Sadness

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.

Page 65 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Middlesex (2002)

  It was the opposite for my parents. Wherever they went, whatever they did, what greeted them was my absence. After the third week of my vanishing, friends and relatives stopped coming over to Middle- sex in such numbers. The house got quieter. The phone didn't ring. Milton called Chapter Eleven, who was now living in the Upper Peninsula, and said, "Your mother's going through a rough period. We still don't know where your sister is. I'm sure your mother would feel a little better if she could see you. Why don't you come down for the weekend?" Milton didn't mention anything about my note. Throughout my time at the Clinic he had kept Chapter Eleven ap- prised of the situation in only the simplest terms. Chapter Eleven heard the seriousness in Milton's voice and agreed to start coming down on weekends and staying in his old bedroom. Gradually, he learned the details of my condition, reacting to them in a milder way than my parents had, which allowed them, or at least Tessie, to begin to accept the new reality. It was during those weekends that Milton, desperate to cement his restored relationship with his son, urged him once again to go into the family business. "You're not still going with that Meg, are you?" "No." "Well, you dropped out of your engineering studies. So what are you doing now? Your mother and I don't have a very clear idea of your life up there in Marquette." "I work in a bar." "You work in a bar? Doing what?" "Short-order cook." Milton paused only a moment. "What would you rather do, stay 473 behind the grill or run Hercules Hot Dogs someday? You're the one that invented them anyway." Chapter Eleven did not say yes. But he did not say no. He had once been a science geek, but the sixties had changed that. Under the imperatives of that decade, Chapter Eleven had become a lacto- vegetarian, a Transcendental Meditation student, a chewer of peyote buttons. Once, long ago, he had sawed golf balls in half, trying to find out what was inside; but at some point in his life my brother had become fascinated with the interior of the mind. Convinced of the essential uselessness of formalized education, he had retreated from civilization. Both of us had our moments of getting back to nature, Chapter Eleven in the U.P. and me in my bush in Golden Gate Park. By the time my father made his offer, however, Chapter Eleven had begun to tire of the woods. "Come on," Milton said, "let's go have a Hercules right now." "I don't eat meat," Chapter Eleven said. "How can I run the place if I don't eat meat?" "I've been thinking about putting in salad bars," said Milton. "Lotta people eating a low-fat diet these days." "Good idea." "Yeah? You think so? That can be your department, then." Milton elbowed Chapter Eleven, kidding, "We'll start you off as vice presi-

• From Middlesex (2002)

  open window, he took hold of the steering wheel and obediently be- gan pulling over to the empty lane. As soon as he was clear of the Customs booth, however, he stomped a tasseled loafer down on the accelerator and the squealing Cadillac rocketed away. Now it was something like a car chase. For out on the bridge, Fa- ther Mike, too, had stepped on the gas. Snaking between the cars and trucks, he was racing toward the international divide, while Milton pursued, flashing his brights to get people out of the way. The bridge rose up over the river in a graceful parabola, its steel cables strung with red lights. The Cadillac's tires hummed over its striated surface. Milton had his foot to the floor, engaging what he called the goose gear. And now the difference between a luxury automobile and a newfangled cartoon car began to show itself. The Cadillac engine roared with power. Its eight cylinders fired, the carburetor sucking in vast quantities of fuel. The pistons thumped and jumped and the drive wheel spun like mad, as the long, superhero car passed others as if they were standing still. Seeing the Eldorado coming so fast, other drivers moved aside. Milton cut straight through the traffic until he spotted the green Gremlin up ahead. "So much for your high gas mileage," Milton cried. "Sometimes you need a little power!" By this time Father Mike saw the Eldorado looming, too. He floored the accelerator, but the Gremlin's engine was already working at capacity. The car vibrated wildly but picked up no speed. On and on came the Cadillac. Milton didn't take his foot off the pedal until his front bumper was nearly touching the Gremlin's rear. They were travelmg now at seventy miles per hour. Father Mike looked up to see Milton's avenging eyes filling the rearview mirror. Milton, gazing ahead into the Gremlin's interior, saw a slice of Father Mike's face. The priest seemed to be asking for forgiveness, or explaining his ac- 508 tions. There was a strange sadness in his eyes, a weakness, which Mil- ton could not interpret. . .

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Won'tthat makeyouparanoid?"Isaid. "No." "I thoughtyou toldmepotalways makesyou paranoid." "Not when I'moutinnature,"saidtheObject.Shegavemea hard look. Thenshetookanothertoke. "Don'tbogartit," said Jerome. He gotuptotakethejoint from her. Hesmoked half-standing,andthenturned and held itouttome. I lookedatthe joint.Oneendburned;theother wasmashedand wet. Ihadanidea thatthiswasallpartoftheboys'plan,the woods, theshack,thecots, thedrugs,thesharingofsaliva.Here's a question Istillcan't answer:DidIseethroughthemaletricksbecause Iwas destinedtoschemethatwaymyself)Ordogirls see throughthe tricks,too,andjustpretendnottonotice? ForonesecondIthoughtofChapterEleven.Hewaslivingin a shackinthewoodslikethis.IaskedmyselfifImissedmybrother.I couldn'ttellifIdidornot.IneverknowwhatIfeeluntilit's toolate. ChapterElevenhadsmokedhisfirstjoint at college.Iwasfouryears aheadofhim. "Holdit in,"Rexcoachedme. "Youhave tolettheTHCbuild up inyourbloodstream,"said Jerome. Therewas asoundoutinthewoods,twigssnapping.TheObject grabbed Rex'sarm."What wasthat?" "Maybeabear," Jerome said. "Neither ofyougirlsareonthe rag, Ihope," saidRex. "Rex!"the Objectprotested. "Hey, I'm serious.Bearscansmellit.Iwas out camping in Yel- lowstone onetime andtherewasthiswomanoutthere whogot killed. Grizzly could smellthe blood." "That isnot true!" "Iswear. This guyIknowtoldme.Hewas an Outward Bound guide." "Well, I don'tknowaboutCallie, butI'mnot,"saidthe Object. They all looked atme."I'mnoteither,"Isaid. "I guesswe're safe,then,Roman,"said Rex,andlaughed. The Object wasstillholdingon tohimforprotection."You want todo ashotgun?" heasked her. "What's that?" 371 "Here."Heturnedtofaceher."What youdoisoneperson opens their mouthandtheotherpersonblows thesmokeinto it.You get totally fucked up. It'sexcellent." Rexput thelit endofthejointinhismouth. Heleanedtoward theObject.Sheleanedforwardtoo.Sheopened hermouth.And Rex begantoblow.TheObscure Object'slipswereaperfectripeoval and intothattarget,thatbull's-eye,Rex Reesedirectedthestreamof muskysmoke.Icould seethecolumnrushintothe Object'smouth. It disappeared downherthroatlikeWhitewateroverfalls.Finally she coughedandhestopped. "Good hit. Nowdome." TheObject'sgreeneyes were watering. Butshetookthejointand inserteditbetweenherlips.Sheleaned towardRexReese,who opened hisown mouth wide. Whentheywerefinished, Jerome tookthejointfromhissister. "Let mesee if Icanmasterthetechnicaldifficultieshere,"hesaid.The nextthingIknew,hisfacewasclose to mine. So finallyIdidit, too. Leanedforward,closedmyeyes,partedmylips,andlet Jerome shot- gunintomymouthalong,dirtyplumeofsmoke. Smokefilled my lungs,whichbegantoburn.Icoughedandletit out.WhenIopenedmyeyes again,Rex had hisarmaroundthe Ob- ject'sshoulder.Shewastrying to actcasualaboutit.Rexfinished his beer. Heopenedtwo more, onefor him and oneforher.Heturned towardtheObject.Hesmiled.HesaidsomethingIcouldn't hear. And thenwhileIwasstillblinkinghe coveredtheObject'slips with his sour,handsome,pot-smokingmouth. Across theflickeringshack Jerome and Iwereleft pretending not tonotice. Thejointwasoursnowtobogartas wewished.Wepassed itback andforth in silenceandsippedourbeers. "I'm having thisweirdthing wheremyfeetlook extremelyfar away," Jerome saidafterawhile."Doyour feetlookextremely far awaytoyou?" "I can'tsee my feet," I said. "It'sdarkinhere." He passed me thejointagain andItookit. Iinhaledandheld the smoke in. Ilet it keepburningmy lungsbecause Iwantedto distract myselffromthe pain inmyheart. Rexandthe Objectwere stillkiss- ing. I looked away, out thedark, grimywindow. "Everythinglooks really blue," Isaid."Didyou notice that?" 372 "Ohyeah," said Jerome. "Allkindsof strange epiphenomena." The Oracle ofDelphihadbeenagirl aboutmysame age.Allday longshe sat overahole intheground, the omphalos ', the navelofthe earth, breathing petrochemicalfumesescapingfrom underneath.A teenage virgin, theOracletoldthefuture, speakingthefirstmetered verse in history.Why doIbringthis up? BecauseCalliopewasalsoa virginthat night (foralittlewhilelonger at least).Andshe,too,had been inhaling hallucinogens.Ethylene was escapingfromthecedar swamp outside theshack.Dressednotinadiaphanousrobebuta pairof overalls,Calliopebegantofeelveryfunnyindeed. "Want anotherbeer?" Jerome asked. "Okay." He handedmea golden canofStroh's.Iputthesweatingcanto my lipsanddrank.ThenI drank somemore. Jerome andIbothfelt theweightof theobligation. We smiled ateachothernervously.I lookeddown and rubbed mykneethroughmy overalls.AndwhenI lookedup again Jerome's face wasclose.Hiseyeswereshut,likethe eyes of a boyjumpingfeetfirstoffthehighdive.BeforeI knewwhat washappeninghe was kissing me. Kissingthegirl whohadnever beenkissed. (Not sinceClementineStark,anyway.)Ididn't stophim. Iremainedcompletelystillwhilehedidhisthing.Despitemylight- headedness,Icouldfeeleverything.Theshockingwetness of his mouth.Thewhiskery feelofhislips.His barging tongue.Certainfla- vors, too, the beer,thedope, a lingering breath mint,andbeneathall thattheactual,animal tasteofaboy's mouth.Icould tastethegamy tangof Jerome's hormonesandthemetalofhisfillings.I openedone eye. Here wasthefinehairI'dspentsomuchtimeadmiring onan- otherhead. Herewerethefrecklesontheforehead,onthebridge of thenose, alongthe ears.But itwasn'ttherightface; theyweren'tthe rightfreckles, andthehair was dyedblack.Behind myimpassiveface my soulcurled upintoaball,waitinguntildieunpleasantness was over. JeromeandIwerestillsittingup.Hewaspressinghis faceagainst mine. Bymaneuvering a little, Icouldseeacrosstheroom towhere Rexand the Objectwere.Theywerelyingdown now.Thetailsof Rex's blue shirtseemedtoflapinthewavering light.Beneath him one of the Object's legsdangled offthebed,thecuffof herpants muddy. I heard them whispering andlaughing,then silenceagain. I 373

