Middlesex

In the five years since leaving Turkey, Sourmelina had managed to erase just about everything identifiably Greek about her, from her hair, which she dyed to a rich chestnut and now wore bobbed and marcelled, to her accent, which had migrated far enough west to sound vaguely “European,” to her reading material ( Collier’s, Harper’s ), to her favorite foods (lobster thermidor, peanut butter), and finally to her clothes. She wore a short green flapper dress fringed at the hemline. Her shoes were a matching green satin with sequined toes and delicate ankle straps. A black feather boa was wrapped around her shoulders, and on her head was a cloche hat that dangled onyx pendants over her plucked eyebrows.

For the next few seconds she gave Lefty the full benefit of her sleek, American pose, but it was still Lina inside there (under the cloche) and soon her Greek enthusiasm bubbled out. She spread her arms wide. “Kiss me hello, cousin.”

They embraced. Lina pressed a rouged cheek against his neck. Then she pulled back to examine him and, dissolving into laughter, cupped her hand over his nose. “It’s still you. I’d know this nose anywhere.” Her laugh completed its follow-through, as her shoulders went up and down, and then she was on to the next thing. “So, where is she? Where is this new bride of yours? Your telegram didn’t even give a name. What? Is she hiding?”

“She’s . . . in the bathroom.”

“She must be a beauty. You got married fast enough. Which did you do first, introduce yourself or propose?”

“I think I proposed.”

“What does she look like?”

“She looks . . . like you.”

“Oh, darling, not that good surely.”

Sourmelina brought her cigarette holder to her lips and inhaled, scanning the crowd. “Poor Desdemona! Her brother falls in love and leaves her behind in New York. How is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“Why didn’t she come with you? She’s not jealous of your new wife, is she?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She clutched his arm. “We read about the fire. Terrible! I was so worried until I got your letter. The Turks started it. I know it. Of course, my husband doesn’t agree.”

“He doesn’t?”

“One suggestion, since you’ll be living with us? Don’t talk politics with my husband.”

“All right.”

“And the village?” Sourmelina inquired.

“Everybody left the horeo, Lina. There’s nothing now.”

“If I didn’t hate that place, maybe I’d shed two tears.”

“Lina, there’s something I have to explain to you . . .”

But Sourmelina was looking away, tapping her foot. “Maybe she fell in.”

“. . . Something about Desdemona and me . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . My wife . . . Desdemona . . .”

“Was I right? They don’t get along?”

“No . . . Desdemona . . . my wife . . .”

“Yes?”

“Same person.” He gave the signal. Desdemona stepped from behind the pillar.

“Hello, Lina,” my grandmother said. “We’re married. Don’t tell.”

And that was how it came out, for the next-to-last time. Blurted out by my yia yia, beneath the echoing roof of Grand Trunk, toward Sourmelina’s cloche-covered ears. The confession hovered in the air a moment, before floating away with the smoke rising from her cigarette. Desdemona took her husband’s arm.

My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until Sourmelina died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified, so that people began to speak of “Sourmelina’s girlfriends.” A secret kept, in other words, only by the loosest definition, so that now—as I get ready to leak the information myself—I feel only a slight twinge of filial guilt.

Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island after.”

As a girl in the horeo, Sourmelina had been caught in compromising circumstances with a few female friends. “Not many,” she told me herself, years later, “two or three. People think if you like girls, you like every single one. I was always picky. And there wasn’t much to pick from.” For a while she’d struggled against her predisposition. “I went to church. It didn’t help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.” When Sourmelina was caught not with another girl but with a full-grown woman, a mother of two children, a scandal arose. Sourmelina’s parents tried to arrange her marriage but found no takers. Husbands were hard enough to come by in Bithynios without the added liability of an uninterested, defective bride.

Her father had then done what Greek fathers of unmarriageable girls did in those days: he wrote to America. The United States abounded with dollar bills, baseball sluggers, raccoon coats, diamond jewelry—and lonely, immigrant bachelors. With a photograph of the prospective bride and a considerable dowry, her father had come up with one.