Middlesex

Copyright

This electronic edition published by

Fourth Estate 2013

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing plc

Copyright © 2002 by Jeffrey Eugenides

The right of Jeffrey Eugenides to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

The author would like to thank the Whiting Younger Writer’s Awards, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Deutscher Akade-mischer 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 in Utah” by Helen Z. Papanikolas; An Original Man by Claude Andrew Clegg III; The Black Muslims in America by C. Eric Lincoln; Venuses Penuses: 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 North America.

www.jeffreyeugenides.com

Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007528653

Version: 2018-09-26

Praise for Middlesex

‘The year’s most sumptuously enjoyable book … Eugenides gives Callie a graceful fluency of style, enriched with witty phrasing and sensuous detail, that is worthy of John Updike’

Sunday Times Books of the Year

‘Expansive and radiantly generous … a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love’

New York Times Book Review Books of the Year

‘Middlesex is a great Greek-American hermaphrodite epic that we didn’t realise we needed until we read it’

Jay Mclnerney’s Book of the Year, Observer

‘Poised and challenging … compounding stories of immigration and personal reinvention, Eugenides fits the theme of hermaphroditism into the shape of the epic American novel, sprawling through three generations and across a century’

The Times

‘The best American novel since Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. exuberant, ambitious, deeply compassionate and wildly funny’

GQ

‘A rich comedy … The narrative tone has possible progenitors in Muriel Spark and John Irving, but bears the individual imprint of Greek America’

Guardian

‘Wide in scope, rich in classical allusion … Eugenides is superb at evoking character, and his eye for period detail is absolutely convincing’

Independent on Sunday

’Middlesex has epic sweep, but the mode is archly comic in a way that points backwards to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as well as to contemporaries David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and our own Zadie Smith … What really sets Middlesex apart is its warmth and generosity, its pervading air of historical optimism and inclusive, allusive cleverness … novels as good as this aren’t published very often’

Time Out

‘A vibrant chronicle of three generations of a Greek-American immigrant family living through the twentieth century … wonderful’

Independent

‘The true triumph of this novel lies in Eugenides’s ability to move beyond mere titillation, and into a sort of intensification of universal experience … superbly readable’

Sunday Telegraph

‘A sweeping, funny, and tender story of a girl’s unlikely journey to manhood … Eugenides has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being’

Los Angeles Times Book Review

‘A marvellously, quirky and moving entertainment, with the narrative energy of Defoe and the gamesomeness of Sterne … In an age of pinched postmodernism, the expansive premodernism of Jeffrey Eugenides’ new book should be welcomed with great cheers and libations of black wine’

Literary Review

‘Employs all its author’s rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family’s idiosyncratic journey … A deeply affecting portrait of one family’s tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century’

New York Times

‘Genuinely moving … That Eugenides manages to move us without sinking into sentiment shows how successfully he has avoided the tentacles of irony which grip so many writers of his generation’

Times Literary Supplement

‘A wonderfully rich, ambitious novel’

Salman Rushdie, New York Magazine

‘Hilarious and touching … So wildly imaginative that it borders on the bizarre, and yet so warm-hearted that it’s hard to resist’

USA Today

‘Even as Eugenides gives us a contemporary model for the grand narratives of social realism, he has conscripted scientific arguments into the service of unforgettably beautiful myths and metaphors for human nature’

Evening Standard

‘Wildly inventive … it was worth the wait; this is a truly extraordinary novel based around one brilliantly drawn character’

Red

‘The ideal book for those who enjoy intimate tales on an epic scale. *****’

Sunday Express

‘A grand narrative of the immigrant experience and a deliciously twisted romance’

Esquire

‘Ever so rarely, I read a novel that deserves the accolade of ’tour de force’. Jeffrey Eugenides’s new book Middlesex is such a novel, managing to be both immense in its human scope and moving and funny in its human detail. Life-changing is a rather alarming way to describe a book, but I suspect this one is just that’

Joanna Trollope’s Book of the Year, Daily Mail

‘Unprecedented, astounding … The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak’

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

‘Handled with storytelling genius … a good, old-fashioned family saga, owing its epic qualities to a fine cast of memorable individuals’

Image

‘Not for nothing has Eugenides been acclaimed as some new Homer: he offers similar scope, heroics and Greeks enduring watery misadventures … the prose is always generous, frequently amusing and never dull’

Financial Times

‘A vast great sprawling story, flickering through three generations, brilliantly engaging, stunningly written’

Anna Pavord’s Book of the Year, Evening Standard

‘Dazzling …a big, fat, funny American book without which no chattering-class home is complete’

GQ

Dedication

FOR MM, WHO COMES FROM A

DIFFERENT GENE POOL ENTIRELY

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Middlesex

Dedication

Book One

The Silver Spoon

Matchmaking

An Immodest Proposal

The Silk Road

Book Two

Henry Ford’s English-Language Melting Pot

Minotaurs

Marriage on Ice

Tricknology

Clarinet Serenade

News of the World

Ex Ovo Omnia

Book Three

Home Movies

Opa!

Middlesex

The Mediterranean Diet

The Wolverette

Waxing Lyrical

The Obscure Object

Tiresias in Love

Flesh and Blood

The Gun on the Wall

Book Four

The Oracular Vulva

Looking Myself Up in Webster’s

Go West, Young Man

Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco

Hermaphroditus

Air-Ride

The Last Stop

A Note on the Author

Also by Jeffrey Eugenides

About the Publisher

Book One

The Silver Spoon

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit 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 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 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 I want 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 of my mother’s own midwestern womb.

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 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 end was 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 attic where my grandparents 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 silkworm box.

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 Eleven was granted a view of 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, over me.

Up until now Desdemona 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 it was bad luck 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 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 for me: Calliope. But when my grandmother shouted in Greek, “A boy!” the cry went around the room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into the living 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 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. To which he replied what many Americans of his generation would have:

“It’s science, Ma.”

Ever since they had decided to have another child—the diner was doing well and Chapter 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 his morning drive to work, 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 the Cadillac 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 from Europe 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 loaded with initiative, decided to see what 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 so was suited to the task.

It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what Uncle 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, a miniature of which 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 she was in Detroit and Milton was in Annapolis at the U.S. Naval Academy. For more 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 love with which it had been created. For this reason, my father’s suggestion didn’t sit well with her.