Middlesex: A Novel

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My German driver's license simply says Cal. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed on the slopes of Mount Olympus, passed down through nine generations, and blew like a seed across the sea to America, where it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's womb. It all began with a prophecy, as these things so often do. My grandmother Desdemona, whose predictions of gender had never once been wrong, dangled a silver spoon over my mother's swollen belly. After some hesitation, it swung north to south. “A boy!” she cried, but my father, a man of his time, shook his head. “It's science, Ma,” he said.

My parents, Milton and Tessie, had wanted a daughter. My father, armed with an article from *Scientific American* and the dubious medical advice of his friend Uncle Pete, had orchestrated my conception with the precision of a military campaign. He learned that male sperm swim faster, but female sperm endure longer. To ensure a girl, he persuaded my mother to consult a basal thermometer, to pinpoint the moment of ovulation, and to time their congress accordingly. The swift male sperm would rush in and die off, leaving the sluggish but reliable female sperm to arrive just as the egg dropped. My mother, who believed that a child could sense the love with which it was created, resisted this clinical approach. But in the optimistic, postwar America where Sputnik had been launched and polio conquered, my father was convinced he could be the master of his own destiny - and mine.

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off and I am sucked back between my mother's legs. Back we go, as a thermometer returns to its case and a steamship appears, docking stern first. We are on dry land again, back at the beginning. In the summer of 1922, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides stood on the slopes of Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, her heart fluttering with a dread she couldn't name. Her parents were dead, killed in the war with the Turks, and her brother, Eleutherios - Lefty, as he would be known - was spending his days slicking his hair with pomade and singing American songs. He was disappearing into the bars of Bursa, and Desdemona, bound by a promise to her dying mother to find him a wife, felt a complicated sorrow. When she confronted him, Lefty admitted his loneliness, but the village girls - one who smelled, another with a mustache - held no appeal. In a desperate attempt to anchor him, Desdemona began a matchmaking campaign, transforming the local girls into an exotic harem with lessons from a French lingerie catalogue.

Lefty, however, was haunted by a different desire. In the brothels of Bursa, he sought out prostitutes who bore an unsettling resemblance to his own sad-eyed, black-braided sister. When Desdemona's matchmaking attempts failed, he fled the village girls, returning home to find his sister not in her usual drab clothes but in a white silk wedding corset, weeping on his bed. Their shared history, their isolation, and an unspoken, powerful sympathy between them coalesced in that moment. “Too bad I'm your sister,” she said, and he replied, “You're not only my sister. You're my third cousin, too.” They danced under the grape arbor, a new intimacy blooming between them, when the sky lit up with explosions. The Greek Army was in full retreat, burning everything in its path. In the chaos of their flight to Smyrna, amidst the refugees clogging the quay, Lefty made his proposal. “If we lived?” he asked. “You'd marry me then?” As the city began to burn around them, Desdemona gave a single nod.

On the deck of the steamship *Giulia*, bound for America, they enacted a public courtship to disguise their secret. They were brother and sister no more, but a young couple who had met and fallen in love at sea. To the other passengers, they were Eleutherios Stephanides and Desdemona Aristos, two strangers bound for Detroit. In the anonymity of the open ocean, they reinvented themselves, their feigned romance slowly becoming real. They were married by the ship's captain, their wedding crowns woven from rope. Their honeymoon took place in a lifeboat, where the strangeness of their union was sanctified by the rocking of the waves and the vast, unjudging darkness of the Atlantic. They arrived in Detroit in the fall of 1922, their secret shared only with their cousin Sourmelina, who harbored secrets of her own. My grandparents settled into a house on Hurlbut Street, Lefty finding work on the assembly line at the Ford Rouge plant and Desdemona, to her shock, teaching the art of sericulture to the nascent Nation of Islam in the city's Black Bottom ghetto.

Years passed. My father, Milton, was born, followed by my Aunt Zoë. Their cousin, Theodora - Tessie - grew up next door. The secret of my grandparents' marriage was buried deep, a genetic landmine waiting for the right moment to detonate. That moment arrived in the courtship of their own children. Milton, a skinny, self-confident boy with a clarinet, began serenading his quiet, pretty cousin Tessie. He played Artie Shaw against her bare skin, the vibrations sending shivers through her body. But Desdemona, sensing the danger of another too-close union, tried to intervene, arranging for Tessie to be courted by a sweet-natured seminarian named Michael Antoniou. Torn between passion and piety, my mother chose piety, and a heartbroken Milton enlisted in the Navy. It was only when she saw a newsreel of sailors heading for the Pacific that Tessie realized her mistake. Milton, facing near-certain death as a signalman in the planned invasion of Japan, was saved by a deus ex machina: his high score on an entrance exam earned him a transfer to the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

My early childhood passed, on film and otherwise, in a house on Middlesex Boulevard in Grosse Pointe. I was a girl and had no doubts about it. I wore dresses, played with dolls, and suffered my first heartbreak over a neighbor girl named Clementine Stark. But as I entered my teens, my body began to change in ways that were not in the script. I grew tall and angular, my voice deepened, and a faint shadow appeared on my upper lip. The locker room at the Baker & Inglis School for Girls became a place of terror and fascination, a humid aquarium where my classmates sprouted breasts like jellyfish and sea anemones of hair while I remained sleek and undeveloped. My only solace was a new friendship with a redheaded, chain-smoking, beautiful girl who landed in my advanced English class - the Obscure Object of my desire.

That summer, staying at the Object's family cottage near Petoskey, my life split open. A night of adolescent fumbling in a hunting shack with her brother, Jerome, ended with a shocking discovery - for both of us. The next day, running from him, I collided with a tractor. In the emergency room, a young doctor pulled down my underpants and the secret I didn't even know I was keeping was finally revealed. The accident led me to New York, to the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic of the famous Dr. Peter Luce. I was examined, photographed, and studied. In the New York Public Library, I looked myself up in Webster's and found a word for what I was: hermaphrodite. And its synonym: monster. Faced with a surgery that promised to “finish” my genitalia and make me a normal girl, I stole three hundred dollars from my father's suitcase and ran away.

I crossed the country, a boy in a thrift-store suit, and landed in San Francisco. There, I found work in a North Beach peep show called Octopussy's Garden, performing underwater as Hermaphroditus, half-man, half-woman. I lived with a fellow performer, a beautiful, radical intersexual named Zora who told me, “We're what's next.” Four months later, after a police raid, I called home, only to learn that my father was dead, killed in a car crash on the Ambassador Bridge while trying to retrieve a fake ransom from my uncle, Father Mike.

I returned home a different person, to a family shattered by grief. The funeral did what funerals are supposed to do: it gave us no time to dwell on our feelings. In the doorway of our house on Middlesex, I stood guard to keep my father's spirit from reentering. Later, in the guesthouse out back, I found my grandmother Desdemona, still in bed after all these years, her mind wandering. She looked at my new, masculine face and mistook me for my grandfather. “You look like my Lefty,” she said. And then, as if a final circuit connected in her fading memory, she told me the secret she had kept for over fifty years. “He was not my third cousin only,” she whispered. “Also brother.” I promised her I would tell no one. “When I die,” she said, “you can tell everything.” And so I have.