Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Milton nods, dubiously. He swivels his head, looking over the place. He hadn’t much cared for the picture Miss Marsh had shown him over at the office. Too boxy-looking. Too modern.

  “I’m not sure my wife would go for this kind of thing, Miss Marsh.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have anything more traditional to show at the moment.”

  She leads him along a spare white 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’s Greek.”

  “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 is well supplied with windows.”

  “It pretty much is a window, Miss Marsh.” Milton moves closer to the glass and examines the backyard. Meanwhile, a few feet behind, Miss Marsh examines Milton.

  “May I ask what 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. My wife takes the kids to the Greek church.”

  “She’s a Grecian, too?”

  “She’s a Detroiter. We’re both East Siders.”

  “And you need space for your two children, is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Plus we have my folks living with 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’t do. That won’t do at all.

  To explain Miss Marsh’s arithmetic: back in those days, the real estate agents in Grosse Pointe evaluated prospective buyers by something called the Point System. (Milton wasn’t the only one who worried 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. You didn’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’s going 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 the window, 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 the market.”

  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 two other, smaller buildings beyond that.

  “Tell me more about this Hudson Clark fella,” he now asks.

  “Clark? Well, to be honest, he’s a minor figure.”

  “Prairie School, eh?”

  “Hudson Clark was no Frank Lloyd Wright, if that’s what you mean.”

  “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’m not sure it even works. Behind that is the guest house. Which also needs a lot of work.”

  “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 showed me doesn’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 show me any more. 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 is Milton’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. Not Miss Marsh and not a bunch of country club real estate guys, either.

  “You don’t have to bother with that,” my father said, relishing the moment. “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 my mother? Well, for those problems there was no remedy.

  On moving 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. That was 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 that was oppressing them.”

  “But it wasn’t another country, Daddy. It was the same country. There wasn’t even such a thing as the United 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, before we had time to register the changes, we were at the house on Middlesex 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 glass windows ran along the front. Hudson Clark (whose name Milton would 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. You could spy on someone down in the living room.

  “Where are the closets?” Tessie asked as soon as we got 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 the way 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 this way. We can see right out.”

  But then there was a scream at the other end of the house:

  “Mana!”

  Against her better judgment, Desdemona had pressed a button on the wall. “What kind door this is?” she was shouting as we all came running. “It move by itself!”

  “Hey, cool,” said Chapter Eleven. “Try it, Cal. Put your head in the doorway. Yeah, like that . . .”

  “Don’t fool with that door, kids.”

  “I’m just testing the pressure.”

  “Ow!”

  “What did I tell you? Birdbrain. Now get your sister out of the door.”

  “I’m trying. The button doesn’t work.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t work?”

  “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.”

  “Stop wriggling, Callie. You’re making it—”

  “I’m not wriggling—”

  “I can see Callie’s underwear! I can see Callie’s underwear!”

  “Stop that right now.”

  “Here, Tessie, take Callie’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 she was) would be the last she would ever live in. She moved what 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 come out in the master bedroom. The speakers distorted our voices, so that we had to listen very closely to understand what was 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 appreciate Middlesex’s glass walls.

  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 now cleaned the huge picture windows, 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 courtyard with 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. Inside was a bathing pool (just warming up now, getting ready to play its part in my 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 the wheel and averting disaster.

  We didn’t need to speak to each other. We understood each other without 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 run my fingers over his thumb, fascinated by the missing nail, which Lefty has always told me a monkey 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 a war. Now we are crossing the grass between the sidewalk and the street. And now we 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 clums
y. 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 leaf matter. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Long enough for Lefty to come face-to-face with the evidence of his own diminished faculties and for me to feel the onrush of my own growing 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.) We went along Middlesex, 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 no more.