Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  She said we would manage by keeping the baby a secret from everyone in the ministry, and from her family. When we traveled to the tent revivals, we would leave the baby with a sitter. Simple. I cast and recast the reasons she should leave Brother Terrell, out loud and to myself. He couldn’t leave Betty Ann. The baby would grow up and someone someday would have to know the identity of the father. I told my mother that if Brother Terrell loved her, truly loved her, he wouldn’t want her to be so sad. I thought clear, compelling arguments would make the difference. Instead they made me my mother’s adversary. She couldn’t stand to hear me say what she was thinking and our “talks” inevitably ended in argument.People have called Brother Terrell a sociopath, but I don’t think that’s true. He had a conscience. I woke to him crying in the middle of the night more than once, calling out again and again, “My kids, oh, my kids. What am I going to do about my kids? Oh God. My children.”The first time I heard him, I slipped out of my bed and felt along its edge until I found the door and pulled it back an inch or two. He was on his knees in the living room, holding his head in his hands. Mama held him and the two of them rocked to and fro in silhouette. A crescent moon grinned in the window behind them. What the hell are you grinning at? I eased the door shut, climbed back into the bed, and fell asleep with my fingers in my ears.The road between sin and hell was turning out to be long and circuitous instead of short and direct. I could deal with that. On days my mother dropped Gary and me off in town to spend the afternoon wandering in and out of stores, I rolled up my knee-length skirts to hit midthigh and flirted with older boys. We set up meetings in alleyways and in nearby houses where I let them kiss me, keeping their tongues out of my mouth and their hands away from restricted zones. On occasion I smoked and said “damn.” My brother charged me a percentage of my allowance not to tell. It’s strange to think that our moral code was such that this delinquent behavior did not make me feel half as guilty as saving up to buy my first pair of jeans. When I pulled on those pants, I was bucking one of the strongest and most visible tenets of holiness. Mama told me to take them off, but I wouldn’t. She stalked me through the fake-wood-paneled trailer, paraphrasing scripture in Deuteronomy: “It is an abomination for a woman to wear that which pertaineth to a man.” Not just a sin, but an abomination, she stressed. That meant it was something God hated.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I missed the spotlight that had so recently shone on me, so I closed my eyes and began to jerk and speak in tongues again. I felt a hand on each elbow. I fluttered my eyelids and saw a young man on one side and Betty on the other.“Isn’t it wonderful how God is blessing this child?”“It is, and he’s gonna bless her some more when we get home.” She knew. I stopped jerking. A permanent uneasiness took up residence in me that night. I couldn’t decide if my initial experience with the Holy Ghost was real or faked. If it was real, why didn’t I feel different? If it was faked, I had blasphemed and that was the point of no return that preachers had always warned against.“There is one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and once you cross that line there is no way back. God will turn you over to a reprobate mind. Even if you want to find your way back to God, you won’t be able to.”Did I have a reprobate mind? What exactly was a reprobate mind? Had God turned his back on me? These questions weighed on me for the rest of my childhood. Whenever I committed some wrong—watching The Monkees on TV, attending movies or high-school football games, making out with a boy, or God forbid, wearing slacks—they always resurfaced. I was never sure where God and I stood after that night, but I was pretty sure there was a vast amount of space between us. [image "005" file=Image00004.jpg] One night after evening worship, the Smiths gathered around their small kitchen table with other church people. I walked in just as Brother Smith pounded the table to make his point. “The Assemblies of God is the only church today that stands by the truth. Everybody knows they only kicked David Terrell out because he had two wives.”His back was to the door that led from the living room to the kitchen, so he did not see me enter the room. Sister Smith shushed him, and he and the others turned to look at me. My face grew hot, and I felt as if the floor had given way, as if I was standing there with nothing to support me, nothing to save me. Brother Terrell’s visits to our house in Houston, the gifts, the empty couch in my mother’s living room all came together in that instant, and I knew that my mother was one of those two wives and that it was an awful, shameful thing and that her shame was my shame. I knew, and from that moment on there was no way to not know. Gary and I passed our days swinging on the rickety wraparound front porch. We pumped our legs out as we arced up toward the peeling blue of the ceiling and snapped them at the knees as we swept back toward the edge of the porch.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  But God help me in a couple of hours”—and I took a French test for which I had studied un petit peu . I did all right on the multiple choice (which-verb-tense-makes-sense-here type questions), but the essay question, In Le Petit Prince, what is the significance of the rose? threw me a bit. Had I read The Little Prince in English or French, I suspect this question might have been quite easy. Unfortunately, I’d spent the evening getting the Colonel drunk. So I answered, Elle symbolise l’amour (“It symbolizes love”). Madame O’Malley had left us with an entire page to answer the question, but I figured I’d covered it nicely in three words. I’d kept up in my classes well enough to get B-minuses and not worry my parents, but I didn’t really care much anymore. The significance of the rose? I thought. Who gives a shit? What’s the significance of the white tulips? There was a question worth answering. — After I’d gotten a lecture and ten work hours at Jury, I came back to Room 43 to find the Colonel telling Takumi everything—well, everything except the kiss. I walked in to the Colonel saying, “So we helped her go.” “You set off the fireworks,” he said. “How’d you know about the fireworks?” “I’ve been doing a bit of investigating,” Takumi answered. “Well, anyway, that was dumb. You shouldn’t have done it. But we all let her go, really,” he said, and I wondered what the hell he meant by that, but I didn’t have time to ask before he said to me, “So you think it was suicide?” “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t see how she could have hit the cop by accident unless she was asleep.” “Maybe she was going to visit her father,” Takumi said. “Vine Station is on the way.” “Maybe,” I said. “Everything’s a maybe, isn’t it?” The Colonel reached in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Well, here’s another one: Maybe Jake has the answers,” he said. “We’ve exhausted other strategies, so I’m calling him tomorrow, okay?” I wanted answers now, too, but not to some questions. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “But listen—don’t tell me anything that’s not relevant. I don’t want to know anything unless it’s going to help me know where she was going and why.” “Me neither, actually,” Takumi said. “I feel like maybe some of that shit should stay private.” The Colonel stuffed a towel under the door, lit a cigarette, and said, “Fair enough, kids. We’ll work on a need-to-know basis.” twenty-nine days after AS I WALKED HOME from classes the next day, I saw the Colonel sitting on the bench outside the pay phone, scribbling into a notebook balanced on his knees as he cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder. I hurried into Room 43, where I found Takumi playing the racing game on mute. “How long has he been on the phone?” I asked. “Dunno.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  I'm the descendant of a smuggling operation, too. Without their knowing, my grandparents, on their way to America, were each car- rying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome. It wasn't a re- cent mutation. According to Dr. Luce, the gene first appeared in my bloodline sometime around 1750, in the body of one Penelope Evan- gelatos, my great-grandmother to the ninth power. She passed it on to her son Petras, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their five children, and so on and so on. Being reces- sive, its expression would have been fitful. Sporadic heredity is what the geneticists call it. A trait that goes underground for decades only to reappear when everyone has forgotten about it. That was how it went in Bithynios. Every so often a hermaphrodite was born, a seem- ing girl who, in growing up, proved otherwise. For the next six nights, under various meteorological conditions, my grandparents trysted in the lifeboat. Desdemona's guilt flared up dur- ing the day, when she sat on deck wondering if she and Lefty were to blame for everything, but by nighttime she felt lonely and wanted to escape the cabin and so stole back to the lifeboat and her new hus- band. Their honeymoon proceeded in reverse. Instead of getting to 71 know each other, becoming familiar with likes and dislikes, ticklish spots, pet peeves, Desdemona and Lefty tried to defamiliarize them- selves with each other. In the spirit of their shipboard con game, they continued to spin out false histories for themselves, inventing broth- ers and sisters with plausible names, cousins with moral short- comings, in-laws with facial tics. They took turns reciting Homeric genealogies, full of falsifications and borrowings from real life, and sometimes they fought over this or that favorite real uncle or aunt, and had to bargain like casting directors. Gradually, as the nights passed, these fictional relatives began to crystallize in their minds. They'd quiz each other on obscure connections, Lefty asking, "Who's your second cousin Yiannis married to?" And Desdemona replying, "That's easy. Athena. With the limp." (And am I wrong to think that my obsession with family relations started right there in the lifeboat? Didn't my mother quiz me on uncles and aunts and cousins, too? She never quizzed my brother, because he was in charge of snow shovels and tractors, whereas I was supposed to provide the feminine glue that keeps families together, writing thank-you notes and remember- ing everybody's birthdays and name days. Listen, I've heard the fol- lowing genealogy come out of my mother's mouth: "That's your cousin Melia. She's Uncle Mike's sister Lucille's brother-in-law Stathis's daughter. You know Stathis the mailman, who's not too swift? Melia's his third child, after his boys Mike and Johnny. You should know her. Melia! She's your cousin-in-law by marriage!")

