Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [205]
They took hold of my underpants. They tugged them down. The elastic caught on my skin, then gave.
The doctor bent closer, mumbling to himself. The intern, rather unprofessionally, raised one hand to her throat and then pretended to fix her collar.
Chekhov was right. If there’s a gun on the wall, it’s got to go off. In real life, however, you never know where the gun is hanging. The gun my father kept under his pillow never fired a shot. The rifle over the Object’s mantel never did either. But in the emergency room things were different. There was no smoke, no gunpowder smell, absolutely no sound at all. Only the way the doctor and nurse reacted made it clear that my body had lived up to the narrative requirements.
One scene remains to be described in this portion of my life. It took place a week later, back on Middlesex, and featured me, a suitcase, and a tree. I was in my bedroom, sitting on the window seat. It was just before noon. I was dressed in traveling clothes, a gray pantsuit with a white blouse. I was reaching out my window, picking berries off the mulberry tree that grew outside. For the last hour I’d been eating the berries to distract myself from the sound coming from my parents’ bedroom.
The mulberries had ripened in the last week. They were fat and juicy. The berries stained my hands. Outside, the sidewalk was splotched purple, as was the grass itself, and the rocks in the flower beds. The sound in my parents’ bedroom was my mother weeping.
I got up. I went over to the open suitcase and checked again to see if I’d packed everything. My parents and I were leaving in an hour. We were going to New York City to see a famous doctor. I didn’t know how long we’d be gone or what was wrong with me. I didn’t pay much attention to the details. I only knew I was no longer a girl like other girls.
Orthodox monks smuggled silk out of China in the sixth century. They brought it to Asia Minor. From there it spread to Europe, and finally traveled across the sea to North America. Benjamin Franklin fostered the silk industry in Pennsylvania before the American Revolution. Mulberry trees were planted all over the United States. As I picked those berries out my bedroom window, however, I had no idea that our mulberry tree had anything to do with the silk trade, or that my grandmother had had trees just like it behind her house in Turkey. That mulberry tree had stood outside my bedroom on Middlesex, never divulging its significance to me. But now things are different. Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough. So I can’t possibly finish up this section of my life without mentioning the following fact:
The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the Bombyx mori, no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: “The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults do not fly.”
BOOK FOUR
THE ORACULAR VULVA
From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.
My parents had at first refused to believe the emergency