Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [116]
Just before my birthday party had started, Chapter Eleven had been down in his basement laboratory, using a hacksaw on a newfangled Titleist that advertised a “liquid center.” The ball was held firmly in a vise as Chapter Eleven sawed. When he reached the center of the Titleist, there was a loud popping sound followed by a puff of smoke. The center of the ball was empty. Chapter Eleven was mystified. But when he emerged from the basement, we all saw the dots …
Back at the party, my birthday cake is coming out with its seven candles. My mother’s silent lips are telling me to make a wish. What did I wish for at seven? I don’t remember. In the film I lean forward and, Aeolian, blow the candles out. In a moment, they re-ignite. I blow them out again. Same thing happens. And then Chapter Eleven is laughing, entertained at last. That was how our home movies ended, with a prank on my birthday. With candles that had multiple lives.
The question remains: Why was this Milton’s last movie? Can it be explained by the usual petering out of parents’ enthusiasm for documenting their children on film? By the fact that Milton took hundreds of baby photographs of Chapter Eleven and no more than twenty or so of me? To answer these questions, I need to go behind the camera and see things through my father’s eyes.
The reason Milton was disappearing on us: after ten years in business, the diner was no longer making a profit. Through the front window (over Athena olive oil tins) my father looked out day after day at the changes on Pingree Street. The white family who’d lived across the way, good customers once, had moved out. Now the house belonged to a colored man named Morrison. He came into the diner to buy cigarettes. He ordered coffee, asked for a million refills, and smoked. He never ordered any food. He didn’t seem to have a job. Sometimes other people moved into his house, a young woman, maybe Morrison’s daughter, with her kids. Then they were gone and it was just Morrison again. There was a tarp up on his roof with bricks around it, to cover a hole.
Just down the block an after-hours place had opened up. Its patrons urinated in the doorway of the diner on their way home. Streetwalkers had started working Twelfth Street. The dry cleaner’s on the next block over had been held up, the white owner severely beaten. A. A. Laurie, who ran the optometrist’s shop next door, took down his eye chart from the wall as workers removed the neon eyeglasses out front. He was moving to a new shop in Southfield.
My father had considered doing the same.
“That whole neighborhood’s going down the tubes,” Jimmy Fioretos had advised one Sunday after dinner. “Get out while the getting’s good.”
And then Gus Panos, who had had a tracheotomy and spoke through a hole in his neck, hissing like a bellows: “Jimmy’s right … sssss … You should move out to … ssss … Bloomfield Hills.”
Uncle Pete had disagreed, making his usual case for integration and support for President Johnson’s War on Poverty.
A few weeks later, Milton had had the business appraised and was met with a shock: the Zebra Room was worth less than when Lefty had acquired it in 1933. Milton had waited too long to sell it. The getting out was no longer good.
And so the Zebra Room remained on the corner of Pingree and Dexter, the swing music on the jukebox growing increasingly out of date, the celebrities and sports figures on the walls more and more unrecognizable. On Saturdays, my grandfather often took me for a ride in the car. We drove out to Belle Isle to look for deer and then stopped in for lunch at the