Middlesex

spectacle before him, the emerald grass, the white wooden bleachers, the school in the distance with its blue slate roof and ivy, pleased him. In America, England is where you go to wash yourself of ethnicity. Milton had on a blue blazer and cream-colored trousers. He looked like the captain of a cruise ship. With one arm on her back, he was gently leading Tessie down the steps to get a good seat.

We heard the audience grow quiet. Then a pan flute was heard—Mr. da Silva playing his recorder.

I went over to the Object and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

She had been repeating her lines silently to herself but now stopped.

“You’re a really good actress,” I continued.

She turned away and lowered her head, moving her lips again.

“You won’t forget your lines. We went over them a billion times. You had them down perfect yester —“

“Will you stop bugging me for a minute?” the Object snapped. “I’m trying to get psyched up.” She glared at me. Then she turned and walked off.

I stood watching her, crestfallen, hating myself. Cool? I was anything but. I’d already made the Obscure Object sick of me. Feeling as if I might cry, I grabbed one of the black curtains and wrapped myself up in it. I stood in the darkness, wishing I were dead.

I hadn’t just been flattering her. She was good. Onstage, the Object’s fidgetiness stilled itself. Her posture improved. And of course there was the sheer physical fact of her, the blood- tinged blade that she was, the riot of color that caught everyone’s attention. The pan flute stopped and the hockey field got silent again. People coughed, getting it out of their systems. I peeked out from the curtains and saw the Object waiting to go on. She was standing just inside the middle arch, no more than ten feet from me. I had never seen her so serious before, so concentrated. Talent is a kind of intelligence. As she waited to go on, the Obscure Object was coming into hers. Her lips moved as if she were speaking Sophocles’ lines to Sophocles himself, as if, contrary to all intellectual evidence, she understood the literary reasons for their endurance. So the Object stood, waiting to go on. Far away from her cigarettes and her snobbishness, her cliquish friends, her atrocious spelling. This was what she was good at: appearing before people. Stepping out and standing there and speaking. She was just beginning to realize it then. What I was witnessing was a self discovering the self it could be.

On cue, our Antigone took a deep breath and walked onstage. Her white robe was cinched around her torso with silver braid. The robe fluttered as she stepped out in the warm breeze.

“Wilt thou aid this hand to lift the dead?”

Maxine-Ismene replied, “Thou wouldst bury him, when ‘tis forbidden to Thebes?”

“I will do my part, and thou wilt not, to a brother. False to him will I never be found.”

I wasn’t on for a while. Tiresias wasn’t that big a part. So I closed the curtain around me again and waited. I had a staff in my hand. It was my only prop, a plastic stick painted to look like wood.

It was then I heard a small, choking sound. Again the Object said, “False to him will I never be found.” Followed by silence. I peeked out the curtain. Through the central arch I could see them. The Object had her back to me. Farther downstage Maxine Grossinger stood with a blank look on her face. Her mouth was open, though no words were coming out. Beyond, just above the lip of the stage, was Miss Fagles’s florid face, whispering Maxine’s next line.

It wasn’t stage fright. An aneurysm had burst in Maxine Grossinger’s brain. At first, the audience took her quick stagger and shocked expression to be part of the play. Titters had begun at the way the girl playing Ismene was hamming it up. But Maxine’s mother, knowing exactly what pain looked like on her child’s face, shot up out of her seat. “No,” she cried. “No!” Twenty feet away, elevated under a setting sun, Maxine Grossinger was still mute. A gurgle escaped from her throat. With the suddenness of a lighting cue her face went blue. Even in the back rows people could see the oxygen leave her blood. Pinkness drained away, down her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. Later, the Obscure Object would swear that Maxine had been looking at her with a kind of appeal, that she had seen the light go out of Maxine’s eyes. According to the doctors, however, this was probably not true. Wrapped in her dark robe, still on her feet, Maxine Grossinger was already dead. She toppled forward seconds later.

Mrs. Grossinger scrambled up onstage. She made no sound now. No one did. In silence she reached Maxine and tore open her robe. In silence the mother began to give the daughter mouth-to-mouth. I froze. I let the curtains untwist and I stepped out and gawked. Suddenly a white blur filled the arch. The Obscure Object was fleeing the stage. For a second I had a crazy idea. I thought Mr. da Silva had been holding out on us. He was doing things the traditional way after all. Because the Obscure Object was wearing a mask. The mask for tragedy, her eyes like knife slashes, her mouth a boomerang of woe. With this hideous face she threw herself on me. “Oh my God!” she sobbed. “Oh my God, Callie,” and she was shaking and needing me.

Which leads me to a terrible confession. It is this. While Mrs. Grossinger tried to breathe life back into Maxine’s body, while the sun set melodramatically over a death that wasn’t in the script, I felt a wave of pure happiness surge through my body. Every nerve, every corpuscle, lit up. I had the Obscure Object in my arms.

Tiresias in Love

Imade a doctor’s appointment for you.”

”I just went to the doctor.”

”Not with Dr. Phil. With Dr. Bauer.”

“Who’s Dr. Bauer?”

“He’s … a ladies’ doctor.”

There was a hot bubbling in my chest. As if my heart were eating Pop Rocks. But I played it cool, looking out at the lake.

“Who says I’m a lady?”

“Very funny.”

“I just went to the doctor, Mom.”

“That was for your physical.”

“What’s this for?”

“When girls get to be a certain age, Callie, they have to go get checked.”

“Why?”

“To make sure everything’s okay.”

“What do you mean, everything?”

“Just—everything.”

We were in the car. The second-best Cadillac. When Milton got a new car he gave Tessie his old one. The Obscure Object had invited me to spend the day at her club and my mother was taking me to her house.

It was summer now, two weeks since Maxine Grossinger had collapsed onstage. School was out. On Middlesex preparations were under way for our trip to Turkey. Determined not to let Chapter Eleven’s condemnation of tourism ruin our travel plans, Milton was making airplane reservations and haggling with car rental agencies. Every morning he scanned the newspaper, reporting the weather conditions in Istanbul. “Eighty-one degrees and sunny. How does that sound, Cal?” In response to which I generally twirled an index finger. I wasn’t keen on visiting the homeland anymore. I didn’t want to waste my summer painting a church. Greece, Asia Minor, Mount Olympus, what did they have to do with me? I’d just discovered a whole new continent only a few miles away.

In the summer of 1974 Turkey and Greece were about to be in the news again. But I didn’t pay any mind to the rising tensions. I had troubles of my own. More than that, I was in love. Secretly, shamefully, not entirely consciously, but for all that quite head-over-heels in love.

Our pretty lake was trimmed in filth. The usual June scum of fish flies. There was also a new guardrail, which gave me a somber feeling as we drove past. Maxine Grossinger wasn’t the only girl at school who had died that year. Carol Henkel, a junior, had died in a car accident. One Saturday night her drunken boyfriend, a guy named Rex Reese, had plunged his parents’ car into the lake. Rex had survived, swimming back to shore. But Carol had been trapped inside the car.

We passed Baker & Inglis, closed for vacation and succumbing to the unreality of schools during summertime. We turned up Kerby Road. The Object lived on Tonnacour, in a gray stone and clapboard house with a