• From Middlesex (2002)

  He reachedoutandplayfully caught Callie'snose betweenhis knuck- les. "Or gettingyournose fixed." Calliepulledher head away, angry. "Don'tdothat!" "Sorry" saidMilton.He cleared histhroat, blinking. "What'swrongwith me?" Calliopeasked, andnowhervoice broke. Tearswere running down hercheeks. "What'swrongwith me, Daddy?" Milton's facedarkened. Heswallowed hard.Callie waitedforhim tosaythe word,toquote Webster's, buthe didn't. Heonlylooked at her acrossthetable,hishead low,his eyes dark, warm,sad,andfullof love. Therewassomuchlove inMilton'seyesthat itwasimpossible to lookfortruth. "It'sahormonalthing,whatyou've got,"hesaid."Iwasalways undertheimpressionthatmenhadmalehormones andwomenhad femalehormones.Buteverybodyhasboth,apparendy." Still Callie waited. "Whatyou'vegot,see,is you've gotalittletoomuchofthemale hormonesandnotquiteenoughofthefemalehormones. Sowhat thedoctorwants to doisgiveyou a shoteverynowandthen toget everythingworkingright." Hedidn't say theword.Ididn'tmakehim. "It'sahormonalthing," Miltonrepeated."Inthegrandscheme of things, nobigdeal." Lucebelieved thatapatient ofmyagewascapable ofunderstanding theessentials. Andso, thatafternoon, hedidnotmincewords.Inhis mellow, pleasing,educatedvoice, lookingdirectiyintomyeyes,Luce declared that I was a girlwhose clitoriswasmerely largerthan those ofothergirls. Hedrewthe same chartsformeashehadformypar- ents. When Ipressed himonthe detailsofmysurgery,he saidonly this: "We're goingto doan operationtofinishyour genitalia.They're not quite finishedyetand wewantto finishthem." Henever mentioned anythingabout hypospadias, and Ibeganto hope that the word didn't applytome. MaybeIhadtakenitoutof context. Dr. Lucemay have beenreferring toanotherpatient. Web- ster's had said that hypospadias wasan abnormalityofthepenis.But Dr. Luce was tellingme thatI had a clitoris. Iunderstoodthat both these things grewout ofthesame fetalgonad,but thatdidn't matter. 433 IfI hada clitoris—and a specialistwastellingme that I did—what could Ibebuta girl? The adolescentegoisa hazy thing,amorphous,cloudlike.It wasn't difficulttopourmyidentity into differentvessels.In a sense,I was abletotake whateverformwasdemandedofme.Ionlywanted toknow the dimensions.Lucewasprovidingthem.Myparents sup- ported him.Theprospectofhaving everythingsolved waswildlyat- tractivetome,too, andwhileIlayonthechaiseIdidn't ask myself where my feelingsfortheObject fitin.Ionlywanteditall tobe over. Iwantedtogohome andforgetithadeverhappened.SoIlistened toLuce quietiyandmadeno objections. Heexplainedthe estrogeninjectionswouldinducemybreaststo grow."Youwon't beRaquel Welch, butyou won't be Twiggyeither." My facialhair woulddiminish.Myvoicewouldrisefromtenorto alto.But whenIaskedifI wouldfinallygetmyperiod,Dr.Lucewas frank."No.Youwon't. Ever.Youwon'tbe able to have ababy your- self, Callie.If you wanttohavea family,you'llhavetoadopt." Ireceivedthisnews calmly.Having childrenwasn'tsomethingI thought muchaboutatfourteen. Therewas aknockon thedoor,andthe receptioniststuckher headin."Sorry, Dr.Luce.But couldIbotheryouaminute?" "Thatdependson Callie."Hesmiledat me."Youmindtakinga little break?I'll be rightback." "Idon'tmind." "Sit there a fewminutes and see ifany otherquestionsoccurto you."He left theroom. Whilehewasgone, Ididn'tthinkofany other questions.I sat in my chair,notthinkinganythingat all.Mymindwas curiously blank. Itwas theblankness of obedience.With the unerringinstinctof chil- dren,Ihadsurmisedwhatmy parentswanted fromme. Theywanted meto staythewayIwas.And this was what Dr.Luce nowpromised. Iwas broughtoutofmy abstractedstate bya salmon-colored cloud passinglowinthe sky. Igotup and wenttothe windowto look outatthe river.I pressed mycheek against theglasstoseeas far southas possible,wheretheskyscrapers rose. Itold myselfthat I would livein NewYorkwhenIgrewup. "Thisisthe cityforme," Isaid.Ihad beguntocryagain.Itriedto stop. Dabbingatmy eyes, Iwandered aroundtheofficeand finallyfound myselfinfront ofone 434

