Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

The source of the music was none other than a Brylcreemed Orpheus who lived directly behind her. Milton Stephanides, a twenty-year-old college student, stood at his own bedroom window, dexterously fingering his clarinet. He was wearing a Boy Scout uniform. Chin lifted, elbows out, right knee keeping time within khaki trousers, he unleashed his love song on the summer day, playing with an ardor that had burned out completely by the time I found that fuzz-clogged woodwind in our attic twenty-five years later. Milton had been third clarinet in the Southeastern High School orchestra. For school concerts he had to play Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart, but now that he had graduated, he was free to play whatever he liked, which was swing. He styled himself after Artie Shaw. He copied Shaw’s exuberant, off-balance stance, as if being blown backward by the force of his own playing. Now, at the window, he flourished his stick with Shaw’s precise, calligraphic dips and circles. He looked along the length of the shining black instrument, sighting on the house two backyards away, and especially on the pale, timid, excited face at the third-floor window. Tree branches and telephone lines obscured his view, but he could make out the long dark hair that shone like his clarinet itself.

She didn’t wave. She made no sign—other than smile—that she heard him at all. In neighboring yards people continued what they were doing, oblivious to the serenade. They watered lawns or filled bird feeders; young kids chased butterflies. When Milton got to the end of the song, he lowered his instrument and leaned out the window, grinning. Then he started again, from the beginning.

Downstairs, entertaining company, Desdemona heard her son’s clarinet and, as if orchestrating a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor’s ginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat on the table.

“What do you think about that, Gaia?” her father teased her. “Milton’s got flat feet. Does that sour the deal for you?”

“Daddeee,” said Gaia, embarrassed.

“Better to have flat feet than to be knocked off your feet forever,” said Lefty.

“That’s right,” agreed Georgia Vasilakis. “You’re lucky they wouldn’t take Milton. I don’t think it’s any kind of dishonor at all. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to send a son off to war.”

Every so often during this conversation, Desdemona had patted Gaia Vasilakis on the knee and said, “Miltie he is coming. Soon.” She had been saying it since her guests arrived. She had been saying it every Sunday for the past month and a half, and not only to Gaia Vasilakis. She had said it to Jeanie Diamond, whose parents had brought her last Sunday, and she had said it to Vicky Logathetis, who’d come the week before that.

Desdemona had just turned forty-three and, in the manner of women of her generation, she was practically an old woman. Gray had infiltrated her hair. She’d begun to wear rimless gold eyeglasses that magnified her eyes, making her look even more perpetually dismayed than she already was. Her tendency to worry (which the swing music upstairs had aggravated of late) had brought back her heart palpitations. They were a daily occurrence with her now. Within the surround of this worrying, however, Desdemona remained a bundle of activity, always cooking, cleaning, doting on her children and the children of others, always shrieking at the top of her lungs, full of noise and life.

Despite my grandmother’s corrective lenses, the world remained out of focus. Desdemona didn’t understand what the fighting was all about. At Smyrna the Japanese had been the only country to send ships to rescue refugees. My grandmother maintained a lifelong sense of gratitude. When people brought up the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, she said, “Don’t tell me about an island in the middle of the ocean. This country isn’t big enough they have to have all the islands, too?” The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as everywhere: men and their wars. Fortunately, Milton had been turned down by the Army. Instead of going off to war he was going to night school and helping out at the bar during the day. The only uniform he wore was that of the Boy Scouts, where he was a troop leader. Every so often he took his scouts camping up north.

After five more minutes, when Milton still had not materialized, Desdemona excused herself and climbed the stairs. She stopped outside Milton’s bedroom, frowning at the music coming from inside. Then, without knocking, she entered.

In front of the window, clarinet erect, Milton played on, oblivious. His hips swayed in an indecent fashion and his lips glistened as brightly as his hair. Desdemona marched across the room and slammed the window shut.

“Come, Miltie,” she commanded. “Gaia is downstairs.”

“I’m practicing.”

“Practice later.” She was squinting out the window at the O’Toole Boardinghouse across the yard. At the third-floor window she thought she saw a head duck down, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Why you always play by the window?”

“I get hot.”

Desdemona was alarmed. “How you mean hot?”

“From playing.”

She snorted. “Come. Gaia brought you cookies.”

For some time now my grandmother had suspected the growing intimacy between Milton and Tessie. She noted the attention Milton paid to Tessie whenever Tessie came over for dinner with Sourmelina. Growing up, Zoë had always been Tessie’s best friend and playmate. But now it was Milton whom Tessie sat in the porch swing with. Desdemona had asked Zoë, “Why you no go out with Tessie no more?” And Zoë, in a slightly bitter tone, had replied, “She’s busy.”

This was what brought on the return of my grandmother’s heart palpitations. After everything she had done to atone for her crime, after she had turned her marriage into an arctic wasteland and allowed a surgeon to tie her fallopian tubes, consanguinity wasn’t finished with her. And so, horrified, my grandmother had resumed an activity at which she had tried her hand once before, with decidedly mixed results. Desdemona was matchmaking again.

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.