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has
led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex. Not so
much to sex as representing nature, but to sex as history, as
signification and discourse. We have placed ourselves under
the sign of sex, but in the form of a Logic of Sex, rather than
a Physics. _ We must make no mistake here: with the great
series of binary oppositions (body/soul, flesh/spirit, instinct!
reason, drives/consciousness) that seemed to refer sex to a
pure mechanics devoid of reason, the West has managed not
only, or not so much, to annex sex to a field of rationality,
which would not be_ all that remarkable an achievement,
seeing how accustomed we are to such “conquests” since the
.Greeks, but to bring us almost entirely-our bodies, our
“minds, our individuality, our history-under the sway of a
�logic of concupiscence and desire. Whenever it is a question
of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves
as our master key. It has been several decades since geneti
cists ceased to conceive of life as an organization strangely
equipped with an additional capacity to reproduce itself; they
see in the reproductive mechanism that very element which
introduces the biological dimension: the matrix not only of
the Ii ving, but of life itself. But it was centuries ago that
countless theoreticians and practitioners of the flesh-whose
approach was hardly “scientific,” it is true-made man the
offspring of an imperious and intelligible sex. Sex, the expla
nation for everything.
It is pointless to �sk: Why then is sex so secret? What is
this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only
recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question
it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its
repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowa
days, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and

The Deployment of Sexuality 79
a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if
you can uncover it. Acheronto movebo: an age-old decision.
Ye wise men, high ly, deeply learned,
Who think it out and know,
How, when, and where do all things pair?
Why do they kiss and love?
Ye men of lofty wisdom, say
What happened to me then;
Search out and tell me where, how, when
And why it happened thus. I
It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this
inj unction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the
truth in sex?
In Diderot’s tale, the good genie Cucufa discovers at the
bottom of his pocket, in the midst of worthless things
consecrated seeds, little pagodas made of lead, and moldy
sugar-coated pills-the tiny silver ring whose stone, when
turned, makes the sexes one encounters speak. He gives it to
the curious sultan. Our problem is to know what marvelous
ring confers a similar power on us, and on which master’s
finger it has been placed; what game of power it makes
possible or presupposes, and how it is that each one of us has
become a sort of attentive and imprudent sultan with respect
to his own sex and that of others. It is this magical ring, this
jewel which is so indiscreet when it comes to making others
speak, but so ineloquent concerning one’s own mechanism,
that we need to render loquacious in its turn; it is what we
have to talk about. We must write the history of this will to
truth, this petition to know that for so many centuries has
kept us enthralled by sex: the history of a stubborn and
relentless effort. What is it that we demand of sex, beyond
its possible pleasures, that makes us so persistent? What is
this patience or eagerness to constitute it as the secret, the
‘Gottfried August BUrger, cited by Arthur Schopenhauer in The Metaphysics of the
Love of the Sexes. From The Will to Live: Selected Writings of A rthur Schopenhauer
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), p.69.

80 The History of Sexuality
omnipotent cause, the hidden meaning, the unremitting fear?
And why was the task of discovering this difficult truth
finally turned into an invitation to eliminate taboos and
break free of what binds us? Was the labor then so arduous
that it had to be enchanted by this promise? Or had this
knowledge become so costly-in political, economic, and
ethical terms-that in order to subject everyone to its rule,
it was necessary to assure them, paradoxically, that their
liberation was at ‘stake?
In order to situate the investigations that will follow, let
me put forward some general propositions concerning the
objective, the method, the domain to be covered, and the
periodizations that one can accept in a provisory way.

I
Objective
Why these investigations? I am well aware that an uncer
tainty runs through the sketches I have drawn thus far, one
that threatens to invalidate the more detailed inquiries that
I have proj ected. I have repeatedly stressed that the history
of the last centuries in Western societies did not manifest the
movement of a power that was essentially repressive. I based
my argument on the disqualification of that notion while
feigning ignorance of the fact that a critique has been
mounted from another quarter and doubtless in a more radi
cal fashion: a critique conducted at the level of the theory of
desire. In point of fact, the assertion that sex is not “re
pressed” is not altogether new. Psychoanalysts have been
saying the same thing for some time. They have challenged
the simple little machinery that comes to mind when one
speaks of repression; the idea of a rebellious energy that must
be throttled has appeared to them inadequate for deciphering
the manner in which power and desire are joined to one
another; they consider them to be linked in a more complex
and primary way than through the interplay of a primitive,
natural, and living energy welling up from below, and a
higher order seeking to stand in its way; thus one should not
think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the
law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it
is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is
already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation
8 1

82 The History of Sexuality
for a repression exerted after the event; but vanity as well,
to go questing after a desire that is beyond the reach of
power.
But, in an obstinately confused way, I sometimes spoke,
as though I were dealing with equivalent notions, of repres
sion, and sometimes of law, of prohibition or censorship.
Through stubbornness or neglect, I failed to consider every
thing that can distinguish their theoretical implications. And
I grant that one might j ustifiably say to me: By constantly
referring to positive technologies of power, you are playing
a double game where you hope to win on all counts; you
confuse your adversaries by appearing to take the weaker
position, and, discussing repression alone, you would have us
believe, wrongly, that you have rid yourself of the problem
of law; and yet you keep the essential practical consequence
of the principle of power-as-Iaw, namely the fact that there
is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present,
constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter
it with. As to the idea of a power-repression, you have re
tained its most fragile theoretical element, and this in order
to criticize it; you have retained the most sterilizing political
consequence of the idea of power-law, but only in order to
preserve it for your own use.
The aim of the inquiries that will follow is to move less
toward a “theory” of power than toward an “analytics” of
power: that is, toward a definition of the specific domain
formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of
the instruments that will make possible its analysis. How
ever, it seems to me that this analytics can be constituted
only if it frees itself completely from a certain representation
of power that I would term-it will be seen later why
“juridico-discursive. ” It is this conception that governs both
the thematics of repression and the theory of the law as
constitutive of desire. In other words, what distinguishes the
analysis made in terms of the repression of instincts from
that made in terms of the law of desire is clearly the way in

The Deployment of Sexuality 83
which they each conceive of the nature and dynamics of the
drives, not the way in which they conceive of power. They
both rely on a common representation of power which, de
pending on the use made of it and the position it is accorded
with respect to desire, leads to two contrary results: either to
the promise of a “liberation,” if power is seen as having only
an external hold on desire, or, if it is constitutive of desire
itself, to the affirmation: you are always-already trapped.
Moreover, one must not imagine that this representation is
peculiar to those who are concerned with the problem of the
relations of power with sex. In fact it is much more general;
one frequently encounters it in political analyses of power,
and it is deeply rooted in the history of the West.
These are some of its principal features:
– The negative relation. It never establishes any connec
tion between power and sex that is not negative: rejection,
exclusion, refusal, blockage, concealment. or mask. Where
sex and pleasure are concerned, power can “do” nothing but
say no to them; what it produces, if anything, is absences and
gaps; it overlooks elements, introduces discontinuities, sepa
rates what is joined, and marks off boundaries. Its effects take
the general form of limit and lack.
– The insistence of the rule. Power is essentially what
dictates its law to sex. Which means first of all that sex is
placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted
and forbidden. Secondly, power prescribes an “order” for sex
that operates at the same time as a form of intelligibility: sex
is to be deciphered on the basis of its relation to the law. And
finally, power acts by laying ‘ down the rule: power’s hold on
sex is maintained through language, or rather through the
act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is
articulated, a rule of law. It speaks, and that is the rule. The
pure form of power resides in the function of the legislator;
and its mode of action with regard to sex is of a j uridico
discursive character.

84 The History of Sexuality
– The cycle of prohibition: thou shalt not go near, thou
shalt not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not
experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not
show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in dark
ness and secrecy. To deal with sex, power employs nothing
more than a law of prohibition. Its objective: that sex re
nounce itself. Its instrument: the threat of a punishment that
is nothing other than the suppression of sex. Renounce your
self or suffer the penalty of being suppressed; do not appear
if you do not want to disappear. Your existence will be
maintained only at the cost of your nullification. Power con
strains sex only through a taboo that plays on the alternative
between two nonexistences.
– The logic of censorship. This interdiction is thought to
take three forms: affirming that such a thing is not permitted,
preventing it from being said, denying that it exists. Forms
that are difficult to reconcile. But it is here that one imagines
a sort of logical sequence that characterizes censorship
mechanisms : it links the inexistent, the illicit, and the inex
pressible in such a way that each is at the same time the
principle and the effect of the others: one must not talk about
what is forbidden until it is annulled in reality; what is inex
istent has no right to show itself, even in the order of speech
where its inexistence is declared; and that which one must
keep silent about is banished from reality as the thing that
is tabooed above all else. The logic of power exerted on sex
is the paradoxical logic of a law that might be expressed as
an inj unction of nonexistence, nonmanifestation, and silence.
– The uniformity of the apparatus. Power over sex is exer
cised in the same way at all levels. From top to bottom, in
its over-all decisions . and its capillary interventions alike,
whatever the devices or institutions on which it relies, it acts
in a uniform and comprehensive manner; it operates accord
ing to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanisms of
law, taboo, and censorship: from state to family, from prince
to father, from the tribunal to the small change of everyday

The Deployment of Sexuality 8 5
punishments, from the agencies of social domination to the
structures that constitute the subj ect himself, one finds a
general form of power, varying in scale alone. This form is
the law of transgression and punishment, with its interplay
of licit and illicit. Whether one attributes to it the form of the
prince who f?rmulates rights, of the father who forbids, of
the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states
the law, in any case one schematizes power in a j uridical
form, and one defines its effects as obedience. Confronted by
a power that is law, the subject who is constituted as subject
-who is “subj ected”-is he who obeys. To the formal
homogeneity of power in these various instances corresponds
the general form of submission in the one who is constrained
by it-whether the individual in question is the subject oppo
site the monarch, the citizen opposite the state, the child
opposite the parent, or the disciple opposite the master. A
legislative power on one side, and an obedient subject on the
other.
Underlying both the general theme that power represses
sex and the idea that the law constitutes desire, one encoun
ters the same putative mechanics of power. It is defined in
a strangely restrictive way, in that, to begin with, this power
is poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in
the tactics it utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly
doomed always to repeat itself. Further, it is a power that
only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say
no; in no condition to produce, capable only of posting limits,
it is basically anti-energy. This is the paradox of its effective
ness: it is incapable of doing anything, except to render what
it dominates incapable of doing anything either, except for
what this power allows it to do. And finally, it is a power
whose model is essentially j uridical, centered on nothing
more than the statement of the law and the operation of
taboos. All the modes of domination, submission, and subju
gation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience.

86 The History of Sexuality
Why is this j uridical notion of power, involving as it does
the neglect of everything that makes for its productive effec
tiveness, its strategic resourcefulness, its positivity, so readily
accepted? In a society such as ours, where the devices of
power are so numerous, its rituals so visible, and its instru
ments ultimately so reliable, in this society that has been
more imaginative, probably, than any other in creating devi
ous and supple mechanisms of power, what explains this
tendency not to recognize the latter except in the negative
and emaciated form of prohibition? Why are the deploy
ments of power reduced simply to the procedure of the law
of interdiction?
Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self
evident: power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a
substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its
aj)ility to hide its own mechanisms. Would power be ac
cepted if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the
nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. Not
only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it domi
nates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the
latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere
limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom
however slight-intact? Power as a pure limit set on freedom
is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.
There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this. The great
institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages
monarchy, the state with its apparatus-rose up on the basis
of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in
opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers,
powers tied to the direct or indirect dominion over the land,
to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty
and vassalage. If these institutions were able to implant
themselves, if, by profiting from a whole series of tactical
alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because
they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitra
tion, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the

The Deployment of Sexuality 87
midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would
temper them and distribute them according to boundaries
and a. fixed hierarchy. Faced with a myriad of clashing
forces, these great forms of power functioned as a principle
of right that transcended all the heterogeneous claims, mani
festing the triple distinction of forming a unitary regime, of
identifying its will with the law, and of acting through mech
anisms of interdiction and sanction. The slogan of this re
gime, pax et justitia, in keeping with the function it laid claim
to, established peace as the prohibition of feudal or private
wars, and justice as a way of suspending the private settling
of lawsuits. Doubtless there was more to this development of
great monarchic institutions than a pure and simple j uridical
edifice. But such was the language of power, the representa
tion it gave of itself, and the entire theory of public law that
was constructed in the Middle Ages, or reconstructed from
Roman law, bears witness to the fact. Law was not simply
a weapon skillfully wielded by monarchs; it was the mo
narchic system’s mode of manifestation and the form of its
acceptability. In Western societies since the Middle Ages, the
exercise of power has always been formulated in terms of
law.
A tradition dating back to the eighteenth or nineteenth
century has accustomed us to place absolute monarchic
power on the side of the unlawful: arbitrariness, abuse, ca
price, willfulness, privileges and exceptions, the traditional
continuance of accomplished facts. But this is to overlook a
fundamental historical trait of Western monarchies: they
were constructed as systems of law, they expressed them
selves through theories of law, and they made their mech
anisms of power work in the form of law. The old reproach
that Boulainvilliers directed at the French monarchy-that
it used the law and jurists to do away with rights and to bring
down the aristocracy-was basically warranted by the facts.
Through the development of the monarchy and its institu
tions this juridico-political dimension was established. It is

8 8 The History o f Sexuality
by no means adequate to describe the manner in which
power was and is exercised, but it is the code according to
which power presents itself and prescribes that we conceive
of it. The history of the monarchy went hand in hand with
the covering up of the facts and procedures of power by
j uridico-political discourse.
Yet, despite the efforts that were made to disengage the
juridical sphere from the monarchic institution and to free
the political from the juridical, the representation of power
remained caught within this system. Consider the two fol
lowing examples. Criticism of the eighteenth-century mo
narchic institution in France was not directed against the
juridico-monarchic sphere as such, but was made on behalf
of a pure and rigorous juridical system to which all the
mechanisms of power could conform, with no excesses or
irregularities, as opposed to a monarchy which, notwith
standing its own assertions, continuously overstepped the
legal framework and set itself above the laws. Political criti
cism availed itself, therefore, of all the juridical thinking that
had accompanied the development of the monarchy, in order
to condemn the latter; but it did not challenge the principle
which held that law had to be the very form of power, and
that power always had to be exercised in the form of law.
Another type of criticism of political institutions appeared in
the nineteenth century, a much more radical criticism in that
it was concerned to show not only that real power escaped
the rules of jurisprudence, but that the legal system itself was
merely a way of exerting violence, of appropriating that
violence for the benefit of the few, and of exploiting the
dissymmetries and injustices of domination under cover of
general law. But this critique of law is still carried out on the
assumption that, ideally and by nature, power must be exer
cised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness.
At bottom, despite the differences in epochs 3.nd objec
tives, the representation of power has remained under the
spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still

