Middlesex (23 page)

   Every Saturday for the remainder of the summer, Michael Antoniou came by O’Toole’s to pick Tessie up. Taking her purse as they walked along, he swung it by its strap, pretending it was a censer. “You have 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 to walk like a priest, too.
   After he was gone, Tessie went inside and climbed the stairs to her room. She lay down on 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 as Mikey he finishes the seminary.”
   “Don’t look too excited,” Zoë told her brother.
   “Why don’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 shoot me 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 finally Mrs. O’Toole said, “Listen, sugar. She don’t want 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.
   Maybe Mrs. O’Toole’s maritime metaphor had given him an idea. A week after Tessie became engaged, on a steamy Tuesday morning, Milton put his clarinet away for good and went down to Cadillac Square to exchange his Boy Scout uniform for another.
   “Well, I did it,” he told the family at dinner that night. “I enlisted.”
   “In the Army!” Desdemona said, horrified.
   “What did you do that for?” said Zoë. “The war’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 about my 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’re a very stupid young man, do you know that? You think this is some kind of game?”
   “No, sir.”
   “This is a war. You think it is some kind of fun, a war? Some kind of big joke to play on your parents?”
   “No, sir.”
   “You will see what kind of a big joke it is.”
   “The Navy!” Desdemona meanwhile continued to moan. “What if your boat it sinks?”
   “You see what you do?” Lefty shook his head. “You’re going to make your mother sick worrying so much.”
   “I’ll be okay,” said Milton.
   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.”

News Of The World

   I waited three days before calling Julie again. It was ten o’clock at night and she was 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 from a crane, so that the effect for the viewer was of floating just above the snaking pipes and smokestacks.
   “Okay, that’s enough,” she said, pushing me toward the door.
   “Hold on,” I said. “I love factories. I’m from Detroit. This is like an Ansel Adams for me.”
   “Now you’ve seen it,” she said, shooing me out, pleased, uncomfortable, smiling, stubborn.
   “I’ve got a Bernd and Hilla Becher in my living room,” I boasted.
   “You’ve got a Bernd and Hilla Becher?” She stopped pushing me.
   “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, you mean?”
   “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, how could you
not
do I. G. Farben.”
   “You think 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 gaydar went off completely.” Julie was shaking her head. “I’m always suspicious, being the last stop.”
   “The last what?”
   “Haven’t you ever heard of that? Asian chicks are the last stop. If a guy’s in the closet, he goes for an Asian because their bodies are more like boys’.”
   “Your body’s not like a boy’s,” I said.
   This embarrassed Julie. She looked away.
   “You’ve had a lot of closeted gay guys go after you?” I asked her.
   “Twice in college, three times in graduate school,” answered Julie.
   There was 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.” A name with more 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 no more 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: too many vowels.
   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 what my newly enlisted father, Seaman 2nd Class Milton 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. Like Dukakis’s, Milton’s chin strap looked as though it had been fastened by his mother. 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 it was the middle 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 was Milton’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 obscured Milton’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. You put 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 single week of drills, Milton realized that he had made a terrible mistake 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. The week before, a kid from Omaha 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 around Milton in the boat now guys were 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 him was saying to another. “On the bulletin board.”
   “What kind of test?”
   “Some kind of admittance exam. For Annapolis.”
   “Yeah, right, they’re gonna let a couple of guys like us into Annapolis.”
   “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, it won’t work.”
   “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, the Mexican 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 now Tessie felt she knew him; he was almost family. Week after week 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 scenery was 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. She was looking for Milton’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 come back—she would 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 Saturday matinees, jumping into the sea and sliding down in movie 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 of my 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 the Nazis 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 best way 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 barely walk. 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’ Greek was even worse than Milton’s, they often made mistakes, lopping off endearments, x’s and o’s.