Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [138]
But soon he was back in the thirties and was searching the radio, listening for speeches from FDR. He mistook our black milkman for Jimmy Zizmo and sometimes climbed up into his truck, thinking they were going rum-running. Using his chalkboard, he engaged the milkman in conversations about bootleg whiskey, and even if this had made sense, the milkman wouldn’t have been able to understand, because right about this time Lefty’s English began to deteriorate. He made spelling and grammatical mistakes he’d long mastered and soon he was writing broken English and then no English at all. He made written allusions to Bursa, and now Desdemona began to worry. She knew that the backward progression of her husband’s mind could lead to only one place, back to the days when he wasn’t her husband but her brother, and she lay in bed at night awaiting the moment with trepidation. In a sense she began to live in reverse, too, because she suffered the heart palpitations of her youth. O God, she prayed, Let me die now. Before Lefty gets back to the boat. And then one morning when she got up, Lefty was sitting at the breakfast table. His hair was pomaded a la Valentino with some Vaseline he’d found in the medicine chest. A dishrag was wrapped around his neck like a scarf. And on the table was the chalkboard, on which was written, in Greek, “Good morning, sis.”
For three days he teased her as he used to do, and pulled her hair, and performed dirty Karaghiozis puppet shows. Desdemona hid his chalkboard, but it was no use. During Sunday dinner he took a fountain pen from Uncle Pete’s shirt pocket and wrote on the tablecloth, “Tell my sister she’s getting fat.” Desdemona blanched. She put her hands to her face and waited for the blow she’d always feared to descend. But Peter Tatakis only took the pen from Lefty and said, “It appears that Lefty is now under the delusion that you are his sister.” Everyone laughed. What else could they do? Hey there, sis, everyone kept saying to Desdemona all afternoon, and each time she jumped; each time she thought her heart would stop.
But this stage didn’t last long. My grandfather’s mind, locked in its graveyard spiral, accelerated as it hurtled toward its destruction, and three days later he started cooing like a baby and the next he started soiling himself. At that point, when there was almost nothing left of him, God allowed Lefty Stephanides to remain another three months, until the winter of 1970. In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who’d been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away.
From the beginning there existed a strange balance between my grandfather and me. As I cried my first cry, Lefty was silenced; and as he gradually lost the ability to see, to taste, to hear, to think or even remember, I began to see, taste, and remember everything, even stuff I hadn’t seen, eaten, or done. Already latent inside me, like the future 120 mph serve of a tennis prodigy, was the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. So that at the makaria after the funeral, I looked around the table at the Grecian Gardens and knew what everyone was feeling. Milton was beset by a storm of emotion he refused to acknowledge. He worried that if he spoke he might start to cry, and so said nothing