The Jeffrey Eugenides Three-Book Collection: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, The Marriage Plot

But now it is late afternoon; dinner is over. And my brother is smiling. Because now comes the one part of Greek Easter he prefers to egg hunts and jelly beans: the egg-cracking game. Everyone gathers around the dining table. Biting his lip, Chapter Eleven selects an egg from the bowl, studies it, returns it. He selects another. “This looks like a good one,” Milton says, choosing his own egg. “Built like a Brinks truck.” Milton holds his egg up. Chapter Eleven prepares to attack. When suddenly my mother taps my father on the back.

“Just a minute, Tessie. We’re cracking eggs here.”

She taps him harder.

“What?”

“My temperature.” She pauses. “It’s up six tenths.”

She has been using the thermometer. This is the first my father has heard of it.

“Now?” my father whispers. “Jesus, Tessie, are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. You told me to watch for any rise in my temperature and I’m telling you I’m up six tenths of a degree.” And, lowering her voice, “Plus it’s been thirteen days since my last you know what.”

“Come on, Dad,” Chapter Eleven pleads.

“Time out,” Milton says. He puts his egg in the ashtray. “That’s my egg. Nobody touch it until I come back.”

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, my parents accomplish the act. A child’s natural decorum makes me refrain from imagining the scene in much detail. Only this: when they’re done, as if topping off the tank, my father says, “That should do it.” It turns out he’s right. In May, Tessie learns she’s pregnant, and the waiting begins.

By six weeks, I have eyes and ears. By seven, nostrils, even lips. My genitals begin to form. Fetal hormones, taking chromosomal cues, inhibit Müllerian structures, promote Wolffian ducts. My twenty-three paired chromosomes have linked up and crossed over, spinning their roulette wheel, as my papou puts his hand on my mother’s belly and says, “Lucky two!” Arrayed in their regiments, my genes carry out their orders. All except two, a pair of miscreants—or revolutionaries, depending on your view—hiding out on chromosome number 5. Together, they siphon off an enzyme, which stops the production of a certain hormone, which complicates my life.

In the living room, the men have stopped talking about politics and instead lay bets on whether Milt’s new kid will be a boy or a girl. My father is confident. Twenty-four hours after the deed, my mother’s body temperature rose another two tenths, confirming ovulation. By then the male sperm had given up, exhausted. The female sperm, like tortoises, won the race. (At which point Tessie handed Milton the thermometer and told him she never wanted to see it again.)

All this led up to the day Desdemona dangled a utensil over my mother’s belly. The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing. Desdemona crouched. The kitchen grew silent. The other women bit their lower lips, watching, waiting. For the first minute, the spoon didn’t move at all. Desdemona’s hand shook and, after long seconds had passed, Aunt Lina steadied it. The spoon twirled; I kicked; my mother cried out. And then, slowly, moved by a wind no one felt, in that unearthly Ouija-board way, the silver spoon began to move, to swing, at first in a small circle but each orbit growing gradually more elliptical until the path flattened into a straight line pointing from oven to banquette. North to south, in other words. Desdemona cried, “Koros!” And the room erupted with shouts of “Koros, koros.”

That night, my father said, “Twenty-three in a row means she’s bound for a fall. This time, she’s wrong. Trust me.”

“I don’t mind if it’s a boy,” my mother said. “I really don’t. As long as it’s healthy, ten fingers, ten toes.”

“What’s this ‘it.’ That’s my daughter you’re talking about.”

I was born a week after New Year’s, on January 8, 1960. In the waiting room, supplied only with pink-ribboned cigars, my father cried out, “Bingo!” I was a girl. Nineteen inches long. Seven pounds four ounces.

That same January 8, my grandfather suffered the first of his thirteen strokes. Awakened by my parents rushing off to the hospital, he’d gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee. An hour later, Desdemona found him lying on the kitchen floor. Though his mental faculties remained intact, that morning, as I let out my first cry at Women’s Hospital, my papou lost the ability to speak. According to Desdemona, my grandfather collapsed right after overturning his coffee cup to read his fortune in the grounds.

