Middlesex

And now the mansions along the lake are lit with Christmas lights. The great snow-covered lawn of Rose Terrace, the Dodge mansion, boasts a forty-foot Christmas tree trucked in from the Upper Peninsula. Elves race around the pine in miniature Dodge sedans. Santa is chauffeured by a reindeer in a cap. (Rudolph hasn’t been created yet, so the reindeer’s nose is black.) Outside the mansion’s gates, a black-and-tan Packard passes by. The driver looks straight ahead. The passenger gazes out at the enormous house.

Jimmy Zizmo is driving slowly because of the chains on the tires. They’ve come out along E. Jefferson, past Electric Park and the Belle Isle Bridge. They’ve continued through Detroit’s East Side, following Jefferson Avenue. (And now we’re here, my neck of the woods: Grosse Pointe. Here’s the Starks’ house, where Clementine Stark and I will “practice” kissing the summer before third grade. And there’s the Baker & Inglis School for Girls, high on its hill over the lake.) My grandfather is well aware that Zizmo hasn’t come to Grosse Pointe to admire the big houses. Anxiously, he waits to see what Zizmo has in mind. Not far from Rose Terrace, the lakefront opens up, black, empty, and frozen solid. Near the bank the ice piles up in chunks. Zizmo follows the shoreline until he comes to a gap in the road where boats launch in summer. He turns in to it and stops.

“We’re going over the ice?” my grandfather says.

“Easiest way to Canada at the moment.”

“Are you sure it will hold?”

In response to my grandfather’s question, Zizmo only opens his door: to facilitate escape. Lefty follows suit. The Packard’s front wheels drop onto ice. It feels as if the entire frozen lake shifts. A high-pitched noise follows, as when teeth bear down on ice cubes. After a few seconds, this stops. The rear wheels drop. The ice settles.

My grandfather, who hasn’t prayed since he was in Bursa, has the impulse to give it another go. Lake St. Clair is controlled by the Purple Gang. It provides no trees to hide behind, no side roads to sneak down. He bites his thumb where the nail is missing.

Without a moon, they see only what the insectile headlamps illuminate: fifteen feet of granular, ice-blue surface, crisscrossed by tire tracks. Vortices of snow whirl up in front of them. Zizmo wipes the fogged windshield with his shirt sleeve. “Keep a lookout for dark ice.”

“Why?”

“That means it’s thin.”

It’s not long before the first patch appears. Where shoals rise, lapping water weakens the ice. Zizmo steers around it. Soon, however, another patch appears and he has to go in the other direction. Right. Left. Right. The Packard snakes along, following the tire tracks of other rumrunners. Occasionally an ice house blocks their path and they have to back up, return the way they came. Now to the right, now the left, now backward, now forward, moving into the darkness over ice as smooth as marble. Zizmo leans over the wheel, squinting toward where the beams die out. My grandfather holds his door open, listening for the sound of the ice groaning . . .

. . . But now, over the engine noise, another noise starts up. Across town on this very same night, my grandmother is having a nightmare. She’s in a lifeboat aboard the Giulia. Captain Kontoulis kneels between her legs, removing her wedding corset. He unlaces it, pulls it open, while puffing on a clove cigarette. Desdemona, filled with embarrassment at her sudden nakedness, looks down at the object of the captain’s fascination: a heavy ship’s rope disappears inside her. “Heave ho!” Captain Kontoulis shouts, and Lefty appears, looking concerned. He takes the end of the rope and begins pulling. And then:

Pain. Dream pain, real but not real, just the neurons firing. Deep inside Desdemona, a water balloon explodes. Warmth gushes against her thighs as blood fills the lifeboat. Lefty gives a tug on the rope, then another. Blood spatters the captain’s face, but he lowers his brim and weathers it. Desdemona cries out, the lifeboat rocks, and then there’s a popping sound and she feels a sick sensation, as if she’s being torn in two, and there, on the end of the rope, is her child, a little knot of muscle, bruise-colored, and she looks to find the arms and cannot, and she looks to find the legs and cannot, and then the tiny head lifts and she looks into her baby’s face, a single crescent of teeth opening and closing, no eyes, no mouth, only teeth, flapping open and shut . . .

Desdemona bolts awake. It’s a moment before she realizes that her actual, real-life bed is soaked through. Her water has broken . . .