• From Middlesex (2002)

  traband. Aside from their blindingbrightness,therewasanotherodd thing about Milton's home movies:likeHitchcock,healwaysap- peared in them. Theonlywaytocheck theamountoffilmleftinthe camera wasby readingthe counterinsidethelens.Inthemiddleof Christmas scenes orbirthday partiestherealwayscame a moment when Milton'seye wouldfill thescreen. Sothatnow,asIquicklytry to sketchmy early years,what comesbackmost clearlyisjustthat: thebrown orb of my father'ssleepy, bearish eye. A postmoderntouch inour domestic cinema,pointing upartifice,callingattention tome- chanics.(And bequeathingmemyaesthetic.) Milton's eye regarded us. Itblinked. AneyeasbigastheChristPantocrator's at church, it was betterthanany mosaic. Itwasaliving eye,thecorneaalittle bloodshot,the eyelashesluxuriant, theskinunderneath coffee- stainedandpouchy. This eyewouldstareusdownfor aslongasten seconds. Finallythecamerawouldpull away,stillrecording. We'dsee theceiling, thelightingfixture,thefloor,and thenusagain: the Stephanides. Firstofall,Lefty.Stilldapperdespitestrokedamage, wearing a starchedwhiteshirtandglen-plaidtrousers,hewritesonhis chalk- boardandholdsit up: "Christos AnestiV Desdemonasitsacross from him,herdenturesmakingherlooklike a snapping turtle.Mymother, inthishomemovie marked "Easter '62," istwoyears fromturning forty.Thecrow's-feetaroundhereyesareanotherreason(aside from thefloodlights)whysheholdsa handover her face. Inthisgesture I seetheemotionalsympathy I'vealwaysfeltwithTessie, thetwoof us neverhappier thanwhen unobserved,people-watching. Behindher hand Icansee thetraces ofthe novelshe stayedupreadingtheprevi- ousnight. All the bigwords shehadtolook upinthedictionary crowdhertired head, waitingto show upinthelettersshewrites me today. Herhand is also a refusal,heronlywayof gettingback ata husbandwho hasbegun todisappearonher.(Miltoncame home every night;he didn't drink orwomanizebut,preoccupiedwith busi- ness worries, hebeganto leavea little moreofhimselfatthediner each day,so that theman whoreturnedtousseemedless andless present, akindof robotwho carvedturkeysandfilmedholidays but who wasn't reallythere atall.)Finally,of course, mymother's up- raised handis a kindof warning,too,a predecessor oftheblack box. Chapter Eleven sprawlsonthecarpet, wolfing candy. Grandson 225 ofthetwo formersilkfarmers (withchalkboard and worry beads), he hasneverhadtohelpinthecocoonery. Hehasnever beento the KozaHan.Environmenthasalready madeits imprint onhim. He hasthetyrannical,self-absorbed lookofAmerican children .. . Andnow twodogscomeboundinginto theframe. Rufus and Willis, ourtwoboxers.Rufussniffsmy diaperand, with perfect comictiming,sitsonme.Hewilllater bitesomeone, andboth dogs will be given away. Mymother appears,shooing Rufus ...andthere Iamagain.Istandupandtoddletoward thecamera,smiling, trying out my wave... Iknowthisfilmwell."Easter '62" was thehomemovie Dr.Luce talkedmyparentsintogivinghim.Thiswas thefilmhescreened each yearforhisstudentsat Cornell UniversityMedical School.This was thethirty-five-secondsegmentthat,Luce insisted,proved outhis theory that genderidentityis establishedearlyoninlife. Thiswas the filmDr.Luceshowedtome,totellmewhoI was.Andwho was that?Lookat the screen. My motherishandingme ababydoll.I takethebabyandhugittomychest.Putting atoybottletothe baby'slips,I offer itmilk. Myearly childhood passed, onfilmandotherwise. Iwasbrought up asa girlandhadnodoubtsaboutthis.Mymotherbathed meand taughtme how to cleanmyself.Fromeverythingthathappened later, Iwouldguessthattheseinstructionsinfeminine hygiene wererudi- mentary atbest. Idon'trememberanydirectallusionstomysexual apparatus. All was shroudedin a zoneofprivacyandfragility,where mymotherneverscrubbedmetoohard.(Chapter Eleven's apparatus wascalleda "pitzi." Butforwhat Ihadtherewasnoword at all.)My fatherwasevenmore squeamish.Intheraretimeshediaperedmeor gaveme a bath,Miltonstudiously avertedhiseyes."Didyouwash herall over?" mymotherwouldaskhim,speaking obliquely as usual. "Notallover. That'syourdepartment." It wouldn'thave matteredanyway.5-alpha-reductasedeficiency syndromeis a skillfulcounterfeiter. UntilIreachedpubertyandan- drogens floodedmy bloodstream,the ways in whichIdifferedfrom otherlittle girlswere hard todetect. My pediatriciannevernoticed anything unusual.Andby thetimeIwasfive Tessiehadstartedtak- ing me toDr.Phil—Dr. Philwithhisfailing eyesightandhiscursory examinations. 226

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And then I fell deeply, endlessly asleep and slept until three in the morning, when the Colonel woke me up. “She dumped me,” he said. “I am concussed,” I responded. “So I heard. Hence my waking you up. Video game?” “Okay. But keep it on mute. My head hurts.” “Yeah. Heard you puked on Lara. Very suave.” “Dumped?” I asked, getting up. “Yeah. Sara told Jake that I had a hard-on for Alaska. Those words. In that order. And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t have a hard-on for anything at this moment. You can check if you’d like,’ and Sara thought I was being too glib, I suppose, because then she said she knew for a fact I’d hooked up with Alaska. Which, incidentally, is ridiculous. I. Don’t. Cheat,” he said, and finally the game finished loading and I half listened as I drove a stock car in circles around a silent track in Talladega. The circles nauseated me, but I kept at it. “So Alaska went ballistic, basically.” He affected Alaska’s voice then, making it more shrill and headache-inducing than it actually was. “‘No woman should ever lie about another woman! You’ve violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?!’ And so on. And then Jake came to Alaska’s defense, saying that she would never cheat because she loved him, and then I was like, ‘Don’t worry about Sara. She just likes bullying people.’ And then Sara asked me why I never stood up for her, and somewhere in there I called her a crazy bitch, which didn’t go over particularly well. And then the waitress asked us to leave, and so we were standing in the parking lot and she said, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and I just stared at her and she said, ‘Our relationship is over.’” He stopped talking then. “‘Our relationship is over?’” I repeated. I felt very spacey and thought it was just best to repeat the last phrase of whatever the Colonel said so he could keep talking. “Yeah. So that’s it. You know what’s lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her. I lost my virginity to her.” “You lost your virginity to her?” “Yeah. Yeah. I never told you that? She’s the only girl I’ve slept with. I don’t know. Even though we fought, like, ninety-four percent of the time, I’m really sad.” “You’re really sad?” “Sadder than I thought I’d be, anyway. I mean, I knew it was inevitable. We haven’t had a pleasant moment this whole year. Ever since I got here, I mean, we were just on each other relentlessly. I should have been nicer to her. I don’t know. It’s sad.” “It is sad,” I repeated. “I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  tearing at the masses ofhairthattumbled down. Her hairwas com- pletelygray but stillvery fineand,in thelightcoming fromthe television, it appearedtobe almost blond.Thehairfellover her shoulders and spreadoutover her bodylikethehairof Botticelli's Venus. Theface framedby this astonishing cascade, however, was not that ofa beautiful youngwomanbutthat ofan old widowwith a square head anddried-out mouth.Inthe unmovingairofthe room andthe smellof medicineandskinsalves Icould feel theweightof thetime shehadspent inthisbedwaiting andhopingtodie.I'mnot sure,witha grandmother like mine,if youcan everbecome atrue Americaninthesenseof believingthat lifeisaboutthepursuitof happiness.The lessonof Desdemona's sufferingandrejectionoflife insistedthatoldage wouldnotcontinuethemanifold pleasuresof youthbut wouldinsteadbea longtrial thatslowlyrobbedlifeof evenits smallest,simplestjoys.Everyonestrugglesagainst despair, butitalwayswinsintheend. It hasto. It's thethingthatletsussay goodbye. AsIwasstanding there takingmy grandmother in,Desdemona suddenlyturnedherheadandnoticedme.Herhandwent up toher breast.Withafrightenedexpressionsherearedbackintoherpillows andshouted,"Lefty!" NowIwastheonewhowasshocked."No, yiayia.It'snot papou. It'sme.Cal." "Who?" "Cal."Ipaused."Yourgrandson." This wasn'tfair,ofcourse.Desdemona's memorywas nolonger sharp. ButIwasn'thelpingheroutany. "Cal?" "TheycalledmeCalliope whenIwas little." "Youlooklikemy Lefty,"shesaid. "Ido?" "I thoughtyouwere myhusbandcoming totakeme to heaven." Shelaughedfor thefirst time. "I'm MiltandTessie's kid." Asquickly as it hadcome, the humorleftDesdemona'sfaceand she looked sadandapologetic. "I'msorry. Idon'trememberyou, honey." "I brought youthese."Iheld outtheEpsom saltsand baklava. "Why Tessieisn'tcoming?" 524 "She hastoget dressed." "Dressed forwhy?" "Forthe funeral." Desdemonagavea cryand clutchedher breastagain. "Who died?" I didn't answer.InsteadI turneddownthevolumeon thetelevi- sion. Then,pointingat thebirdcage,Isaid,"Irememberwhen you usedtohave about twentybirds." Shelooked over at thecagebutsaid nothing. "Youusedto liveintheattic.OnSeminole.Remember?That's whenyougot allthebirds.Yousaidthey reminded youofBursa." Atthesoundofthename,Desdemona smiledagain."In Bursawe haveallkindofbirds.Green,yellow,red. Allkind.Littlebirdsbut verybeautiful.Likemadefromglass." "Iwanttogo there. Remember thatchurchthere?Iwanttogo and fixitupsomeday." "Miltonisgoingto fixit. Ikeeptellinghim." "Ifhedoesn't do it,Iwill." Desdemonalookedatme a moment as ifmeasuring myabilityto fulfillthispromise.Thenshesaid,"Idon't rememberyou,honey,but please canyoufixforyiayiatheEpsomsalts?" Igot thefootbasinandfilleditwith warmwaterfromthebath- tubfaucet.I sprinkledinthesoakingsalts andbroughtitbackinto the bedroom. "Put itnext thechair,dollymouV Idid so. "Nowhelp yiayiato get outof bed." Comingcloser, Ibentdown.Islid each ofherlegs out ofthecov- ers, turning her. Puttingherarm overmyshoulder, Ipulledherto her feetforthe shortwalk tothechair. "I can't donothinganymore," she lamentedon theway. "I'mtoo old, honey." "You're doing okay." "No,I can't remembernothing. Ihave achesand pains.Myheart itisnot good." We had reachedthe chair now.I maneuveredaroundbehindher to ease her down. Coming around tothefrontagain,Iliftedher swollen, blue-veined feetinto the sudsywater.Desdemonamur- mured with pleasure. She closedher eyes. 525 Forthe next few minutesDesdemonawassilent,luxuriatingin the warm foot bath.Colorreturned toher anklesandrose upher legs. This rosiness disappearedunder thehemof hernightgown but, a minute later, peekedoutthecollar.The flushspreadup to herface, and whenshe openedher eyes there was a clarityinthemthathad been absentbefore. Shestaredstraight at me. Andthensheshouted, "Calliope!" She heldher hand to hermouth. "Mana!Whathappentoyou?" "Igrew up," wasallIsaid. Ihadn't intended to tellherbutnow it wasout. I hadanidea itwouldn'tmake anydifference. Shewouldn't rememberthisconversation. Shewasstill examiningme,thelensesofherglassesmagnifying hereyes.Hadshehad allherwits, Desdemonacouldnotpossibly havefathomedwhatIwassaying.Butinhersenilityshesomehow accommodatedtheinformation.Shelivednow amid memories and dreams,andin thisstatetheoldvillagestoriesgrewnearagain. "You're aboy now,Calliope?" "Moreor less." Shetookthisin."Mymother sheusetotellmesomething funny,"she said."Inthevillage,longtimeago,they useto have sometimes babieswhowerelookinglikegirls.Then—fifteen,six- teen—theyarelooking likeboys!My mothertellme thisbutI never believe." "It's ageneticthing. ThedoctorI went tosays ithappens in little villages. Where everyonemarrieseachother." "Dr.Phil heusedtotalk about this,too." "Hedid?" "It'sall myfault." Sheshookherhead grimly. "Whatwas? Whatwasyourfault?" She was not crying exactly.Her tearductsweredriedupandno moisturerolled down hercheeks.Buther facewasgoingthroughthe motions, her shoulders quaking. "The priests say evenfirstcousinsnever shouldmarry," she said. "Second cousins is okay, but youhavetoask firstthearchbishop." Shewas looking away now,tryingto rememberitall."Evenifyou wantto marryyour godparents'son,youcan't. Ithoughtit was only something forthe Church. I didn't know itwasbecausewhat can happento the babies. I was juststupid girlfromvillage."Shewent on in that vein fora while, castigatingherself.Shehad momentarilyfor- 526

