Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [113]
Suppressed laughter from the pews, a few old ladies gasping in horror, then silence. Disgraced by his own partial immersion—and dabbing himself like a Protestant—Father Mike completed the ceremony. Taking the chrism on his fingertips, he anointed me, marking the sign of the Cross on the required places, first my forehead, then eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet. As he touched each place, he said, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Finally he gave me my First Communion (with one exception: Father Mike didn’t forgive me for my sin).
“That’s my girl,” Milton crowed on the way home. “Pissed on a priest.”
“It was an accident,” Tessie insisted, still hot with embarrassment. “Poor Father Mike! He’ll never get over it.”
“That went really far,” marveled Chapter Eleven.
In all the commotion, no one wondered about the engineering involved.
Desdemona took my reverse baptism of her son-in-law as a bad omen. Already potentially responsible for her husband’s stroke, I had now committed a sacrilege at my first liturgical opportunity. In addition, I had humiliated her by being born a girl. “Maybe you should try guessing the weather,” Sourmelina teased her. My father rubbed it in: “So much for your spoon, Ma. It sort of pooped out on you.” The truth was that in those days Desdemona was struggling against assimilationist pressures she couldn’t resist. Though she had lived in America as an eternal exile, a visitor for forty years, certain bits of her adopted country had been seeping under the locked doors of her disapproval. After Lefty came home from the hospital, my father took a TV up to the attic to provide some entertainment. It was a small black-and-white Zenith, prone to vertical shift. Milton placed it on a bedside table and went back downstairs. The television remained, rumbling, glowing. Lefty adjusted his pillows to watch. Desdemona tried to do housework but found herself looking over at the screen more and more often. She still didn’t like cars. She covered her ears whenever the vacuum cleaner was on. But the TV was somehow different. My grandmother took to television right away. It was the first and only thing about America she approved of. Sometimes she forgot to turn the set off and would awaken at 2 a.m. to hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing before the station signed off.
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents’ lives. Desdemona watched all day long, scandalized by the love affairs on As the World Turns. She liked detergent commercials especially, anything with animated scrubbing bubbles or avenging suds.
Living on Seminole contributed to the cultural imperialism. On Sundays, instead of serving Metaxa, Milton fixed cocktails for his guests. “Drinks with the names of people,” Desdemona complained to her mute husband back in the attic. “Tom Collins. Harvey Wall Bang. This is a drink! And they are listening to music on the, how you say, the hi-fi. Milton he puts this music, and they drink Tom Collins and sometimes they are, you know, dancing, one on one, men together with the women. Like wrestling.”
What was I to Desdemona but another sign of the end of things? She tried not to look at me. She hid behind her fans. Then one day Tessie had to go out and Desdemona was forced to baby-sit. Warily, she entered my bedroom. Taking cautious steps, she approached my crib. Black-draped sexagenarian leaned down to examine pink-swaddled infant. Maybe something in my expression set off an alarm. Maybe she was already making the connections she would later make, between village babies and this suburban one, between old wives’ tales and new endocrinology … Then again, maybe not. Because as she peered distrustfully over the rail of my crib, she saw my face—and blood intervened. Desdemona’s worried expression hovered above my (similarly) perplexed one. Her mournful eyes gazed down at my (equally) large black orbs. Everything about us was the same. And so she picked me up and I did what