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  o Of course, Jesus says, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone,” and the Jewish leaders leave one by one, feeling guilty for their own sins. When only the woman is left, Jesus says, “Is there no one lefi to condemn you?” She replies, “No, Lord, no one.” And Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.” o Again, the woman is unnamed in the gospels, but Gregory the Great claimed that she was the same woman who anointed Jesus’s feet in Luke and that both women were Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is referred to in Luke 8:1—3 and John 20. In Luke 8. we're told that she accompanied Jesus on his journeys and had had seven demons cast out of her. Gregory maintained that these demons had led Mary into sin and that she was the adulterous woman, who was also the prostitute who anointed Jesus's feet. The result was a Scanned by CamScanner conflation of these three stories, two from Luke and one from John, but the three women are not linked in the New Testament. The Gospel of Mary e In other gospels from early Christianity, Mary Magdalene is assigned a significant role in Jesus’s ministry. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Gospel of Mary. This incomplete gospel was discovered at the end of the 19 century, although it was not published and made available for scholars to examine until the mid- 20" century. e The Gospel of Mary begins in the middle of a teaching of Jesus, in which Jesus is giving a revelation to his disciples on the question of whether or not the material world will be destroyed. o After Jesus gives this revelation, he leaves, presumably returning to heaven. The disciples are upset at his departure, but Mary Magdalene comes before them and tells them not to be aggrieved, that Jesus will still be with them. © Peter asks Mary to tell the disciples what Jesus had revealed to her because, Peter says, “Jesus loved you more than all other women.” When she concludes her description of the revelation (part of which is missing), the male disciples have trouble believing that Jesus would have revealed such a thing to a woman and not to them. But the apostle Levi affirms that Jesus loved Mary more than he did the male disciples. The New Testament on Mary

• From Middlesex (2002)

  What was happening to Desdemona? Was she, always so receptive to a deep priesdy voice, coming under the influence of Fard's disem- bodied one? Or was she just, after ten years in the city, finally becom- ing a Detroiter, meaning that she saw everything in terms of black and white? There's one last possibility. Could it be that my grandmother's sense of guilt, that sodden, malarial dread that swamped her insides almost seasonally— could this incurable virus have opened her up to Fard's appeal? Plagued by a sense of sin, did she feel that Fard's accu- sations had weight? Did she take his racial denunciations personally? One night she asked Lefty, "Do you think anything is wrong with the children?" "No. They're fine." "How do you know?" "Look at them." "What's the matter with us? How could we do what we did?" "Nothing's the matter with us." "No, Lefty. We"— she started to cry—"we are not good people." "The children are fine. We're happy. That's all in the past now." But Desdemona threw herself onto the bed. "Why did I listen to you?" she sobbed. "Why didn't I jump into the water like everybody else!" My grandfather tried to embrace her, but she shrugged him off. "Don't touch me!" "Des, please . "I wish I had died in the fire! I swear to you! I wish I had died in ." . Smyrna!" 156 She began to watch her children closely. So far, aside from one scare— at five, Milton had nearly died from a mastoid infection— they had both been healthy. When they cut themselves, their blood congealed. Milton got good marks at school, Zoe above average. But Desdemona wasn't reassured by any of this. She kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most devastating way possible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children. I can feel how the house changed in the months leading to 1933. A coldness passing through its root-beer-colored bricks, invading its rooms and blowing out the vigil light burning in the hall. A cold wind that fluttered the pages of Desdemona's dream book, which she consulted for interpretations to increasingly nightmarish dreams. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling, dividing. Of hideous crea- tures growing up from pale foam. Now she avoided all lovemaking, even in the summer, even after three glasses of wine on somebody's name day. After a while, Lefty stopped persisting. My grandparents, once so inseparable, had drifted apart. When Desdemona went off to Temple No. 1 in the morning, Lefty was asleep, having kept the speakeasy open all night. He disappeared into the basement before she returned home.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Desdemona and Sourmelina remained upstairs, raising the chil- dren. Practically speaking, this meant that Desdemona got them out of bed in the morning, fed them, washed their faces, and changed their diapers before bringing them in to Sourmelina, who by then was receiving visitors, still smelling of the cucumber slices she put over her eyelids at night. At the sight of Theodora, Sourmelina v— snatching her golden spread her arms and crooned, "Chryso fili! girl from Desdemona and covering her face with kisses. For the rest of the morning, drinking coffee, Lina amused herself by applying kohl to little Theodora's eyelashes. When odors arose, she handed the baby back, saying, "Something happened." It was Sourmelina's belief that the soul didn't enter the body until a child started speaking. She let Desdemona worry about the diaper rashes and whooping coughs, the earaches and nosebleeds. Whenever company came over for Sunday dinner, however, Sourmelina greeted them with the overdressed baby pinned to her shoulder, the perfect accessory. Sourmelina was bad with babies but terrific with teen- agers. She was there for your first crushes and heartbreaks, your party dresses and spins at sophisticated states like anomie. And so, in those early years, Milton and Theodora grew up together in the traditional Stephanides way. As once a kelimi had separated a brother and sister, now a wool blanket separated second cousins. As once a double shadow had leapt up against a mountainside, now a similarly con- 133 joined shadow moved across the back porch of the house on Hurl- but. They grew. At one, they shared the same bathwater. At two, the same crayons. At three, Milton sat in a toy airplane while Theodora spun the propeller. But the East Side of