Middlesex

From Sunday to Sunday, as in the house in Bithynios, a parade of marriageable girls came through the front door of Hurlbut. The only difference was that in this case they weren’t the same two girls multiplied over and over. In Detroit, Desdemona had a large pool to choose from. There were girls with squeaky voices or soft altos, plump girls and thin ones, babyish girls who wore heart lockets and girls who were old before their time and worked as secretaries in insurance firms. There was Sophie Georgopoulos, who walked funny ever since stepping on hot coals during a camping trip, and there was Mathilda Livanos, supremely bored in the way of beautiful girls, who’d shown no interest in Milton and hadn’t even washed her hair. Week after week, aided or coerced by their parents, they came, and week after week Milton Stephanides excused himself to go up to his bedroom and play his clarinet out the window.

Now, with Desdemona riding herd behind, he came down to see Gaia Vasilakis. She was sitting between her parents on the overstuffed sea-foam-green sofa, a large girl herself, wearing a white crinoline dress with a ruffled hem and puffed sleeves. Her short white socks had ruffles, too. They reminded Milton of the lace cover over the bathroom trashcan.

“Boy, those are a lot of badges,” Gus Vasilakis said.

“Milton needed one more badge and he could have been an Eagle Scout,” Lefty said.

“Which one is that?”

“Swimming,” said Milton. “I can’t swim for beans.”

“I’m not a very good swimmer either,” Gaia said, smiling.

“Have a cookie, Miltie,” Desdemona urged.

Milton looked down at the tin and took a cookie.

“Gaia made them,” Desdemona said. “How you like it?”

Milton chewed, meditatively. After a moment, he held up the Boy Scout salute. “I cannot tell a lie,” he said. “This cookie is lousy.”

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It’s impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh. Milton lying on his bed, dreaming about my mother in the same way I would later dream about the Obscure Object. Milton writing love letters and even, after reading Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” at night school, love poems. Milton mixing Elizabethan metaphysics with the rhyming styles of Edgar Bergen:

You’re just as amazing, Tessie Zizmo
as some new mechanical gizmo
a GE exec might give a pal
you’re a World’s Fair kind of gal . . .

Even looking back through a daughter’s forgiving eye, I have to admit: my father was never good-looking. At eighteen, he was alarmingly, consumptively skinny. Blemishes dotted his face. Beneath his doleful eyes the skin was already darkening in pouches. His chin was weak, his nose overdeveloped, his Brylcreemed hair as massive and gleaming as a Jell-O mold. Milton, however, was aware of none of these physical deficits. He possessed a flinty self-confidence that protected him like a shell from the world’s assaults.

Theodora’s physical appeal was more obvious. She had inherited Sourmelina’s beauty on a smaller scale. She was only five foot one, thin-waisted and small-busted, with a long, swanlike neck supporting her pretty, heart-shaped face. If Sourmelina had always been a European kind of American, a sort of Marlene Dietrich, then Tessie was the fully Americanized daughter Dietrich might have had. Her mainstream, even countrified, looks extended to the slight gap between her teeth and her turned-up nose. Traits often skip a generation. I look much more typically Greek than my mother does. Somehow Tessie had become a partial product of the South. She said things like “shucks” and “golly.” Working every day at the florist’s shop, Lina had left Tessie in the care of an assortment of older women, many of them Scotch Irish ladies from Kentucky, and in this way a twang had gotten into Tessie’s speech. Compared with Zoë’s strong, mannish features, Tessie had so-called all-American looks, and this was certainly part of what attracted my father.

Sourmelina’s salary at the florist’s shop was not high. Mother and daughter were forced to economize. At secondhand shops, Sourmelina gravitated to Vegas showgirl outfits. Tessie picked out sensible clothes. Back at O’Toole’s, she mended wool skirts and hand-washed blouses; she de-pilled sweaters and polished used saddle shoes. But the faint thrift-store smell never quite left her clothes. (It would attach to me years later when I went on the road.) The smell went along with her fatherlessness, and with growing up poor.