Middlesex

“They should let us speak Greek if they’re so accepting,” Desdemona grumbled.

Summer was abandoning the ocean. One night it grew too cold in the lifeboat to crack the corset’s combination. Instead they huddled under blankets, talking.

“Is Sourmelina meeting us in New York?” Desdemona asked.

“No. We have to take a train to Detroit.”

“Why can’t she meet us?”

“It’s too far.”

“Just as well. She wouldn’t be on time anyway.”

The ceaseless sea wind made the tarp’s edges flap. Frost formed on the lifeboat’s gunwales. They could see the top of the Giulia’s smokestack, the smoke itself discernible only as a starless patch of night sky. (Though they didn’t know it, that striped, canted smokestack was already informing them about their new home; it was whispering about River Rouge and the Uniroyal plant, and the Seven Sisters and Two Brothers, but they didn’t listen; they wrinkled up their noses and ducked down in the lifeboat away from the smoke.)

And if the smell of industry didn’t insist on entering my story already, if Desdemona and Lefty, who grew up on a pine-scented mountain and who could never get used to the polluted air of Detroit, hadn’t ducked down in the lifeboat, then they might have detected a new aroma wafting in on the brisk sea air: a humid odor of mud and wet bark. Land. New York. America.

“What are we going to tell Sourmelina about us?”

“She’ll understand.”

“Will she keep quiet?”

“There are a few things she’d rather her husband didn’t know about her.”

“You mean Helen?”

“I didn’t say a thing,” said Lefty.

They fell asleep after that, waking to sunlight, and a face staring down at them.

“Did you have a good sleep?” Captain Kontoulis said. “Maybe I could get you a blanket?”

“I’m sorry,” Lefty said. “We won’t do it again.”

“You won’t get the chance,” said the captain and, to prove his point, pulled the lifeboat’s tarp completely away. Desdemona and Lefty sat up. In the distance, lit by the rising sun, was the skyline of New York. It wasn’t the right shape for a city—no domes, no minarets—and it took them a minute to process the tall geometric forms. Mist curled off the bay. A million pink windowpanes glittered. Closer, crowned with her own sunrays and dressed like a classical Greek, the Statue of Liberty welcomed them.

“How do you like that?” Captain Kontoulis asked.

“I’ve seen enough torches to last the rest of my life,” said Lefty.

But Desdemona, for once, was more optimistic. “At least it’s a woman,” she said. “Maybe here people won’t be killing each other every single day.”

BOOK TWO

HENRY FORD’S ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MELTING POT

Everyone who builds a factory builds a temple.

—Calvin Coolidge

Detroit was always made of wheels. Long before the Big Three and the nickname “Motor City”; before the auto factories and the freighters and the pink, chemical nights; before anyone had necked in a Thunderbird or spooned in a Model T; previous to the day a young Henry Ford knocked down his workshop wall because, in devising his “quadricycle,” he’d thought of everything but how to get the damn thing out; and nearly a century prior to the cold March night, in 1896, when Charles King tiller-steered his horseless carriage down St. Antoine, along Jefferson, and up Woodward Avenue (where the two-stroke engine promptly quit); way, way back, when the city was just a piece of stolen Indian land located on the strait from which it got its name, a fort fought over by the British and French until, wearing them out, it fell into the hands of the Americans; way back then, before cars and cloverleaves, Detroit was made of wheels.

I am nine years old and holding my father’s meaty, sweaty hand. We are standing at a window on the top floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel. I have come downtown for our annual lunch date. I am wearing a miniskirt and fuschia tights. A white patent leather purse hangs on a long strap from my shoulder.

The fogged window has spots on it. We are way up high. I’m going to order shrimp scampi in a minute.

The reason for my father’s hand perspiration: he’s afraid of heights. Two days ago, when he offered to take me wherever I wanted, I called out in my piping voice, “Top of the Pontch!” High above the city, amid the business lunchers and power brokers, was where I wanted to be. And Milton has been true to his promise. Despite racing pulse he has allowed the maître d’ to give us a table next to the window; so that now here we are—as a tuxedoed waiter pulls out my chair—and my father, too frightened to sit, begins a history lesson instead.

What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it? Milton, olive complexion turning a shade pale, only says, “Look. See the wheel?”