Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.

Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft.

dirty poetry

In support of my personal belief that real life doesn’t live up to writing about it, the members of my family seem to have spent most of their time that year engaged in correspondence.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.”

By the third time up, therefore, I had indeed been reborn: as a fountain.

In all the commotion, no one wondered about the engineering involved.

Unconsciously Milton was adhering to the Greek custom of not shaving after a death in the family.

And me, still squeezing my eyes shut to erase what I’d seen: “I think I’ll go back to bed now.”

Its very falseness made it credible.

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.

Back in 1933, a disembodied voice had spoken to my grandmother through the heating grate. Now, forty-two years later, a disguised voice spoke to my father over the phone.

ohhhh how evil.

five-foot-four frame. Father Mike.

whhhhhhhhhhhat!

It was, after all, a car chase between a Greek Orthodox priest and a middle-aged Republican.

Grow up in Detroit and you understand the way of all things.

Hooray to the Yankee-killing Tigers.