The Deployment of Sexuality 8 9
have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance
that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and
violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially
the state and sovereignty (even if the latter is questioned
insofar as it is personified in a collective being and no longer
a sovereign individual). To conceive of power on the basis of
these problems is to conceive of it in terms
·
of a historical
form that is characteristic of our societies: the j uridical mon
archy. Characteristic yet transitory. For while many of its
forms have persisted to the present, it has gradually been
penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are prob
ably irreducible to the representation of law. As we shall see,
these power mechanisms are, at least in part, those that,
beginning in the eighteenth century, took charge of men’s
existence, men as living bodies. And if it is true that the
j uridical system was useful for representing, albeit in a
nonexhaustive way, a power that was centered primarily
around deduction (prelevement) and death, it is utterly in
congruous with the new methods of power whose operation
is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by
normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods
that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond
the state and its apparatus. We have been engaged for centu
ries in a type of society in which the j uridical is increasingly
incapable of coding power, of serving as its system of repre
sentation. Our historical gradient carries us further and fur
ther away from a reign of law that had already begun to
recede into the past at a time when the French Revolution
and the accompanying age of constitutions and codes seemed
to destine it for a future that was at hand.
It is this j uridical representation that is still at work in
recent analyses concerning the relationships of power to sex.
But the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to
power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to
be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as
constituting it. This question is beside the point. Whether

90 The History of Sexuality
desire is this or that, in any case one continues to conceive
of it in relation to a power that is always j uridical and discur
sive, a power that has its central point in the enunciation of
the law. One remains attached to a certain image of power
law, of power-sovereignty, which was traced out by the
theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution. It is this
image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical
privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power
within the concrete and historical framework of its opera
tion. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer
takes law as a model and a code.
This history of sexuality, or rather this series of studies
concerning the historical relationships of power and the dis
course on sex, is, I realize, a circular project in the sense that
it involves two endeavors that refer back to one another. We
shall try to rid ourselves of a j uridical and negative represen
tation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law,
prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty. But how then do we
analyze what has occurred in recent history with regard to
this thing-seemingly one of the most forbidden areas of our
lives and bodies-that is sex? How, if not by way of prohibi
tion and blockage, does power gain access to it? Through
which mechanisms, or tactics, or devices? But let us assume
in turn that a somewhat careful scrutiny will show that
power in modern societies has not in fact governed sexuality
through law and sovereignty; let us suppose that historical
analysis has revealed the presence of a veritable “technol
ogy” of sex, one that is much more complex and above all
much more positive than the mere effect of a “defense” could
be; this being the case, does this example-which can only
be considered a privileged one, since power seemed in this
instance, more than anywhere else, to function as prohibition
-not compel one to discover principles for analyzing power
which do not derive from the system of right and the form
of law? Hence it is a question of forming a different grid of
historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of

The Deployment of Sexuality 9 1
power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little
toward a different conception of power through a closer
examination of an entire historical material. We must at the
same time conceive of sex without the law, and power with
out the king.

2
Method
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowl
edge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in
terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to a
number of misunderstandings-misunderstandings with re
spect to its nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not
mean “Power” as a group of institutions and mechanisms
that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state.
By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subj ugation
which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule.
Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domi
nation exerted by one group over another, a system whose
effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire
social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not
assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law,
or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset;
rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It
seems to me that power must be understood in the first
instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the
sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own
organization; as the process which, through ceaseless strug
gles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses
them; as the support which these force relations find in one
another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the con
trary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them
from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they
92

The Deployment of Sexuality 9 3
take effect, whose general design or institutional crystalliza
tion is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation
of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power’s condi
tion of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits
one to understand its exercise, even in its more “peripheral”
effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mech
anisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not
be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a
unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and de
scendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of
force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly
engender states of power, but the latter are always local and
unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the
privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible
unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the
next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one
point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it em
braces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
And “Power,” insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert,
and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that
emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that
rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their move
ment. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not
an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain
strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib
utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that
politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to
maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we
should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force rela
tions can be coded-in part but never totally-either in the
form of “war,” or in the form of “politics”; this would imply
two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch
into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogene
ous, unstable, and tense force relations.

94 The History of Sexuality
Continuing this line of discussion, we can advance a cer
tain number of propositions:
-Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared,
something that one holds on to or allows to slip away;
power is exercised from innumerable points, in the inter
play of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.
-Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with
respect to other types of relationships (economic proc
esses, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are
immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of
the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which
occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal
conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are
not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of
prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly pro
ductive role, wherever they come into play.
-Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and
all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at
the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix
-no such duality extending from the top down and react
ing on more and more limited groups to the very depths
of the social body. One must suppose rather that the mani
fold relationships of force that take shape and come into
play in the machinery of production, in families, limited
groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging
effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a
whole. These then form a general line of force that trav
erses the local oppositions and links them together; to be
sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments,
homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences
of the force relations. Major dominations are the hege
monic effects that are .sustained by all these confronta
tions.
-Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If
in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the

The Deployment of Sexuality 9 5
effect of another instance that “explains” them, but rather
because they are imbued, through and through, with cal
culation: there is no power that is exercised without a
series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that
it results from the choice or decision of an individual
subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides
over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor
the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those
who make the most important economic decisions direct
the entire network of power that functions in a society
(and makes it function); the rationality of power is charac
terized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the re
stricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism
of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one an
other, attracting and propagating one another, but finding
their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by
forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly
clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case
that no one is there to have invented them, and few who
can be said to have formulated them: an implicit charac
teristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strate
gies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “in
ventors” or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy.
-Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or
rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position
of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that
one is always “inside” power, there is no “escaping” it,
there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because
one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being
the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always
emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the
strictly relational character of power relationships. Their
existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance:
these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle
in power relations. These points of resistance are present
everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single

96 The History of Sexuality
locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all
rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there
is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case:
resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others
that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram
pant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise,
interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist
in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not
mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming
with respect to the basic domination an underside that is
in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous prin
ciples; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of
necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of
power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible
opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fash
ion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread
over time and space at varying densities, at times mobiliz
ing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming
certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain
types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures,
massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But
more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory
points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society- that
shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings,
furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up
and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in
them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of
power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes
through apparatuses and institutions, without being ex
actly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of
resistance traverses social stratifications and individual
unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of
these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible,
somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on
the institutional integration of power relationships.

The Deployment of Sexuality 97
It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to
analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape
from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated
political thought for such a long time. And if it is true that
Machiavelli was among the few-and this no doubt was the
scandal of his “cynicism”-who conceived the power of the
Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go
one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and
decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that
is immanent in force relationships.
To return to sex and the discourses of truth that have
taken charge of it, the question that we must address, then,
is not: Given a specific state structure, how and why is it that
power needs to establish a knowledge of sex? Neither is the
question: What over-all domination was served by the con
cern, evidenced since the eighteenth century, to produce true
discourses on sex? Nor is it: What law presided over both the
regularity of sexual behavior and the conformity of what was
said about it? It is rather: In a specific type’ of discourse on
sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing histori
cally and in specific places (around the child’s body, apropos
of women’s sex, in connection with practices restricting
births, and so on), what were the most immediate, the most
local power relations at work? How did they make possible
these kinds of discourses, and conversely, how were these
discourses used to support power relations? How was the
action of these power relations modified by their very exer
cise, entailing a strengthening of some terms and a weaken
ing of others, with effects of resistance and counterinvest
ments, so that there has never existed one type of stable
subjugation, given once and for all? How were these power
relations linked to one another according to the logic of a
great strategy, which in retrospect takes on the aspect of a
unitary and voluntarist politics of sex? In general terms:
rather than referring all the infinitesimal violences that are
exerted on sex, all the anxious gazes that are directed at it,

98 The History of Sexuality
and all the hiding places whose discovery is made into an
impossible task, to the unique form of a great Power, we
must immerse the expanding production of discourses on sex
in the field of multiple and mobile power relations.
Which leads us to advance, in a preliminary way, four
rules to follow. But these are not intended as methodological
imperatives; at most they are cautionary prescriptions.
1 . Rule of immanence
One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of
sexuality that would be the legitimate concern of a free and
disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mech
anisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or
ideological requirements of power. If sexuality was con
stituted as an area of investigation, this was only because
relations of power had established it as a possible object; and
conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was
because techniques of knowledge and procedures of dis
course were capable of investing it. Between techniques of
knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority,
even if they have specific roles and are linked together on the
basis of their difference. We will start, therefore, from what
might be called “local centers” of power-knowledge: for ex
ample, the relations that obtain between penitents and
confessors, or the faithful and their directors of conscience.
Here, guided by the theme of the “flesh” that must be mas
tered, different forms of discourse-self-examination, ques
tionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews-were the
vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of
forms of subjugation and schemas of knowledge. Similarly,
the body of the child, under surveillance, surrounded in his
cradle, his bed, or his room by an entire watch-crew of
parents, nurses, servants, educators, and doctors, all atten
tive to the least manifestations of his sex, has constituted,
particularly since the eighteenth century, another ” local cen
ter” of power-knowledge.

The Deployment of Sexuality 99
2. R u les of continual variations
We must not look for who has the power in the order of
sexuality (men, adults, parents, doctors) and who is deprived
of it (women, adolescents, children, patients); nor for who
has the right to know and who is forced to remain ignorant.
We must seek rather the pattern of the modifications which
the relationships of force imply by the very nature of their
process. The “distributions of power” and the “appropria
tions of knowledge” never represent only instantaneous
slices taken from processes involving, for example, a cumula
tive reinforcement of the strongest factor, or a reversal of
relationship, or again, a simultaneous increase of two terms.
Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distri
bution, they are “matrices of transformations. ” The nine
teenth-century grouping made up of the father, the mother,
the educator, and the doctor, around the child and his sex,
was subjected to constant modifications, continual shifts.
One of the more spectacular results of the latter was a strange
reversal: whereas to begin with the child’s sexuality had been
problematized within the relationship established between
doctor and parents (in the form of advice, or recommenda
tions to keep the child under observation, or warnings of
future dangers), ultimately it was in the relationship of the
psychiatrist to the child that the sexuality of adults them
selves was called into question.
3. Rule of double conditioning
No “local center, ” no “pattern of transformation” could
function if, through a series of sequences, it did not eventu
ally enter into an over-all strategy. And inversely, no strategy
could achieve comprehensive effects if did not gain support
from precise and tenuous relations serving, not as its point
of application or final outcome, but as its prop and anchor
point. There is no discontinuity between them, as if one were
dealing with two different levels (one microscopic and the

1 00 The History o f Sexuality
other macroscopic); but neither is there homogeneity (as if
the one were only the enlarged projection or the miniaturiza
tion of the other); rather, one must conceive of the double
conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tac
tics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them
work. Thus the father in the family is not the “representa
tive” of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not
projections of the father on a different scale. The family does
not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the
family. But the family organization, precisely to the extent
that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the
other power mechanisms, was used to support the great
“maneuvers” employed for the Malthusian control of the
birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicali
zation of sex and the psychiatrization of its non genital forms.
4. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses
What is said about sex must not be analyzed simply as the
surface of projection of these power mechanisms. Indeed, it
is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.
And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a
series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is
neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not
imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted dis
course and excluded discourse, or bet)Veen the dominant
discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of
discursive elements that can come into play in various strate
gies. It is t�is distribution that we must reconstruct, with the
things said and those concealed, the enunciations required
and those forbidden, that it comprises; with the variants and
different effects-according to who is speaking, his position
of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be
situated-that it implies; and with the shifts and reutiliza
tions of identical formulas for contrary objectives that it also
includes. Discourses are not once and for all subservient to

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 0 1
power o r raised u p against it, any more than silences are. We
must make allowance for the complex and unstable process
whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect
of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of
resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Dis
course transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but
also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes
it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy
are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they
also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas
of tolerance. Consider for example the history of what was ,
once “the” great sin against nature. The extreme discretion
of the texts dealing with sodomy-that utterly confused cate
gory-and the nearly universal reticence in talking about it
made possible a twofold operation: on the one hand, there
was an extreme severity (punishment by fire was meted out
well into the eighteenth century, without there being any
substantial protest expressed before the middle of the cen
tury), and on the other hand, a tolerance that must have been
widespread (which one can deduce indirectly from the infre
quency of j udicial sentences, and which one glimpses more
directly through certain statements concerning societies of
men that were thought to exist in the army or in the courts).
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-cen
tury psychiatry, j urisprudence, and literature of a whole se
ries of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexu
ality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism”
made possible a strong advance of social controls into this
area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation
of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its
own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be
acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same
categories by which it was medically disqualified. There is
not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it,
another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are
tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force

102 The History of Sexuality
relations; there can exist different and even contradictory
discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the con
trary, circulate without changing their form from one strat
egy to another, opposing strategy. We must not expect the
discourses on sex to tell us, above all, what strategy they
derive from, or what moral divisions they accompany, or
what ideology-dominant or dominated-they represent;
rather we must question them on the two levels of their
tactical productivity (what reciprocal effects of power and
knowledge they ensure) and their strategical integration
(what conj unction and what force relationship make their
utilization necessary in a given episode of the various con
frontations that occur).
In short, it is a question of orienting ourselves to a concep
tion of power which replaces the privilege of the law with the
viewpoint of the objective, the privilege of prohibition with
the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege of sovereignty
with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force
relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable,
effects of domination are produced. The strategical model,
rather than the model based on law. And this, not out of a
speculative choice or theoretical preference, but because in
fact it is one of the essential traits of Western societies that
the force relationships which for a long time had found
expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually be
came invested in the order of political power.

