Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [156]
My brother was lying on his bed, wrapped in an old afghan Tessie had crocheted for him. His head extended from one end—eyes glazed—and his white legs from the other. Across the room his stereo amplifier was on, the radio needle jumping.
That spring, Chapter Eleven had received two letters, one from the University of Michigan informing him of his acceptance and the other from the U.S. government informing him of his eligibility for the draft. Since then my apolitical brother had been taking an unusual interest in current events. Every night, he watched the news with Milton, tracking military developments and paying close attention to the guarded statements of Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks. “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac,” Kissinger famously said, and it must have been true: because Chapter Eleven was glued to the set night after night, following the machinations of diplomacy. At the same time, Milton was pricked by the strange desire of parents, and especially of fathers, to see their children repeat their own sufferings. “Might do you some good being in the service,” he said. To which Chapter Eleven replied, “I’ll go to Canada.” “You will not. If they call you up, you’ll serve your country just like I did.” And then Tessie: “Don’t worry. The whole thing’ll be over before they can get you.”
In the summer of ’72, however, as I watched my number-stunned brother, the war was still officially on. Nixon’s Christmas bombings were still awaiting their holiday season. Kissinger was still shuttling between Paris and Washington to maintain his sex appeal. In actuality, the Paris Peace Accords would be signed the following January and the last American troops would pull out of Vietnam in March. But as I peeked in at my brother’s inert body, no one knew that yet. I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent to war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable? I felt a sympathy and protectiveness for my brother I’d never felt before. I thought of Chapter Eleven in an army uniform, squatting in the jungle. I imagined him wounded on a stretcher, and I started to cry. The voice on the radio droned on: “February twenty-first—one hundred and forty-one. February twenty-second—seventy-four. February twenty-third—two hundred and six.”
I waited until March 20, Chapter Eleven’s birthday. When the voice announced his draft number—it was two hundred and ninety, he would never go to war—I burst into his room. Chapter Eleven leapt out of bed. We looked at each other and—almost unheard of between us—we hugged.
The next fall, my brother left not for Canada but for Ann Arbor. Once again, as when Chapter Eleven’s egg had dropped, I was left alone. Alone at home to note my father’s growing anger at the nightly news, his frustration at the “half-assed” way the Americans were waging the war (napalm notwithstanding) and his increasing sympathy for President Nixon. Alone, also, to detect a feeling of uselessness that began to plague my mother. With Chapter Eleven out of the house and me growing up, Tessie found herself with too much time on her hands. She began to fill her days with classes at the War Memorial Community Center. She learned decoupage. She wove plant hangers. Our house began to fill up with her craft projects. There were painted baskets and beaded curtains, paperweights with various objects suspended in them, dried flowers, colored grains and beans. She went antiquing and hung an old washboard on the wall. She took yoga, too.
It was the combination of Milton’s disgust at the antiwar movement and Tessie’s sense of uselessness that led them to begin reading the entire one-hundred-and-fifteen-volume set of the Great Books series. Uncle Pete had been touting these books for a long time, not to mention quoting from them liberally to score points in Sunday de bates. And now, with so much learning in the air—Chapter Eleven majoring in engineering, I myself taking first-year Latin with