Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

By day, no words; by night, hundreds. Every evening at quitting time my exhausted grandfather would come out of the factory and tramp across to an adjacent building housing the Ford English School. He sat in a desk with his workbook open in front of him. The desk felt as though it were vibrating across the floor at the Line’s 1.2 miles per hour. He looked up at the English alphabet in a frieze on the classroom walls. In rows around him, men sat over identical workbooks. Hair stiff from dried sweat, eyes red from metal dust, hands raw, they recited with the obedience of choirboys:

“Employees should use plenty of soap and water in the home.

“Nothing makes for right living so much as cleanliness.

“Do not spit on the floor of the home.

“Do not allow any flies in the house.

“The most advanced people are the cleanest.”

Sometimes the English lessons continued on the job. One week, after a lecture by the foreman on increasing productivity, Lefty speeded up his work, grinding a bearing every twelve seconds instead of fourteen. Returning from the lavatory later, he found the word “RAT” written on the side of his lathe. The belt was cut. By the time he found a new belt in the equipment bin, a horn sounded. The Line had stopped.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” the foreman shouted at him. “Every time we shut down the line, we lose money. If it happens again, you’re out. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay! Let her go!”

And the Line started up again. After the foreman had gone, O’Malley looked both ways and leaned over to whisper, “Don’t try to be a speed king. You understand? We all have to work faster that way.”

Desdemona stayed home and cooked. Without silkworms to tend or mulberry trees to pick, without neighbors to gossip with or goats to milk, my grandmother filled her time with food. While Lefty ground bearings nonstop, Desdemona built pastitsio, moussaka and galactoboureko. She coated the kitchen table with flour and, using a bleached broomstick, rolled out paper-thin sheets of dough. The sheets came off her assembly line, one after another. They filled the kitchen. They covered the living room, where she’d laid bedsheets over the furniture. Desdemona went up and down the line, adding walnuts, butter, honey, spinach, cheese, adding more layers of dough, then more butter, before forging the assembled concoctions in the oven. At the Rouge, workers collapsed from heat and fatigue, while on Hurlbut my grandmother did a double shift. She got up in the morning to fix breakfast and pack a lunch for her husband, then marinated a leg of lamb with wine and garlic. In the afternoon she made her own sausages, spiced with fennel, and hung them over the heating pipes in the basement. At three o’clock she started dinner, and only when it was cooking did she take a break, sitting at the kitchen table to consult her dream book on the meaning of her previous night’s dreams. No fewer than three pots simmered on the stove at all times. Occasionally, Jimmy Zizmo brought home a few of his business associates, hulking men with thick, ham-like heads stuffed into their fedoras. Desdemona served them meals at all hours of the day. Then they were off again, into the city. Desdemona cleaned up.

The only thing she refused to do was the shopping. American stores confused her. She found the produce depressing. Even many years later, seeing a Kroger’s McIntosh in our suburban kitchen, she would hold it up to ridicule, saying, “This is nothing. This we fed to goats.” To step into a local market was to miss the savor of the peaches, figs, and winter chestnuts of Bursa. Already, in her first months in America, Desdemona was suffering “the homesickness that has no cure.” So, after working at the plant and attending English class, Lefty was the one to pick up the lamb and vegetables, the spices and honey.

And so they lived . . . one month . . . three . . . five. They suffered through their first Michigan winter. A January night, just past 1A.M. Desdemona Stephanides asleep, wearing her hated YMCA hat against the wind blowing through the thin walls. A radiator sighing, clanking. By candlelight, Lefty finishes his homework, notebook propped on knees, pencil in hand. And from the wall: rustling. He looks up to see a pair of red eyes shining out from a hole in the baseboard. He writes R-A-T before throwing his pencil at the vermin. Desdemona sleeps on. He brushes her hair. He says, in English, “Hello, sweetheart.” The new country and its language have helped to push the past a little further behind. The sleeping form next to him is less and less his sister every night and more and more his wife. The statute of limitations ticks itself out, day by day, all memory of the crime being washed away. (But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant . . .)

Spring arrived, 1923. My grandfather, accustomed to the multifarious conjugations of ancient Greek verbs, had found English, for all its incoherence, a relatively simple tongue to master. Once he had swallowed a good portion of the English vocabulary, he began to taste the familiar ingredients, the Greek seasoning in the roots, prefixes, and suffixes. A pageant was planned to celebrate the Ford English School graduation. As a top student, Lefty was asked to take part.

“What kind of pageant?” Desdemona asked.

“I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise. But you have to sew me some clothes.”

“What kind?”

“Like from the patridha .”

It was a Wednesday evening. Lefty and Zizmo were in the sala when suddenly Lina came in to listen to “The Ronnie Ronnette Hour.” Zizmo gave her a disapproving look, but she escaped behind her headphones.

“She thinks she’s one of these Amerikanidhes ,” Zizmo said to Lefty. “Look. See? She even crosses her legs.”

“This is America,” Lefty said. “We’re all Amerikanidhes now.”

“This is not America,” Zizmo countered. “This is my house. We don’t live like the Amerikanidhes in here. Your wife understands. Do you see her in the sala showing her legs and listening to the radio?”

Someone knocked at the door. Zizmo, who had an inexplicable aversion to unannounced guests, jumped up and reached under his coat. He motioned for Lefty not to move. Lina, noticing something, took off her earphones. The knock came again. “ Kyrie ,” Lina said, “if they were going to kill you, would they knock?”

“Who’s going to kill!” Desdemona said, rushing in from the kitchen.

“Just a way of speaking,” said Lina, who knew more about her husband’s importing concern that she’d been letting on. She glided to the door and opened it.

Two men stood on the welcome mat. They wore gray suits, striped ties, black brogues. They had short sideburns. They carried matching briefcases. When they removed their hats, they revealed identical chestnut hair, neatly parted in the center. Zizmo took his hand out of his coat.

“We’re from the Ford Sociological Department,” the tall one said. “Is Mr. Stephanides at home?”

“Yes?” Lefty said.

“Mr. Stephanides, let me tell you why we’re here.”

“Management has foreseen,” the short one seamlessly continued, “that five dollars a day in the hands of some men might work a tremendous handicap along the paths of rectitude and right living and might make of them a menace to society in general.”

“So it was established by Mr. Ford”—the taller one again took over—“that no man is to receive the money who cannot use it advisedly and conservatively.”

“Also”—the short one again—“that where a man seems to qualify under the plan and later develops weaknesses, that it is within the province of the company to take away his share of the profits until such time as he can rehabilitate himself. May we come in?”