3
Domain
Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by
nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which
exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control
it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer
point for relations of power: between men and women, young
people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and
students, priests and laity, an administration and a popula
tion. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power
relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest
instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers
and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin,
for the most varied strategies.
There is no single, all-encompassing strategy, valid for all
of society and uniformly bearing on all the manifestations of
sex. For example, the idea that there have been repeated
attempts, by various means, to reduce all of sex to its repro
ductive function, its heterosexual and adult form, and its
matrimonial legitimacy fails to take into account the mani
fold objectives aimed for, the manifold means employed in
the different sexual politics concerned with the two sexes, the
different age groups and social classes.
In a first approach to the problem, it seems that we can
distinguish four great strategic unities which, beginning in
the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of
knowledge and power centering on sex. These did not come
103

1 04 The History of Sexuality
into being fully developed at that time; but it was then that
they took on a consistency and gained an effectiveness in the
order of power, as well as a productivity in the order of
knowledge, so that it is possible to describe them in their
relative autonomy.
1 . A hysterization of women ‘s bodies: a threefold process
whereby the feminine body was analyzed-qualified and dis
qualified-as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality;
whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical prac
tices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally,
it was placed in organic communication with the social body
(whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the
family space (of which it had to be a substantial and func
tional element), and the life of children (which it produced
and had to guarantee, by virtue of a biologico-moral respon
sibility lasting through the entire period of the children’s
education): the Mother, with her negative image of “nervous
woman,” constituted the most visible form of this hysteriza
tion.
2. A pedagogization of children ‘s sex: a double assertion
that practically all children indulge or are prone to indulge
in sexual activity; and that, being unwarranted, at the same
time “natural” and “contrary to nature,” this sexual activity
posed physical and moral, individual and collective dangers;
children were defined as “preliminary” sexual beings, on this
side of sex, yet within it, astride a dangerous dividing line.
Parents, families, educators, doctors, and eventually psy
chologists would have to take charge, in a continuous way,
of this precious and perilous, dangerous and endangered
sexual potential: this pedagogization was especially evident
in the war against onanism, which in the West lasted nearly
two centuries.
3. A socialization of procreative behavior: an economic so
cialization via all the incitements and restrictions, the “so
cial” and fiscal measures brought to bear on the fertility of

The Deployment of Sexuality 105
couples; a political socialization achieved through the “re
sponsibilization” of couples with regard to the social body as
a whole (which had to be limited or on the contrary rein
vigorated), and a medical socialization carried out by at
tributing a pathogenic value-for the individual and the spe
cies-to birth-control practices.
4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure: the sexual in
stinct was isolated as a separate biological and psychical
instinct; a clinical analysis was made of all the forms of
anomalies by which it could be afflicted; it was assigned a role
of normalization or pathologization with respect to all be
havior; and finally, a corrective technology was sought for
these anomalies.
Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex,
which mounted throughout the nineteenth century-four
privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and
anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the hysteri
cal woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple,
and the perverse adult. Each of them corresponded to one of
these strategies which, each in its own way, invested and
made use of the sex of women, children, and men.
What was at issue in these strategies? A struggle against
sexuality? Or were they part of an effort to gain control of
it? An attempt to regulate it more effectively and mask its
more indiscreet, conspicuous, and intractable aspects? A way
of formulating only that measure of knowledge about it that
was acceptable or useful? In actual fact, what was involved,
rather, was the very production of sexuality. Sexuality must
not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries
to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge
tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given
to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult
to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimula
tion of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement

106 The History of Sexuality
to discourse, the formation of special know ledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowl
edge and power.
It will be granted no doubt that relations of sex gave rise,
in every society, to a deployment of alliance: a system of
marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of
transmission of names and possessions. This deployment of
alliance, with the mechanisms of constraint that ensured its
existence and the complex knowledge it often required, lost
some of its importance as economic processes and political
structures could no longer rely on it as an adequate instru
ment or sufficient support. Particularly from the eighteenth
century onward, Western societies created and deployed a
new apparatus which was superimposed on the previous one,
and which, without completely supplanting the latter, helped
to reduce its importance. I am speaking of the deployment of
sexuality: like the deployment of alliance, it connects up with
the circuit of sexual partners, but in a completely different
way. The two systems can be contrasted term by term. The
deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules
defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the
illicit, whereas the deployment of sexuality operates accord
ing to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of
power. The deployment of alliance has as one of its chief
objectives to reproduce the interplay of relations and main
tain the law that governs them; the deployment of sexuality,
on the other hand, engenders a continual extension of areas
and forms of control. For the first, what is pertinent is the
link between partners and definite statutes; the second is
concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of
pleasures, and the nature of impressions, however tenuous or
imperceptible these may be. Lastly, if the deployment of
alliance is firmly tied to the economy due to the role it can
play in the transmission or circulation of wealth, the deploy
ment of sexuality is linked to the economy through numer-

The Deployment of Sexuality 107
ous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the
body-the body that produces and consumes. In a word, the
deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostasis of the
social body, which it has the function of maintaining; whence
its privileged link with the law; whence too the fact that the
important phase for it is “reproduction.” The deployment of
sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself,
but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and
penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in
controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive
way. We are compelled, then, to accept three or four hypoth
eses which run counter to the one on which the theme of a
sexuality repressed by the modern forms of society is based:
sexuality is tied to recent devices of power; it has been ex
panding at an increasing rate since the seventeenth century;
the arrangement that has sustained it is not governed by
reproduction; it has been linked from the outset with an
intensification of the body-with its exploitation as an object
of knowledge and an element in relations of power.
It is not exact to say that the deployment of sexuality
supplanted the deployment of alliance. One can imagine that
one day it will have replaced it. But as things stand at pre
sent, while it does tend to cover up the deployment of alli
ance, it has neither obliterated the latter nor rendered it
useless. Moreover, historically it was around and on the basis
of the deployment of alliance that the deployment of sexual
ity was constructed. First the practice of penance, then that
of the examination of conscience and spiritual direction, was
the formative nucleus : as we have seen, l what was at issue to
begin with at the tribunal of penance was sex insofar as it was
the basis of relations; the questions posed had to do with the
commerce allowed or forbidden (adultery, extramarital rela
tions, relations with a person prohibited by blood or statute,
the legitimate or illegitimate character of the act of sexual
I Cf page 37 above.

1 0 8 The History of Sexuality
congress); then, coinciding with the new pastoral and its
application in seminaries, secondary schools, and convents,
there was a gradual progression away from the problematic
of relations toward a problematic of the “flesh,” that is, of
the body, sensation, the nature of pleasure, the more secret
forms of enjoyment or acquiescence. “Sexuality” was taking
shape, born of a technology of power that was originally
focused on alliance. Since then, it has not ceased to operate
in conjunction with a system of alliance on which it has
depended for support. The family cell, in the form in which
it came to be valued in the course of the eighteenth century,
made it possible for the main elements of the deployment of
sexuality (the feminine body, infantile precocity, the regula
tion of births, and to a lesser extent no doubt, the specifica
tion of the perverted) to develop along its two primary
dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parents-children
axis. The family, in its contemporary form, must not be
understood as a social, economic, and political structure of
alliance that excludes or at least restrains sexuality, that
diminishes it as much as possible, preserving only its useful
functions. On the contrary, its role is to anchor sexuality and
provide it with a permanent support. It ensures the produc
tion of a sexuality that is not homogeneous with the privi
leges of alliance, while making it possible for the systems of
alliance to be imbued with a new tactic of power which they
would otherwise be impervious to. The family is the inter
change of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the
juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality; and it
conveys the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensa
tions in the regime of alliance.
This interpenetration of the deployment of alliance and
that of sexuality in the form of the family allows us to under
stand a number of facts: that since the eighteenth century the
family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings,
love; that sexuality has its privileged point of development in
the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from

The Deployment of Sexuality 109
the start. It may be that in societies where the mechanisms
of alliance predominate, prohibition of incest is a function
ally indispensable rule. But in a society such as ours, where
the family is the most active site of sexuality, and where it
is doubtless the exigencies of the latter which maintain and
prolong its existence, incest-for different reasons altogether
and in a completely different way-occupies a central place;
it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of
obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispens
able pivot. It is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden
in the family insofar as the latter functions as a deployment
of alliance; but it is also a thing that is continuously de
manded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant
sexual incitement. If for more than a century the West has
displayed such a strong interest in the prohibition of incest,
if more or less by common accord it has been seen as a social
universal and one of the points through which every society
is obliged to pass on the way to becoming a culture, perhaps
this is because it was found to be a means of self-defense, not
against an incestuous desire, but against the expansion and
the implications of this deployment of sexuality which had
been set up, but which, among its its many benefits, had the
disadvantage of ignoring the laws and j uridical forms of
alliance. By asserting that all societies without exception,
and consequently our own, were subject to this rule of rules,
one guaranteed that this deployment of sexuality, whose
strange effects were beginning to be felt-among them, the
affective intensification of the family space…=…..-would not be
able to escape from the grand and ancient system of alliance.
Thus the law would be secure, even in the new mechanics of
power. For this is the paradox of a society which, from the
eighteenth century to the present, has created so many tech
nologies of power that are foreign to the concept of law: it
fears the effects and proliferations of those technologies and
attempts to recode them in forms of law. If one considers the
threshold of all culture to be prohibited incest, then sexuality

1 1 0 The History of Sexuality
has been, from the dawn of time, under the sway of law and
right. By devoting so much effort to an endless reworking of
the transcultural theory of the incest taboo, anthropology
has proved worthy of the whole modern deployment of sexu
ality and the theoretical discourses it generates.
What has taken place since the seventeenth century can be
interpreted in the following manner: the deployment of
sexuality which first developed on the fringes of familial
institutions (in the direction of conscience and pedagogy, for
example) gradually became focused on the family: the alien,
irreducible, and even perilous effects it held in store for the
deployment of alliance (an awareness of this danger was
evidenced in the criticism often directed at the indiscretion
of the directors, and in the entire controversy, which oc
curred somewhat later, over the private or public, institu
tional or familial education of children2) were absorbed by
the family, a family that was reorganized, restricted no
doubt, and in any case intensified in comparison with the
functions it formerly exercised in the deployment of alliance.
In the family, parents and relatives became the chief agents
of a deployment of sexuality which drew its outside support
from doctors, educators, and later psychiatrists, and which
began by competing with the relations of alliance but soon
“psychologized” or “psychiatrized” the latter. Then these
new personages made their appearance: the nervous woman,
the frigid wife, the indifferent mother-or worse, the mother
beset by murderous obsessions-the impotent, sadistic,
perverse husband, the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the
precocious and already exhausted child, and the young
homosexual who rejects marriage or neglects his wife. These
were the combined figures of an alliance gone bad and an
abnormal sexuality; they were the means by which the dis
turbing factors of the latter were brought into the former;
2 Moliere’s Tartuffe and Jakob Michael Lenz’s Tutor, separated by more than a
century, both depict the interference of the deployment of sexuality in the family
organization, apropos of spiritual direction in TartuJfe and education in The Tutor.

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 1
and yet they also provided an opportunity for the alliance
system to assert its prerogatives in the order of sexuality.
Then a pressing demand emanated from the family: a
plea for help in reconciling these unfortunate conflicts be
tween sexuality and alliance; and, caught in the grip of
this deployment of sexuality which had invested it from
without, contributing to its solidification into its modern
form, the family broadcast the long complaint of its sex
ual suffering to doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests,
and pastors, to all the “experts” who would listen. It was
as if it had suddenly discovered the dreadful secret of
what had always been hinted at and inculcated in it: the
family, the keystone of alliance, was the germ of all the
misfortunes of sex. And 10 and behold, from the mid
nineteenth century onward, the family engaged in search
ing out the slightest traces of sexuality in its midst,
wrenching from itself the most difficult confessions, solic
iting an audience with everyone who might know some
thing about the matter, and opening itself unreservedly to
endless examination. The family was the crystal in the de
ployment of sexuality: it seemed to be the source of a sex
uality which it actually only reflected and diffracted. By
virtue of its permeability, and through that process of re
flections to the outside, it became one of the most valu
able tactical components of the deployment.
But this development was not without its tensions and
problems. Charcot doubtless constituted a central figure in
this as well. For many years he was the most noteworthy of
all those to whom families, burdened down as they were with
this sexuality that saturated them, appealed for mediation
and treatment. On receiving parents who brought him their
children, husbands their wives, and wives their husbands,
from the world over, his first concern was to separate the
“patient” from his family, and the better to observe him, he
would pay as little attention as possible to what the family

1 1 2 The History of Sexuality
had to say.3 He sought to detach the sphere of sexuality from
the system of alliance, in order to deal with it directly
through a medical practice whose technicity and autonomy
were guaranteed by the neurological model. Medicine thus
assumed final responsibility, according to the rules of a spe
cific knowledge, for a sexuality which it had in fact urged
families to concern themselves with as an essential task and
a major danger. Moreover, Charcot noted on several occa
sions how difficult it was for families to “yield” the patient
whom they nonetheless had brought to the doctor, how they
laid siege to the mental hospitals where the subject was being
kept out of view, and the ways in which they were constantly
interfering with the doctor’s work. Their worry was unwar
ranted, however: the therapist only intervened in order to
return to them individuals who were sexually compatible
with the family system; and while this intervention manipu
lated the sexual body, it did not authorize the latter to define
itself in explicit discourse. One must not speak of these “geni
tal causes”: so went the phrase-muttered in a muted voice
-which the most famous ears of our time overheard one day
in 1 8 86, from the mouth of Charcot.
This was the context in which psychoanalysis set to work;
but not without substantially modifying the pattern of anxie
ties and reassurances. In the beginning it must have given
rise to distrust and hostility, for, pushing Charcot’s lesson to
the extreme, it undertook to examine the sexuality of in
dividuals outside family control; it brought this sexuality to
light without covering it over again with the neurological
model; more serious still, it called family relations into ques
tion in the analysis it made of them. But despite everything,
J Jean-Martin Charcot, Lerons de Mardi, January 7, 1888: ” I n order to properly
treat a hysterical girl, one must not leave her with her father and mother; she needs
to be placed in a mental hospital. . . . Do you know how long well-behaved little
girls cry for their mothers after they part company? . . . Let us take the average,
if you will; it’s not very long, a half· hour or thereabouts.”
February 21, 1888: “In the case of hysteria of young boys, what one must do is
to separate them from their mothers. So long as they are with their mothers, nothing
is of any use . . . . The father is sometimes j ust as unbearable as the mother; it is
best, then, to get rid of them both.”

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 3
psychoanalysis, whose technical procedure seemed to place
the confession of sexuality outside family j urisdiction, redis
covered the law of alliance, the involved workings of mar
riage and kinship, and incest at the heart of this sexuality, as
the principle of its formation and the key to its intelligibility.
The guarantee that one would find the parents-children rela
tionship at the root of everyone’s sexuality made it possible
-even when everything seemed to point to the reverse proc
ess-to keep the deployment of sexuality coupled to the
system of alliance. There was no risk that sexuality would
appear to be, by nature, alien to the law: it was constituted
only through the law. Parents, do not be afraid to bring your
children to analysis: it will teach them that in any case it is
you whom they love. Children, you really shouldn’t com
plain that you are not orphans, that you always rediscover
in your innermost selves your Obj ect-Mother or the sover
eign sign of your Father: it is through them that you gain
access to desire. Whence, after so many reticences, the enor
mous consumption of analysis in societies where the deploy
ment of alliance and the family system needed strengthening.
For this is one of the most significant aspects of this entire
history of the deployment of sexuality : it had its beginnings
in the technology of the “flesh” in classical Christianity,
basing itself on the alliance system and the rules that gov
erned the latter; but today it fills a reverse function in that
it tends to prop up the old deployment of alliance. From the
direction of conscience to psychoanalysis, the deployments
of alliance and sexuality were involved in a slow process that
had them turning about one another until, more than three
centuries later, their positions were reversed; in the Christian
pastoral, the law of alliance codified the flesh which was just
being discovered and fitted it into a framework that was still
juridical in character; with psychoanalysis, sexuality gave
body and life to the rules of alliance by saturating them with
desire.
Hence the domain we must analyze in the different studies
that will follow the present volume is that deployment of

1 14 The History of Sexuality
sexuality: its formation on the basis of the Christian notion
of the flesh, and its development through the four great
strategies that were deployed in the nineteenth century: the
sexualization of children, the hysterization of women, the
specification of the perverted, and the regulation of popula
tions-all strategies that went by way of a family which must
be viewed, not as a powerful agency of prohibition, but as a
major factor of sexualization.
The first phase corresponded to the need to form a “labor
force” (hence to avoid any useless “expenditure,” any wasted
energy, so that all forces were reduced to labor capacity
alone) and to ensure its reproduction (conjugality, the regu
lated fabrication of children). The second phase corre
sponded to that epoch of Spatkapitalismus in which the
exploitation of wage labor does not demand the same violent
and physical constraints as in the nineteenth century, and
where the politics of the body does not require the elision of
sex or its restriction solely to the reproductive function; it
relies instead on a multiple channeling into the controlled
circuits of the economy-on what has been called a hyper
repressive desublimation.
If the politics of sex makes little use of the law of the taboo
but brings into play an entire technical machinery, if what
is involved is the production of sexuality rather than the
repression of sex, then our emphasis has to be placed else
where; we must shift our analysis away from the problem of
“labor capacity” and doubtless abandon the diffuse energet
ics that underlies the theme of a sexuality repressed for eco
nomIC reasons.