• From Middlesex (2002)

  niversaries ofherhusband's deathand whichshebasically just cried away; and Dupuytren's contracture, where inflamedfasciainher hand curled herthumb and threefingers painfully intoherpalm, leaving her middlefinger raised inan obscene gesture. One doctorenrolled Desdemona in alongevity study.Hewas writing an article foramedical journal on"TheMediterranean Diet." Tothat endhe plied Desdemona with questionsabout thecuisineof her homeland. Howmuch yogurt hadsheconsumed as achild?How much oliveoil?Garlic?She answered everyoneofhisqueries because she thoughthisinterestindicated thatthere wassomething, at last, organicallythe matter withher, andbecause shenevermisseda chanceto strollthroughthe precinctsof her childhood. Thedoctor's namewas Miiller.German byblood,herenounced hisracewhenit cametoits cooking.With postwarguilt,hedecriedbratwurst,sauer- braten,andKonigsbergerKlopse as dishes vergingonpoison.They weretheHideroffoods.InsteadhelookedtoourownGreek diet— oureggplantaswimintomatosauce,ourcucumberdressingsand fish-eggspreads,our pilafi, raisins,andfigs— as potentialcuratives, as life-giving,artery-cleansing,skin-smoothingwonderdrugs.And what Dr. Muller said appearedtobetrue:thoughhewasonlyforty- two,hisface was wrinkled, burdenedwithjowls.Grayhairprickled uponthesidesofhishead; whereasmyfather,at forty-eight,despite the coffeestainsbeneath hiseyes,was stillthepossessorofanunlined olive complexionanda rich,glossy, blackhead of hair. Theydidn't callitGrecian Formula for nothing.Itwas inourfood!A veritable fountain ofyouthinour dolmades and taramasalataandeveninour baklava, whichdidn't commit the sinofcontainingrefined sugar but had onlyhoney. Dr. Muller showed us graphshe'dmade, listingthe names andbirth dates of Italians, Greeks,anda Bulgarianliving in theDetroit metropolitan area, and wesaw ourown entrant—Desde- mona Stephanides,age ninety-one— going stronginthe midstofthe rest. Plotted against Poles killed off by kielbasa,or Belgiansdone in bypommes frites, or Anglo-Saxons disappeared by puddings,or Spaniards stoppedcold by chorizo, our Greek dottedlinekept going where theirs tailed off ina tangle of downward trajectories.Who knew? As apeople we hadn't had, forthe past fewmillennia,that much to beproudof. So it was perhaps understandable that during Dr. Mailer's house calls we failed to mention thetroublinganomaly 287 ofLefty'smultiplestrokes.Wedidn'twanttoskew thegraph with new data,andsodidn'tmentionthat Desdemonawas actually seventy-one,notninety-one,andthatshealways confusedsevens withnines. We didn'tmentionheraunts,Thalia andVictoria, who bothdiedofbreastcancerasyoungwomen; andwesaidnothing about thehighbloodpressurethat taxed the veinswithinMilton's own smooth,youthfulexterior.Wecouldn't.Wedidn't wanttolose outtotheItaliansoreventhat one Bulgarian.AndDr.Muller, lostin hisresearch,didn'tnoticethestoredisplayof mortuaryservicesnext toDesdemona's bed, thephotographofthe dead husband nexttothe photographofhisgrave,theabundantparaphernaliaof a widow abandonedonearth.Nota member ofabandofimmortalsfrom MountOlympus. Just theonlymemberleftalive. Meanwhile,tensionsbetweenmymotherandmewererising. "Don'tlaughs "I'msorry, honey. Butit'sjust, you'vegotnothing to...to.. ." "Mom!" ". .. toholditup." Atantrum-edgedscream.Twelve-year-oldfeet running up the stairs,whileTessiecalled out, "Don't be sodramatic,Callie.We'llget youa braif you want." Up intomybedroom, where,afterlockingthe door,Ipulledoffmyshirtbeforethe mirror to see .. .thatmy mother wasright. Nothing!Nothing at alltoholdupanything. And Iburstinto tears offrustrationandrage. Thatevening,whenIfinallycameback downtodinner,I retali- atedinthe onlyway Icould. "What'sthematter?You'renothungry?" "Iwantnormalfood." "Whatdo you meannormalfood?" "Americanfood." "Ihave tomakewhatyiayia likes." "WhataboutwhatJlike?" "Youlikespanakopita.You'vealwaysliked spanakopita." "Well,Idon'tanymore." "Okay,then. Don't eat.Starveifyouwant. Ifyou don'tlike what we giveyou,you can justsitatthetable untilwe're finished." Faced withthe mirror's evidence, laughedatby myown mother, surrounded by developing classmates,I hadcome toadire conclu- 288