Detroit wasn't a small moun- tain village. There were lots of kids to play with. And so when he turned four, Milton renounced his cousin's companionship, prefer- ring to play with neighborhood boys. Theodora didn't care. By then she had another cousin to play with. Desdemona had done everything she could to fulfill her promise of never having another child. She nursed Milton until he was three. She continued to rebuff Lefty's advances. But it was impossible to do so every night. There were times when the guilt she felt for marrying Lefty conflicted with the guilt she felt for not satisfying him. There were times when Lefty's need seemed so desperate, so pitiful, that she couldn't resist giving in to him. And there were times when she, too, needed physical comfort and release. It happened no more than a handful of times each year, though more often in the summer months. Occasionally Desdemona had too much wine on some- body's name day, and then it also happened. And on a hot night in July of 1927 it significantly happened, and the result was a daughter: Zoe Helen Stephanides, my Aunt Zo.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  That was how it went every week. Plantagenet took the photo- graphs. My grandfather provided the models. The girls weren't hard to find. They came into the speakeasy every night. They needed money like everybody else. Plantagenet sold the photos to a distribu- tor downtown and gave Lefty a percentage of the take. The formula was straightforward: women in lingerie lounging in cars. The scantily dressed girls curled up in the backseat, or bared breasts in the front, or fixed flat tires, bending way over. Usually there was one girl, but sometimes there were two. Plantagenet teased out all the harmonies, between a buttock's curve and a fender's, between corset and uphol- 158 stery pleats, between garter belts and fan belts. It was my grandfa- ther's idea. Remembering his father's old hidden treasure, "Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome," he'd had a vision for updating an old ideal. The days of the harem were over. Bring on the era of the back- seat! Automobiles were the new pleasure domes. They turned the common man into a sultan of the open road. Plantagenet's photo- graphs suggested picnics in out-of-the-way places. The girls napped on running boards, or dipped to get a tire iron out of the trunk. In the middle of the Depression, when people had no money for food, men found money for Plantagenet's auto-erotica. The photographs provided Lefty with a steady side income. He began to save money, in fact, which later brought about his next opportunity. Every now and then at flea markets, or in the occasional photog- raphy book, I come across one of Plantagenet's old pictures, usually erroneously ascribed to the twenties because of the Daimler. Sold during the Depression for a nickel, they now fetch upward of six hundred dollars. Plantagenet's "artistic" work has all been forgotten, but his erotic studies of women and automobiles remain popular. He got into the history books on his day off, when he thought he was compromising himself. Going through the bins, I look at his women, their engineered hosiery, their uneven smiles. I gaze into those faces my grandfather gazed into, years ago, and I ask myself: Why did Lefty stop searching for his sister's face and start searching for others, for blondes with thin lips, for gun molls with provocative rumps? Was his interest in these models merely pecuniary? Did the cold wind blowing through the house lead him to seek warmth in other places? Or had guilt begun to infect him, too, so that to distract himself from the thing he'd done he ended up with these Mabels and Lucies and Doloreses? Unable to answer these questions, I return now to Temple No. 1, where new converts are consulting compasses. Tear-shaped, white with black numbers, the compasses have a drawing of the Kaaba

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Dr. Phil he used to talk about this, too." "He did?" "It's all my fault." She shook her head grimly. "What was? What was your fault?" She was not crying exactly. Her tear ducts were dried up and no moisture rolled down her cheeks. But her face was going through the motions, her shoulders quaking. "The priests say even first cousins never should marry," she said. "Second cousins is okay, but you have to ask first the archbishop." She was looking away now, trying to remember it all. "Even if you want to marry your godparents' son, you can't. I thought it was only something for the Church. I didn't know it was because what can happen to the babies. I was just stupid girl from village." She went on in that vein for a while, castigating herself. She had momentarily for- 526 gotten that I was there or that she was speaking aloud. "And then Dr. Phil he tell me terrible things. I was so scared I had an operation! No more babies. Then Milton he have children and again I was scared. But nothing happen. So I think, after so long time, everything was okay." "What are you saying, yiayia> Papou was your cousin?" "Third cousin." "That's all right." "Not third cousin only. Also brother." My heart skipped. "Papou was your brother?" "Yes, honey," Desdemona said with infinite weariness. "Long time ago. In another country." Right then the intercom sounded: "Callie?" Tessie coughed, correcting herself: "Cal?" "Yeah." "You better get cleaned up. The car's coming in ten minutes." "I'm not going." I paused. "I'm going to stay here with yia yia" "You need to be there, honey," said Tessie. I crossed to the intercom and put my mouth against the speaker and said in a deep voice, "I'm not going into that church." "Why not?" "Have you seen what they charge for those goddamn candles?" Tessie laughed. She needed to. So I kept going, lowering my voice to sound like my father's. "Two bucks for a candle? What a racket! Maybe you could convince somebody from the old country to shell out for that kind of thing, but not here in the U.S.A.!" It was infectious to do Milton. Now Tessie lowered her voice in the speaker: "Total rip-off!" she said, and laughed again. We under- stood then that this was how we were going to do it. This was how we were going to keep Milton alive. "Are you sure you don't want to go?" she asked me. "It'll be too complicated, Mom. I don't want to have to explain everything to everybody. Not yet. It'll be too big of a distraction. It'll be better if I'm not there." In her heart Tessie agreed, and so she soon relented. "I'll tell Mrs. Papanikolas she doesn't need to come stay with yia yia." Desdemona was still looking at me but her eyes had gone dreamy. She was smiling. And then she said, "My spoon was right."

