Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)

Chapter One

THE SILVER SPOON

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroitday in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, inan emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce'sstudy, "Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,"published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Ormaybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the nowsadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578, standingnaked beside a height chart with a black box covering my 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 hockeygoalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation,rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox mass, and, for most of myadult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, Iwas first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by classmates,guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researchedby the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from GrossePointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brotherliked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimmingpool turned me into myth; I've left my body in order to occupyothers-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-auntsand -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or,in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. Andso before it's too late I want to get it down for good: this roller-coasterride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of therecessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomedtwo and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, whilethe goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed downthrough nine generations, gathering invisibly within the pollutedpool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in theguise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seedacross the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrialrains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's own mid-westernwomb.

Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too.

Three months before I was born, in the aftermath of one of our elaborateSunday dinners, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides orderedmy brother to get her silkworm box. Chapter Eleven had beenheading toward the kitchen for a second helping of rice puddingwhen she blocked his way. At fifty-seven, with her short, squat figureand intimidating hairnet, my grandmother was perfectly designed forblocking people's paths. Behind her in the kitchen, the day's large femalecontingent had congregated, laughing and whispering. Intrigued,Chapter Eleven leaned sideways to see what was going on,but Desdemona reached out and firmly, hegemonically even, pinchedhis cheek. Having regained his attention, she sketched a rectangle inthe 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 theliving room. On all fours he scrambled up the formal staircase to thesecond floor. He raced past the bedrooms along the upstairs corridor.At the far end was a nearly invisible door, wallpapered over like theentrance to a secret passageway. Chapter Eleven located the tinydoorknob level with his head and, using all his strength, pulled itopen. Another set of stairs lay behind it. For a long moment mybrother stared hesitantly into the darkness above, before climbing,very slowly now, up to the attic where my grandparents lived.

In sneakers he passed beneath the twelve, damply newspaperedbirdcages suspended from the rafters. With a brave face he immersedhimself in the sour odor of the parakeets, and in my grandparents'own particular aroma, a mixture of mothballs and hashish. He negotiatedhis way past my grandfather's book-piled desk and his collectionof rebetika records. Finally, bumping into the leather ottomanand the circular coffee table made of brass, he found my grandparents'bed and, under it, the silkworm box.

Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had atin lid perforated by tiny airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizablesaint. The saint's face had been rubbed off, but the fingersof his right hand were raised to bless a short, purple, terrifically self-confident-lookingmulberry tree. After gazing awhile at this vividbotanical presence, Chapter Eleven pulled the box from under thebed and opened it. Inside were the two wedding crowns made fromrope and, coiled like snakes, the two long braids of hair, each tiedwith a crumbling black ribbon. He poked one of the braids with hisindex finger. Just then a parakeet squawked, making my brotherjump, and he closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and carried itdownstairs to Desdemona.

She was still waiting in the doorway. Taking the silkworm box outof his hands, she turned back into the kitchen. At this point ChapterEleven was granted a view of the room, where all the women nowfell silent. They moved aside to let Desdemona pass and there, in themiddle of the linoleum, was my mother. Tessie Stephanides was leaningback in a kitchen chair, pinned beneath the immense, drum-tightglobe of her pregnant belly. She had a happy, helpless expression onher face, which was flushed and hot. Desdemona set the silkwormbox on the kitchen table and opened the lid. She reached under thewedding crowns and the hair braids to come up with somethingChapter Eleven hadn't seen: a silver spoon. She tied a piece of stringto the spoon's handle. Then, stooping forward, she dangled thespoon over my mother's swollen belly. And, by extension, over me.

Up until now Desdemona had had a perfect record: twenty-threecorrect guesses. She'd known that Tessie was going to be Tessie.She'd predicted the sex of my brother and my four classically namedcousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cleopatra. The only childrenwhose genders she hadn't divined were her own, because it was badluck for a mother to plumb the mysteries of her own womb. Fearlessly,however, she plumbed my mother's. After some initial hesitation,the spoon swung north to south, which meant that I was goingto be a boy.

Splay-legged in the chair, my mother tried to smile. She didn'twant a boy. She had one already. In fact, she was so certain I was goingto be a girl that she'd picked out only one name for me: Calliope.But when my grandmother shouted in Greek, "A boy!" the cry wentaround the room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into theliving room where the men were arguing politics. And my mother,hearing it repeated so many times, began to believe it might be true.