4
Periodization
The history of sexuality supposes two ruptures if one tries
to center it on mechanisms of repression. The first, occurring
in the course of the seventeenth century, was characterized
by the advent of the great prohibitions, the exclusive promo
tion of adult marital sexuality, the imperatives of decency,
the obligatory concealment of the body, the reduction to
silence and mandatory reticences of language. The second, a
twentieth-century phenomenon, was really less a rupture
than an inflexion of the curve: this was the moment when the
mechanisms of repression were seen as beginning to loosen
their grip; one passed from insistent sexual taboos to a rela
tive tolerance with regard to prenuptial or extramarital rela
tions; the disqualification of “perverts” diminished, their
. condemnation by the law was in part eliminated; a good
many of the taboos that weighed on the sexuality of children
were lifted.
We must attempt to trace the chronology of these devices:
the inventions, the instrumental mutations, and the renova
tions of previous techniques. But there is also the calendar
of their utilization to consider, the chronology of their diffu
sion and of the effects (of subjugation and resistance) they
produced. These multiple datings doubtless will not coincide
with the great repressive cycle that is ordinarily situated
between the sev.enteenth and the twentieth centuries.
1 . The chronology of the techniques themselves goes back
1 1 5

1 1 6 The History of Sexuality
a long way. Their point of formation must be sought in the
penitential practices of medieval Christianity, or rather in
the dual series constituted by the obligatory, exhaustive, and
periodic confession imposed on all the faithful by the Lateran
Council and by the methods of asceticism, spiritual exercise,
and mysticism that evolved with special intensity from the
sixteenth century on. First the Reformation, then Tridentine
Catholicism, mark an important mutation and a schism in
what might be called the “traditional technology of the
flesh.” A division whose depth should not be under
estimated; but this did not rule out a certain parallelism in
the Catholic and Protestant methods of examination of con
science and pastoral direction: procedures for analyzing
“concupiscence” and transforming it into discourse were
established in both instances. This was a rich, refined tech
nique which began to take shape in the sixteenth century and
went through a long series of theoretical elaborations until,
at the end of the eighteenth century, it became fixed in ex
pressions capable of symbolizing the mitigated strictness of
Alfonso de’ Liguori in the one case and Wesleyan pedagogy
in the other.
It was during the same period-the end of the eighteenth
century-and for reasons that will have to be determined,
that there emerged a completely new technology of sex; new
in that for the most part it escaped the ecclesiastical institu
tion without being truly independent of the thematics of sin.
Through pedagogy, medicine; and economics, it made sex
not only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well;
to be more exact, sex became a matter that required the social
body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals, to place
themselves under surveillance. New too for the fact that it
expanded along three axes: that of pedagogy, having as its
objective the specific sexuality of children; that of medicine,
whose objective was the sexual physiology peculiar to
women; and last, that of demography, whose objective was
the spontaneous or concerted regulation of births. Thus the

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 7
“sin of youth,” “nervous disorders, ” and “frauds against
procreation” (as those “deadly secrets” were later to be
called) designate three privileged areas of this new technol
ogy. There is no question that in each of these areas, it went
back to methods that had already been formed by Christian
ity, but of course not without modifying them: the sexuality
of children was already problematized in the spiritual
pedagogy of Christianity (it is interesting to note that Molli
ties, the first treatise on sin, was written in the fifteenth
century by an educator and mystic named Gerson, and that
the Onania collection compiled by Dekker in the eighteenth
century repeats word for word examples set forth by the
Anglican pastoral); the eighteenth-century medicine of
nerves and vapors took up in turn a field of analysis that had
already been delimited when the phenomena of possession
fomented a grave crisis in the all too indiscreet practices of
conscience direction and spiritual examination (nervous ill
ness is certainly not the truth of possession, but the medicine
of hysteria is not unrelated to the earlier direction of “ob
sessed” women); and the campaigns apropos of the birthrate
took the place of the control of conjugal relations-in a
different form and at another level-which the Christian
penance had so persistently sought to establish through its
examinations. A visible continuity, therefore, but one that
did not prevent a major transformation: from that time on,
the technology of sex was ordered in relation to the medical
institution, the exigency of normality, and-instead of the
question of death and everlasting punishment-the problem
of life and illness. The flesh was brought down to the level
of the organism.
This mutation took place at the turn of the nineteenth
century; it opened the way for many other transformations
that derived from it. The first of these set apart the medicine
of sex from the medicine of the body; it isolated a sexual
“instinct” capable of presenting constitutive anomalies, ac
quired derivations, infirmities, or pathological processes.

1 1 8 The History of Sexuality
Heinrich Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1 846,
can be used as an indicator: these were the years that saw the
correlative appearance of a medicine, an “orthopedics,”
specific to sex: in a word, the opening up of the great medico
psychological domain of the “perversions,” which was
destined to take over from the old moral categories of de
bauchery and excess. In the same period, the analysis of
heredity was placing sex (sexual relations, venereal diseases,
matrimonial alliances, perversions) in a position of “biologi
cal responsibility” with regard to the species: not only could
sex be affected by its own diseases, it could also, if it was not
controlled, transmit diseases or create others that would
afflict future generations. Thus it appeared to be the source
of an entire capital for the species to draw from. Whence the
medical-but also political-project for organizing a state
management of marriages, births, and life expectancies; sex
and its fertility had to be administered. The medicine of
perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great
innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the
nineteenth century.
Innovations that merged together quite well, for the
theory of “degenerescence” made it possible for them to
perpetually refer back to one another; it explained how a
heredity that was burdened with various maladies (it made
little difference whether these were organic, functional, or
psychical) ended by producing a sexual pervert (look into the
genealogy of an exhibitionist or a homosexual: you will find
a hemiplegic ancestor, a phthisic parent, or an uncle afflicted
with senile dementia); but it went on to explain how a sexual
perversion resulted in the depletion of one’s line of descent
-rickets in the children, the sterility of future generations.
The series composed of perversion-heredity-degenerescence
formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex. And
let it not be imagined that this was nothing more than a
medical theory which was scientifically lacking and improp
erly moralistic. Its application was widespread and its im-

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 9
plantation went deep. Psychiatry, to be sure, but also juris
prudence, legal medicine, agencies of social control, the sur
veillance of dangerous or endangered children, all func
tioned for a long time on the basis of “degen
erescence” and the heredity-perversion system. An entire
social practice, which took the exasperated but coherent
form of a state-directed racism, furnished this technology of
sex with a formidable power and far-reaching consequences.
And the strange position of psychiatry at the end of the
nineteenth century would be hard to comprehend if one did
not see the rupture it brought about in the great system of
degenerescence: it resumed the project of a medical technol
ogy appropriate for dealing with the sexual instinct; but it
sought to free it from its ties with heredity, and hence from
eugenics and the various racisms. It is very well to look back
from our vantage point and remark upon the normalizing
impulse in Freud; one can go on to denounce the role played
for many years by the psychoanalytic institution; but the fact
remains that in the great family of technologies of sex, which
goes so far back into the history of the Christian West, of all
those institutions that set out in the nineteenth century to
medicalize sex, it was the one that, up to the decade of the
forties, rigorously opposed the political and institutional
effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system.
It is clear that the genealogy of all these techniques, with
their mutations, their shifts, their continuities and ruptures,
does not coincide with the hypothesis of a great repressive
phase that was inaugurated in the course of the classical age
and began to slowly decline in the twentieth. There was
rather a perpetual inventiveness, a steady growth of methods
and procedures, with two especially productive moments in
this proliferating history : around the middle of the sixteenth
century, the development of procedures of direction and
examination of conscience; and at the beginning of the nine
teenth century, the advent of medical technologies of sex.
2. But the foregoing is still only a dating of the techniques

1 20 The History of Sexuality
themselves. The history of their spread and their point of
application is something else again. If one writes the history
of sexuality in terms of repression, relating this repression to
the utilization of labor capacity, one must suppose that sex
ual controls were the more intense and meticulous as they
were directed at the poorer classes; one has to assume that
they followed the path of greatest domination and the most
systematic exploitation: the young adult man, possessing
nothing more than his life force, had to be the primary target
of a subjugation destined to shift the energy available for
useless pleasure toward compulsory labor. But this does not
appear to be the way things actually happened. On the con
trary, the most rigorous techniques were formed and, more
particularly, applied first, with the greatest intensity, in the
economically privileged and politically dominant classes.
The direction of consciences, self-examination, the entire
long elaboration of the transgressions of the flesh, and the
scrupulous detection of concupiscence were all subtle proce
dures that could only have been accessible to small groups
of people. It is true that the penitential method of Alfonso
de’ Liguori and the rules recommended to the Methodists by
Wesley ensured that these procedures would be more widely
disseminated, after a fashion; but this was at the cost of a
considerable simplification.
The same can be said of the family as an agency of control
and a point of sexual saturation: it was in the “bourgeois” or
“aristocratic” family that the sexuality of children and
adolescents was first problematized, and feminine sexuality
medicalized; it was the first to be alerted to the potential
pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close
watch and to devise a rational technology of correction. It
was this family that first became a locus for the psychiatriza
tion of sex. Surrendering to fears, creating remedies, appeal
ing for rescue by learned techniques, generating countless
discourses, it was the first to commit itself to sexual erethism.
The bourgeoisie began by considering that its own sex was

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 2 1
something importaIlt, a fragile treasure, a secret that had to
be discovered at all costs. It is worth remembering that the
first figure to be invested by the deployment of sexuality, one
of the first to be “sexualized,” was the “idle” woman. She
inhabited the outer edge of the “world,” in which she always
had to appear as a value, and of the family, where she was
assigned a new destiny charged with conjugal and parental
obligations. Thus there emerged the “nervous” woman, the
woman afflicted with “vapors”; in this figure, the hysteriza
tion of woman found its anchorage point. As for the adoles
cent wasting his future substance in secret pleasures, the
onanistic child who was of such concern to doctors and
educators from the end of the eighteenth century to the end
of the nineteenth, this was not the child of the people, the
future worker who had to be taught the disciplines of the
body, but rather the schoolboy, the child surrounded by
domestic servants, tutors, and governesses, who was in dan
ger of compromising not so much his physical strength as his
intellectual capacity, his moral fiber, and the obligation to
preserve a healthy line of descent for his family and his social
class.
For their part, the working classes managed for a long
time to escape the deployment of “sexuality. ” Of course,
they were subjected in specific ways to the deployment of
“alliances ” : the exploitation of legitimate marriage and fertil
ity, the exclusion of consanguine sexual union, prescriptions
of social and local endogamy. On the other hand, it is un
likely that the Christian technology of the flesh ever had any
importance for them. As for the mechanisms of sexualiza
tion, these penetrated them slowly and apparently in three
successive stages. The first involved the problems of birth
control, when it was discovered, at the end of the eighteenth
century, that the art of fooling nature was not the exclusive
privilege of city dwellers and libertines, but was known and
practiced by those who, being close to nature itself, should
have held it to be more repugnant than anyone else did. Next

1 22 The History of Sexuality
the organization of the “conventional” family came to be
regarded, sometime around the eighteen-thirties, as an indis
pensable instrument of political control and economic regu
lation for the subjugation of the urban proletariat: there was
a great campaign for the “moralization of the poorer
classes. ” The last stage came at the end of the nineteenth
century with the development of the juridical and medical
control of perversions, for the sake of a general protection of
society and the race. It can be said that this was the moment
when the deployment of “sexuality,” elaborated in its more
complex and intense forms, by and for the privileged classes,
spread through the entire social body. But the forms it took
were not everywhere the same, and neither were the instru
ments it employed (the respective roles of medical and judi
cial authority were not the same in both instances; nor was
even the way in which medicine and sexuality functioned).
These chronological reminders-whether we are con
cerned with the invention of techniques or the calendar of
their diffusion-are of some importance. They cast much
doubt on the idea of a repressive cycle, with a beginning and
an end and forming a curve with its point of irtflexion: it
appears unlikely that there was an age of sexual restriction.
They also make it doubtful that the process was homoge
neous at all levels of society and in all social classes: there was
no unitary sexual politics. But above all, they make the
meaning of the process, and its reasons for being, problemati
cal: it seems that the deployment of sexuality was not estab
lished as a principle of limitation of the pleasures of others
by what have traditionally been called the “ruling classes . ”
Rather i t appears t o me that they first tried i t on themselves.
Was this a new avatar of that bourgeois asceticism described
so many times in connection with the Reformation, the new
work ethic, and the rise of capitalism? It seems in fact that
what was involved was not an asceticism, in any case not a
renunciation of pleasure or a disqualification of the flesh, but

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 23
on the contrary an intensification of the body, a problemati
zation of health and its operational terms: it was a question
of techniques for maximizing life. The primary concern was
not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but
rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of
the classes that “ruled.” This was the purpose for which the
deployment of sexuality was first established, as a new distri
bution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to
be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the
enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthen
ing, and an exaltation that were eventually extended to oth
ers-at the cost of different transformations-as a means of
social control and political subj ugation. With this investment
of its own sex by a technology of power and knowledge
which it had itself invented, the bourgeoisie underscored the
high political price of its body, sensations, and pleasures, its
well-being and survival. Let us not isolate the restrictions,
reticences, evasions, or silences which all these procedures
may have manifested, in order to refer them to some con
stitutive taboo, psychical repression, or death instinct. What
was formed was a political ordering of life, not through an
enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self.
And this was far from being a matter of the class which in
the eighteenth century became hegemonic believing itself
obliged to amputate from its body a sex that was useless,
expensive, and dangerous as soon as it was no longer given
over exclusively to reproduction; we can assert on the con
trary that it provided itself with a body to be cared for,
protected, cultivated, and preserved from the many dangers
and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would
retain its differential value; and this, by equipping itself with
-among other resources-a technology of sex.
Sex is not that part of the body which the bourgeoisie was
forced to disqualify or nullify in order to put those whom it
dominated to work. It is that aspect of itself which troubled
and preoccupied it more than any other, begged and obtained