• From Middlesex (2002)

  up undermy shirt again. I didn'thave a bra on.After myshower I had gonewithoutit,flushingawaythe Kleenex.I wasdonewith them.Jerome's handsmovedhigher. Ididn'tcare.I lethimfeel me up. Forwhatitwasworth.ButifI washoping todisappointhim, it didn't work.Hestrokedand squeezed whilehislowerhalf swished like acrocodile'stail.Andthenhesaid anunironicthing.Ferventiy he whispered,"I'mreallyinto you." Hislipsclosed,seekingmine.Histongue entered.Thefirst pene- trationthatauguredthenext.Butnotnow, notthistime. "Stop,"Isaid. "What?" "Stop." "Whystop?" "Because." "Because why?" "BecauseIdon'tlikeyoulikethat." Hesatup.Liketheguy in theoldvaudevilleskit,the guy inthe foldingcotthatwon'tstayfolded, Jerome flippedstraight up,wide awake.Thenhejumpedoffthebed. "Don'tbe mad at me,"Isaid. "Whosays I'm mad?" said Jerome, andleft. Therestofthedaywentslowly.Istayedinmy room untilIsaw Jerome leavethehouse,carryinghismoviecamera.IguessedthatI wasnolongerinthecast.TheObject's parentsreturnedfromtheir morningtennisfoursome.Mrs.Objectcameupthe stairs tothemas- terbathroom.From mywindowIsaw Mr.Objectclimbintothe backyard hammock withabook.Iwaitedforthe shower to turnon andthencamedownthebackstairsandout thekitchen door.I walkeddowntothe bay, feelingmelancholy. The cedarswamp layononesideofthehouse. Ontheotherwas a dirtand gravelroad thatledthroughan openfield,treeless,with highyellow grass. Theabsenceoftreeswas noticeable,andpoking around out thereI cameupon a historicalmarker, nearlyovergrown. It markedthesiteofafortor a massacre,Idon't rememberwhich. Moss encroachedupontheraisedlettersandI didn'treadthewhole plaque.Istood therefor awhilethinkingabout thefirstsettlersand how they had killedoneanother overbeaver andfoxpelts.Iputmy 380 foot onthe plaque, kickingoffthemoss withmy sneaker,untilIgot tired ofthat. Itwasalmostnoonbynow. Thebaywas brightblue. Over the riseI couldsensethecityofPetoskey,thesmoke ofstoves and chimneys downthere.Thegrassgotmarshy nearthewater.I climbed up onthebreakwallandwalkedbackand forth,keepingmy balance. Iheldmy armsoutandpranced,OlgaKorbutstyle.Butmy heart wasn'tin it.AndIwas waytoo tall to beOlgaKorbut.Some- time laterthe whirofanoutboardenginereachedme.Ishadedmy eyes withmy handtolookoutovertheshimmeringwater.Aspeed- boatwas shootingpast.AtthewheelwasRexReese.Bare-chested, drinkinga beerand wearing sunglasses,hegunnedthethrottle,tow- inga water-skier.Itwas the Object,of course,inhershamrockbikini. She lookedalmost nakedagainst theexpanse ofwater,onlythose two littlestrips,one above,onebelow,separatingherfromEden.Herred hair flappedlike a galewarning.Shewasn't a beautifulskier.She leanedtoo farforward,bowleggedonthepontoons.Butshedidn't fall.Rex kept turningaroundtocheckonherwhilehesippedhis beer.FinallytheboatmadeasharpturnandtheObjectcrossedher wake,whippingalongpasttheshore. A terriblethinghappenswhenyouwater-ski.Afteryoureleasethe rope, youkeepskimmingoverthewaterforawhile,free.Butthere comesan inevitablemomentwhenyourspeed fails tosustainyour forwardprogress. Thesurfaceof thewaterbreakslikeglass.The depthsopen upto claim you. ThatwashowIfeltonland,watching theObjectski past. Thatsameplunging,hopelessfeeling,thatemo- tional physics. WhenI gotbackatdinnertimetheObjectwasstillnotthere.Her mother was angry,thinkingitrudeof the Objecttoleaveme alone. Jerome, too, wasout withfriends.SoIatedinnerwiththeObject's parents.I felttoodesolatetocharmthegrownupsthatnight.Iatein silence andafterward satinthelivingroompretendingtoread.The clock ticked on. The nightlaboredandcreaked.WhenIfeltImight fall apartI wentintothebathroomandthrewwateronmyface.I held awarmwashcloth overmyeyesandpressedmyhandsagainst my temples.I wonderedwhattheObjectandRexweredoing.Ipic- tured her socksin the air,herlittletennissockswiththe ballsatthe heels, those ensanguinedballs, bouncing. Itwas obvious thatMr.andMrs.Objectwerestaying upjustto 381 keep me company.Sofinally Isaidgoodnightand went upto bed myself.Igotinandimmediatelystartedcrying. Icried foralong time, tryingnottomakeanynoise.While IsobbedIsaid thingsin an aggrievedwhisper.Icried,"Why don'tyoulike me?"and"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"Ididn't carewhatIsoundedlike. Therewasapoison in my systemandIneededtopurge it.WhileIwascarrying onlike that, Iheardthescreen doorbangshutdownstairs.Iwiped mynose onthesheetsandtriedtosettledown andlisten.Footstepsclimbed thestairs,andinanother momentthedoorofthebedroom opened andclosed.TheObjectenteredand stoodthereindarkness.She mighthavebeen waitingforhereyestoadjust.Ilayonmyside, pre- tendingtobeasleep.Thefloorboardscreaked asshe cameover tomy sideofthe bed.Ifeltherstandingoverme,lookingdown.Thenshe wenttotheothersideofthe bed,took off hershoesandshorts,put on a T-shirt, andgotin. TheObjectsleptonher back. Shetoldme once that back-sleepers weretheleadersinlife,bornperformersorexhibitionists.Stomach- sleeperslikemewereinretreatfromreality,given to darkperception andthemeditativearts.Thistheoryappliedinourcase.Ilayprone, my noseandeyessorefromcrying.TheObject, supine,yawnedand (likeabornperformer,perhaps)soonfellasleep. Iwaited tenorsominutes,justtobesafe. Then, as thoughtoss- ing inmysleep,IrolledoversothatIwaslookingat the Object. The moonwas gibbousandfilledtheroom withbluelight.Thereupon the wicker bed theObscureObjectslept.Thetop ofherGroton T-shirt wasvisible. Itwas an old oneofherfather's,witha fewholes. Shehad onearmcrossedoverherface,likea slashonasignthat meant "NoTouching." So Ilookedinstead.Overthe pillowherhair was spreadout. Herlipswereparted. Somethingglinted insideher ear,grains ofsandfromthebeachmaybe. Beyond,the atomizers glowedon thedresser.Theceilingwas up above somewhere.I could feelthespiders workinginthecorners.Thesheets werecool.Thefat duvet rolled up atourfeetwas leakingfeathers.I'd grownuparound the smell ofnew carpeting,of polyestershirtshot fromthe dryer. HeretheEgyptian sheetssmelled likehedges,the pillowslike water fowl. Thirteen inches away,theObjectwas partof allthis.Her colors seemedto agree with theAmerican landscape, herpumpkin hair,her applecider skin. Shemade asoundand went stillagain. 382

• From Middlesex (2002)

