Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

“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:

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.

Jimmy Zizmo: all that remained of him was what he’d left on Tessie’s body. Her frame was delicate like his, her hair, though silken, was black like his. When she didn’t wash it enough, it got oily, and, sniffing her pillow, she would think, “Maybe this is what my dad smelled like.” She got canker sores in wintertime (against which Zizmo had taken vitamin C). But Tessie was fair-skinned and burned easily in the sun.

Ever since Milton could remember, Tessie had been in the house, wearing the stiff, churchy oufits her mother found so amusing. “Look at the two of us,” Lina would say. “Like a Chinese menu. Sweet and sour.” Tessie didn’t like it when Lina talked this way. She didn’t think she was sour; only proper. She wished that her mother would act more proper herself. When Lina drank too much, Tessie was the one who took her home, undressed her, and put her to bed. Because Lina was an exhibitionist, Tessie had become a voyeur. Because Lina was loud, Tessie had turned out quiet. She played an instrument, too: the accordion. It sat in its case under her bed. Every so often she took it out, throwing the strap over her shoulders to keep the huge, many-keyed, wheezing instrument off the ground. The accordion seemed nearly as big as she was and she played it dutifully, badly, and always with the suggestion of a carnival sadness.

As little children Milton and Tessie had shared the same bedroom and bathtub, but that was long ago. Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. “That’s honey from the icebox,” he said, as Artie Shaw might have. “Cold sweets don’t spread.”

And then one day Milton came home with some new reeds from the music store. He hung his coat and hat on the pegs in the foyer, took out the reeds, and balled the paper bag up in his fist. Stepping into the living room, he took a set shot. The paper sailed across the room, hit the rim of the trashcan, and bounced out. At which point a voice said, “You better stick to music.”

Milton looked to see who it was. He saw who it was. But who it was was no longer who it had been.

Theodora was lying on the couch, reading. She had on a spring dress, a pattern of red flowers. Her feet were bare and that was when Milton saw them: the red toenails. Milton had never suspected that Theodora was the kind of girl who would paint her toenails. The red nails made her look womanly while the rest of her—the thin pale arms, the fragile neck—remained as girlish as always. “I’m watching the roast,” she explained.

“Where’s my mom?”

“She went out.”

“She went out? She never goes out.”

“She did today.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“4-H.” Tessie looked at the black case he was holding. “That your clarinet?”

“Yeah.”

“Play something for me.”

Milton set his instrument case down on the sofa. As he opened it and took out his clarinet, he remained aware of the nakedness of Tessie’s legs. He inserted the mouthpiece and limbered up his fingers, running them up and down the keys. And then, at the mercy of an overwhelming impulse, he bent forward, pressing the flaring end of the clarinet to Tessie’s bare knee, and blew a long note.

She squealed, moving her knee away.

“That was a D flat,” Milton said. “You want to hear a D sharp?”

Tessie still had her hand over her buzzing knee. The vibration of the clarinet had sent a shiver all the way up her thigh. She felt funny, as though she were about to laugh, but she didn’t laugh. She was staring at her cousin, thinking, “Will you just look at him smiling away? Still got pimples but thinks he’s the cat’s meow. Where does he get it?”

“All right,” she answered at last.

“Okay,” said Milton. “D sharp. Here goes.”

That first day it was Tessie’s knees. The following Sunday, Milton came up from behind and played his clarinet against the back of Tessie’s neck. The sound was muffled. Wisps of her hair flew up. Tessie screamed, but not long. “Yeah, dad,” said Milton, standing behind her.

And so it began. He played “Begin the Beguine” against Tessie’s collarbone. He played “Moonface” against her smooth cheeks. Pressing the clarinet right up against the red toenails that had so dazzled him, he played “It Goes to Your Feet.” With a secrecy they didn’t acknowledge, Milton and Tessie drifted off to quiet parts of the house, and there, lifting her skirt a little, or removing a sock, or once, when nobody was home, pulling up her blouse to expose her lower back, Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations penetrate her muscles, pulsing in waves, until they rattled her bones and made her inner organs hum.