When he heard the news of my sex, Uncle Pete refused to accept any congratulations. There was no magic involved. “Besides,” he joked, “Milt did all the work.” Desdemona became grim. Her American-born son had been proven right and, with this fresh defeat, the old country, in which she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded one more notch. My arrival marked the end of her baby-guessing and the start of her husband’s long decline. Though the silkworm box reappeared now and then, the spoon was no longer among its treasures.

I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly tagged. This can’t be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen.

Someone had switched on my eyes.

Matchmaking

When this story goes out into the world, I may become the most famous hermaphrodite in history. There have been others before me. Alexina Barbin attended a girls’ boarding school in France before becoming Abel. She left behind an autobiography, which Michel Foucault discovered in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene. (Her memoirs, which end shortly before her suicide, make unsatisfactory reading, and it was after finishing them years ago that I first got the idea to write my own.) Gottlieb Gottlich, born in 1798, lived as Marie Rosine until the age of thirty-three. One day abdominal pains sent Marie to the doctor. The physician checked for a hernia and found undescended testicles instead. From then on, Marie donned men’s clothes, took the name of Gottlieb, and made a fortune traveling around Europe, exhibiting himself to medical men.

As far as the doctors are concerned, I’m even better than Gottlieb. To the extent that fetal hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I’ve got a male brain. But I was raised as a girl. If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture, you couldn’t come up with anything better than my life. During my time at the Clinic nearly three decades ago, Dr. Luce ran me through a barrage of tests. I was given the Benton Visual Retention Test and the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test. My verbal IQ was measured, and lots of other things, too. Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I’m sucked back between my mother’s legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There’s a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he’s in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we’re out of America completely; we’re in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we’re up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning …

In the late summer of 1922, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides wasn’t predicting births but deaths, specifically, her own. She was in her silkworm cocoonery, high on the slope of Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, when her heart, without warning, missed a beat. It was a distinct sensation: she felt her heart stop and squeeze into a ball. Then, as she stiffened, it began to race, thumping against her ribs. She let out a small, astonished cry. Her twenty thousand silkworms, sensitive to human emotion, stopped spinning cocoons. Squinting in the dim light, my grandmother looked down to see the front of her tunic visibly fluttering; and in that instant, as she recognized the insurrection inside her, Desdemona became what she’d remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body. Nevertheless, unable to believe in her own endurance, despite her already quieting heart, she stepped out of the cocoonery to take a last look at the world she wouldn’t be leaving for another fifty-eight years.

The view was impressive. A thousand feet below lay the old Ottoman capital of Bursa, like a backgammon board spread out across the valley’s green felt. Red diamonds of roof tile fit into diamonds of whitewash. Here and there, the sultans’ tombs were stacked up like bright chips. Back in 1922, automobile traffic didn’t clog the streets. Ski lifts didn’t cut swaths into the mountain’s pine forests. Metallurgic and textile plants didn’t ring the city, filling the air with smog. Bursa looked—at least from a thousand feet up—pretty much as it had for the past six centuries, a holy city, necropolis of the Ottomans and center of the silk trade, its quiet, declining streets abloom with minarets and cypress trees. The tiles of the Green Mosque had turned blue with age, but that was about it. Desdemona Stephanides, however, kibitzing from afar, gazed down on the board and saw what the players had missed.

To psychoanalyze my grandmother’s heart palpitations: they were the manifestations of grief. Her parents were dead—killed in the recent war with the Turks. The Greek Army, encouraged by the Allied Nations, had invaded western Turkey in 1919, reclaiming the ancient Greek territory in Asia Minor. After years of living apart up on the mountain, the people of Bithynios, my grandmother’s village, had emerged into the safety of the Megale Idea—the Big Idea, the dream of Greater Greece. It was now Greek troops who occupied Bursa. A Greek flag flew over the former Ottoman palace. The Turks and their leader, Mustafa Kemal, had retreated to Angora in the east. For the first time in their lives the Greeks of Asia Minor were out from under Turkish rule. No longer were the giaours (“infidel dogs”) forbidden to wear bright clothing or ride horses or use saddles. Never again, as in the last centuries, would Ottoman officials arrive in the village every year, carting off the strongest boys to serve in the Janissaries. Now, when the village men took silk to market in Bursa, they were free Greeks, in a free Greek city.