1 24 The History of Sexuality
its attention, and which it cultivated with a mixture of fear,
curiosity, delight, and excitement. The bourgeoisie made this
element identical with its body, or at least subordinated the
latter to the former by attributing to it a mysterious and
undefined power; it staked its life and its death on sex by
making it responsible for its future welfare; it placed its hopes
for the future in sex by imagining it to have ineluctable effects
on generations to come; it subordinated its soul to sex by
conceiving of it as what constituted the soul’s most secret and
determinant part. Let us not picture the bourgeoisie symboli
cally castrating itself the better to refuse others the right to
have a sex and make use of it as they please. This class must
be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth
century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a
specific body based on it, a “class” body with its health,
hygiene, descent, and race: the autosexualization of its body,
the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and
the body.
There were doubtless many reasons for this. First of all,
there was a transposition into different forms of the methods
employed by the nobility for marking and maintaining its
caste distinction; for the aristocracy had also asserted the
special character of its body, but this was in the form of
blood, that is, in the form of the antiquity of its ancestry and
of the value of its alliances; the bourgeoisie on the contrary
looked to its progeny and the health of its organism when it
laid claim to a specific body. The bourgeoisie’s “blood” was
its sex. And this is more than a play on words; many of the
themes characteristic of the caste manners of the nobility
reappeared in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, but in the
guise of biological, medical, or eugenic precepts. The concern
with genealogy became a preoccupation with heredity; but
included in bourgeois marriages were not only economic
imperatives and rules of social homogeneity, not only the
promises of inheritance, but the menaces of heredity; families
wore and concealed a sort of reversed and somber escutcheon

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 2 5
whose defamatory quarters were the diseases o r defects of the
group of relatives-the grandfather’s general paralysis, the
mother’s neurasthenia, the youngest child’s phthisis, the hys
terical or erotomanic aunts, the cousins with bad morals. But
there was more to this concern with the sexual body than the
bourgeois transposition of themes of the nobility for the
purpose of self-affirmation. A different project was also in
volved: that of the indefinite extension of strength, vigor,
health, and life. The emphasis on the body should undoubt
edly be linked to the process of growth and establishment of
bourgeois hegemony: not, however, because of the market
value assumed by labor capacity, but because of what the
“cultivation” of its own body could represent politically,
economically, and historically for the present and the future
of the bourgeoisie. Its dominance was in part dependent on
that cultivation; but it was not simply a matter of economy
or ideology, it was a “physical” matter as well. The works,
published in great numbers at the end of the eighteenth
century, on body hygiene, the art of longevity, ways of hav
ing healthy children and of keeping them alive as long as
possible, and methods for improving the human lineage, bear
witness to the fact: they thus attest to the correlation of this
concern with the body and sex to a type of “racism . ” But the
latter was very different from that manifested by the nobility
and organized for basically conservative ends. It was a dy
namic racism, a racism of expansion, even if it was still in a
budding state, awaiting the second half of the nineteenth
century to bear the fruits that we have tasted.
May I be forgiven by those for whom the bourgeoisie
signifies the elision of the body and the repression of sexual
ity, for whom class struggle implies the fight to eliminate that
repression; the “spontaneous philosophy” of the bourgeoisie
is perhaps not as idealistic or castrating as is commonly
thought. In any event, one of its primary concerns was to
provide itself with a body and a sexuality-to ensure the
strength, endurance, and secular proliferation of that body

1 26 The History of Sexuality
through the organization of a deployment of sexuality. This
process, moreover, was linked to the movement by which it
asserted its distinctiveness and its hegemony. There is little
question that one of the primordial forms of class conscious
ness is the affirmation of the body; at least, this was the case
for the bourgeoisie during the eighteenth century. It con
verted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and
a healthy sexuality. One understands why it took such a long
time and was so unwilling to acknowledge that other classes
had a body and a sex-precisely those classes it was exploit
ing. The living conditions that were dealt to the proletariat,
particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, show
there was anything but concern for its body and sex: l it was
of little importance whether those people lived or died, since
their reproduction was something that took care of itself in
any case. Conflicts were necessary (in particular, conflicts
over urban space: cohabitation, proximity, contamination,
epidemics, such as the cholera outbreak of 1 832, or again,
prostitution and venereal diseases) in order for the proletar
iat to be granted a body and a sexuality; economic emergen
cies had to arise (the development of heavy industry with the
need for a stable and competent labor force, the obligation
to regulate the population flow and apply demographic con
trols); lastly, there had to be established a whole technology
of control which made it possible to keep that body and
sexuality, finally conceded to them, under surveillance
(schooling, the politics of housing, public hygiene, institu
tions of relief and insurance, the general medicalization of
the population, in short, an entire administrative and techni
cal machinery made it possible to safely import the deploy
ment of sexuality into the exploited class; the latter no longer
risked playing an assertive class role opposite the bourgeoi
sie; it would remain the instrument of the bourgeoisie’s
‘ Cf. Karl Marx, “The Greed for Surplus-Labor,” Capital. trans. Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1970), vol. 1, chap. 10, 2,
pp. 235-43.

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 27
hegemony). Whence no doubt the proletariat’s hesitancy to
accept this deployment and its tendency to say that this .
sexuality was the business of the the bourgeoisie and did not
concern it.
Some think they can denounce two symmetrical hypocri
sies at the same time: the primary hypocrisy of the bourgeoi
sie which denies its own sexuality, and the secondary hypoc
risy of the proletariat which in turn rejects its sexuality by
accepting the dominant ideology. This is to misunderstand
the process whereby on the contrary the bourgeoisie en
dowed itself, in an arrogant political affirmation, with a gar
rulous sexuality which the proletariat long refused to accept,
since it was foisted on them for the purpose of subjugation.
If it is true that sexuality is the set of effects produced in
bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deploy
ment deriving from a complex political technology, one has
to admit that this deployment does not operate in symmetri
cal fashion with respect to the social classes, and conse
quently, that it does not produce the same effects in them.
We must return, therefore, to formulations that have long
been disparaged; we must say that there is a bourgeois sexu
ality, and that there are class sexualities. Or rather, that
sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its
successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class
effects.
A few more words are in order. As we have noted, the
nineteenth century witnessed a generalization of the deploy
ment of sexuality, starting from a hegemonic center. Eventu
ally the entire social body was provided with a “sexual
body,” although this was accomplished in different ways and
using different tools. Must we speak of the universality of
sexuality, then? It is at this point that one notes the introduc
tion of a new differentiating element. Somewhat similar to
the way in which, at the end of the eighteenth century, the
bourgeoisie set its own body and its precious sexuality

1 2 8 The History o f Sexuality
against the valorous blood of the nobles, at the end of the
nineteenth century it sought to redefine the specific character
of its sexuality relative to that of others, subjecting it to a
thorough differential review, and tracing a dividing line that
would set apart and protect its body. This line was not the
same as the one which founded sexuality, but rather a bar
running through that sexuality; this was the taboo that con
stituted the difference, or at least the manner in which the
taboo was applied and the rigor with which it was imposed.
It was here that the theory of repression-;-which was gradu
ally expanded to cover the entire deployment of sexuality, so
that the latter came to be explained in terms of a generalized
taboo-had its point of origin. This theory is bound up his
torically with the spread of the deployment of sexuality. On
the one hand, the theory would justify its authoritarian and
constraining influence by postulating that all sexuality must
be subject to the law; more precisely, that sexuality owes its
very definition to the action of the law: not only will you
submit your sexuality to the law, but you will have no sexual
ity except by subjecting yourself to the law. But on the other
hand, the theory of repression would compensate for this
general spread of the deployment of sexuality by its analysis
of the differential interplay of taboos according to the social
classes. The discourse which at the end of the eighteenth
century said: “There is a valuable element within us that
must be feared and treated with respect; we must exercise
extreme care in dealing with it, lest it be the cause of count
less evils,” was replaced by a discourse which said: “Our
sexuality, unlike that of others, is subj ected to a regime of
repression so intense as to present a constant danger; not
only is sex a formidable secret, as the directors of conscience,
moralists, pedagogues, and doctors always said to former
generations, not only must we search it out for the truth it
conceals, but if it carries with it so many dangers, this is
because-whether out of scrupulousness, an overly acute
sense of sin, or hypocrisy, no matter-we have too long

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 29
reduced it to silence. ” Henceforth social differentiation
would be affirmed, not by the “sexual” quality of the body,
but by the intensity of its repression.
Psychoanalysis comes in at this juncture: both a theory of
the essential interrelatedness of the law and desire, and a
technique for relieving the effects of the taboo where its rigor
makes it pathogenic. In its historical emergence, psychoanal
ysis cannot be dissociated from the generalization of the
deployment of sexuality and the secondary mechanisms of
differentiation that resulted from it. The problem of incest is
still significant in this regard. On one hand, as we have seen,
its prohibition was posited as an absolutely universal princi
ple which made it possible to explain both the system of
alliance and the regime of sexuality; this taboo, in one form
or another, was valid therefore for every society and every
individual. But in practice psychoanalysis gave itself the task
of alleviating the effects of repression (for those who were in
a position to resort to psychoanalysis) that this prohibition
was capable of causing; it allowed individuals to express their
incestuous desire in discourse. But during the same period,
there was a systematic campaign being organized against the
kinds of incestuous practices that existed in rural areas or in
certain urban quarters inaccessible to psychiatry: an inten
sive administrative and j udicial grid was laid out then to put
an end to these practices. An entire poll tics for die protection
of children or the placing of “endangered” minors under
guardianship had as its partial objective their withdrawal
from families that were suspected-through lack of space,
dubious proximity, a history of debauchery, antisocial
“primitiveness,” or degenerescence-of practicing incest.
Whereas the deployment of sexuality had been intensifying
affective relations and physical proximity since the eigh
teenth century, and although there had occurred a perpetual
incitement to incest in the bourgeois family, the regime of
sexuality applied to the lower classes on the contrary in
volved the exclusion of incestuous practices or at least their

1 30 The History of Sexuality
displacement into another form. At a time when incest was
being hunted out as a conduct, psychoanalysis was busy
revealing it as a desire and alleviating-for those who suff
ered from the desire-the severity which repressed it. We
must not forget that the discovery of the Oedipus complex
was contemporaneous with the juridical organization of loss
of parental authority (in France, this was formulated in the
laws of 1 889 and 1 898). At the moment when Freud was
uncovering the nature of Dora’s desire and allowing it to be
put into words, preparations were being made to undo those
reprehensible proximities in other social sectors; on the one
hand, the father was elevated into an object of compulsory
love, but on the other hand, if he was a loved one, he was
at the same time a fallen one in the eyes of the law. Psychoa
nalysis, as a limited therapeutic practice, thus played a differ
entiating role with respect to other procedures, within a
deployment of sexuality that had come into general use.
Those who had lost the exclusive privilege of worrying over
their sexuality henceforth had the privilege of experiencing
more than others the thing that prohibited it and of possess
ing the method which made it possible to remove the repres
sion.
The history of the deployment of sexuality, as it has
evolved since the classical age, can serve as an archaeology
of psychoanalysis. We have seen in fact that psychoanalysis
plays several roles at once in this deployment: it is a mecha
nism for attaching sexuality to the system of alliance; it
assumes an adversary position with respect to the theory of
degenerescence; it functions as a differentiating factor in the
general technology of sex. Around it the great requirement
of confession that had taken form so long ago assumed the
new meaning of an injunction to lift psychical repression.
The task of truth was now linked to the challenging of
taboos.
This same development, moreover, opened up the possibil
ity of a substantial shift in tactics, consisting in: reinterpret-

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 3 1
ing the deployment of sexuality in terms of a generalized
repression; tying this repression to general mechanisms of
domination and exploitation; and linking together the proc
esses that make it possible to free oneself both of repression
and of domination and exploitation. Thus between the two
world wars there was formed, around Reich, the historico
political critique of sexual repression. The importance of this
critique and its impact on reality were substantial. But the
very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that it
always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not
outside or against it. The fact that so many things were able
to change in the sexual behavior of Western societies without
any of the promises or political conditions predicted by
Reich being realized is sufficient proof that this whole sexual
“revolution,” this whole “anti repressive” struggle, repre
sented nothing more, but nothing less-and its importance
is undeniable-than a tactical shift and reversal in the great
deployment of sexuality. But it is also apparent why one
could not expect this critique to be the grid for a history of
that very deployment. Nor the basis for a movement to dis
mantle it.

PART F I VE
R isht of Death
and Power over Life

For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of
sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a
formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria
potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the
right to “dispose” of the life of his children and his slaves;
just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. By
the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi
cal theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form.
It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign
over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and un
conditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign’s very
existence was in j eopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he
were threatened by external enemies who s0ught to over
throw him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately
wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense
of the state; without “directly proposing their death,” he was
empowered to “expose their life”: in this sense, he wielded
an “indirect” power over them of life and death. 1 But if
someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws,
then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life:
as punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in
this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute
privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign,
and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as
the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by
every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death
of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was
manifested with the formation of that new juridical being,
I Samuel von Pufendorf. Le Droit de la nature (French trans . • 1734). p. 445.
1 3 5

1 36 The History of Sexuality
the sovereign?2 In any case, in its modern form-relative and
limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life
and death is a dis symmetrical one. The sovereign exercised
his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by
refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only
through the death he was capable of requiring. The right
which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was
in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after
all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be re
ferred to a historical type of society in which power was
exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a
subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of
the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and
blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was
essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and
ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize
hold of life in order to suppress it.
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very
profound transformation of these mechanisms of power.
“Deduction” has tended to be no longer the major form of
power but merely one element among others, working to
incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize
the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, mak
ing them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated
to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least
a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-adminis
tering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that
was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure,
maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody
as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things
2 “Just as a composite body can have propt’rties not found in any of the simple bodies
of which the mixture consists, so a moral body, by virtue of the very union of
persons of which it is composed, can have certain rights which none of the individu
als could expressly claim and whose exercise is the proper function of leaders
alone.” Pufendorf, Le Droit de la nature, p. 452.

