Home movies - an extract from Middlesex.

Desdemona had found Lefty on our kitchen floor, lying next to his overturned coffee cup. She knelt beside him and pressed an ear to his chest. When she heard no heartbeat, she cried out his name. her wail echoed off the kitchen’s hard surfaces: the toaster, the oven, the refrigerator. Finally she collapsed on his chest. In the silence that followed, however, Desdemona felt a strange emotion rising inside her. It spread in the space between her panic and grief. It was like a gas inflating her. Soon her eyes snapped open as she recognized the emotion: it was happiness. Tears were running down her face, she was already berating God for taking her husband from her, but on the other side of these proper emotions was an altogether improper relief. The worst had happened. This was it: the worst thing. For the first time in her life my grandmother had nothing to worry about.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in everything I’ll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here’s where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, being a part of it. I’m talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn’t been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

The happiness that attends disaster didn’t possess Desdemona for long. A few seconds later she returned her head to her husband’s chest - and heard his heart beating! Lefty was rushed to hospital. Two days later he regained consciousness. His mind was clear, his memory intact. But when he tried to ask whether the baby was a boy or a girl, he found he was unable to. The stroke had left him with speech paralysis.

What am I to make of this? On the morning of my birth, my grandfather lost the ability to speak. Coincidence? Maybe. But I can’t avoid wondering if there was some significance to the exchange. Was it maybe a signal that I, officially known at that point only as “Baby Girl Stephanides” was going to be the voice of the family? That in reparation for silencing my grandfather I would never be allowed to shut up? And there’s another possibility. Was my grandfather’s speech paralysis a heavy-handed symbol - because life is a bad movie, too, sometimes - of the fading of my ancestral language? Making Greek Greek to me? Maybe all of this and maybe none of it. Maybe it was just the obvious lesson that our children kill us, that in arriving they schedule our deaths.

(c) Jeffrey Eugenides 2002

Middlesex is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99)

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