Middlesex

I translated the menu for Julie and we ordered. Out came the platters of boiled beef, the bowls of gravy and red cabbage, the knödels as big as softballs. We talked about Berlin and the differences between European countries. Julie told me a Barcelona story of getting locked in the Parque Güell with her boyfriend after visiting hours. Here it comes, I thought. The first ex-boyfriend had been summoned. Soon the rest would follow. They would file around the table, presenting their deficiencies, telling of their addictions, their cheating hearts. After that, I would be called on to present my own ragged gallery. And here is where my first dates generally go wrong. I lack sufficient data. I don’t have it in quite the bulk a man of my years should have. Women sense this and a strange, questioning look comes into their eyes. And already I am retreating from them, before dessert has been served . . .

But that didn’t happen with Julie. The boyfriend popped up in Barcelona and then was gone. None followed. This was surely not because there weren’t any. This was because Julie isn’t husband-hunting. So she didn’t have to interview me for the job.

I like Julie Kikuchi. I like her a lot.

And so I have my usual questions. What does she want from? How would she react if? Should I tell her that? No. Too soon. We haven’t even kissed. And right now, I’ve got another romance to concentrate on.

* * *

We open on a summer evening in 1944. Theodora Zizmo, whom everyone now calls Tessie, is painting her toenails. She sits on a daybed at the O’Toole Boardinghouse, her feet propped up on a pillow, a pillow of cotton between each toe. The room is full of wilting flowers and her mother’s various messes: lidless cosmetics, discarded hose, Theosophy books, and a box of chocolates, also lidless, full of empty paper wrappings and a few tooth-scarred, rejected creams. Over where Tessie is, it’s neater. Pens and pencils stand upright in cups. Between brass bookends, each a miniature bust of Shakespeare, are the novels she collects at yard sales.

Tessie Zizmo’s twenty-year-old feet: size four and a half, pale, blue-veined, the red toenails fanning out like suns on a peacock’s tail. She examines them sternly, going down the line, just as a gnat, attracted by the lotion perfuming her legs, lands on her big toenail and gets stuck. “Oh, shoot,” Tessie says. “Darn bugs.” She sets to work again, picking the gnat off, reapplying polish.

On this evening in the middle of World War II, a serenade is about to begin. It’s minutes away. If you listen closely you can hear a window scraping open, a fresh reed being inserted into a woodwind’s mouthpiece. The music which started everything and on which, you could say, my entire existence depended, is on its way. But before the tune launches into full volume, let me fill you in on what has happened these last eleven years.

Prohibition has ended, for one thing. In 1933, by ratification of all the states, the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth. At the American Legion Convention in Detroit, Julius Stroh removed the bung from a Gilded Keg of Stroh’s Bohemian beer. President Roosevelt was photographed sipping a cocktail at the White House. And on Hurlbut Street, my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, took down the zebra skin, dismantled his underground speakeasy, and emerged once again into the upper atmosphere.

With the money he’d saved from the auto-erotica, he put a down payment on a building on Pingree Street, just off West Grand Boulevard. The above-ground Zebra Room was a bar & grill, set in the middle of a busy commercial strip. The neighboring businesses were still there when I was a kid. I can dimly remember them: A. A. Laurie’s optometrist’s shop with its neon sign in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses; New Yorker Clothes, in whose front window I saw my first naked mannequins, dancing a murderous tango. Then there was Value Meats, Hagermoser’s Fresh Fish, and the Fine-Cut Barber Shop. On the corner was our place, a narrow single-story building with a wooden zebra’s head projecting over the sidewalk. At night, blinking red neon outlined the muzzle, neck, and ears.