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 37
being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts
on their own populations. But this formidable power of death
-and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and
the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits
-now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to adminis
ter, optimize, and mUltiply it, subj ecting it to precise controls
and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in
the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire popula
tions are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is
as managers of life and survival, of bodies _and the race, that
so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that
closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them
to tend increasingly toward aU-out destruction, the decision
that initiates thetn and the one that terminates them are in
fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival.
The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process:
the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s con
tinued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of bat
tle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on
living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of
states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical
existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence
of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at
the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.
On another level, I might have taken up the example of the
death penalty. Together with war, it was for a long time the
other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply
of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or

1 3 8 The History o f Sexuality
his person. Those who died on the scaffold became fewer and
fewer, in contrast to those who died in wars. But it was for
the same reasons that the latter became more numerous and
the former more and more rare. As soon as power gave itself
the function of administering life, its reason for being and the
logic of its exercise-and not the awakening of humanitarian
feelings-made it more and more difficult to apply the death
penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives
by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure,
sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such
a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal,
and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be
maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime
itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility,
and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those
who represented a kind of biological danger to others.
One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live
was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the
point of death. This is perhaps what explains that disqualifi
cation of death which marks the recent wane of the rituals
that accompanied it. That death is so carefully evaded is
linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable
for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power
have not ceased to turn away from death. In the passage from
this world to the other, death was the manner in which a
terrestrial sovereignty was relieved by another, singularly
more powerful sovereignty; the pageantry that surrounded it
was in the category of political ceremony. Now it is over life,
throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domin
ion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death
becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “pri
vate.” It is not surprising that suicide-once a crime, since
it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign
alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the
right to exercise-became, in the course of the nineteenth
century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of

Right of Death and Power over LIfe 1 39
sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private
right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that
was exercised over life. This determination to die, strange
and yet so persistent and constant in its manifestations, and
consequently so difficult to explain as being due to particular
circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first
astonishments of a society in which political power had as
signed itself the task of administering life.
In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this
power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were
not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles
of development linked together by a whole intermediary
cluster of relations. One of these poles-the first to be
formed, it seems–centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its
docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic
controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the
human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused
on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propa
gation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expect
ancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause
these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an
entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio
politics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the
regulations of the population constituted the two poles
around which the organization of power over life was de
ployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of
this great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, in
dividualizing and specifying, directed toward the perfor
mances of the body, with attention to the processes of life
characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps
no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power

140 The History o f Sexuality
was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies
and the calculated management of life. During the classical . .
period, there was a rapid development o f various disciplines
-universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops;
there was also the emergence, in the field of political prac
tices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate,
longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence
there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the SUbjugation of bodies and the control of
populations, marking the beginning of an era of “bio
power. ” The two directions taken by its development still
appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth century.
With regard to discipline, this development was embodied in
institutions such as the army and the schools, and in reflec
tions on tactics, apprenticeship, education, and the nature of
societies, ranging from the strictly military analyses of Mar
shal de Saxe to the political reveries of Guibert or Servan. As
for population controls, one notes the emergence of demog
raphy, the evaluation of the relationship between resources
and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth
and its circulation: the work of Quesnay, Moheau, and Sliss
milch. The philosophy of the “Ideologists,” as a theory of
ideas, signs, and the individual genesis of sensations, but also
a theory of the social composition of interests-Ideology
being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of
contracts and the regulated formation of the social body
no doubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one
sought to coordinate these two techniques of power in order
to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however,
they were not to be joined at the level of a speCUlative
discourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements (agence
ments concrets) that would go to make up the great technol
ogy of power in the nineteenth century: the deployment of
sexuality would be one of them, and one of the most impor
tant.
This bio-power was without question an indispensable ele-

R ight of Death and Power over Life 1 4 1
ment i n the development of capitalism; the latter would not
, have been p0ssible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adj ustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. But this
was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these
factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and
docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimiz
ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same
time making them more difficult to govern. If the develop
ment of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of
power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the
rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eigh
teenth century as techniques of power present at every level
of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions
(the family and the army, schools and the police, individual
medicine and the administration of collectiv� bodies), ope
rated in the sphere of economic processes, their development,
and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as
factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting
their influence on the respective forces of both these move
ments, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of
hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to
that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to
the expansion of productive forces and the differential alloca
tion of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The
investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive
management of its forces were at the time indispensable.
One knows how many times the question has been raised
concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma”
tion of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth cen
tury in some Western countries, an event bound up with the
development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon hav
ing perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was
nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the
entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species

142 The History of Sexuality
into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of ,
political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this
was the moment when the first contact between life and
history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure
exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very
strong for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the
two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always
dominated by the menace of death. But through a circular
process, the economic-and primarily agricultural–devel
opment of the eighteenth century, and an increase in produc
tivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic
growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these
profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the pe
riod of great ravages from starvation and plague had come
to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing
to torment life so directly. But at the same time, the develop
ment of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life
in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and
the observations and measures relative to man’s life and
survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over
life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space
for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organiz
ing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed
responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control
and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what
it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a
body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individ
ual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and
a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal
manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological
existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living
was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged
from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and
power’s sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be
dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 4 3
dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery
it would be able to exercise over them would have to be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of
life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access
even to the body . If one can apply the term bio- history to the
pressures through which the movements of life and the proc
esses of history interfere with one another, one would have
to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques
that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.
Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale
than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are
perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the
birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society’s
“threshold of modernity” has been reached when the life of
the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence;
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence
as a living being in question.
This transformation had considerable consequences. It
would serve no purpose here to dwell on the rupture that
occurred then in the pattern of scientific discourse and on the
manner in which the twofold problematic of life and man
disrupted and redistributed the order of the classical epis
teme. If the question of man was raised-insofar as he was
a specific living being, and specifically related to other living
beings-the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode
of relation between history and life: in this dual position of
life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its
biological environment, and inside human historicity, pene
trated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power.
There is no need either to lay further stress on the prolifera
tion of political technologies that ensued, investing the body,

1 44 The History o f Sexuality
health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living condi
tions, the whole space of existence.
Another consequence of this development of bio-power
was the growing importance assumed by the action of the
norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law
cannot help but but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to
the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life
needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of
value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient
subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not
mean to say that the law fades into the background or that
the institutions of j ustice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
j udicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a con
tinuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)
whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normal
izing society is the historical outcome of a technology of
power centered on life. We have entered a phase of juridical
regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century
societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived
by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since
the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a
whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these
were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power
acceptable.
Moreover, against this power that was still new in the
nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support
on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a
living being. Since the last century, the great struggles that

Right of Death and Power .over Life 1 45
have challenged the general system of power were not guided
by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old
dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. One no longer
aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the poor, or the
kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of our
imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what
served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man’s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that
was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has
been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object
was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against
the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more
than the law that becam,e the issue of political struggles, even
if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happi
ness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppres
sions or “alienations,” the ” right” to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this “right” -which the classical
j uridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending
was the political response to all these new procedures of
power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right
of sovereignty.
This is the background that enables us to understand the
importance assumed by sex as a political issue. It was at the
pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire politi
cal technology of life. On the one hand it was tied to the
disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and
distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of ener
gies. On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of
populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activ
ity. It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesi
mal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous
orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological
examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the

1 46 The History of Sexuality
body. But it gave rise as well to comprehensive measures,
statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire
social body or at groups taken as a whole. Sex was a means
of access both to the life of the body and the life of the
species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and
as a basis for regulations. This is why in the nineteenth
century sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of
individual existences; it was tracked down in behavior, pur
sued in dreams; it was suspected of underlying the least
follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood;
it became the stamp of individuality-at the same time what
enabled one to analyze the latter and what made it possible
to master it. But one also sees it becoming the theme of
political operations, economic interventions (through incite
ments to or curbs on procreation), and ideological campaigns
for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was
put forward as the index of a society’s strength, revealing of
both its political energy and its biological vigor. Spread out
from one pole to the other of this technology of sex was a
whole series of different tactics that combined in varying
proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of
regulating populations.
Whence the importance of the four great lines of attack
along which the politics of sex advanced for two centuries.
Each one was a way of combining disciplinary techniques
with regulative methods. The first two rested on the require
ments of regulation, on a whole thematic of the species,
descent, and collective welfare, in order to obtain results at
the level of discipline; the sexualization of children was ac
complished in the form of a campaign for the health of the
race (precocious sexuality was presented from the eighteenth
century to the end of the nineteenth as an epidemic menace
that risked compromising not only the future health of adults
but the future of the entire society and species); the hysteriza
tion of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of
their bodies and their sex, was carried out in the name of the

Right of Death and Power over Life 147
responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the
solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of
society. It was the reverse relationship that applied in the
case of birth controls and the psychiatrization of perversions:
here the intervention was regulatory in nature, but it had to
rely on the demand for individual disciplines and constraints
(dressages). Broadly speaking, at the juncture of the “body”
and the “population,” sex became a crucial target of a power
organized around the management of life rather than the
menace of death.
The blood relation long remained an important element in
the mechanisms of power, its manifestations, and its rituals.
For a society in which the systems of alliance, the political
form of the sovereign, the differentiation into orders and
castes, and the value of descent lines were predominant; for
a society in which famine, epidemics, and violence made
death imminent, blood constituted one of the fundamental
values. It owed its high value at the same time to its instru
mental role (the ability to shed blood), to the way it func
tioned in the order of signs (to have a certain blood, to be of
the same blood, to be prepared to risk one’s blood), and also
to its precariousness (easily spilled, subject to drying up, too
readily mixed, capable of being quickly corrupted). A society
of blood-I was tempted to say, of “sanguinity”-where
power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of
famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword,
executioners, and tortures; blood was a reality with a sym
bolic function. We, on the other hand, are in a society of
“sex,” or rather a society “with a sexuality” : the mechanisms
of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes
it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina,
its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used.
Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of
the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of
sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a
symbol, it was an object and a target. Moreover, its impor-

148 The History of Sexuality
tance was due less to its rarity or its precariousness than to
its insistence, its insidious presence, the fact that it was every
where an object of excitement and fear at the same time.
Power delineated it, aroused it, and employed it as the prolif
erating meaning that had always to be taken control of again
lest it escape; it was an effect with a meaning-value. I do not
mean to say that a substitution of sex for blood was by itself
responsible for all the transformations that marked the
threshold of our modernity. It is not the soul of two civiliza
tions or the organizing principle of two cultural forms that
I am attempting to express; I am looking for the reasons for
which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of
that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused. The
new procedures of power that were devised during the classi
cal age and employed in the nineteenth century were what
caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an
analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side
of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sove
reignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the
norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regula
tions.
Sade and the first eugenists were contemporary with this
transition from “sanguinity” to “sexuality.” But whereas the
first dreams ofthe perfecting of the species inclined the whole
problem toward an extremely exacting administration of sex
(the art of determining good marriages, of inducing the
desired fertilities, of ensuring the health and longevity of
children), and while the new concept of race tended to oblit
erate the aristocratic particularities of blood, retaining only
the controllable effects of sex, Sade carried the exhaustive
analysis of sex over into the mechanisms of the old power of
sovereignty and endowed it with the ancient but fully main
tained prestige of blood; the latter flowed through the whole
dimension of pleasure-the blood of torture and absolute
power, the blood of the caste which was respected in itself
and which nonetheless was made to flow in the major rituals

R ight 0/ Death and Power over Life 149
of parricide and incest, the blood of the people, which was
shed unreservedly since the sort that flowed in its veins was
not even deserving of a name. In Sade, sex is without any
norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own
nature; but it is subject to the unrestricted law of a power
which itself knows no other law but its own; if by chance it
is at times forced to accept the order of progressions carefully
disciplined into successive days, this exercise carries it to a
point where it is no longer anything but a unique and naked
sovereignty: an unlimited right of all-powerful monstrosity.
While it is true that the analytics of sexuality and the
symbolics of blood were grounded at first in two very distinct
regimes of power, in actual fact the passage from one to the
other did not come about (any more than did these powers
themselves) without overlappings, interactions, and echoes.
In different ways, the preoccupation with blood and the law
has for nearly two centuries haunted the administration of
sexuality. Two of these interferences are noteworthy, the one
for its historical importance, the other for the problems it
poses. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century,
the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its
entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of politi
cal power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality.
Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, “bi
ologizing,” statist form): it was then that a whole politics of
settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social
hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series
of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct,
health, and everyday life, received their color and their jus
tification from the mythical concern with protecting the
purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race.
Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naive
(and the former because of the latter) combination of the
fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.
A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the
way of extension and intensification of micro-powers, in the

1 50 The History of Sexuality
guise of an unrestricted state control (etatisation), was ac
companied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood; the
latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the
risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice. It is an irony of
history that the Hitlerite politics of sex remained an insignifi
cant practice while the blood myth was transformed into the
greatest blood bath in recent memory.
At the opposite extreme, starting from this same end of the
nineteenth century, we can trace the theoretical effort to
reinscribe the thematic of sexuality in the system of law, the
symbolic order, and sovereignty. It is to the political credit
of psychoanalysis-or at least, of what was most coherent in
it-that it regarded with suspicion (and this from its incep
tion, that is, from the moment it broke away from the neu
ropsychiatry of degenerescence) the irrevocably proliferating
aspects which might be contained in these power mech
anisms aimed at controlling and administering the everyday
life of sexuality: whence the Freudian end�avor (out of reac
tion no doubt to the great surge of racism that was contem
porary with it) to ground sexuality in the law-the law of
alliance, tabooed consanguinity, and the Sovereign-Father,
in short, to surround desire with all the trappings of the old
order of power. It was owing to this that psychoanalysis was
-in the main, with a few exceptions-in theoretical and
practical opposition to fascism. But this position of psychoa
nalysis was tied to a specific historical conjuncture. And yet,
to conceive the category of the sexual in terms of the law,
death, blood, and sovereignty-whatever the references
to Sade and Bataille, and however one _might gauge their
“subversive” influence-is in the last analysis a historical
“retro-version.” We must conceptualize the deployment of
sexuality on the basis of the techniques of power that are
contemporary with it.
People are going to say that I am dealing in a historicism
which is more careless than radical; that I am evading the

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 5 1
biologically established existence of sexual functions for the
benefit of phenomena that are variable, perhaps, but fragile,
secondary, and ultimately superficial; and that I speak of
sexuality as if sex did not exist. And one would be entitled
to object as follows: “You claim to analyze in detail the
processes by which women’s bodies, the lives of children,
family relationships, and an entire network of social relations
were sexualized. You wish to describe that great awakening
of sexual concern since the eighteenth century and our grow
ing eagerness to suspect the presence of sex in everything. Let
us admit as much and suppose that the mechanisms of power
were in fact used more to arouse and ‘excite’ sexuality than
to repress it. But here you remain quite near to the thing you
no doubt believe you have gotten away from; at bottom,
when you point out phenomena of diffusion, anchorage, and
fixation of sexuality, you are trying to reveal what might be
called the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body; it
may well be the case that you have done nothing more than
transpose to the level of diffuse processes mechanisms which
psychoanalysis has identified with precision at the level ofthe
individual. But you pass over the thing on the basis of which
this sexualization was able to develop and which psychoanal
ysis does not fail to recognize-namely, sex. Before Freud,
one sought to localize sexuality as closely as possible: in sex,
in its reproductive functions, in its immediate anatomical
localizations; one fell back upon a biological minimum:
organ, instinct, and finality. You, on the other hand, are in
a symmetrical and inverse position: for you, there remain
only groundless effects, ramifications without roots, a sexual
ity without a sex. What is this if not castration once again?”
Here we need to distinguish between two questions. First,
does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of
the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional? To this
question, I think we can reply in the negative. In any case,
the purpose of the present study is in fact to show how
deployments of power are directly connected to the body-