  gottenthat Iwas thereorthat shewas speaking aloud. "And then Dr. Philhe tell me terrible things.I wassoscaredIhadanoperation! No more babies. Then Miltonhe have childrenand againIwas scared. But nothing happen. So Ithink, aftersolongtime,everything was okay." "What areyou saying,yiayia> Papouwas yourcousin?" "Thirdcousin." "That's allright." "Not thirdcousin only.Also brother." My heartskipped. "Papouwasyour brother?" "Yes, honey," Desdemonasaidwith infiniteweariness."Longtime ago. Inanother country." Right thentheintercomsounded: "Callie?" Tessiecoughed, correctingherself:"Cal?" "Yeah." "You bettergetcleanedup.Thecar's comingintenminutes." "I'mnotgoing."Ipaused. "I'mgoingto stay herewithyiayia" "Youneedtobe there,honey,"saidTessie. Icrossedtothe intercomand put mymouthagainstthe speaker andsaidinadeep voice,"I'mnotgoingintothatchurch." "Whynot?" "Haveyou seen whattheychargeforthosegoddamncandles?" Tessielaughed.Sheneededto.SoIkeptgoing,loweringmy voice tosoundlikemyfather's."Twobucksfor a candle?Whata racket!Maybe youcould convince somebodyfromtheoldcountry toshelloutforthatkindofthing, but not hereintheU.S.A.!" Itwas infectious to doMilton. NowTessieloweredhervoicein the speaker:"Totalrip-off!"shesaid, andlaughed again.We under- stood thenthat thiswashowweweregoing todoit.Thiswas how wewere going tokeep Miltonalive. "Are yousureyoudon'twant togo?"she askedme. "It'll be toocomplicated,Mom.I don'twanttohaveto explain everything toeverybody. Notyet.It'll betoobigof a distraction. It'll be betterifI'm notthere." In her heartTessie agreed,andso shesoonrelented. "I'lltellMrs. Papanikolas she doesn'tneed tocome stay withyiayia." Desdemona wasstilllooking at mebuthereyes hadgonedreamy. She was smiling. And thenshe said,"Myspoonwasright." "I guess so." 527 "I'm sorry, honey. Pmsorrythishappen to you." "It's all right." "I'm sorry, honeymouV "I likemy life,"Itoldher. "I'm goingtohaveagood life." Shestill looked pained,so Itookherhand. "Don't worry, yiayia.Iwon'ttellanyone." "Who's totell?Everybody'sdeadnow." "You'renot. I'llwaituntilyou'regone." "Okay. WhenIdie, youcantelleverything." "Iwill." "Bravo,honeynum. Bravo." AtAssumption Church,no doubtagainsthis wishes,Milton Stephanideswas givenafullOrthodoxfuneral.FatherGregper- formed the service.AsforFatherMichaelAntoniou,hewas later convicted ofattemptedgrandlarcenyandservedtwoyearsinprison. AuntZodivorcedhimandmoved to Floridawith Desdemona. Wheretoexacriy?NewSmyrnaBeach.Whereelse?Afewyearslater, when mymotherwasforcedtosellourhouse,she moved toFlorida, too,andthethreeofthemlivedtogetherastheyoncehadonHurl- butStreet,untilDesdemona'sdeathin1980.TessieandZoearestill inFlorida today,twowomenlivingontheir own. Milton's casketremained closedduringthefuneral.Tessie had given GeorgiePappas,theundertaker,her husband's weddingcrown, so thatit could beburiedalong withhim.Whenitcametimetogive the deceased thefinalkiss,the mournersfiledpastMilton'scoffin and kissed its burnished lid. Fewerpeoplecame tomy father'sfuneral than we expected. Noneofthe Hercules franchise ownersshowed up, not one of themenMiltonhad socializedwithfor yearsand years; and so werealized that, despite hisbonhomie, Miltonhad never had any friends, only businessassociates. Family members turned out instead. PeterTatakis, the chiropractor, arrivedinhis wine-dark Buick, andBartSkiotis paidhis respects atthechurch whose foundation hehadlaidwith substandardmaterials. Gus and Helen Panos werethere and,because itwasa funeral, Gus's trache- otomy made his voicesound even morelikethevoiceof death. Aunt Zo and our cousins didn'tsitinfront.Thatpewwasreservedformy motherand brother. 528