Desdemona, however, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her inability to feel happy like everybody else. Years later, in her widowhood, when she’d spend a decade in bed trying with great vitality to die, she would finally agree that those two years between wars a half century earlier had been the only decent time in her life; but by then everyone she’d known would be dead and she could only tell it to the television.

For the greater part of an hour Desdemona had been trying to ignore her foreboding by working in the cocoonery. She’d come out the back door of the house, through the sweet-smelling grape arbor, and across the terraced yard into the low, thatch-roofed hut. The acrid, larval smell inside didn’t bother her. The silkworm cocoonery was my grandmother’s own personal, reeking oasis. All around her, in a firmament, soft white silkworms clung to bundled mulberry twigs. Desdemona watched them spinning cocoons, moving their heads as though to music. As she watched, she forgot about the world outside, its changes and convulsions, its terrible new music (which is about to be sung in a moment). Instead she heard her mother, Euphrosyne Stephanides, speaking in this very cocoonery years ago, elucidating the mysteries of silkworms—“To have good silk, you have to be pure,” she used to tell her daughter. “The silkworms know everything. You can always tell what somebody is up to by the way their silk looks”—and so on, Euphrosyne giving examples—“Maria Poulos, who’s always lifting her skirt for everyone? Have you seen her cocoons? A stain for every man. You should look next time”—Desdemona only eleven or twelve and believing every word, so that now, as a young woman of twenty-one, she still couldn’t entirely disbelieve her mother’s morality tales, and examined the cocoon constellations for a sign of her own impurity (the dreams she’d been having!). She looked for other things, too, because her mother also maintained that silkworms reacted to historical atrocities. After every massacre, even in a village fifty miles away, the silkworms’ filaments turned the color of blood—“I’ve seen them bleed like the feet of Christos Himself,” Euphrosyne again, and her daughter, years later, remembering, squinting in the weak light to see if any cocoons had turned red. She pulled out a tray and shook it; she pulled out another; and it was right then that she felt her heart stop, squeeze into a ball, and begin punching her from inside. She dropped the tray, saw her tunic flutter from interior force, and understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, over anything else.

So my yia yia, suffering the first of her imaginary diseases, stood looking down at Bursa, as though she might spot a visible confirmation of her invisible dread. And then it came from inside the house, by means of sound: her brother, Eleutherios (“Lefty”) Stephanides, had begun to sing. In badly pronounced, meaningless English:

“Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun,” Lefty sang, standing before their bedroom mirror as he did every afternoon about this time, fastening the new celluloid collar to the new white shirt, squeezing a dollop of hair pomade (smelling of limes) into his palm and rubbing it into his new Valentino haircut. And continuing: “In the meantime, in-between time, ain’t we got fun.” The lyrics meant nothing to him, either, but the melody was enough. It spoke to Lefty of jazz-age frivolity, gin cocktails, cigarette girls; it made him slick his hair back with panache … while, out in the yard, Desdemona heard the singing and reacted differently. For her, the song conjured only the disreputable bars her brother went to down in the city, those hash dens where they played rebetika and American music and where there were loose women who sang … as Lefty put on his new striped suit and folded the red pocket handkerchief that matched his red necktie … and she felt funny inside, especially her stomach, which was roiled by complicated emotions, sadness, anger, and something else she couldn’t name that hurt most of all. “The rent’s unpaid, dear, we haven’t a car,” Lefty crooned in the sweet tenor I would later inherit; and beneath the music Desdemona now heard her mother’s voice again, Euphrosyne Stephanides’ last words spoken just before she died from a bullet wound, “Take care of Lefty. Promise me. Find him a wife!” … and Desdemona, through her tears, replying, “I promise. I promise!” … these voices all speaking at once in Desdemona’s head as she crossed the yard to go into the house. She came through the small kitchen where she had dinner cooking (for one) and marched straight into the bedroom she shared with her brother. He was still singing—“Not much money, Oh! but honey”—fixing his cuff links, parting his hair; but then he looked up and saw his sister—“Ain’t we got”—and pianissimo now—“fun”—fell silent.