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Maybe you were just scared.” “Scared isn’t a good excuse!” she shouted into the couch. “Scared is the excuse everyone has always used!” I didn’t know who “everyone” was, or when “always” was, and as much as I wanted to understand her ambiguities, the slyness was growing annoying. “Why are you upset about this now? ” “It’s not just that. It’s everything. But I told the Colonel in the car.” She sniffled but seemed done with the sobs. “While you were sleeping in the back. And he said he’d never let me out of his sight during pranks. That he couldn’t trust me on my own. And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.” “It took guts to tell him,” I said. “I have guts, just not when it counts. Will you—um,” and she sat up straight and then moved toward me, and I raised my arm as she collapsed into my skinny chest and cried. I felt bad for her, but she’d done it to herself. She didn’t have to rat. “I don’t want to upset you, but maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of going home or something?” She pulled away from me and gave me a Look of Doom that would have made the Eagle proud, and I felt like she hated me or hated my question or both, and then she looked away, out the window, toward the soccer field, and said, “There’s no home.” “Well, you have a family,” I backpedaled. She’d talked to me about her mom just that morning. How could the girl who told that joke three hours before become a sobbing mess? Still staring at me, she said, “I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.” “Okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.” I didn’t even know what she was talking about anymore. One vague notion after another. “Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.” And there was something to that, truth be told. christmas WE ALL WENT HOME for Christmas break—even purportedly homeless Alaska. I got a nice watch and a new wallet—“grown-up gifts,” my dad called them. But mostly I just studied for those two weeks. Christmas vacation wasn’t really a vacation, on account of how it was our last chance to study for exams, which started the day after we got back. I focused on precalc and biology, the two classes that most deeply threatened my goal of a 3.4 GPA. I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college. So, yeah, I spent a lot of my time at home studying math and memorizing French vocab, just like I had before Culver Creek.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “I have always appreciated your enthusiasm, Pudge. And I’m just going to go ahead and pretend you still have it until it comes back. Now let’s go home and find out why people off themselves.” fourteen days after WARNING SIGNS OF SUICIDE the Colonel and I found on the Web: Previous suicide attempts Verbally threatening suicide Giving away prized possessions Collecting and discussing methods of suicide Expressions of hopelessness and anger at oneself and/or the world Writing, talking, reading, and drawing about death and/or depression Suggesting that the person would not be missed if s/he were gone Self-injury Recent loss of a friend or family member through death or suicide Sudden and dramatic decline in academic performance Eating disorders, sleeplessness, excessive sleeping, chronic headaches Use (or increased use) of mind-altering substances Loss of interest in sex, hobbies, and other activities previously enjoyed Alaska displayed two of those warning signs. She had lost, although not recently, her mother. And her drinking, always pretty steady, had definitely increased in the last month of her life. She did talk about dying, but she always seemed to be at least half kidding. “I make jokes about death all the time,” the Colonel said. “I made a joke last week about hanging myself with my tie. And I’m not gonna off myself. So that doesn’t count. And she didn’t give anything away, and she sure as hell didn’t lose interest in sex. One would have to like sex an awful lot to make out with your scrawny ass.” “Funny,” I said. “I know. God, I’m a genius. And her grades were good. And I don’t recall her talking about killing herself.” “Once, with the cigarettes, remember? ‘You smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.’” “That was a joke .” But when prodded by the Colonel, maybe to prove to him that I could remember Alaska as she really was and not just as I wanted her to be, I kept returning the conversation to those times when she would be mean and moody, when she didn’t feel like answering how, when, why, who, or what questions. “She could seem so angry ,” I thought aloud. “What, and I can’t?” the Colonel retorted. “I’m plenty angry, Pudge. And you haven’t been the picture of placidity of late, either, and you aren’t going to off yourself. Wait, are you?” “No,” I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn’t hit the brakes and I couldn’t hit the accelerator. Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked, but no. “Good to know. So yeah, she was up and down—from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes. But partly, this year at least, it was the whole Marya thing. Look, Pudge, she obviously wasn’t thinking about killing herself when she was making out with you. After that, she was asleep until the phone rang.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I knew I’d been awful—Imagine, I kept telling myself, if you were Lara, with a dead friend and a silent ex-boyfriend —but I only had room for one true want, and she was dead, and I wanted to know the how and why of it, and Lara couldn’t tell me, and that was all that mattered. forty-five days after FOR WEEKS, the Colonel and I had relied on charity to support our cigarette habit—we’d gotten free or cheap packs from everyone from Molly Tan to the once-crew-cutted Longwell Chase. It was as if people wanted to help and couldn’t think of a better way. But by the end of February, we ran out of charity. Just as well, really. I never felt right taking people’s gifts, because they did not know that we’d loaded the bullets and put the gun in her hand. So after our classes, Takumi drove us to Coosa “We Cater to Your Spiritual Needs” Liquors. That afternoon, Takumi and I had learned the disheartening results of our first major precalc test of the semester. Possibly because Alaska was no longer available to teach us precalc over a pile of McInedible french fries and possibly because neither of us had really studied, we were both in danger of getting progress reports sent home. “The thing is that I just don’t find precalc very interesting,” Takumi said matter-of-factly. “It might be hard to explain that to the director of admissions at Harvard,” the Colonel responded. “I don’t know,” I said. “I find it pretty compelling.” And we laughed, but the laughs drifted into a thick, pervasive silence, and I knew we were all thinking of her, dead and laughless, cold, no longer Alaska. The idea that Alaska didn’t exist still stunned me every time I thought about it. She’s rotting underground in Vine Station, Alabama, I thought, but even that wasn’t quite it. Her body was there, but she was nowhere, nothing, POOF. The times that were the most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly, totally gone she was. I bought the cigarettes. I’d never entered Coosa Liquors, but it was every bit as desolate as Alaska described. The dusty wooden floor creaked as I made my way to the counter, and I saw a large barrel filled with brackish water that purported to contain LIVE BAIT , but in fact contained a veritable school of dead, floating minnows. The woman behind the counter smiled at me with all four of her teeth when I asked her for a carton of Marlboro Lights.