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  For trans women: To tuck or not to tuck, that is the question. Reese never tucks. Her math is solid, tight as a geometric proof: to go untucked, to bare her little dickprint for all to see, is brazen enough that she can otherwise wear a tight one-piece without seeming too prudish. Thalia, beside Reese, wears only a pair of boy shorts—but tucked —and is sunning her perfect little boobs golden. Thalia has always had, in Reese’s estimation, the best collarbones in Brooklyn; she recently gave up eating any animal products, and between her new diet and the sun, they’ve taken on the soft gloss of burnished teak. Reese showed up at Thalia’s house the night before, trying to hold it together, to maintain the righteousness of the letter she had emailed to Ames and Katrina, but she fell apart after only ten minutes, sobbing about the cowboy, and AIDS panics, and how she'll never get another chance to be a mother. Despite her amazing collarbones, Thalia’s shoulders are not the most comfortable upon which to cry. Because Thalia grew up with a self-described histrionic Greek stereotype for a mother, whenever Reese got histrionic, Thalia turned edgy and furtive, insecure about the adequacy of her own emotions in response. But for once, Thalia’s reassurances did not falter. “Babe,” she told Reese, “just sleep over, okay?” And she led Reese to her bed, fed her an Ambien, and tucked her in to sleep. Reese woke in the morning to instant coffee steaming beside the bed and Thalia already dressed. As Reese sipped, Thalia announced that she had spent the night thinking about Reese’s problem, and that it was not in fact a problem, but a solution. Ames and Katrina had indeed been the issue all along. Reese was a queer, if she was going to do a queer family model, she ought to do it with real queers. “Ames brainwashed you,” Thalia insisted. “He made you think this is your only chance to have a child. But why should that be? Queers have kids all the time.” “Not trans women.” Thalia listed off five trans women who had children, but Reese protested that they had all had children before they transitioned. They had been fathers. “What about Babs?” Thalia countered. Babs was a trans woman who had married a trans guy and the two of them moved to southwest Florida, where the trans guy got pregnant. “You could pull a Babs!” Thalia suggested brightly.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese rotates onto a hip, and pushes her back up against the closet wall, gathering the skirts of her dress beneath her. “So you detransitioned into a mansplainer, huh?” she asks. Ames withdraws his hand. “And you’ve only gotten sweeter.” Reese frowns, and Ames sees that she might cry again. “I’m just sad and angry,” she says in a small voice. She gestures at the West Elm bedroom set that they had picked out together on a fall Saturday five years ago, giggling in the store as they flopped down together on mattresses of memory foam and opened chests of drawers. “This was supposed to be my life. No, it wasn’t supposed to be. It was.” “Tt still can be,” Ames says. “That’s the whole point here. We can still be so important in each other’s lives.” Reese shakes her head. “No, we can’t go back. Look at you. Everything has changed. Except for maybe how the closet smells.” Two years prior, Katrina and Ames’s agency acquired Ketel One Vodka as a client, one of its larger accounts. Because Ketel One— along with other flagrantly gay brands such as Delta Air Lines and Hyundai—is, and has been for some time, a sponsor of the GLAAD awards gala, the agency has purchased a ten-seat table at the event. Only a few employees wanted to go, so Ames claimed three of the remaining tickets for himself, Reese, and Katrina. His logic, he explained to Reese when he called to invite her, was that the spectacle would offer sufficient distractions to cover any awkwardness arising from their first meeting together. “Plus Madonna will be there.” He dangled the bait. “Sarah Jessica Parker will be there too. Your inner fangirl won’t let you miss this.” “My inner fangirl is a cynic,” Reese corrected. “But that’s just another reason to come.” So here she is now, the glitz of a hotel already putting her in a better mood as she trails Ames up an escalator that deposits her at the entrance to the red carpet. There, a GLAAD volunteer checks a clipboard and directs Ames and Reese toward an area where noncelebrities mill around drinking Ketel One martinis. Reese tries not to take her banishment from the red carpet as an insult. She wears a red satin Marchesa gown that she found marked down to sixty dollars at Beacon’s Closet, but which does wonders for her curves. Some tiny part of Reese had indulged in a fantasy that the organizers or media consultants, or someone important, would take one look at her in the Marchesa gown, gasp, and usher her onto the red carpet, whereupon photographers would clamor all over her.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina shakes her head. “I already missed my chance to do it with the pill. Now they have to use a vacuum and if I wait more, dilation. The longer I wait—” She pauses and pulls the blanket over her face, so Reese thinks she might be crying, but a moment later, she pulls it back down, eyes still dry, and her face expressionless. “I just can’t take the risk. I just can’t handle the uncertainty, I just can’t.” Reese refuses to let herself respond. She does not trust herself to speak on the subject of risk. Which of them has it in them to risk and which doesn’t. To her surprise, Ames, who is sitting beside Katrina, holding her hand, speaks up. “Do you remember, Reese,” he asks, “what you used to call the Sex and the City Problem?” “Yes, of course. I remember my own bullshit, thank you very much.” Katrina, thankfully, smiled at this. Ames turns to her. “Do you, Katrina, remember how much you liked that reference when I told you about it? I pretended that I had come up with it myself, but actually I stole that from Reese.” “Yes, I remember.” Katrina nods. “Although now it makes way more sense, because I kept asking you about different episodes of Sex and the City, and you could never remember them. I was like, ‘How does someone come up with a life philosophy about a show he doesn’t seem to have watched?’ It makes sense that you got it from Reese. It’s obviously her style.” “Yes,” Reese agrees sadly. “I am much more culturally relevant and funny.” Ames accepts this in the way he’s always accepted being teased, although this teasing has the somberness of a joke cracked at a wake. “Okay, let me ask again: Reese, do you remember how the whole idea of the Sex and the City Problem for you is that no generation of trans women has solved the Sex and the City Problem, and that every generation of cis women has to reinvent it?” “Yes.” “Well, what if this is our solution? Maybe this is so awkward and hard and without obvious precedent because we're trying to imagine our own solution, to reinvent something for ourselves, whatever kind of’—he pauses, and looks down at his own feet, the boots and jeans he wears—“whatever kind of women we are.” “Maybe,” Katrina says. Reese hears this, an indefinite to Katrina’s tone, and she raises her head, eyes shining in the dark circles. “Yeah,” Reese agrees, “maybe.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Still, over that first year that Ames worked for Katrina, she kept her personal life just that. Instead of talking about her divorce, Ames intuited it. He noted the slight woundedness and exasperation that clung to her, the nearly teenage angst and willingness to test bad ideas that led to a certain oh-fuck-it-ness about her work and a straightforward honesty with her employees. She developed a visceral suspicion of conventional narratives. The anodyne corporate clients who came to the agency occasionally saw one or two much darker and more experimental pitches for their online marketing campaigns slipped in among the conventional fare. Dadaism for the Clorox bleach campaign. Cyborgian despair for Anker batteries. A series of radio ads for Purina in which Jon Lovitz catered to nineties nostalgia by reprising his cult role as critic Jay Sherman in order to give negative reviews to various puppies. It made her good at her work. Ames interpreted her tendency to re- narrativize as divorce-induced. Well into their romance, after theyd already slept together numerous times, she brought up the subject of her divorce. They were in his bed, on their sides, facing each other, he propped up on an elbow, she with her face resting on one of his forest-green pillowcases, her glossy brown hair stepping down from head to pillow to bed. The bedside light shining behind her illuminated the outer crescents of her face—he still instinctively noticed the curve of a brow. “T know that people in the office probably told you about the miscarriage,” she said. “I stupidly talked about it with a few people. Telling Abby anything is a mistake.” He laughed, because, yeah, Abby Was a gossip. “When you get a divorce,” she said after a moment, “everyone expects you to provide a story to justify it. Every woman I’ve ever met who has had a divorce has a story to explain herself. But in real life the story and actual reasons for the divorce diverge. In reality, everything is more ambivalent. My own reasons are closer to a tone than a series of causes and effects. But when I talk about it, I know people want a cause and effect, a clear why.” “All right,” Ames said. “So what’s the tone of your divorce?” “T like to call it the Ennui of Heterosexuality.” “IT see. Do you still suffer from the ennui of heterosexuality?” Ames asked, gesturing grandly at their postcoital bedroom tableau. “T suffered from a miscarriage,” she replied defiantly, puncturing his irony. Ames quickly apologized.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  he started growing sad and contemplative about how trans women treat each other—he came up with a private, not-particularly-catchy term for the trans women of his cohort, the ones who began transition in the early 2010s. He called them juvenile elephants. Nowadays, Ames didn’t really feel that he had the right to say anything much about trans women, but if you had asked him that year, he would have told you about juvenile elephants. In 2002, park rangers in the Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa hunted down and shot a gang of three juvenile elephants that had made a sport of chasing, raping, and killing rhinoceroses. The elephant gang raped and murdered sixty-three rhinos before the park rangers caught up with them. In Sierra Leone, another herd of elephants razed a village of three hundred, flattening the mud-and-wattle homes, and killing an elderly woman who attempted to chase them away. A young elephant in that pack, barely full-grown, pinned the woman to the ground with a knee, and slowly gored his tusk through her chest with malicious precision. Toward the end of the civil war in Northern Uganda, Karamojong villagers began to leave out poison-laced elephant snacks, to retaliate against raids by the legally protected elephants of nearby Kidepo Park, who smashed the homes in the adjacent villages to get drunk on the fermenting fruit the Karamojong used to brew wine. Perhaps the villagers needn’t have bothered. Since the midnineties, ninety percent of male elephant deaths in South African game parks could be attributed to murder by other roving gangs of pachydermicidal elephants, a fifteen hundred percent increase in elephant-on- elephant violence over previous decades. Ames learned all this in an essay titled “Elephant Breakdown,” published in the science journal Nature, in which a group of leading elephant behaviorists argued that the abnormal quality and frequency of elephant attacks and violence could no longer be understood through the long-standing reasoning that suggested high levels of testosterone in young males or competition for scant land and resources. No, the behaviorists argued, the younger generation of elephants suffered from a form of chronic stress, a species-wide trauma that has led to a total and ongoing breakdown of elephant culture. The cause is simple: Throughout their long history, elephants have lived in intricately ordered social structures. Young elephants learned their place and healthy behavior in concentric societal rings of caregivers—birth mother, aunts, grandmothers, friends— relationships that might last a lifetime: seventy years or more. Unless orphaned, young elephants stay within fifteen feet of their mothers for the first eight years of their lives. When an elephant dies, her family members grieve and ritually mourn. The bereaved conduct weeklong vigils by the body, covering it with brush and rubbing their trunks along the teeth of the lower jaw of the carcass, a gesture of greeting among live elephants.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I couldn’t honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering. Like Rabe’a, I didn’t think people should believe in God because of heaven and hell. But I didn’t feel a need to run around with a torch. You can’t burn down a made-up place. — After class, as Takumi picked through his fries at McInedible, eating only the crunchiest, I felt the total loss of her, still reeling from the idea that she was not only gone from this world but from all of them. “How have you been?” I asked. “Uh,” he said, a mouth full of fries, “nah good. You?” “Not good.” I took a bite of cheeseburger. I’d gotten a plastic stock car with my Happy Meal, and it sat overturned on the table. I spun the wheels. “I miss her,” Takumi said, pushing away his tray, uninterested in the remaining soggy fries. “Yeah. I do, too. I’m sorry, Takumi,” and I meant it in the largest possible way. I was sorry we ended up like this, spinning wheels at a McDonald’s. Sorry the person who had brought us together now lay dead between us. I was sorry I let her die. Sorry I haven’t talked to you because you couldn’t know the truth about the Colonel and me, and I hated being around you and having to pretend that my grief is this uncomplicated thing—pretending that she died and I miss her instead of that she died because of me. “Me too. You’re not dating Lara anymore, are you?” “I don’t think so.” “Okay. She was kind of wondering.” I had been ignoring her, but by then she had begun to ignore me back, so I figured it was over, but maybe not. “Well,” I told Takumi, “I just can’t—I don’t know, man. That’s pretty complicated.” “Sure. She’ll understand. Sure. All good.” “Okay.” “Listen, Pudge. I—ah, I don’t know. It sucks, huh?” “Yeah.” twenty-seven days after SIX DAYS LATER, four Sundays after the last Sunday, the Colonel and I were trying to shoot each other with paintball guns while turning 900s in a half pipe. “We need booze. And we need to borrow the Eagle’s Breathalyzer.” “Borrow it? Do you know where it is?” “Yeah. He’s never made you take one?” “Um. No. He thinks I’m a nerd.” “You are a nerd, Pudge. But you’re not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking.” Actually, I hadn’t drunk since that night, and didn’t feel particularly inclined to ever take it up ever again. Then I nearly elbowed the Colonel in the face, swinging my arms wildly as if contorting my body in the right ways mattered as much as pressing the right buttons at the right moments—the same video-game-playing delusion that had always gripped Alaska. But the Colonel was so focused on the game he didn’t even notice.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  one month following their accident—though their mood is certainly somber when they think about their situation. Most of the time, however, paraplegics work, read, enjoy jokes and friends, and get angry when they read about politics in the newspaper. When they are involved in any of these activities, they are not much different from anyone else, and we can expect the experienced well-being of paraplegics to be near normal much of the time. Adaptation to a new situation, whether good or bad, consists in large part of thinking less and less about it. In that sense, most long-term circumstances of life, including paraplegia and marriage, are part-time states that one inhabits only when one attends to them. One of the privileges of teaching at Princeton is the opportunity to guide bright undergraduates through a research thesis. And one of my favorite experiences in this vein was a project in which Beruria Cohn collected and analyzed data from a survey firm that asked respondents to estimate the proportion of time that paraplegics spend in a bad mood. She split her respondents into two groups: some were told that the crippling accident had occurred a month earlier, some a year earlier. In addition, each respondent indicated whether he or she knew a paraplegic personally. The two groups agreed closely in their judgment about the recent paraplegics: those who knew a paraplegic estimated 75% bad mood; those who had to imagine a paraplegic said 70%. In contrast, the two groups differed sharply in their estimates of the mood of paraplegics a year after the accidents: those who knew a paraplegic offered 41% as their estimate of the time in that bad mood. The estimates of those who were not personally acquainted with a paraplegic averaged 68%. Evidently, those who knew a paraplegic had observed the gradual withdrawal of attention from the condition, but others did not forecast that this adaptation would occur. Judgments about the mood of lottery winners one month and one year after the event showed exactly the same pattern. We can expect the life satisfaction of paraplegics and those afflicted by other chronic and burdensome conditions to be low relative to their experienced well- being, because the request to evaluate their lives will inevitably remind them of the life of others and of the life they used to lead. Consistent with this idea, recent studies of colostomy patients have produced dramatic inconsistencies between the patients’ experienced well-being and their evaluations of their lives. Experience sampling shows no difference in experienced happiness between these patients and a healthy population. Yet colostomy patients would be willing to trade away years of their life for a shorter life without the colostomy. Furthermore, patients whose colostomy has been reversed remember their time in this condition as awful, and they would give up even more of their remaining life not to have to return to it. Here it appears that the remembering self is

