Middlesex

Tessie Stephanides, who in a different lifetime when space travel was new had decided to go along with her husband and create a girl by devious means, now saw before her, in the snowy driveway, the fruit of that scheme. Not a daughter at all anymore but, at least by looks, a son. She was tired and heartsick and had no energy to deal with this new event. It was not acceptable that I was now living as a male person. Tessie didn’t think it should be up to me. She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else. Tessie didn’t know how this had happened. Though she could still see Calliope in my face, each feature seemed changed, thickened, and there were whiskers on my chin and above my upper lip. There was a criminal aspect to my appearance, in Tessie’s eyes. She couldn’t help herself thinking that my arrival was part of some settling of accounts, that Milton had been punished and that her punishment was just beginning. For all these reasons she stood still, red-eyed, in the doorway.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “I’m home.”

I went forward to meet her. I set down my suitcase, and when I looked up again, Tessie’s face had altered. She had been preparing for this moment for months. Now her faint eyebrows lifted, the corners of her mouth rose, crinkling the wan cheeks. Her expression was that of a mother watching a doctor remove bandages from a severely burned child. An optimistic, dishonest, bedside face. Still, it told me all I needed to know. Tessie was going to try to accept things. She felt crushed by what had happened to me but she was going to endure it for my sake.

We embraced. Tall as I was, I laid my head on my mother’s shoulder, and she stroked my hair while I sobbed.

“Why?” she kept crying softly, shaking her head. “Why?” I thought she was talking about Milton. But then she clarified: “Why did you run away, honey?”

“I had to.”

“Don’t you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?”

I lifted my face and looked into my mother’s eyes. And I told her: “This is the way I was.”

You will want to know: How did we get used to things? What happened to our memories? Did Calliope have to die in order to make room for Cal? To all these questions I offer the same truism: it’s amazing what you can get used to. After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. In most ways I remained the person I’d always been. Even now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter. I’m still the one who remembers to call her every Sunday. I’m the one she recounts her growing list of ailments to. Like any good daughter, I’ll be the one to nurse her in her old age. We still discuss what’s wrong with men; we still, on visits back home, have our hair done together. Bowing to the changing times, the Golden Fleece now cuts men’s hair as well as women’s. (And I’ve finally let dear old Sophie give me that short haircut she always wanted.)

But all that came later. Right then, we were in a hurry. It was almost ten. The limousine from the funeral parlor would be arriving in thirty-five minutes. “You better get cleaned up,” Tessie said to me. The funeral did what funerals are supposed to do: it gave us no time to dwell on our feelings. Hooking her arm in mine, Tessie led me into the house. Middlesex, too, was in mourning. The mirror in the den was covered by a black cloth. There were black streamers on the sliding doors. All the old immigrant touches. Aside from that, the house seemed unnaturally still and dim. As always, the enormous windows brought the outdoors in, so that it was winter in the living room; snow lay all around us.

“I guess you can wear that suit,” Chapter Eleven said to me. “It looks pretty appropriate.”

“I doubt you even have a suit.”

“I don’t. I didn’t go to a stuck-up private school. Where did you get that thing, anyway? It smells.”

“At least it’s a suit.”

While my brother and I teased each other, Tessie watched closely. She was picking up the cue from my brother that this thing that had happened to me might be handled lightly. She wasn’t sure she could do this herself, but she was watching how the younger generation pulled it off.

Suddenly there was a strange noise, like an eagle’s cry. The intercom on the living room wall crackled. A voice shrieked, “Yoo-hoo! Tessie honey!”

The immigrant touches, of course, weren’t around the house because of Tessie. The person shrieking over the intercom was none other than Desdemona.