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And the accicide, the suident, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you toward a fate you didn’t want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn’t know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go. But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it out, she had made us closer—the Colonel and Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn’t leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps. — “There’s one more thing we should do,” the Colonel said as we played a video game together with the sound on—just the two of us, like in the first days of the Investigation. “There’s nothing more we can do.” “I want to drive through it,” he said. “Like she did.” We couldn’t risk leaving campus in the middle of the night like she had, so we left about twelve hours earlier, at 3:00 in the afternoon, with the Colonel behind the wheel of Takumi’s SUV. We asked Lara and Takumi to come along, but they were tired of chasing ghosts, and besides, finals were coming. It was a bright afternoon, and the sun bore down on the asphalt so that the ribbon of road before us quivered with heat. We drove a mile down Highway 119 and then merged onto I-65 northbound, heading toward the accident scene and Vine Station. The Colonel drove fast, and we were quiet, staring straight ahead. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking, trying again to see through time and space, to get inside her head just for a moment. An ambulance, lights and sirens blaring, sped past us, going in the opposite direction, toward school, and for an instant, I felt a nervous excitement and thought, It could be someone I know . I almost wished it was someone I knew, to give new form and depth to the sadness I still felt. The silence broke: “Sometimes I liked it,” I said. “Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.” “You mean it felt good?” “No. I don’t know. It felt…pure.” “Yeah,” he said, dropping his usual eloquence. “Yeah. I know. Me, too. It’s natural. I mean, it must be natural.” It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things. Five miles north of school, the Colonel moved into the left lane of the interstate and began to accelerate. I gritted my teeth, and then before us, broken glass glittered in the blare of the sun like the road was wearing jewelry, and that spot must be the spot. He was still accelerating. I thought: This would not be a bad way to go. I thought: Straight and fast.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  As the chosen one, Gary dwelt in a land of perpetual smiles and kindnesses.“Here, honey, let me help you with those buttons.”“Do you want another sucker?”Or turning to her old aunt Eunice, “He’s just the sweetest child I’ve ever seen.”She answered most of my questions with a terse yes or no and little eye contact. Questions that required further explanation were ignored. Her emotional coldness made me miserable, but I understood and accepted it as the penalty for my sins. I was always looking for ways to ingratiate myself with her. Once when we were on a long trip, I devised a game in which Gary counted gas stations and I counted churches. When Sister Coleman heard the rules, she sighed and responded exactly as I had anticipated.“Honey, I’m afraid you’ll always lose counting churches.”“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”The next time we stopped for gas, I got the sucker and the pat on the head, and Gary got nothing. I remained the favorite for a day or two, until I felt so guilty and so bad for my brother, I engineered my own fall from grace.I pulled out a bag of books I kept under the daybed. In the bag was the oversize Bible storybook my mother had bought and for some reason Queenie and Rita had inscribed. The inscription read: “To David and Betty. May God bless and keep you always. Queenie and Rita.” Everyone called my mother by her middle name, Carolyn, but Betty was her first name, and it was the name she had used in Houston when living incognito with Brother Terrell. I handed the book to Sister Coleman and asked if she would read us a story. She opened it and studied the inscription.“Do you know what this says?”I shrugged.“Why do you think this is addressed to David and Betty? Isn’t Betty your mother’s first name?”I nodded. “Yes, but everyone calls her Carolyn. They probably meant Betty Ann. David and Betty Ann. That book probably belonged to Pam and Randall.”She knew I had engineered her seeing the inscription and that I was lying about the ownership of the book, but she didn’t know why. I didn’t know either. What I knew but could not articulate was that sometimes I felt so awful, so sinful, that I wanted to pull everything down around me, wanted in fact for everything to fall on me like the dead weight of a felled tree and crush me into the ground. Maybe that “everything” was Sister Coleman. Tim-ber. Sister Coleman opened the door to her lab and flicked on the light. My eyes lingered on the vending machine as we walked past and entered the main room. It was a Saturday and the employees were gone. Gary and Bug had stayed at the house with the sinner husband. I moved the teeth aside and placed my books on the table. The plan was for me to read and do homework while she caught up on work.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  When they were gone, I got my suitcase from the closet. Then, looking at the turquoise flowers, I exchanged it for my father's suit- case, a gray Samsonite. I left my skirts and my Fair Isle sweater in the dresser drawers. I packed only the darker garments, a blue crew neck, the alligator shirts, and my corduroys. The brassiere I abandoned, too. For the time being, I held on to my socks and panties, and I tossed in my toiletry case entire. When I was finished, I searched in Milton's garment bag for the cash he'd hidden there. The wad was fairly large and came to nearly three hundred dollars. It wasn't all Dr. Luce's fault. I had lied to him about many things. His decision was based on false data. But he had been false in turn. On a piece of stationery, I left a note for my parents. Dear Mom I know don't think don't want and Dad, you're only trying to do what's best for me, but I anyone knows for sure what's best. I love you and to be a problem, so I've decided to go away. I 438 know you'll say I'm not a problem, but I know I am. If you want to know why I'm doing this, you should ask Dr. Luce, who is a big liar ! I am not a girl. I'm a boy . That's what I found out today. So I'm going where no one knows me. Everyone in Grosse Pointe will talk when they find out. Sorry I took your money, Dad, but I promise to pay you back someday, with interest. Please don't worry about me. I will be ALL RIGHT ! Despite its content, I signed this declaration to my parents: "Callie." It was the last time I was ever their daughter. 439 GO WEST. VOURG III II II nee again, in Berlin, a Stephanides lives among the Turks. I feel comfortable here in Schoneberg. The Turkish shops along Haupt- strasse are like those my father used to take me to. The food is the same, the dried figs, the halvah, the stuffed grape leaves. The faces are the same, too, seamed, dark-eyed, significantiy boned. Despite family history, I feel drawn to Turkey. I'd like to work in the embassy in Is- tanbul. I've put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle. Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the doner restaurant downstairs. He bakes bread in a stone oven like those they used to have in Smyrna. He uses a long-handled spat- ula to shift: and retrieve the bread. All day long he works, fourteen,

