Middlesex

The crucial feature was this: the crocus didn’t have a hole at the tip. This was certainly not what a boy had. Put yourself in my shoes, reader, and ask yourself what conclusion you would have come to about your sex, if you had what I had, if you looked the way I looked. To pee I had to sit. The stream issued from underneath. I had an interior like a girl. It was tender inside, almost painful if I inserted my finger. True, my chest was completely flat. But there were other ironing boards at my school. And Tessie insisted I took after her in that department. Muscles? Not much to speak of. No hips either, no waist. A dinner plate of a girl. The low-Cal special.

Why should I have thought I was anything other than a girl? Because I was attracted to a girl? That happened all the time. It was happening more than ever in 1974. It was becoming a national pastime. My ecstatic intuition about myself was now deeply suppressed. How long I would have managed to keep it down is anybody’s guess. But in the end it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we’re born.

The following Thursday morning was hot. It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water. The Object was draggy in any kind of heat. She claimed her ankles swelled. All morning she’d been a trying companion, demanding, sullen. While I was dressing she’d come back from the bathroom to accuse me from the doorway, “What did you do with the shampoo?”

“I didn’t do anything with it.”

“I left it right on the windowsill. You’re the only other person who uses it.”

I squeezed past her and went down the hall. “It’s right here in the tub,” I said.

The Object took it from me. “I feel totally gross and sticky!” she said, by way of apology. Then she got into the shower while I brushed my teeth. After a minute her oval face appeared, the shower curtain snug around it. She looked bald and big-eyed like an alien. “Sorry I’m such a bitch today,” she said.

I kept brushing, wanting her to suffer a little.

The Object’s forehead wrinkled and her eyes grew soft in appeal. “Do you hate me?”

“I’m still deciding.”

“You’re so mean!” she said, comically frowning, and snapped the curtain shut.

After breakfast, we were on the porch swing, drinking lemonade and gliding back and forth to create a breeze. I had my feet up on the railing, pushing off from it. The Object was lying sideways, her legs spread over my lap, her head resting against the arm of the swing. She had on cutoffs, short enough to reveal the white lining of the pockets, and her bikini top. I was wearing khaki shorts and a white alligator shirt.

Out in front of us, the bay flashed silver. The bay had scales, like the fish beneath.

“Sometimes I get really sick of having a body,” the Object said.

“Me too.”

“You too?”

“Especially when it’s hot like this. It’s like torture just moving around.”

“Plus I hate sweating.”

“I can’t stand to sweat,” I said. “I’d rather pant like a dog.”

The Object laughed. She was smiling at me, marveling. “You understand everything I say,” she said. She shook her head. “Why can’t you be a guy?”

I shrugged, indicating that I had no answer. I was aware of no irony in this. Neither was the Object.

She was looking at me, low-lidded. Her eyes in the brightness of day with heat currents rising over the baking grass looked very green, even if they were only slits, crescents. Her head was bent forward against the arm of the swing; she had to look up to see me. This gave her a vixenish attitude. Without taking her eyes off mine, she adjusted her legs, spreading them slightly.

“You have the most amazing eyes,” she said.

“Your eyes are really green. They almost look fake.”

“They are fake.”

“You’ve got glass eyes?”

“Yeah, I’m blind. I’m Tiresias.”