Middlesex (26 page)

   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’s window in the rear.
   “Can I help you?” the pharmacist asked.
   “Twenty-two,” said Lefty.
   “You got 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 up with 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 preoccupation with the dream book, and after he won for two weeks 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 that money 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 of Mrs. 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 at Milton’s new house in Indian Village for Sunday dinner. One day Desdemona 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 it was sunny, and there were 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 159 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, Lefty walked out of the bank into his penniless old age.
   The earsplitting cry my grandmother let out when 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 GAVE YOU 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!” My grandfather watched in astonishment as his modest 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 and Desdemona lay on the linoleum, exposing to the world 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 she was 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. “We don’t have bad luck enough you want 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 drove my grandparents’ 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 does my 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 the mantel. 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. Jimmy Papanikolas holds his egg out, passive, as Chapter 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 her mouth.
   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 and made a deal with 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, my destiny fell into place … On March 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 to meet its twin.