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “Your cry has surely come before the Lord of host and the day of your deliverance is at hand!”With the service at its emotional peak, Brother Terrell made his pitch for Jesus. He implored every person in the congregation who didn’t know the Lord to come to the front and lay down their burden of sin. Usually the invitation was accompanied by music, but there was no music that night. He turned to find out why, and saw an empty piano bench. My mother was on her knees at the altar. She had been seduced by the world. She had lost her way. It poured out of her: guilt, recrimination, resentment, self-loathing, and betrayal after betrayal after betrayal. Her daddy’s. Her husband’s. Her own. She had come to the end of her ability to make things work. She longed to go back to that time when God was as present as her breath, back to that place where everything had purpose and meaning.Brother Terrell placed his hand on her forehead, and she felt the weight of her failed marriage and all that had led up to it fall away. She saw her life as it was before, filled with grace and promise and rising on the wind of the spirit. In that moment she was changed.Brother Terrell preached at Grandpa’s church for a week. When the revival ended, he asked Mama to join his evangelistic team and become the organist for his tent revivals. She had never played an organ, but she knew that wasn’t a problem. She sold her furniture, the wedding gifts, knickknacks, flatware, all of her slacks, and the more fashionable dresses and skirts in her wardrobe. It all had to go. What she couldn’t sell, she gave away. She kept a few of her plainer dresses, a couple of toys, two pots, a set of sheets, a few towels, and her old ’49 Ford. She didn’t want anything to slow her down. Chapter ThreeBROTHER TERRELL COULD SCAT ON SCRIPTURE LIKE A JAZZ SINGER HOPPED up on speed. He started slow, establishing his theme in a soft melody, circling around and over and through it for three, four, and five hours. He riffed on stories about his childhood, his last meal, or that time he ate a green persimmon, then meandered back to one of his standard themes of holiness, divine healing, the dry bones of institutionalized religion, or a medley of all three—without notes or outlines. I grew up thinking of him as the only one of his kind. He was in fact the last of his kind, or one of them. The sawdust-trail preachers were disappearing even as Brother Terrell joined their ranks. The term “sawdust trail” refers to the circuit traveled by the tent preachers and to the sawdust-covered aisles that a convert walked down to profess his or her new faith. The revivals peaked in the nineteen-forties and early fifties with the healing crusades of A. A.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “We’ll have a real daddy.”My brother called every man he spent more than ten minutes with “Daddy,” so Brother Terrell’s latest incarnation suited him. I had spent every year of my life since I was one living apart from my dad, but I had never thought he was gone for good until that moment.Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “Donna, you’ve got that lip so far out, you could ride it to town.”I didn’t say anything.“I thought you loved Brother Terrell. What is it?”I didn’t know where to begin. There were so many “it’s” piled one on top of the other in a big sticky mess. My real daddy. Pam’s and Randall’s real daddy. My mother’s coming and going. Sister Coleman. Moving from one crappy place to the next. Always talking about the Truth, but living a lie. I did not know how to choose my words or pull apart the grievances. In the end it didn’t matter. The words chose me.“He is not our daddy! You are not his wife! This is all a big, fat lie!”My mother’s eyes met mine and in one awful instant I knew. This was the big “it.” Her hand popped across my face. The slap registered, but the euphoria of saying what only seconds before had been unsayable and the righteousness of knowing I was right , numbed the sting. I could not stop myself. “The Bible says thou shalt not commit adultery, but you do it all the time.”“Do you just want to hurt me?”I did want to hurt her and in the next second I didn’t. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry.”She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Well, for your information, men in the Bible usually had more than one wife. They took a woman into their tent and they were married. They didn’t go through all the rigmarole we do today. In the eyes of God, we are married.”In the eyes of most people, Brother Terrell was still married to Betty Ann, but I decided to let that one go. [image "007" file=Image00006.jpg] My mother waved her left hand through the air and said in the breathy voice of a new bride, “Aren’t they beautiful?” Brother Terrell had given Mama a set of diamond-encrusted wedding rings he had pulled from the offering. When believers had no money to give or when they wanted to “prove God” for a miracle, they made an offering of their most treasured possessions. The thought was that the goods would be sold and the money transferred to the ministry, and that God would honor the sacrifice and answer the prayer of the giver. Jewelry, they dropped directly into the offering buckets. In the early years, Brother Terrell announced from the platform that we didn’t have the time to sell the items, but people continued to give them anyway. He stopped making that announcement after awhile.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "So doI," respondsthedriver."But minemakemoney." Maurice Plantagenet, his Kodak boxcamera sittinginthe backseat beside Lefty,smilesat Mabelanddrives out Jefferson Avenue. Plantagenet has foundthese pre-WPA years inimical tohisartistic inclinations. As theyheadtowardBelleIslehedelivers a disquisition onthehistory of photography,howNicephoreNiepceinvented it,andhow Daguerre gotallthecredit.Hedescribes thefirst photographever takenof a humanbeing,aParisstreetscenedonewithanexposure solongthat noneofthefast-movingpedestriansshowed upexceptforalonefig- urewhohadstoppedtoget hisshoesshined. "Iwantto get in the history books myself.ButIdon'tthinkthisistheright route,exacdy." OnBelle Isle,PlantagenetpilotstheDaimler alongCentralAv- enue.Insteadofheading toward TheStrand,however,he takesa small turnoffdown a dirtroadthatdead-ends.He parks and theyall getout.Plantagenetsetsup hiscamerainfavorable light,whileLefty attends to theautomobile.Withhishandkerchiefhepolishes the spokedhubcapsandthe headlamps;hekicksmud offtherunning board,cleansthewindowsandwindshield.Plantagenetsays,"The maestroisready." Mabel Reesetakes offhercoat.Underneath sheiswearing onlya corsetandgarterbelt. "Wheredoyouwantme?" "Stretchoutoverthehood." "Likethis?" "Yeah.Good.Face