For a moment, the mirror held their two faces. At twenty-one, long before ill-fitting dentures and self-imposed invalidism, my grandmother was something of a beauty. She wore her black hair in long braids pinned up under her kerchief. These braids were not delicate like a little girl’s but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver’s tail. Years, seasons, and various weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. At present, black silk ribbons were tied around the braids, too, making them even more imposing, if you got to see them, which few people did. What was on view for general consumption was Desdemona’s face: her large, sorrowful eyes, her pale, candlelit complexion. I should also mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona’s voluptuous figure. Her body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn’t sanction. In church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when she picked fruit, Desdemona’s feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab, confining clothes. Above the jiggling of her body, her kerchief-framed face remained apart, looking slightly scandalized at what her breasts and hips were up to.

Eleutherios was taller and skinnier. In photographs from the time he looks like the underworld figures he idolized, the thin mustachioed thieves and gamblers who filled the seaside bars of Athens and Constantinople. His nose was aquiline, his eyes sharp, the overall impression of his face hawk-like. When he smiled, however, you saw the softness in his eyes, which made it clear that Lefty was in fact no gangster but the pampered, bookish son of comfortably well-off parents.

That summer afternoon in 1922, Desdemona wasn’t looking at her brother’s face. Instead her eyes moved to the suit coat, to the gleaming hair, to the striped trousers, as she tried to figure out what had happened to him these past few months.

Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often wondered how she’d survived those first twelve months without him. For as long as she could remember he’d always been on the other side of the goat’s-hair blanket that separated their beds. Behind the kelimi he performed puppet shows, turning his hands into the clever, hunchbacked Karaghiozis who always outwitted the Turks. In the dark he made up rhymes and sang songs, and one of the reasons she hated his new American music was that he sang it exclusively to himself. Desdemona had always loved her brother as only a sister growing up on a mountain could love a brother: he was the whole entertainment, her best friend and confidant, her co-discoverer of short cuts and monks’ cells. Early on, the emotional sympathy she’d felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she’d sometimes forgotten they were separate people. As kids they’d scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed creature. She was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed house at evening, and whenever she encountered her solitary outline, it seemed cut in half.

Peacetime seemed to be changing everything. Lefty had taken advantage of the new freedoms. In the last month he’d gone down to Bursa a total of seventeen times. On three occasions he’d stayed overnight in the Cocoon Inn across from the Mosque of Sultan Ouhan. He’d left one morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas, and vest and come back the following evening in a striped suit, with a silk scarf tucked into his collar like an opera singer and a black derby on his head. There were other changes. He’d begun to teach himself French from a small, plum-colored phrase book. He’d picked up affected gestures, putting his hands in his pockets and rattling change, for instance, or doffing his cap. When Desdemona did the laundry, she found scraps of paper in Lefty’s pockets, covered with mathematical figures. His clothes smelled musky, smoky, and sometimes sweet.

Now, in the mirror, their joined faces couldn’t hide the fact of their growing separation. And my grandmother, whose constitutional gloom had broken out into full cardiac thunder, looked at her brother, as she once had her own shadow, and felt that something was missing.

“So where are you going all dressed up?”

“Where do you think I’m going? To the Koza Han. To sell cocoons.”

“You went yesterday.”

“It’s the season.”