As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched intothe kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon waswrong. "And how you know so much?" Desdemona asked him. Towhich he replied what many Americans of his generation wouldhave:

"It's science, Ma."

Ever since they had decided to have another child-the diner was doingwell and Chapter Eleven was long out of diapers-Milton andTessie had been in agreement that they wanted a daughter. ChapterEleven had just turned five years old. He'd recently found a dead birdin the yard, bringing it into the house to show his mother. He likedshooting things, hammering things, smashing things, and wrestlingwith his father. In such a masculine household, Tessie had begun tofeel like the odd woman out and saw herself in ten years' time imprisonedin a world of hubcaps and hernias. My mother pictured adaughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconderof proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In the spring of 1959, whendiscussions of my fertilization got under way, my mother couldn'tenvision that women would soon be burning their brassieres by thethousand. Hers were padded, stiff, fire-retardant. As much as Tessieloved her son, she knew there were certain things she'd be able toshare only with a daughter.

On his morning drive to work, my father had been seeing visionsof a irresistibly sweet, dark-eyed little girl. She sat on the seat besidehim-mostly during stoplights-directing questions at his patient,all-knowing ear. "What do you call that thing, Daddy?" "That? That'sthe Cadillac seal." "What's the Cadillac seal?" "Well, a long time ago,there was a French explorer named Cadillac, and he was the one whodiscovered 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 biggerthan a country. But Cadillacs don't come from Europe anymore,kukla. They come from right here in the good old U.S.A." The lightturned green and he drove on. But my prototype lingered. She wasthere at the next light and the next. So pleasant was her company thatmy father, a man loaded with initiative, decided to see what he coulddo to turn his vision into reality.

Thus: for some time now, in the living room where the men discussedpolitics, they had also been discussing the velocity of sperm.Peter Tatakis, "Uncle Pete," as we called him, was a leading memberof the debating society that formed every week on our black loveseats. A lifelong bachelor, he had no family in America and so had becomeattached to ours. Every Sunday he arrived in his wine-darkBuick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an incongruouslyvital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponentof the Great Books series-which he had read twice-UnclePete was engaged with serious thought and Italian opera. He had apassion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for thejournals of Madame de Stakl. He liked to quote that witty lady'sopinion on the German language, which held that German wasn'tgood for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentencefor the verb, and so couldn't interrupt. Uncle Pete had wantedto become a doctor, but the "catastrophe" had ended that dream. Inthe United States, he'd put himself through two years of chiropracticschool, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a humanskeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractorshad a somewhat dubious reputation. People didn't come toUncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He cracked necks, straightenedspines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, hewas the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sundayafternoons. As a young man he'd had half his stomach surgicallyremoved, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-Cola to help digesthis meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzymepepsin, he sagely told us, and so was suited to the task.

It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what UnclePete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head ona throw pillow, his shoes off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on myparents' stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under the microscope,sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim fasterthan those carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generatedimmediate merriment among the restaurant owners and fur finishersassembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted the poseof his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker, a miniature of whichsat across the room on the telephone table. Though the topic hadbeen brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of those postprandialSundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal toneof 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 "havesexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation." That way, theswift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggishbut more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.

My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with thescheme. Tessie Zizmo had been a virgin when she married MiltonStephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement, which coincidedwith the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. Mymother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindleand snuff my father's flame, keeping him at a low burn for the durationof a global cataclysm. This hadn't been all that difficult,however, since she was in Detroit and Milton was in Annapolis at theU.S. Naval Academy. For more than a year Tessie lit candles at theGreek church for her fianci, while Milton gazed at her photographspinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of themovie magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step,an expanse of black stocking visible. My mother looks surprisinglypliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing betterthan to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches andlampposts of their humble neighborhood.

She didn't surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their weddingnight onward (according to what my brother told my coveredears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When it came tohaving children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was herbelief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which ithad been created. For this reason, my father's suggestion didn't sitwell with her.

"What do you think this is, Milt, the Olympics?"

"We were just speaking theoretically," said my father.

"What does Uncle Pete know about 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 flatfeet like you do, I'd go. But that's it."

"This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The malesperms are faster."

"I bet they're stupider, too."

"Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don'twant a male sperm. What we want is a good old, slow, reliable femalesperm."

"Even if it's true, it's still ridiculous. I can't just do it like clockwork,Milt."

"It'll be harder on me than you."

"I don't want to hear it."

"I thought you wanted a daughter."

"I do."

"Well," said my father, "this is how we can get one."

Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was aserious moral reservation.