1 52 The History of Sexuality
to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and
pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is
needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the
biological and the historical are not consecutive to one an
other, as in the evolutionism of the first sociologists, but are
bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accord
ance with the development of the modern technologies of
power that take life as their objective. Hence I do not envis
age a “history of mentalities” that would take account of
bodies only through the manner in which they have been
perceived and given meaning and value; but a “history of
bodies” and the manner in which what is most material and
most vital in them has been invested.
Another question, distinct from the first one: this material
ity that is referred to, is it not, then, that of sex, and is it not
paradoxical to venture a history of sexuality at the level of
bodies, without there being the least question of sex? After
all, is the power that is exercised through sexuality not di
rected specifically at that element of reality which is “sex,”
sex in general? That sexuality is not, in relation to power, an
exterior domain to which power is applied, that on the con
trary it is a result and an instrument of power’s designs, is
all very well. But as for sex, is it not the “other” with respect
to power, while being the center around which sexuality
distributes its effects? Now, it is precisely this idea of sex in
itself that we cannot accept without examination. Is “sex”
really the anchorage point that supports the manifestations
of sexuality, or is it not rather a complex idea that was
formed inside the deployment of sexuality? In any case, one
could show how this idea of sex took form in the different
strategies of power and the definite role it played therein.
All along the great lines which the development of the
deployment of sexuality has followed since the nineteenth
century, one sees the elaboration of this idea that there exists
something other than bodies, organs, somatic localizations,
functions, anatomo-physiological systems, sensations, and

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 5 3
pleasures; something else and something more, with intrinsic
properties and laws of its own: “sex . ” Thus, in the process
of hysterization of women, “sex” was defined in three ways:
as that which belongs in common to men and women; as that
which belongs, par excellence, to men, and hence is lacking
in women; but at the same time, as that which by itself
constitutes woman’s body, ordering it wholly in terms of the
functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agita
tion through the effects of that very function. Hysteria was
interpreted in this strategy as the movement of sex insofar as
it was the “one” and the “other,” whole and part, principle
and lack. In the sexualization of childhood, there was formed
the idea of a sex that was both present (from the evidence of
anatomy) and absent (from the standpoint of physiology),
present too if one considered its activity, and deficient if one
referred to its reproductive finality; or again, actual in its
manifestations, but hidden in its eventual effects, whose path
ological seriousness would only become apparent later. If the
sex of the child was still present in the adult, it was in the
form of a secret causality that tended to nullify the sex of the
latter (it was one of the tenets of eighteenth- and nineteenth
century medicine that precocious sex would eventually result
in sterility, impotence, frigidity, the inability to experience
pleasure, or the deadening of the senses); by sexualizing
childhood, the idea was established of a sex characterized
essentially by the interplay of presence and absence, the visi
ble and the hidden; masturbation and the effects imputed to
it were thought to reveal in a privileged way this interplay
of presence and absence, of the visible and the hidden.
In the psychiatrization of perversions, sex was related to
biological functions and to an anatomo-physiological ma
chinery that gave it its “meaning,” that is, its finality; but it
was also referred to an instinct which, through its peculiar
development and according to the objects to which it could
become attached, made it possible for perverse behavior pat
terns to arise and made their genesis intelligible. Thus “sex”

1 54 The History of Sexuality
was defined by the interlacing of function and instinct, final
ity and signification; moreover, this was the form in which
it was manifested, more clearly than anywhere else, in the
model perversion, in that “fetishism” which, from at least as
early as 1 877, served as the guiding thread for analyzing all
the other deviations. In it one could clearly perceive the way
in which the instinct became fastened to an object in accord
ance with an individual’s historical adherence and biological
inadequacy. Lastly, in the socialization of procreative behav
ior, “sex” was described as being caught between a law of
reality (economic necessity being its most abrupt and imme
diate form) and an economy of pleasure which was always
attempting to circumvent that law-when, that is, it did not
ignore it altogether. The most notorious of “frauds,” coitus
interruptus, represented the point where the insistence of the
real forced an end to pleasure and where the pleasure found
a way to surface despite the economy dictated by the real. It
is apparent that the deployment of sexuality, with its differ
ent strategies, was what established this notion of “sex”; and
in the four major forms of hysteria, onanism, fetishism, and
interrupted coition, it showed this sex to be governed by the
interplay of whole and part, principle and lack, absence and
presence, excess and deficiency, by the function of instinct,
finality, and meaning, of reality and pleasure.
The theory thus generated performed a certain number of
functions that made it indispensable. First, the notion of
“sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial
unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts,
sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of
this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent
meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus
able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal
signified. Further, by presenting itself in a unitary fashion, as
anatomy and lack, as function and latency, as instinct and
meaning, it was able to mark the line of contact between a
knowledge of human sexuality and the biological sciences of

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 5 5
reproduction; thus, without really borrowing anything from
the these sciences, excepting a few doubtful analogies, the
knowledge of sexuality gained through proximity a guaran
tee·of quasi-scientificity; but by virtue of this same proximity,
some of the contents of biology and physiology were able to
serve as a principle of normality for human sexuality. Fi
nally, the notion of sex brought about a fundamental rever
sal; it made it possible to invert the representation of the
relationships of power to sexuality, causing the latter to ap
pear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but
as being rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which
power tries as best it can to dominate; thus the idea of “sex”
makes it possible to evade what gives “power” its power; it
enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo. Sex
-that agency which appears to dominate us and that secret
which seems to underlie all that we are, that point which
enthralls us through the the power it manifests and the
meaning it conceals, and which we ask to reveal what we are
and to free us from what defines us-is doubtless but an ideal
point made necessary by the deployment of sexuality and its
operation. We must not make the mistake of thinking that
sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces
manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its
surface of contact with power. On the contrary, sex is the
most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a
deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on
bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensa
tions, and pleasures.
It might be added that “sex” performs yet another func
tion that runs through and sustains the ones we have just
examined. Its role in this instance is more practical than
theoretical. It is through sex-in fact, an imaginary point
determined by the deployment of sexuality-that each
individual has to pass in order to have access to his own
intelligibility (seeing that it is both the hidden aspect and the
generative principle of meaning), to the whole of his body

1 5 6 The History o f Sexuality
(since it is a real and threatened part of it, while symbolically
constituting the whole), to his identity (since it joins the force
of a drive to the singularity of a history). Through a reversal
that doubtless had its surreptitious beginnings long ago-it
‘ was already making itself felt at the time of the Christian
pastoral of the flesh-we have arrived at the point where we
expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many
centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body
from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a
wound; our identity from what was perceived as an obscure
and nameless urge. Hence the importance we ascribe to it,
the reverential fear with which we surround it, the care we
take to know it. Hence the fact that over the centuries it has
become more important than our soul, more important al
most than our life; and so it is that all the world’s enigmas
appear frivolous to us compared to this secret, minuscule in
each of us, but of a density that makes it more serious than
any other. The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been
instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as
follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the
truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It
is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued
with the death instinct. When a long while ago the West
discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to
make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this
equivalence, the highest of all. And while the deployment of
sexuality permits the techniques of power to invest life, the
fictitious point of sex, itself marked by that deployment,
exerts enough charm on everyone for them to accept hearing
the grumble of death within it.
By creating the imaginary element that is “sex,” the de
ployment of sexuality established one of its most essential
internal operating principles: the desire for sex-the desire to
have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to
articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth. It con
stituted “sex” itself as something desirable. And it is this

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 57
desirability of sex that attaches each one of us to the injunc
tion to know it, to reveal its law and its power; it is this
desirability that makes us think we are affirming the rights
of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to
the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep
within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves
reflected-the dark shimmer of sex.
“It is sex,” said Kate in The Plumed Serpent. “How won
derful sex can be, when men keep it powerful and sacred, and
it fills the world! like sunshine through and through one!”
So we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency
of sex; but rather show how “sex” is historically subordinate
to sexuality. We must not place sex on the side of reality, and
sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is
a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the
notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its opera
tion. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says
no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid
out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency
of sex that we must break away from, if we aim-through a
tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality-to
counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleas
ures, and know ledges, in their mUltiplicity and their possibil
ity of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex
desire, but bodies and pleasures.
“There has been so much action in the past,” said D. H.
Lawrence, “especially sexual action, a wearying repetition
over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corre
sponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex.
Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more
important than the act itself. ”
Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not
be able to understand how a civilization so intent on develop
ing enormous instruments of production and destruction

1 5 8 The History of Sexuality
found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxi
ously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile
perhaps when they recall that here were men-meaning our
selves-who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as
precious as the one they had already demanded from the
earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought; people
will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went about
pretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every
thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our
regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the
light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment. And
people will ask themselves why we were so bent on ending
the rule of silence regarding what was the noisiest of our
preoccupations. In retrospect, this noise may appear to have
been out of place, but how much stranger will seem our
persistence in interpreting it as but the refusal to speak and
the order t� remain silent. People will wonder what could
have made us so presumptuous; they will look for the reasons
that might explain why we prided ourselves on being the first
to grant sex the importance we say is its due and how we
came to congratulate ourselves for finally-in the twentieth
century-having broken free of a long period of harsh repres
sion, a protracted Christian asceticism, greedily and fastidi
ously adapted to the imperatives of bourgeois economy. And
what we now perceive as the chronicle of a censorship and
the difficult struggle to remove it will be seen rather as the
centuries-long rise of a complex deployment for compelling
sex to speak, for fastening our attention and concern upon
sex, for getting us to believe in the sovereignty of its law when
in fact we were moved by the power mechanisms of sexuality.
People will be amused at the reproach of pansexualism
that was once aimed at Freud and psychoanalysis. But the
ones who will appear to have been blind will perhaps be not
so much those who formulated the objection as those who
discounted it out of hand, as if it merely expressed the fears
of an outmoded prudishness. For the first, after all, were only

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 59
taken unawares by a process which had begun long before
and by which, unbeknown to them, they were already sur
rounded on all sides; what they had attributed solely to the
genius of Freud had already gone through a long stage of
preparation; they had gotten their dates wrong as to the
establishment, in our society, of a general deployment of
sexuality. But the others were mistaken concerning the na
ture of the process; they believed that Freud had at last,
through a sudden reversal, restored to sex the rightful share
which it had been denied for so long; they had not seen how
the good genius of Freud had placed it at one of the critical
points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the
strategies of knowledge and power, how wonderfully effec
tive he was-worthy of the greatest spiritual fathers and
directors of the classical period-in giving a new impetus to
the secular injunction to study sex and transform it into
discourse. We are often reminded of the countless procedures
which Christianity once employed to make us detest the
body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for
centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it
desirable and everything said about it precious. Let us con
sider the stratagems by which we were induced to apply all
our skills to discovering its secrets, by which we were at
tached to the obligation to draw out its truth, and made
guilty for having failed to recognize it for so long. These
devices are what ought to make us wonder today. Moreover,
we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in
a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no
longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the
power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us
to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated
to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest
of confessions from a shadow.
The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that
our “liberation” is in the balance.

Index
adultery, 3 8 , 4 1
Anglican pastoral, 1 1 7. See also
Christian pastoral
Arabo-Moslem societies, 57
Aristotle, 1 43
ars erotica
compared with confession, 62
vs. scientia sexualis. 67, 70- 1
truth value, 57-8
atomic power, 1 37
auto-monosexualists, 43
Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 2 8 , 29
Bataille, 1 50
bestiality, 3 8
Bijoux indiscrets, Les (Diderot), 77,
79
bio-history, 1 43
bio-power, 1 4 0- 1 , 1 43-4
birth control
pathogenic value, 105
among working classes, 1 2 1
birthrate
and family organization, 100
regulation by state, 25-6, 1 1 6, 1 1 8
blood relations, 124, 1 47-50
body
discipline of, 1 39-40
early seventeenth-century atti
tudes, 3
encroachment of power on, 47-8
intensification of, 107, 1 2 3
perversion seen a s imbedded in,
43, 44
woman’s, 104, 1 2 1 , 1 46–7
Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 87
bourgeoisie
locus of sexual repression, 3-5, 1 7,
1 20- 1 , 1 2 2-7
perversion and, 47
BUrger, Gottfried August, 79
Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 63
capitalism
and bio-power, 1 40-1
and deployment of sexuality, 1 14
and sexual repression, 5-6
Catholic Church
during Counter Reformation, 1 9,
63, 70
Inquisition, 58
Lateran Council, 5 8 , 1 1 6
penitential practices, 1 1 6
waning influence against perver
sion, 4 1
See also Christian pastoral
censorship, 1 7- 1 8 , 2 1 , 84
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 55, 56 and n.,
1 1 1 – 1 2
children
confession guidelines for, 1 9
and hysterization of women’s bod
ies, 1 46–7
under patria potestas, 1 3 5
1 6 1

1 62 Index
and psychoanalysis, I 1 3
sexualization of, 1 5 3
sexual segregation i n nineteenth
century family, 46
children’s sexuality
eighteenth-century attitudes, 27-
30, 3 7
interference with, 4 1 -2
and loci of power, 9 8 , 99
pedagogization, 104
scrutiny of, 38
and socialization of sex, 1 1 6, 1 1 7
Victorian attitude, 4
China, 57
Christian pastoral
evolution after Council of Trent,
1 8-20
and family alliance, 1 1 3- 1 4
obligation t o confess, 20– 1 , 3 5 ,
60– 1
and pleasures of sex, 63
regulation of sexual practices, 37
transformation of desire, 22-3
See also confession
Christian religion
asceticism, 1 58
penitential practices, 1 1 6, 1 1 7
rejection of body, 1 59
technology of the flesh, 1 2 1 , 1 5 6
class structure, and sexual repres-
sion, 1 20–7
coitus interruptus, 1 54
Condorcet, Marquis de, 24
confession
compared with ars erotica, 62
and development of archives of
sexual pleasure, 63-4
historical significance, 1 1 6
in literature, 2 1 -2, 5 9-60
and loss of freedom, 60– 1
manuals of Middle Ages, 1 8
means of scientizing, 65-7
pervasive role, 5 9
privileged theme of, 6 1
and production o f truth, 58-9, 60,
6 1
recent transformation, 63
as ritual of power, 6 1-2
as therapy, 67
transformation of sex into dis
course, 20– 1
of “unnatural” sexuality, 3 8-9
confessor
hermaneutic function, 66-7
power relationship, 6 1 -2
consanguine marriage, 4 1
Council of Trent, 1 9
Counter Reformation, 1 9, 63, 70
criminal justice, 30. See also law
death, 1 3 5ft’.
as limit of power, 1 3 8
loosening grip of, 1 42
suicide, 1 3 8-9
death instinct, 1 5 6
death penalty, l 3 7-8
debauchery, 3 8 , 39
“degenerescence,” 1 1 8- 1 9
Dekker, 1 1 7
desire
relation to power, 8 1 -3 , 86, 89-90
transformation into discourse, 20,
2 1 , 23
Dialogues (Erasmus), 27
Diderot, Denis, 79
discourse
juridico-political, 87-9
tactical polyvalence, 100–2
See also sexual discourse
Don Juan character, 39-40
dreams, 20
dyspareunist women, 43
economy, and sexuality. 1 06-7. 1 14.
See also capitalism
ecstasy. 70
Ellis. Havelock, 63
Erasmus, 27
erotic art. See ars erotica
erotic literature, 2 1 -3
eugenics movement. 1 1 8, 1 1 9,
148-50