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  separate 0–6 scales (0 = the absence of the feeling; 6 = most intense feeling). Our method drew on evidence that people who are able to retrieve a past situation in detail are also able to relive the feelings that accompanied it, even experiencing their earlier physiological indications of emotion. We assumed that our participants would fairly accurately recover the feeling of a prototypical moment of the episode. Several comparisons with experience sampling confirmed the validity of the DRM. Because the participants also reported the times at which episodes began and ended, we were able to compute a duration-weighted measure of their feeling during the entire waking day. Longer episodes counted more than short episodes in our summary measure of daily affect. Our questionnaire also included measures of life satisfaction, which we interpreted as the satisfaction of the remembering self. We used the DRM to study the determinants of both emotional well-being and life satisfaction in several thousand women in the United States, France, and Denmark. The experience of a moment or an episode is not easily represented by a single happiness value. There are many variants of positive feelings, including love, joy, engagement, hope, amusement, and many others. Negative emotions also come in many varieties, including anger, shame, depression, and loneliness. Although positive and negative emotions exist at the same time, it is possible to classify most moments of life as ultimately positive or negative. We could identify unpleasant episodes by comparing the ratings of positive and negative adjectives. We called an episode unpleasant if a negative feeling was assigned a higher rating than all the positive feelings. We found that American women spent about 19% of the time in an unpleasant state, somewhat higher than French women (16%) or Danish women (14%). We called the percentage of time that an individual spends in an unpleasant state the U-index. For example, an individual who spent 4 hours of a 16-hour waking day in an unpleasant state would have a U-index of 25%. The appeal of the U-index is that it is based not on a rating scale but on an objective measurement of time. If the U-index for a population drops from 20% to 18%, you can infer that the total time that the population spent in emotional discomfort or pain has diminished by a tenth. A striking observation was the extent of inequality in the distribution of emotional pain. About half our participants reported going through an entire day without experiencing an unpleasant episode. On the other hand, a significant minority of the population experienced considerable emotional distress for much of the day. It appears that a small fraction of the population does most of the suffering—whether because of physical or mental illness, an unhappy temperament, or the misfortunes and personal tragedies in their life.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  historical fact. Like most American cities, Madison, Wisconsin, had replaced the blue-white lighting of incandescent and mercury-vapor streetlamps with the orange of sodium-vapor. This not only required less energy to run but, because a trick of the human eye perceives orange light to be brighter and thus more revealing than the same lumens of white-blue light, cities installed sodium-vapor in the “super-predator”-panicked nineties as a method to deter street crime. As though one would comfortably rape and murder and steal in the privacy of blue light, but would hew to a life of church going and clean language if illuminated by the eerie public gaze of yellow- orange sodium-vapor lamps. In the pictures of Reese’s early childhood, cities shone as stars, but now they burned a combustion- orange glow heavenward, flames licking the firmament as whole cities engulfed themselves in nocturnal conflagration, eternally incinerating, blazing, scorching everybody caught within their scaffolds of kindling. And at the center, her daughter, Thalia, queen of fire. “T think I need my shot,” Reese tells Thalia. “’'m feeling very grandiose and morose and old. That’s always a sign that I’m hormonal. I was thinking that night is a different color than it used to be.” “T have to change songs,” Thalia says, taking Reese lightly by the arm. “Stop being weird and come back inside.” And this, Reese reflects, is the other reason to be a mother—in whatever fashion motherhood comes your way—so when you're old and alone and feeling sorry for yourself, your daughter will roll her eyes at your theatrics and bring you in from the cold. After the disaster of their dinner with Biz Dev and Marketing, Ames puts a drunk Katrina into a cab and, despite her protests, gets in after her. “I’m not leaving you alone. No matter what you say to or about me,” he insists. His reasons for staying with her were twofold: wanting to make sure she was safe and because the driver seemed skeptical about having a drunk woman in his car without a chaperone. Now Katrina slumps against the window, holding her head. “Tm not that into pet insurance anyway,” Ames says finally, into Katrina’s silence. Katrina doesn’t change position. The car travels slowly, block by block through traffic. Tourists and a few groups of teenagers Frogger their way across the streets. “Did you drink like that to punish me or the baby?” Ames asks as the car pulls back onto Lake Shore Drive. Katrina pulls her head up from a loll. If there wasn’t all the road noise, Ames guesses he’d hear the whirring of a mind calculating the most damaging insult. But instead, she pulls her thin jacket closer and starts to softly cry. “I don’t know,” she chokes out after a minute or so. “I didn’t mean to out you. I don’t want to hurt you either. I don’t know what I’m doing. You were supposed to care about me. I wasn't supposed to be alone.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “I was just about to say that.”Brother Terrell and Betty Ann thought second grade would be easier for everyone if Randall went to school in Villa Rica, Georgia, and lived with his aunt Marie and uncle Raymond. Randall didn’t want it to be easy.“I won’t try your patience no more. I’ll be good. Please don’t leave me,” he begged.Brother Terrell reasoned with him. “Son, the law says you got to go to school.”“But Jesus will come soon, and I won’t need no education.”“Son, it’s outta my hands.”“But Carolyn can teach me.” He rolled his big, baleful eyes toward my mother.“Son, you done wore Sister Johnson plumb out. Now stop arguing, before I wear you out.”I experienced my family, the Terrells, and the other members of our nomadic tribe as a single unit, a holistic entity incapable of functioning without each individual. The earlier mention of the orphanage and Randall’s impending exile made it clear that some members could be left behind: the kids. Mama could leave Gary and me, and the life we had lived with her would go on without us. The hot, dusty morning services where time stood still, the blur of the afternoon services, the wild singing and shouting at night, the long drives between revivals. Everything would be the same, but we wouldn’t be there.The drive to Villa Rica was miserable. Randall rode in the backseat with Mama, Gary, and me, and his unhappiness took up so much room we couldn’t breathe without brushing up against it. Mama tapped her foot and Randall moaned. I cracked my knuckles and he wailed. Gary tried to make him feel better by offering my Etch A Sketch.“Git that thang away. I’m too miserable to play.”Betty Ann’s standard warning of, “Randall Terrell, you better straighten up,” started a new round of begging and pleading.“Please, Daddy. Don’t leave me. I want to go with you. Mama, make him take me with you. Please, y’all. Please take me with you.” He choked on his words. Pam began to weep softly. Brother Terrell glanced up from the road and looked over at Betty Ann, who looked over her shoulder at Randall, then back at her husband. Randall ratcheted up the crying. That was a mistake.The longer and louder he cried, the less we felt sorry for him. His daddy warned him. “Son, I need you to stop crying right now. And I mean right now.” Randall had nothing to lose and he had never minded whippings, so on he wailed. The atmosphere in the car went from sad to mad in a couple of miles, but Randall didn’t notice.“I just want to goooooooooo with you. Please. Please. Don’t leave meeeeeeeeee.”Mama sighed and rolled her eyes. Brother Terrell doubled his tongue between his lips and hunkered over the steering wheel. Gary and I worked on making ourselves smaller. Any minute now, I thought, any minute . Brother Terrell glared at Randall over his shoulder.