With a tortoiseshell comb Lefty parted his hair on the right, adding pomade to an unruly curl that refused to stay flat.

Desdemona came closer. She picked up the pomade and sniffed it. It wasn’t the smell on his clothes. “What else do you do down there?”

“Nothing.”

“You stay all night sometimes.”

“It’s a long trip. By the time I walk there, it’s late.”

“What are you smoking in those bars?”

“Whatever’s in the hookah. It’s not polite to ask.”

“If Mother and Father knew you were smoking and drinking like this …” She trailed off.

“They don’t know, do they?” said Lefty. “So I’m safe.” His light tone was unconvincing. Lefty acted as though he had recovered from their parents’ deaths, but Desdemona saw through this. She smiled grimly at her brother and, without comment, held out her fist. Automatically, while still admiring himself in the mirror, Lefty made a fist, too. They counted, “One, two, three … shoot!”

“Rock crushes snake. I win,” said Desdemona. “So tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what’s so interesting in Bursa.”

Lefty combed his hair forward again and parted it on the left. He swiveled his head back and forth in the mirror. “Which looks better? Left or right?”

“Let me see.” Desdemona raised her hand delicately to Lefty’s hair—and mussed it.

“Hey!”

“What do you want in Bursa?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Tell me!”

“You want to know?” Lefty said, exasperated with his sister now. “What do you think I want?” He spoke with pent-up force. “I want a woman.”

Desdemona gripped her belly, patted her heart. She took two steps backward and from this vantage point examined her brother anew. The idea that Lefty, who shared her eyes and eyebrows, who slept in the bed beside hers, could be possessed by such a desire had never occurred to Desdemona before. Though physically mature, Desdemona’s body was still a stranger to its owner. At night, in their bedroom, she’d seen her sleeping brother press against his rope mattress as though angry with it. As a child she’d come upon him in the cocoonery, innocently rubbing against a wooden post. But none of this had made an impression. “What are you doing?” she’d asked Lefty, eight or nine at the time, and gripping the post, moving his knees up and down. With a steady, determined voice, he’d answered, “I’m trying to get that feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“You know”—grunting, puffing, pumping knees—“that feeling.”

But she didn’t know. It was still years before Desdemona, cutting cucumbers, would lean against the corner of the kitchen table and, without realizing it, would lean in a little harder, and after that would find herself taking up that position every day, the table corner snug between her legs. Now, preparing her brother’s meals, she sometimes struck up her old acquaintance with the dining table, but she wasn’t conscious of it. It was her body that did it, with the cunning and silence of bodies everywhere.

Her brother’s trips to the city were different. He knew what he was looking for, apparently; he was in full communication with his body. His mind and body had become one entity, thinking one thought, bent on one obsession, and for the first time ever Desdemona couldn’t read that thought. All she knew was that it had nothing to do with her.

It made her mad. Also, I suspect, a little jealous. Wasn’t she his best friend? Hadn’t they always told each other everything? Didn’t she do everything for him, cook, sew, and keep house as their mother used to? Wasn’t she the one who had been taking care of the silkworms single-handedly so that he, her smart little brother, could take lessons from the priest, learning ancient Greek? Hadn’t she been the one to say, “You take care of the books, I’ll take care of the cocoonery. All you have to do is sell the cocoons at the market.” And when he had started lingering down in the city, had she complained? Had she mentioned the scraps of paper, or his red eyes, or the musky-sweet smell on his clothes? Desdemona had a suspicion that her dreamy brother had become a hashish smoker. Where there was rebetika music there was always hashish. Lefty was dealing with the loss of their parents in the only way he could, by disappearing in a cloud of hash smoke while listening to the absolutely saddest music in the world. Desdemona understood all this and so had said nothing. But now she saw that her brother was trying to escape his grief in a way she hadn’t expected; and she was no longer content to be quiet.

“You want a woman?” Desdemona asked in an incredulous voice. “What kind of woman? A Turkish woman?”

Lefty said nothing. After his outburst he had resumed combing his hair.