against the hood.Nowspreadyourlegsjusta bit." "Likethis?" "Yeah.Nowturnyourheadand lookbackat thecamera. Okay, smile.LikeI'myourboyfriend." Thatwashowitwenteveryweek. Plantagenettookthephoto- graphs.My grandfatherprovidedthemodels. Thegirlsweren'thard tofind.Theycameintothespeakeasy every night.Theyneeded moneylikeeverybodyelse. Plantagenetsoldthe photostoadistribu- tor downtownandgaveLefty a percentage ofthe take.Theformula was straightforward:womeninlingerie lounging incars.Thescantily dressed girlscurledup in thebackseat,or bared breastsinthefront, orfixedflattires, bendingwayover.Usually there wasonegirl,but sometimestherewere two.Plantagenetteasedout allthe harmonies, between a buttock's curve anda fender's,between corsetand uphol- 158 stery pleats, betweengarterbeltsand fanbelts.Itwasmy grandfa- ther'sidea. Rememberinghisfather's old hiddentreasure, "Sermin, Girl ofthe PleasureDome,"he'dhad a visionforupdatingan old ideal. Thedays ofthe harem wereover.Bring on the eraoftheback- seat! Automobiles werethenewpleasuredomes.Theyturnedthe common man intoa sultan oftheopenroad.Plantagenet'sphoto- graphs suggested picnicsinout-of-the-way places.Thegirlsnapped on runningboards, ordipped togetatire iron outofthe trunk.In the middle oftheDepression,whenpeoplehadnomoneyforfood, menfound moneyfor Plantagenet's auto-erotica.Thephotographs provided Leftywithasteadysideincome.Hebegantosavemoney, in fact,which laterbroughtabouthisnextopportunity. Everynowand then at fleamarkets,orin the occasionalphotog- raphybook, IcomeacrossoneofPlantagenet'soldpictures, usually erroneouslyascribedtothetwentiesbecauseoftheDaimler.Sold duringtheDepressionforanickel,theynowfetchupwardofsix hundreddollars. Plantagenet's"artistic"work hasallbeen forgotten, buthis eroticstudiesofwomenandautomobilesremainpopular.He gotinto thehistory books onhis day off,whenhethoughthe was compromisinghimself.Goingthroughthebins,Ilookathiswomen, theirengineeredhosiery,theirunevensmiles.I gaze intothosefaces mygrandfathergazedinto,yearsago,and I ask myself:Why did Lefty stop searching forhissister's faceandstartsearchingforothers, forblondeswith thinlips, forgunmollswith provocative rumps? Washisinterestin these modelsmerely pecuniary? Didthecoldwind blowing throughthehouselead himtoseekwarmthinotherplaces? Orhadguilt beguntoinfecthim, too,sothattodistracthimselffrom the thinghe'd doneheendedup withthese Mabels and Lucies and Doloreses? Unable toanswerthese questions,Ireturnnowto TempleNo. 1, where new convertsare consulting compasses.Tear-shaped,white with black numbers,the compasseshavea drawingoftheKaaba stone atthecenter. Still hazyabout theactualrequirements of their new faith, thesemenprayat noprescribedtimes.Butat leastthey've gotthese compasses,bought fromthesamegood sisterwhosells the clothes. The men revolve,onestepata time,untilcompassneedles point to 34, the numbercodingfor Detroit.Theyconsulttherim's arrow to determinethe directionofMecca. 159 "LETUS MOVENOW TOCRANIOMETRY. WHAT IS CRANIOMETRY? IT ISTHESCIENTIFIC MEASUREMENT OF THEBRAIN,OFWHATIS CALLEDBYTHEMEDICAL COMMUNITY'GRAYMATTER.'THE BRAINOFTHE AVER- AGEWHITE MAN WEIGHSSIXOUNCES.THEBRAIN OF THEAVERAGEBLACKMANWEIGHS SEVENOUNCESAND onehalf."FardlacksthefireofaBaptist preacher,thedeep-gut oratory, buttohisaudienceof disaffected Christians(andone Ortho- doxbeliever)thisturnsouttobeanadvantage.They'retired ofthe holy-rolling, the shoutingand brow-mopping, theraspybreathing. They'retiredofslavereligion,bywhichtheWhiteManconvinces the Blackthatservitude is holy. "BUTTHEREIS ONETHING ATWHICHTHEWHITE RACE EXCELLEDTHEORIGINALPEOPLE.BYDESTINY, ANDBYTHEIR OWNGENETICPROGRAMMING, THE WHITERACEEXCELLEDATTRICKNOLOGY.DOIHAVE TO TELL YOUTHIS? THIS IS WHATYOUALREADY KNOW. THROUGHTRICKNOLOGYTHEEUROPEANSBROUGHT THEORIGINALPEOPLE FROMMECCAANDOTHERPARTS OFEASTASIA.IN1555ASLAVETRADERNAMED JOHN HAWKINSBROUGHTTHEFIRSTMEMBERSOFTHETRIBE OFSHABAZZTOTHESHORESOFTHIS COUNTRY.1555. THENAME OFTHE SHIP? JESUS. THISISIN THE HIS- TORYBOOKS.YOUCANGOTOTHE DETROITPUBLICLI- BRARYAND LOOK THISUP. "WHATHAPPENEDTOTHE FIRSTGENERATIONOF ORIGINALPEOPLEINAMERICA?THE WHITEMANMUR- DEREDTHEM. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY. HEMURDERED THEM SOTHATTHEIRCHILDREN WOULD GROW UP WITHNOKNOWLEDGEOF THEIROWN PEOPLE,OF WHERETHEYCAMEFROM.THE DESCENDANTSOF THOSECHILDREN,THEDESCENDANTS OFTHOSEPOOR ORPHANS—THATIS WHOYOU ARE. YOU HEREINTHIS ROOM. ANDALL THE SO-CALLED NEGROES INTHE GHETTOS OFAMERICA. I HAVE COME HERETOTELL YOUWHOYOU ARE. YOU ARETHE LOST MEMBERSOF THETRIBE OFSHABAZZ." Andriding throughBlackBottomdidn't help. Desdemonareal- 160

• From Middlesex (2002)

  selfand prays,whilein theother aseven-year-old girlisalsopraying, prayingfor forgiveness, becauseit wasclear tome thatIwasrespon- sible.Itwas whatIdid ...whatLefty saw ...AndIam promising never todo anything like that againand askingPlease don'tlet papou die and swearingIt wasClementine's fault. Shemademe doit. (Andnow it'stime forMr. Stark's hearttohave itsmoment. Its arteries coatedwithwhat lookslike foie gras,itseizes upone day. Clementine'sfathercrumples forward inthe shower.Down onthe firstfloor, sensing something, Mrs. Starkstops doingleglifts; and threeweekslatershesells thehouse andmovesher daughter away.I neversawClementineagain .. .) Lefty didrecoverand camehome fromthehospital. Butthis was onlyapause intheslow butinevitabledissolution ofhis mind.Over thenextthreeyears,the harddiskofhismemory slowlybegan tobe erased,beginningwiththemost recentinformation andproceeding backward.AtfirstLeftyforgotshort-term thingslikewhere'd heput downhisfountainpenorhisglasses,andthenhe forgotwhat day it was,whatmonth,andfinallywhatyear.Chunksofhislife fellaway, sothatwhileweweremovingaheadintime,hewasmoving back. In 1969 itbecamecleartousthathewas livingin 1968, becausehekept shakinghis headoverthe assassinationsofMartinLuther King, Jr., andRobert Kennedy.By thetimewecrossedoverintothevalleyof theseventies, Leftywasback inthe fifties.Onceagainhe wasexcited aboutthecompletionoftheSt. LawrenceSeaway,andhestoppedre- ferring tomealtogether becauseI hadn'tbeenborn. He reexperi- encedhis gambling maniaand hisfeelingsofuselessnessafter retiring, butthissoon passed becauseitwas the 1940s and he was running the bar andgrill again. Every morning hegotupas though hewere goingtowork. Desdemonahad todeviseelaboraterusesto satisfy him, tellinghim that our kitchenwasthe ZebraRoom,only redecorated, andlamenting at howbad businesswas. Sometimesshe invited ladies from church over whoplayed along, orderingcoffee andleaving money onthe kitchen counter. Inhis mind Lefty Stephanidcs grew youngerandyoungerwhile in actuality hecontinued toage, sothathe oftentried tolift thingshe couldn't or to tackle stairshis legs couldn't climb. Falls ensued. Things shattered. At these moments, bending tohelphimup,Desde- 267 mona would seea momentaryclarity inherhusband's eyes,asifhe were playingalongtoo,pretending torelivehislife inthe pastso as nottofacethepresent.Thenhewouldbegin tocryand Desdemona wouldliedownnexttohim,holdinghimuntil thefitended. Butsoonhewasbackinthethirties andwassearching theradio, listeningforspeechesfromFDR.He mistookourblackmilkman for Jimmy Zizmo andsometimesclimbed up into histruck,thinking theyweregoingrum-running.Usinghis chalkboard,heengaged the milkmaninconversations aboutbootiegwhiskey,and evenifthis hadmadesense,themilkmanwouldn'thave beenabletounderstand, because