Middlesex

solidarity. We were up against the same prejudices and misunderstandings. I was gladdened by this, but I never felt sisterly around Zora. Not completely. I was always aware of her figure under the robe. I went around averting my eyes and trying not to stare. On the street people took me for a boy. Zora turned heads. Men whistled at her. She didn’t like men, however. Only lesbians.

She had a dark side. She drank to extremes and sometimes acted ugly. She raged against football, male bonding, babies, breeders, politicians, and men in general. There was a violence in Zora at such times that set me on edge. She had been the high school beauty. She had submitted to caresses that had done nothing for her and to sessions of painful lovemaking. Like many beauties, Zora had attracted the worst guys. The varsity stooges. The herpetic section leaders. It was no surprise that she held a low opinion of men. Me she exempted. She thought I was okay. Not a real man at all. Which I felt was pretty much right.

Hermaphroditus’s parents were Hermes and Aphrodite. Ovid doesn’t tell us how they felt after their child went missing. As for my own parents, they still kept the telephone nearby at all times, refusing to leave the house together. But now they were scared to answer the phone, fearing bad news. Ignorance seemed preferable to grief. Whenever the phone rang, they paused before answering it. They waited until the third or fourth peal.

Their agony was harmonious. During the months I was missing, Milton and Tessie experienced the same spikes of panic, the same mad hopes, the same sleeplessness. It had been years since their emotional life had been so in sync and this had the result of bringing back the times when they first fell in love.

They began to make love with a frequency they hadn’t known for years. If Chapter Eleven was out, they didn’t wait to go upstairs but used whatever room they happened to be in. They tried the red leather couch in the den; they spread out on the bluebirds and red berries of the living room sofa; and a few times they even lay down on the heavy-duty kitchen carpeting, which had a pattern of bricks. The only place they didn’t use was the basement because there was no telephone there. Their lovemaking was not passionate but slow and elegiac, carried out to the magisterial rhythms of suffering. They were not young anymore; their bodies were no longer beautiful. Tessie sometimes wept afterward. Milton kept his eyes squeezed shut. Their exertions resulted in no flowering of sensation, no release, or only seldom.

Then one day, three months after I was gone, the signals coming over my mother’s spiritual umbilical cord stopped. Tessie was lying in bed when the faint purring or tingling in her navel ceased. She sat up. She put her hand to her belly.

“I can’t feel her anymore!” Tessie cried.

“What?”

“The cord’s cut! Somebody cut the cord!”

Milton tried to reason with Tessie, but it was no use. From that moment, my mother became convinced that something terrible had happened to me.

And so: into the harmony of their suffering entered discord. While Milton fought to keep up a positive attitude, Tessie increasingly gave in to despair. They began to quarrel. Every now and then Milton’s optimism would sway my mother and she would become cheerful for a day or two. She would tell herself that, after all, they didn’t know anything definite. But such moods were temporary. When she was alone Tessie tried to feel something coming in over the umbilical cord, but there was nothing, not even a sign of distress.

I had been missing four months by this time. It was now January 1975. My fifteenth birthday had passed without my being found. On a Sunday morning while Tessie was at church, praying for my return, the phone rang. Milton answered.

“Hello?”

At first there was no response. Milton could hear music in the background, a radio playing in another room maybe. Then a muffled voice spoke.

“I bet you miss your daughter, Milton.”

“Who is this?”

“A daughter is a special thing.”

“Who is this?” Milton demanded again, and the line went dead.

He didn’t tell Tessie about the call. He suspected it was a crank. Or a disgruntled employee. The economy was in recession in 1975 and Milton had been forced to close a few franchises. The following Sunday, however, the phone rang again. This time Milton answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Milton. I have a question for you this morning. Would you like to know the question, Milton?”

“You tell me who this is or I’m hanging up.”

“I doubt you’ll do that, Milton. I’m the only chance you have to get your daughter back.”

Milton did a characteristic thing right then. He swallowed, squared his shoulders, and with a small nod prepared himself to meet whatever was coming.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m listening.”

And the caller hung up.

“Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool …” I could do it in my sleep now. I was asleep, considering our backstage festivities, the flowing Averna, the tranquilizing smoke. Halloween had come and gone. Thanksgiving, too, and then Christmas. On New Year’s, Bob Presto threw a big party. Zora and I drank champagne. When it was time for my act, I plunged into the pool. I was high, drunk, and so that night did something I didn’t normally do. I opened my eyes underwater. I saw the faces looking back at me and I saw that they were not appalled. I had fun in the tank that night. It was all beneficial in some way. It was therapeutic. Inside Hermaphroditus old tensions were roiling, trying to work themselves out. Traumas of the locker room were being released. Shame over having a body unlike other bodies was passing away. The monster feeling was fading. And along with shame and self-loathing another hurt was healing. Hermaphroditus was beginning to forget about the Obscure Object.

In my last weeks in San Francisco I read everything Zora gave me, trying to educate myself. I learned what varieties we hermaphrodites came in. I read about hyperadrenocorticism and feminizing testes and something called cryptorchidism, which applied to me. I read about Kleinfelter’s Syndrome, where an extra X chromosome renders a person tall, eunuchoid, and temperamentally unpleasant. I was more interested in historical than medical material. From Zora’s manuscript I became acquainted with the hijras of India, the kwolu- aatmwols of the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, and the guevedoche of the Dominican Republic. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, writing in Germany in 1860, spoke of das dritte Geschlecht, the third gender. He called himself a Uranist and believed that he had a female soul in a male body. Many cultures on earth operated not with two genders but with three. And the third was always special, exalted, endowed with mystical gifts.

One cold drizzly night I gave it a try. Zora was out. It was a Sunday and we were off work. I sat in a half-lotus position on the floor and closed my eyes. Concentrating, prayerful, I waited for my soul to leave my body. I tried to fall into a trance state or become an animal. I did my best, but nothing happened. As far as special powers went, I didn’t seem to have any. A Tiresias I wasn’t.

All of which brings me to a Friday night in late January. It was after midnight. Carmen was in the tank, doing her Esther Williams. Zora and I were in the dressing room, maintaining traditions (thermos, cannabis). In the mermaid suit, Z. was none too mobile and stretched out across the couch, a Piscean odalisque. Her tail hung over the arm bolsters, dripping. She wore a T-shirt over her top. It had Emily Dickinson on it.

Sounds from the tank were piped into the dressing room. Bob Presto was giving his spiel: “Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for a truly electrifying experience?”

Zora and I mouthed along with the next line: “Are you ready for some high voltage?”

“I’ve had enough of this place,” said Zora. “I really have.”

“Should we quit?”

“We should.”

“What would we do instead?”

“Mortgage banking.”

There was a splash in the tank. “But where is Ellie’s eel today? It seems to be hiding, ladies and gentlemen. Could it be extinct? Maybe a fisherman caught it. That’s right, ladies and gentleman, maybe Ellie’s eel is for sale out on Fisherman’s Wharf.”