That evening, when my mother and I got back to the hotel, Milton had a surprise. Tickets to a Broadway musical. I acted excited but later, after dinner, crawled into my parents’ bed, claiming I was too tired to go.

“Too tired?” Milton said. “What do you mean you’re too tired?”

“That’s okay, honey,” said Tessie. “You don’t have to go.”

“Supposed to be a good show, Cal.”

“Is Ethel Merman in it?” I asked.

“No, smartass,” Milton said, smiling. “Ethel Merman is not in it. She’s not on Broadway right now. So we’re seeing something with Carol Channing. She’s pretty good, too. Why don’t you come along?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Okay, then. You’re missing out.”

They started to go. “Bye, honey,” my mother said.

Suddenly I jumped out of bed and ran to Tessie, hugging her.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

My eyes brimmed with tears. Tessie took them to be tears of relief at everything we’d been through. In the narrow entryway carved from a former suite, cockeyed, dim, the two of us stood hugging and crying.

When they were gone, I got my suitcase from the closet. Then, looking at the turquoise flowers, I exchanged it for my father’s suitcase, a gray Samsonite. I left my skirts and my Fair Isle sweater in the dresser drawers. I packed only the darker garments, a blue crew neck, the alligator shirts, and my corduroys. The brassiere I abandoned, too. For the time being, I held on to my socks and panties, and I tossed in my toiletry case entire. When I was finished, I searched in Milton’s garment bag for the cash he’d hidden there. The wad was fairly large and came to nearly three hundred dollars.

It wasn’t all Dr. Luce’s fault. I had lied to him about many things. His decision was based on false data. But he had been false in turn.

On a piece of stationery, I left a note for my parents.

Despite its content, I signed this declaration to my parents: “Callie.”

It was the last time I was ever their daughter.

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

Once again, in Berlin, a Stephanides lives among the Turks. I feel comfortable here in Schöneberg. The Turkish shops along Hauptstrasse are like those my father used to take me to. The food is the same, the dried figs, the halvah, the stuffed grape leaves. The faces are the same, too, seamed, dark-eyed, significantly boned. Despite family history, I feel drawn to Turkey. I’d like to work in the embassy in Istanbul. I’ve put in a request to be transferred there. It would bring me full circle.

Until that happens, I do my part this way. I watch the bread baker in the döner restaurant downstairs. He bakes bread in a stone oven like those they used to have in Smyrna. He uses a long-handled spatula to shift and retrieve the bread. All day long he works, fourteen, sixteen hours, with unflagging concentration, his sandals leaving prints in the flour dust on the floor. An artist of bread baking. Stephanides, an American, grandchild of Greeks, admires this Turkish immigrant to Germany, this Gastarbeiter, as he bakes bread on Hauptstrasse here in the year 2001. We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

The bell on the door of Ed’s Barbershop in the Scranton bus station merrily rang. Ed, who had been reading the newspaper, lowered it to greet his next customer.

There was a pause. And then Ed said, “What happened? You lose a bet?”

Standing inside the door but looking as though he might flee back out of it was a teenage kid, tall, stringy, and an odd mix if ever Ed saw one. His hair was a hippie’s and came down past his shoulders. But he was wearing a dark suit. The jacket was baggy and the trousers were too short, riding high above his chunky tan, square-toed shoes. Even from across the shop Ed detected a musty, thrift-store smell. Yet the kid’s suitcase was big and gray, a businessman’s.

“I’m just tired of the style,” the kid answered.

“You and me both,” said Ed the barber.

He directed me to a chair. I—the easily rechristened Cal Stephanides, teen runaway—set my suitcase down and hung my jacket on the rack. I walked across the room, concentrating as I did on walking like a boy. Like a stroke victim, I was having to relearn all the simple motor skills. As far as walking went, this wasn’t too difficult. The time when Baker & Inglis girls had balanced books on their heads was long gone. The slight gracelessness of my walk, which Dr. Luce had commented on, predisposed me to join the graceless sex. My skeleton was a male’s, with its higher center of gravity. It promoted a tidy, forward thrust. It was my knees that gave me trouble. I had a tendency to walk knock-kneed, which made my hips sway and my back end twitch. I tried to keep my pelvis steady now. To walk like a boy you let your shoulders sway, not your hips. And you kept your feet farther apart. All this I had learned in a day and a half on the road.

I climbed into the chair, glad to stop moving. Ed the barber tied a paper bib around my neck. Next he draped an apron over me. All the while he was taking my measure and shaking his head. “I never understood what it was with you young people and the long hair. Nearly ruined my business. I get mostly retired fellas in here. Guys who come in my shop for a haircut, they don’t have any hair.” He chuckled, but only briefly. “Okay, so nowadays the hairstyles are a little bit shorter. I think, good, maybe I can make a living. But no. Now everyone wants to go unisex. They want to be shampooed.” He leaned toward me, suspicious. “You don’t want a shampoo, do you?”

“Just a haircut.”

He nodded, satisfied. “How do you want it?”

“Short,” I ventured.

“Short short?” he asked.

“Short,” I said, “but not too short.”

“Okay. Short but not too short. Good idea. See how the other half lives.”

I froze, thinking he meant something by this. But he was only joking.

As for himself, Ed kept a neat head. What hair he had was slicked back. He had a brutal, pugnacious face. His nostrils were dark and fiery as he labored around me, pumping up the chair and stropping his razor.

“Your father let you keep your hair like this?”

“Up until now.”

“So the old man is finally straightening you out. Listen, you won’t regret it. Women don’t want a guy looks like a girl. Don’t believe what they tell you, they want a sensitive male. Bullshit!”

The swearing, the straight razors, the shaving brushes, all these were my welcome to the masculine world. The barber had the football game on the TV. The calendar showed a vodka bottle and a pretty girl in a white fur bikini. I planted my feet on the waffle iron of the footrest while he swiveled me back and forth before the flashing mirrors.

“Holy mackerel, when’s the last time you had a haircut anyway?”

“Remember the moon landing?”

“Yeah. That’s about right.”

He turned me to face the mirror. And there she was, for the last time, in the silvered glass: Calliope. She still wasn’t gone yet. She was like a captive spirit, peeking out.

Ed the barber put a comb in my long hair. He lifted it experimentally, making snipping sounds with his scissors. The blades weren’t touching my hair. The snipping was only a kind of mental barbering, a limbering up. This gave me time for second thoughts. What was I doing? What if Dr. Luce was right? What if that girl in the mirror really was me? How did I think I could defect to the other side so easily? What did I know about boys, about men? I didn’t even like them that much.