Index 1 6 3
family
and deployment of sexuality,
1 0 8 – 1 4
incest taboo, 1 09-10, 1 1 3
as locus of power, 1 00
a s locus o f psychiatrization o f sex,
1 20— 1
penetration of medico-sexual re
gime into, 42
psychoanalytic view of, 1 1 2- 1 3
sexual segregation o f members,
46
Victorian attitudes, 3
fetishism, 1 54
Franciscans, 8
freedom, vs. power, 86
French monarchy, 87-8
French Revolution
constitutions since, 144
effect on public law, 89
end of plague era, 142
status of contraception at time of,
26
Freud, Sigmund
and changing nature of sexual dis
course, 5 3 , 56
conformism, 5
and locus of sexuality, 1 50!
1 5 1
normalization of sex, 1 1 9
Oedipus complex, 1 30
preparation for, 1 5 8-9
Garnier, Pierre, 54
genocide, 1 3 7
German philanthropic movement,
2 8
Gerson, Jean Charlier, 1 1 7
Goethe, Johann Wilhelm yon,
29
Greece (ancient)
linking of sex and learning, 6 1
penal law, 5 9 n.
rational influence, 78
Guibert, Jacques A. H . de, 1 40
gynecomasts, 43
Herbert, Claude-Jacques, 25
heredity
bourgeois concern with, 1 2 1 ,
1 24-5
and sexual technology, 1 1 8- 1 9
hermaphrodism
criminal status, 3 8
and homosexuality, 43
Hitlerism, 1 50
Hobbes, Thomas, 1 3 5
homosexuality
entry into sexual discourse, 1 0 1
initial characterization, 43
and penal law, 38
hygiene, 54
hypnosis, 65
Ideologists, 140
incest
and alliance systems, 1 09-10, 1 1 3
and psychoanalysis, 1 29-30
as sin, 3 8
India, 5 7
infidelity, 3 8
Inquisition, 5 8
institutions
biopolitics of, 1 4 1
power relationships, 8�8
Japan, 57
Jouy case, 3 1 -2
Justi, Johann yon, 25
Kaan, Heinrich, 63, 1 1 8
Krafft-Ebing, Richard yon, 43, 63
Ladoucette, Doctor, 54
language, censorship of sex in, 1 7-
1 8, 2 1 , 84. See also sexual dis
course
Lateran Council of 1 2 1 5, 58, 1 1 6
law
and alliance systems, 1 06-7, 1 08
and incest, 109- 1 0
YS. medical regimentation, 4 1
normalization of, 144
political significance, 87-9

1 64 Index
power over sex, 8 3
of prohibition, 84
and sexual acts “contrary to na
ture,” 38
and sodomy, 43
Lawrence, D. H . , 1 57
Lenz, Jacob Michael, 1 1 0 n.
life
entry into history, 1 4 1-3
as political object, 1 44-5
Liguori, Alfonso de’, 1 9, 1 1 6, 120
literature
confessional, 59-60
sexual discourse in, 2 1 -3
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 97
Malthusian couple
strategic significance, 1 05
Victorian ideal, 3
See also procreation
Marcus, Steven, 4
marriage
and alliance system, 1 06
consanguine, 4 1
protection and surveillance of,
37-8
masturbation
interference with, 42
vs. reproductive sex, 1 5 3
schools designed t o prohibit, 28,
29
See also onanism
medicine
detachment of sexuality from alli
ance system, 1 1 2
development of sexual technolo
gies, 1 1 6– 1 9
early disgust a t sexual discourse,
24
entry into sexual discourse, 30
homosexuality characterized by,
43
interference with children’s sexu
ality, 4 1 , 42
pathological approach to sex, 4 1 ,
54-6
political inadequacy, 5
and power-pleasure spiral, 44-5
therapeutic interest in confession,
67
See also psychiatry
mental hospitals, 4, 46, 55-6
mental illness
and family alliances, 1 1 1 – 1 2
search for sexual causes, 30
and “unnatural” sexuality, 36, 38
Methodists, 1 20
Middle Ages
confession, 1 8, 58
development of public law, 87
institutions of power, 86
sexual discourse in, 3 3
torture, 59
mixoscopophiles, 43
Moheau, (demographer), 140
Moliere, 1 1 0 n.
Molle, 63
Mollities (Gerson), 1 1 7
monarchy, juridical powers, 87-9
My Secret Life (anonymous), 2 1-2
Nazism, 1 49-50
obedience, 85
Oedipus complex, 1 30
Onania (Dekker), 1 1 7
onanism
and class structure, 1 2 1
and sexual discourse, 30
war against, 104
See also masturbation
patria potestas. 1 3 5
peace, aim o f power, 87
penance
and alliance systems, 1 07-8
and sexual discourse, 1 8, 1 9, 20
technological developments, \ \6,
1 1 7
perversion, 36-49
children’s sexuality treated as,
4 1-2
domain of, 40, 1 1 8
fragmentation of, 39

Index 1 6 5
medical view of, 4 1
minor, 43-4
new specifications, 42-4
penal laws, 3 8
psychiatrization of, 30, 105, 1 5 3-5
Philanthropinum, 29
pleasure
“negative relation” of power to, 8 3
and sensualization o f power, 44–5 ,
48-9
of sexual discourse, 7 1
i n truth, 7 1
See also sexual pleasure
Plumed Serpant, The (Lawrence),
1 5 7
population
biological survival, 1 37
biopolitics of, 1 3 9-40
sexual regulation, 25-6, 1 1 6, 1 1 8,
145-7
and war, 1 3 7
possession, 70, 1 1 7
Pouillet, Thesee, 54
power
“analytics” of, 82-3
and blood relations, 1 47-50
over children’s sexuality, 4 1-2
confession as ritual of, 6 1 -2
and desire, 8 3 , 89-90
encroachment on individual bod-
ies, 47-8
generalized locus, 93, 94, 96
in juridico-political discourse,
87-9
-as-law, 82
modes of ruling over sex, 8 3
a s multiplicity o f force relation-
ships, 92-3
“negative relation” to sex, 8 3
and obedience, 85
origin of, 94
and pleasure, spirals of, 44–5 , 48-9
political institutionalization, 86-7
polymorphous techniques, 1 1
and population problem, 25-6
positive relation to sex hypothe-
sized, 90– 1
and prohibition, 84
pure form, 83
question of relation to sexual re-
pression, 1 0
rationality of, 94-5
resistance to, 95-6
and secrecy, 86, 1 0 1
o f sovereign, 1 3 5-6
strategies involving sexuality,
1 03-6
uniformity of apparatus, 84-5
and war, 1 36-7
power relationships
and confession ritual, 6 1-3
continual variations, 99
“double conditioning,” 99-100
as intentional and nonsubjective,
94-5
Machiavellian view, 97
and other relationships, 94
and sexual discourse, 97-8
shifting matrices, 99
strategic vs. legal model, 102
presbyophiles, 43
procreation
political and economic signifi-
cance, 25-6
psychiatric view, 30
socialization of, 105-6
supported in sexual discourse,
36-7
Victorian attitudes, 3-4
See also reproduction
prohibition, cycle of, 84
proletariat, 1 27. See also working
class
prostitution, 4, 27
Protestantism, 6 3 , 1 1 6
psychiatry
and alliance systems, 1 1 0
antirepressive effects, 1 1 9
characterization of homosexual-
ity, 43
classification of pleasure, 63-4
and power-pleasure spiral, 45
and sexual perversion, 30, 105

1 66 Index
and sodomy, 1 0 1
specification o f minor perversions,
43–4
psychoanalysis
antirepressive effects, 1 1 9
denial of repression of Sex, 8 1
and family alliances, 1 1 2-1 3
and incest, 1 29-30
opposition to fascism, 1 50
political inadequacy, 5
Psychopathia Sexualis (Kaan), 1 1 8
Pufendorf, Samuel von, 1 3 6 n.
Quesnay, Fran<;ois, 1 40 racism and blood relations, 1 49-50 and medicalization of sex, 54 and sexual technology, 1 1 9 and state intervention in sex, 26 rape, 3 8 Reformation, 1 1 6, 1 22 Reich, Wilhelm, 5, 1 3 1 relationships of blood, 1 24, 1 47-50 power inherent in, 94 See also power relationships repression. See sexual repression repressive hypothesis, 1 0 - 1 2 and incitement to discourse, 1 7-35 and perversion, 36--49 reproduction biological significance, 54-5, 78 and deployment of alliance, 107 See also procreation ritual, of confession, 6 1 -2 Rohleder, Hermann, 43 Rollinat, Maurice, 54 Rome (ancient) ars erotica, 57 patria potestas, 1 3 5 penal law, 5 9 n . , 87 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse de, 2 1 , 1 48-9, 1 50 Salpetriere, 55-6 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 28, 63 Sanchez, Tomas, 19 Saxe, Marshal de, 140 schools, 27-9, 46 science, approach to sexual dis course, 53--4. See also medicine secrecy in ars erotica, 57 and buried truth of sex, 69-70 exploitation of, 34-5 and power, 86, 1 0 1 surrounding children's sexual practices, 42 Segneri, Paolo, 1 9 , 20 Servan, Joseph-Michel-Antoine, 1 40 sex in art. See ars erotica binary system, 8 3 causal power imputed t o , 65-6 and censorship, 1 7- 1 8 , 2 1 , 84 and death instinct, 1 5 6 desirability, 1 56-7 discourse on. See sexual discourse exploitation of its secrecy, 34-5 intrinsic latency imputed to, 66 in literature, 2 1 -3, 59-60 logic of, 78 medicalization of, 1 1 7- 1 9 . See also medicine "negative relation" of power to, 8 3 as a police matter, 24-5 and political technology, 1 45-7 and population problems, 25-6 as privileged theme of confession, 6 1 as a problem of truth, 5 6-7, 69-70 prohibition of, 84 relation to sexuality, 1 5 1-7 ruled by power, 83 socialization of, 1 1 6- 1 7 technology of, 90, 1 1 9 two orders of knowledge about, 54-5 See also sexuality sex education, 28-9, 42 sexoesthetic inverts, 43 Index 1 67 sexual discourse, 1 7- 3 5 and censorship, 1 7- 1 8, 2 1 , 8 4 about children's sex, 2 7-30 in the confessional, 1 8-2 1 , 3 5 , 6 1 -3. See also confession illicit, 4, 1 8 on incest, 1 29-30 in literature, 2 1- 3 , 59-60 new sources in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 30-1 pervasiveness of, 32-4 and pleasure, 7 1 political incitement to, 1 7- 1 8, 34-5 and power relationships, 97-8 process of scientization, 53-73 and the public interest, 23-6 sanctions against perversion, 36--7 and sodomy, 1 0 1 valorization and enlargement o f boundaries, 2 3 sexual initiation and ars erotica, 57 compared to discourse, 62 sexual pleasure and ars erotica, 58 confessional archives, 63-4 perverse, 1 05 See also pleasure sexual practices and ars erotica, 5 7 seventeenth-century frankness, 3 three major codes regulating, 37-8 sexual repression advent of, 5, 1 7 and class structure, 1 20-2 denial of, 8 1-2 distinguished from legal prohibi tion, 4 economic and political motives, 5-6, 25-6 in eighteenth-century schools, 27-30 vs. expansion of sexual discourse, 1 7- 1 8, 34-5, 72-3 history of, 1 1 5-3 1 liberation from, 5, 1 0 modern discourses o n , 6--9, 10, 1 1 , 1 2 . See also sexual discourse Reich's critique, 1 3 1 See also repressive hypothesis sexuality and alliance systems, 1 06-- 1 3 and blood relations, 1 47-9 of children. See children's sexual- ity and class structure, 1 20-7 as correlative of discourse, 68-9 as historical construct, 105-6, 1 0 8 latency principle, 66 psychoanalysis, role of, 1 29-30 relation to sex, 1 5 1-7 as sin, 9 strategies involving, 103-5 in Victorian era, 3-4 See also sex sin confession of, 1 9-20. See also con fession sexual perversion as, 3 8 Sixth Commandment, 39 sodomy ancient laws, 43 discourse on, 1 0 1 distinguished from homosexuality, 43 as sin, 3 8 uncertain status, 3 7 states policing of sex, 24-6 power strategy, 1 3 7 suicide, 1 3 8-9 Stissmi1ch, Johann Peter, 1 40 Tamburini, Tommaso, 1 9 Tardieu, Auguste, 24, 63 Tartuffe (Moliere), 1 1 0 n. Three Essays (Freud), 27 torture, 59 and n. Tridentine Catholicism, 1 1 6 truth and confession, 58-63 pleasure in, 7 1 Tutor, The (Lenz), 1 1 0 n . 1 68 Index venereal disease, 54, 1 1 8 Victorian era influence on modern sexual dis course, 3-1 3 sexual literature, 2 1 -3 war new technology, 1 36-7 and power, 93, 1 02 sovereign's rights, 1 3 5 Wesley, John, 1 1 6 Westphal, Carl, 43 Wolke (professor at Philanthropi num), 29 women's bodies, hysterization of, 104, 1 2 1 , 1 46-7 working class, spread of repression to, 1 2 1 -2 zooerasts, 43 A bout the A u thor Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1 926. He has lectured in many universities throughout the world and served as Director of the Institut Fran<;ais in Ham burg and the Institut de Philosophie at the Faculte des Lettres in the University of Clermont-Ferrand. He writes frequently for French newspapers and reviews, and is the holder of a chair at France's most prestigious institution, the College de France. In addition to his classic study, Madness and Civiliza tion, M. Foucault is the author of The Order of Things, The A rchaeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic, and L Pierre R iviere. His latest book, Discipline and Pun ish: The Birth of the Prison, was published by Pantheon in 1 97 8 .

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