“Maybe you want a harem girl. Is that right? You think I don’t know about those types of loose girls, those poutanes? Yes, I do. I’m not so stupid. You like a fat girl shaking her belly in your face? With a jewel in her fat belly? You want one of those? Let me tell you something. Do you know why those Turkish girls cover their faces? You think it’s because of religion? No. It’s because otherwise no one can stand to look at them!”

And now she shouted, “Shame on you, Eleutherios! What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you get a girl from the village?”

It was at this point that Lefty, who was now brushing off his jacket, called his sister’s attention to something she was overlooking. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” he said, “but there aren’t any girls in this village.”

Which, in fact, was pretty much the case. Bithynios had never been a big village, but in 1922 it was smaller than ever. People had begun leaving in 1913, when the phylloxera blight ruined the currants. They had continued to leave during the Balkan Wars. Lefty and Desdemona’s cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built along a gentle slope of the mountain, Bithynios wasn’t a precarious, cliffside sort of place. It was an elegant, or at least harmonious, cluster of yellow stucco houses with red roofs. The grandest houses, of which there were two, had çikma, enclosed bay windows that hung out over the street. The poorest houses, of which there were many, were essentially one-room kitchens. And then there were houses like Desdemona and Lefty’s, with an overstuffed parlor, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a backyard privy with a European toilet. There were no shops in Bithynios, no post office or bank, only a church and one taverna. For shopping you had to go into Bursa, walking first and then taking the horse-drawn streetcar.

In 1922 there were barely a hundred people living in the village. Fewer than half of those were women. Of forty-seven women, twenty-one were old ladies. Another twenty were middle-aged wives. Three were young mothers, each with a daughter in diapers. One was his sister. That left two marriageable girls. Whom Desdemona now rushed to nominate.

“What do you mean there aren’t any girls? What about Lucille Kafkalis? She’s a nice girl. Or Victoria Pappas?”

“Lucille smells,” Lefty answered reasonably. “She bathes maybe once a year. On her name day. And Victoria?” He ran a finger over his upper lip. “Victoria has a mustache bigger than mine. I don’t want to share a razor with my wife.” With that, he put down his clothing brush and put on his jacket. “Don’t wait up,” he said, and left the bedroom.

“Go!” Desdemona called after him. “See what I care. Just remember. When your Turkish wife takes off her mask, don’t come running back to the village!”

But Lefty was gone. His footsteps faded away. Desdemona felt the mysterious poison rising in her blood again. She paid no attention. “I don’t like eating alone!” she shouted, to no one.

The wind from the valley had picked up, as it did every afternoon. It blew through the open windows of the house. It rattled the latch on her hope chest and her father’s old worry beads lying on top. Desdemona picked the beads up. She began to slip them one by one through her fingers, exactly as her father had done, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather, performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying. As the beads clicked together, Desdemona gave herself up to them. What was the matter with God? Why had He taken her parents and left her to worry about her brother? What was she supposed to do with him? “Smoking, drinking, and now worse! And where does he get the money for all his foolishness? From my cocoons, that’s how!” Each bead slipping through her fingers was another resentment recorded and released. Desdemona, with her sad eyes, her face of a girl forced to grow up too fast, worried with her beads like all the Stephanides men before and after her (right down to me, if I count).

She went to the window and put her head out, heard the wind rustling in the pine trees and the white birch. She kept counting her worry beads and, little by little, they did their job. She felt better. She decided to go on with her life. Lefty wouldn’t come back tonight. Who cared? Who needed him anyway? It would be easier for her if he never came back. But she owed it to her mother to see that he didn’t catch some shameful disease or, worse, run off with a Turkish girl. The beads continued to drop, one by one, through Desdemona’s hands. But she was no longer counting her pains. Instead, the beads now summoned to her mind images in a magazine hidden in their father’s old desk. One bead was a hairstyle. The next bead was a silk slip. The next was a black brassiere. My grandmother had begun to matchmake.