Middlesex

The bedroom grows still. Inside my mother, a billion sperm swim upstream, males in the lead. They carry not only instructions about eye color, height, nose shape, enzyme production, microphage resistance, but a story, too. Against a black background they swim, a long white silken thread spinning itself out. The thread began on a day two hundred and fifty years ago, when the biology gods, for their own amusement, monkeyed with a gene on a baby’s fifth chromosome. That baby passed the mutation on to her son, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their children (my great-great-greats, etc.), until finally it ended up in the bodies of my grandparents. Hitching a ride, the gene descended a mountain and left a village behind. It got trapped in a burning city and escaped, speaking bad French. Crossing the ocean, it faked a romance, circled a ship’s deck, and made love in a lifeboat. It had its braids cut off. It took a train to Detroit and moved into a house on Hurlbut; it consulted dream books and opened an underground speakeasy; it got a job at Temple No. 1 . . . And then the gene moved on again, into new bodies . . . It joined the Boy Scouts and painted its toenails red; it played “Begin the Beguine” out the back window; it went off to war and stayed at home, watching newsreels; it took an entrance exam; posed like the movie magazines; received a death sentence and made a deal with St. Christopher; it dated a future priest and broke off an engagement; it was saved by a bosun’s chair . . . always moving ahead, rushing along, only a few more curves left in the track now, Annapolis and a submarine chaser . . . until the biology gods knew this was their time, this was what they’d been waiting for, and as a spoon swung and a yia yia worried, my destiny fell into place . . . On March 20, 1954, Chapter Eleven arrived and the biology gods shook their heads, nope, sorry . . . But there was still time, everything was in place, the roller coaster was in free fall and there was no stopping it now, my father was seeing visions of little girls and my mother was praying to a Christ Pantocrator she didn’t entirely believe in, until finally—right this minute!—on Greek Easter, 1959, it’s about to happen. The gene is about to meet its twin.

As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. There’s a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks. I feel myself shift, already losing bits of my prenatal omniscience, tumbling toward the blank slate of personhood. (With the shred of all-knowingness I have left, I see my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, on the night of my birth nine months from now, turning a demitasse cup upside down on a saucer. I see his coffee grounds forming a sign as pain explodes in his temple and he topples to the floor.) Again the sperm rams my capsule; and I realize I can’t put it off any longer. The lease on my terrific little apartment is finally up and I’m being evicted. So I raise one fist (male-typically) and begin to beat on the walls of my eggshell until it cracks. Then, slippery as a yolk, I dive headfirst into the world.

“I’m sorry, little baby girl,” my mother said in bed, touching her belly and already speaking to me. “I wanted it to be more romantic.”

“You want romantic?” said my father. “Where’s my clarinet?”

BOOK THREE

HOME MOVIES

My eyes, switched on at last, saw the following: a nurse reaching out to take me from the doctor; my mother’s triumphant face, as big as Mount Rushmore, as she watched me heading for my first bath. (I said it was impossible, but still I remember it.) Also other things, material and immaterial: the relentless glare of OR lights; white shoes squeaking over white floors; a housefly contaminating gauze; and all around me, up and down the halls of Women’s Hospital, individual dramas under way. I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new father’s terror as he calculated the tuition for triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.