Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [133]
“Where are the closets?” Tessie asked as soon as we got inside.
“Closets?”
“The kitchen’s a million miles away from the family room, Milt. Every time you want a snack you have to traipse all the way across the house.”
“It’ll give us some exercise.”
“And how am I supposed to find curtains for those windows? They don’t make curtains that big. Everyone can see right in!”
“Think of it this way. We can see right out.”
But then there was a scream at the other end of the house:
“Mana!”
Against her better judgment, Desdemona had pressed a button on the wall. “What kind door this is?” she was shouting as we all came running. “It move by itself!”
“Hey, cool,” said Chapter Eleven. “Try it, Cal. Put your head in the doorway. Yeah, like that …”
“Don’t fool with that door, kids.”
“I’m just testing the pressure.”
“Ow!”
“What did I tell you? Birdbrain. Now get your sister out of the door.”
“I’m trying. The button doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t work?”
“Oh, this is wonderful, Milt. No closets, and now we have to call the fire department to get Callie out of the door.”
“It’s not designed to have someone’s neck in it.”
“Mana!”
“Can you breathe, honey?”
“Yeah, but it hurts.”
“It’s like that guy at Carlsbad Caverns,” said Chapter Eleven. “He got stuck and they had to feed him for forty days and then he finally died.”
“Stop wriggling, Callie. You’re making it—”
“I’m not wriggling—”
“I can see Callie’s underwear! I can see Callie’s underwear!”
“Stop that right now.”
“Here, Tessie, take Callie’s leg. Okay, on three. A-one and a-two and a-three!”
We settled in, with our various misgivings. After the incident with the pneumatic door, Desdemona had a premonition that this house of modern conveniences (which was in fact nearly as old as she was) would be the last she would ever live in. She moved what remained of her and my grandfather’s belongings into the guest house—the brass coffee table, the silkworm box, the portrait of Patriarch Athenagoras—but she could never get used to the skylight, which was like a hole in the roof, or the push-pedal faucet in the bathroom, or the box that spoke on the wall. (Every room on Middlesex was equipped with an intercom. Back when they had been installed in the 1940s—over thirty years after the house itself had been built in 1909—the intercoms had probably all worked. But by 1967 you might speak into the kitchen intercom only to have your voice come out in the master bedroom. The speakers distorted our voices, so that we had to listen very closely to understand what was being said, like deciphering a child’s first, garbled speech.)
Chapter Eleven tapped into the pneumatic system in the basement and spent hours sending a Ping-Pong ball around the house through a network of vacuum cleaner hoses. Tessie never stopped complaining about the lack of closet space and the impractical layout, but gradually, thanks to a touch of claustrophobia, she grew to appreciate Middlesex’s glass walls.
Lefty cleaned them. Making himself useful as always, he took upon himself the Sisyphean task of keeping all those Modernist surfaces sparkling. With the same concentration he trained on the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs—a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that might never be completed—Lefty now cleaned the huge picture windows, the fogged glass of the greenhouse, the sliding doors that led to the courtyard, and even the skylights. As he was Windexing the new house, however, Chapter Eleven and I were exploring it. Or, I should say, them. The meditative, pastel yellow cube that faced the street contained the main living quarters. Behind that lay a courtyard with a dry pool and a fragile dogwood leaning