rightaboutthistimeLefty's Englishbeganto deteriorate. Hemade spelling and grammatical mistakeshe'dlong masteredand soonhewaswritingbrokenEnglish andthennoEnglish at all. HemadewrittenallusionstoBursa,andnowDesdemona beganto worry.Sheknewthatthebackwardprogressionof herhusband's mindcouldlead to only oneplace,backtothedayswhenhewasn't herhusbandbutherbrother,andshelay inbedatnightawaitingthe momentwithtrepidation. Inasenseshebegantoliveinreverse,too, becauseshesufferedtheheartpalpitationsofher youth.OGod,she prayed,Letmedienow. Before Lefty getsbacktotheboat.Andthenone morningwhenshegot up, Leftywassitting at thebreakfast table. His hairwaspomadedalaValentinowithsomeVaselinehe'dfound inthemedicinechest.Adishrag was wrappedaroundhisnecklikea scarf.Andon thetablewasthechalkboard, onwhich was written,in Greek,"Goodmorning,sis." Forthree days he teasedheras he usedto do,andpulledherhair, andperformed dirtyKaraghiozispuppetshows. Desdemonahidhis chalkboard,butitwasnouse.DuringSunday dinner hetookafoun- tainpenfromUnclePete'sshirtpocketandwroteonthetablecloth, "Tell my sister she'sgettingfat." Desdemonablanched.Sheputher handstoherfaceandwaitedfortheblow she'dalwaysfearedtode- scend.ButPeterTatakisonlytookthepenfromLefty andsaid,"It appearsthatLeftyisnow under thedelusionthatyou arehissister." Everyonelaughed.What else couldthey do? Hey there,sis,everyone keptsaying to Desdemonaallafternoon,andeach timeshejumped; eachtime she thoughtherheart wouldstop. Butthis stage didn'tlastlong.Mygrandfather's mind,locked in its graveyardspiral,acceleratedasithurtled towardits destruction, 268

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "YOU HAVEHEARDOFTHE DARWINIAN THEORYOF NATURAL SELECTION? THISWASUNNATURALSELEC- TION. BY HISSCIENTIFIC GRAFTINGYACUBPRO- DUCED THEFIRSTYELLOWAND REDPEOPLE.BUTHE DIDN'TSTOP THERE. HEWENTONMATING THELIGHT- SKINNEDOFFSPRING OFTHOSEPEOPLE.OVERMANY, MANY YEARS HE GENETICALLY CHANGEDTHEBLACK MAN,ONE GENERATION ATATIME, MAKINGHIMPALER AND WEAKER,DILUTING HISRIGHTEOUSNESS AND MORALITY,TURNINGHIM INTOTHEPATHS OFEVIL. ANDTHEN,MYBROTHERS, ONEDAYYACUB WASDONE. ONEDAYYACUBWASFINISHEDWITH HISWORK.AND WHATHADHISWICKEDNESS CREATED?ASIHAVETOLD YOUBEFORE: LIKE CANONLYCOME FROMLIKE.YACUB HADCREATEDTHE WHITEMAN!BORN OFLIES.BORN OFHOMICIDE.ARACE OFBLUE-EYED DEVILS." Outside,theMuslim GirlsTrainingandGeneralCivilization Classinstalledsilkworm trays. They workedinsilence,daydreaming ofvariousthings. Ruby James wasthinkingabouthowhandsome John 2X hadlookedthat morning,andwonderediftheywould get married someday.Darlene Woodwasbeginningtogetmiffedbe- causeallthe brothershadgottenridoftheir slavenamesbutMinister Fard hadn't gottenaroundtothegirls yet,sohereshewas, stillDar- lene Wood.LilyHale was thinking almostentirely aboutthe spitcurl hairdo shehadhidden up underher headscarfandhowtonightshe wasgoing tostickherheadoutherbedroom window,pretendingto check the weather,sothatLubbockT.Hassnext doorcouldsee. Betty Smith wasthinking,Praise Allah PraiseAllahPraiseAllah.Mil- lie Little wanted gum. While upstairs,herfacehotfromtheairrushing outof thevent, Desdemona resisted thisnew twistin thestoryline."Devils? All white people?" Shesnorted.Shegotupfromthefloor,dustingher- self off. "Enough. I'mnot goingtolisten tothis crazy personany- more. I work.They pay me.That'sit." But the nextmorning,shewasback at thetemple.Atoneo'clock the voice beganspeaking, andagain mygrandmother paid attention: "NOW LET US MAKE APHYSIOLOGICALCOMPARI- SON BETWEEN THEWHITERACEANDTHEORIGINAL 155 PEOPLE. WHITEBONES,ANATOMICALLY SPEAKING, ARE MOREFRAGILE. WHITEBLOODISTHINNER. WHITES POSSESS ROUGHLYONE-THIRDTHEPHYSICAL STRENGTH OFBLACKS. WHOCANDENYTHIS? WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCEOFYOUR OWNEYES SUGGEST?" Desdemonaarguedwiththevoice. SheridiculedFard'spro- nouncements.But asthedayspassed, my grandmotherfoundherself obediendyspreading outsilkbeforetheheatingventtocushionher knees.Shekneltforward,puttinghereartothegrate,herforehead nearlytouchingthefloor."He'sjustacharlatan," she said."Taking everyone'smoney."Still,she didn't move.Inamoment,theheating systemrumbledwiththelatestrevelations. What was happening to Desdemona?Wasshe,alwayssoreceptive toadeeppriesdyvoice,comingundertheinfluenceof Fard'sdisem- bodiedone?Orwasshejust,aftertenyearsinthecity,finallybecom- ing a Detroiter, meaning that shesaw everythingintermsofblack andwhite? There's onelast possibility.Couldit be thatmy grandmother's senseofguilt,thatsodden,malarialdreadthat swampedherinsides almostseasonally—couldthisincurablevirus haveopenedher up to Fard'sappeal?Plaguedbyasenseof sin,didshefeelthatFard'saccu- sationshadweight?Didshetakehisracial denunciationspersonally? Onenightsheasked Lefty, "Doyou thinkanything iswrongwith thechildren?" "No.They'refine." "Howdoyouknow?" "Look at them." "What'sthematterwithus?How couldwedo whatwedid?" "Nothing'sthematterwithus." "No,Lefty. We"— shestartedtocry—"we arenot goodpeople." "The childrenarefine.We're happy.That's allin the pastnow." But Desdemonathrew herselfontothebed. "WhydidIlistento you?" shesobbed."Whydidn'tIjump into the waterlikeeverybody else!" Mygrandfather triedtoembrace her,but she shruggedhimoff. "Don'ttouch me!" "Des,please .. ." "IwishIhaddied inthe fire!Isweartoyou! I wishIhaddiedin Smyrna!" 156 She began to watchher childrenclosely.Sofar,aside fromone scare—at five, Miltonhad nearlydiedfromamastoid infection— they had both been healthy.When they cutthemselves, theirblood congealed. Milton gotgoodmarksat school,Zoeaboveaverage.But Desdemona wasn't reassured by any of this.Shekeptwaiting for somethingto happen,somedisease, someabnormality,fearing that the punishment forhercrimewas goingto be taken outinthemost devastating way possible:noton herownsoul but in the bodies of her children. Ican feelhowthe housechangedinthemonthsleadingto1933.A coldness passingthroughitsroot-beer-coloredbricks,invadingits roomsand blowingoutthevigillightburninginthehall.Acold windthat flutteredthepagesofDesdemona'sdreambook,which she consulted forinterpretationstoincreasinglynightmarishdreams. Dreamsofthegermsofinfantsbubbling,dividing.Ofhideouscrea- turesgrowingupfrompalefoam.Nowsheavoidedalllovemaking, eveninthesummer,even afterthreeglasses ofwineonsomebody's nameday.Afterawhile,Leftystoppedpersisting.Mygrandparents, onceso inseparable, had drifted apart.WhenDesdemonawent off to TempleNo.1inthemorning,Lefty wasasleep,havingkeptthe speakeasyopenallnight.Hedisappearedinto thebasementbefore shereturnedhome. Following thiscoldwind,whichkeptblowing throughtheIndian summerof 1932, 1saildownthebasementstairs tofindmygrandfa- ther,onemorning, counting money. Shutoutof hiswife'saffections, Lefty Stephanidesconcentratedonwork. Hisbusiness, however,had gonethrough somechanges.Responding tothefall-offincustomers at the speakeasy, mygrandfatherhaddiversified. Itis aTuesday, justpast eight o'clock.Desdemona hasleftfor work. Andin thefrontwindow, a hand isremovingtheiconof St. George fromview. Atthe curb, anoldDaimler pullsup.Leftyhurries outsideand getsinto the backseat. My grandfather's newbusinessassociates: inthefrontseat sits Mabel Reese, twenty-sixyearsold, fromKentucky,facerouged, hair giving off aburntsmellfromthe morning'scurling iron."BackinPa- ducah," sheis tellingthedriver, "there'sthisdeafmanwho's got a camera. He justgoesupanddown theriver,takingpictures. He takes the darndest things." 157