Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [181]
“Okay,” I said, after a long while, “my turn.”
But that night was like all the others. She was asleep.
It was never my turn with the Object.
They come back to me, the scattered days of that summer with the Object, each encased in a souvenir snow globe. Let me shake them up again. Watch the flakes float down:
We are lying in bed together on a Saturday morning. The Object is on her back. I’m fulcrumed on one elbow, leaning over to inspect her face.
“You know what sleep is?” I say.
“What?”
“Snot.”
“It is not.”
“It is. It’s mucus. It’s snot that comes out your eyes.”
“That’s so gross!”
“You’ve got a little sleep in your eyes, my dear,” I say in a fake deep voice. With my finger I flick the crust from the Object’s eyelashes.
“I can’t believe I’m letting you do this,” she says. “You’re touching my snot.”
We look at each other a moment.
“I’m touching your snot!” I scream. And we writhe around, throwing pillows and screaming some more.
On another day, the Object is taking a bath. She has her own bathroom. I’m on the bed, reading a gossip magazine.
“You can tell Jane Fonda isn’t really naked in that movie,” I say.
“How?”
“She’s got a body stocking on. You can see it.”
I go into the bathroom to show her. In the claw-footed tub, under a layer of whipped cream, the Object lolls, pumicing one heel.
She looks at the photograph and says, “You’re never naked, either.”
I am frozen, speechless.
“Do you have some kind of complex?”
“No, I don’t have a complex.”
“What are you afraid of, then?”
“I’m not afraid.”
The Object knows this isn’t true. But her intentions aren’t malicious. She isn’t trying to catch me out, only to put me at ease. My modesty baffles her.
“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she says. “You’re my best friend.”
I pretend to be engrossed in the magazine. I can’t get myself to look away. Inside, however, I’m bursting with happiness. I’m erupting with joy, but I keep staring at the magazine as though I’m mad at it.
It’s late. We’ve stayed up watching TV. The Object is brushing her teeth when I come into the bathroom. I pull down my underpants and sit on the toilet. I do this sometimes as a compensatory tactic. The T-shirt is long enough to cover my lap. I pee while the Object brushes.
It’s then I smell smoke. Looking up, I see, besides a toothbrush in the Object’s mouth, a cigarette.
“You even smoke while you brush your teeth?”
She looks at me sideways. “Menthol,” she says.
The thing about those souvenirs, though: the glitter falls fast.
A reminder taped to our refrigerator brought me back to reality: “Dr. Bauer, July 22, 2 p.m.”
I was filled with dread. Dread of the perverted gynecologist and his inquisitorial instruments. Dread of the metal things that would spread my legs and of the doohickey that would spread something else. And dread of what all this spreading might reveal.
It was in this state, this emotional foxhole, that I started going to church again. One Sunday in early July my mother and I dressed up (Tessie in heels, me not) and drove down to Assumption. Tessie was suffering, too. It had been six months since Chapter Eleven had sped away from Middlesex on his motorcycle, and since that time he hadn’t been back. Worse, in April he had broken the news that he was dropping out of college. He was planning to move to the Upper Peninsula with some friends and, as he put it, live off the land. “You don’t think he’d do something crazy like run off and marry that Meg, do you?” Tessie asked Milton. “Let’s hope not,” he answered. Tessie worried that Chapter Eleven wasn’t taking care of himself, either. He wasn’t going to the dentist regularly. His vegetarianism made him pale. And he was losing his hair. At the age of twenty. This made Tessie feel suddenly old.
United in anxiety, seeking solace for differing complaints (Tessie wanting to get rid of her pains while I wanted mine to begin), we entered the church. As far as I could