As sperm meets egg, I feel a jolt. There’s a loud sound, a sonic boom as my world cracks. I feel myself shift, already losing bits of my prenatal omniscience, tumbling toward the blank slate of personhood. (With the shred of all-knowingness I have left, I see my grandfather, Lefty Stephanides, on the night of my birth nine months from now, turning a demitasse cup upside down on a saucer. I see his coffee grounds forming a sign as pain explodes in his temple and he topples to the floor.) Again the sperm rams my capsule; and I realize I can’t put it off any longer. The lease on my terrific little apartment is finally up and I’m being evicted. So I raise one fist (male-typically) and begin to beat on the walls of my eggshell until it cracks. Then, slippery as a yolk, I dive headfirst into the world.
“I’m sorry, little baby girl,” my mother said in bed, touching her belly and already speaking to me. “I wanted it to be more romantic.”
“You want romantic?” said my father. “Where’s my clarinet?”
BOOK THREE
HOME MOVIES
My eyes, switched on at last, saw the following: a nurse reaching out to take me from the doctor; my mother’s triumphant face, as big as Mount Rushmore, as she watched me heading for my first bath. (I said it was impossible, but still I remember it.) Also other things, material and immaterial: the relentless glare of OR lights; white shoes squeaking over white floors; a housefly contaminating gauze; and all around me, up and down the halls of Women’s Hospital, individual dramas under way. I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new father’s terror as he calculated the tuition for triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.
The nurse who cleaned me up was named Rosalee. She was a pretty, long-faced woman from the Tennessee mountains. After suctioning the mucus from my nostrils, she gave me a shot of vitamin K to coagulate my blood. Inbreeding is common in Appalachia, as are genetic deformities, but Nurse Rosalee noticed nothing unusual about me. She was concerned about a purple splotch on my cheek, thinking it was a port-wine stain. It turned out to be placenta, and washed off. Nurse Rosalee carried me back to Dr. Philobosian for an anatomical exam. She placed me down on the table but kept one hand on me for security’s sake. She’d noticed the doctor’s hand tremor during the delivery.
In 1960, Dr. Nishan Philobosian was seventy-four. He had a camel’s head, drooping on its neck, with all the activity in the cheeks. White hair surrounded his otherwise bald head in a nimbus and plugged his big ears like cotton. His surgeon’s eyeglasses had rectangular loupes attached.
He began with my neck, searching for cretinous folds. He counted my fingers and toes. He inspected my palate; he noted my Moro reflex without surprise. He checked my backside for a sacral tail. Then, putting me on my back again, he took hold of each of my curved legs and pulled them apart.
What did he see? The clean, saltwater mussel of the female genitalia. The area inflamed, swollen with hormones. That touch of the baboon all babies have. Dr. Philobosian would have had to pull the folds apart to see any better, but he didn’t. Because right at that instant Nurse Rosalee (for whom the moment was also destiny) accidentally touched his arm. Dr. Phil looked up. Presbyopic, Armenian eyes met middle-aged, Appalachian ones. The gaze lingered, then broke away. Five minutes old, and already the themes of my life—chance and sex—announced themselves. Nurse Rosalee blushed. “Beautiful,” Dr. Philobosian said, meaning me but looking at his assistant. “A beautiful, healthy girl.”
On Seminole, the birth celebrations were tempered by the prospect of death.
Desdemona had found Lefty on our kitchen floor, lying next to his overturned coffee cup. She knelt beside him and pressed an ear to his chest. When she heard no heartbeat, she cried out his name. Her wail echoed off the kitchen’s hard surfaces: the toaster, the oven, the refrigerator. Finally she collapsed on his chest. In the silence that followed, however, Desdemona felt a strange emotion rising inside her. It spread in the space between her panic and grief. It was like a gas inflating her. Soon her eyes snapped open as she recognized the emotion: it was happiness. Tears were running down her face, she was already berating God for taking her husband from her, but on the other side of these proper emotions was an altogether improper relief. The worst had happened. This was it: the worst thing. For the first time in her life my grandmother had nothing to worry about.
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I’ll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here’s where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I’m a part of it. I’m talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn’t been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.
The happiness that attends disaster didn’t possess Desdemona for long. A few seconds later she returned her head to her husband’s chest—and heard his heart beating! Lefty was rushed to the hospital. Two days later he regained consciousness. His mind was clear, his memory intact. But when he tried to ask whether the baby was a boy or a girl, he found he was unable to speak.
According to Julie Kikuchi, beauty is always freakish. Yesterday, over strudel and coffee at Café Einstein, she tried to prove this to me. “Look at this model,” she said, holding up a fashion magazine. “Look at her ears. They belong on a Martian.” She started flipping pages. “Or look at the mouth on this one. You could put your whole head in it.”
I was trying to get another cappuccino. The waiters in their Austrian uniforms ignored me, as they do everyone, and outside, the yellow lindens were dripping and weeping.
“Or what about Jackie O.?” said Julie, still advocating. “Her eyes were so wide-set they were basically on the sides of her head. She looked like a hammerhead.”
I’m working up with the foregoing to a physical description of myself. Baby pictures of the infant Calliope show a variety of features on the freakish side. My parents, looking fondly down into my crib, got stuck on every one. (I sometimes think that it was the arresting, slightly disturbing quality of my face that distracted everyone’s attention from the complications below.) Imagine my crib as a diorama in a museum. Press one button and my ears light up like two golden trumpets. Press another and my stark chin begins to glow. Another, and the high, ethereal cheekbones appear out of the darkness. So far the effect isn’t promising. On the evidence of ears, chin, and cheekbones I might be a baby Kafka. But the next button illuminates my mouth and things begin to improve. The mouth is small but well shaped, kissable, musical. Then, in the middle of the map, comes the nose. It is nothing like the noses you see in classical Greek sculpture. Here is a nose that came to Asia Minor, like silk itself, from the East. In this case, the Middle East. The nose of the diorama baby already forms, if you look closely, an arabesque. Ears, nose, mouth, chin—now eyes. Not only are they widely set (like Jackie O.’s), they’re big. Too big for a baby’s face. Eyes like my grandmother’s. Eyes as big and sad as the eyes in a Keane painting. Eyes rimmed with long, dark eyelashes my mother couldn’t believe had formed inside her. How had her body worked in such detail? The complexion around these eyes: a pale olive. The hair: jet black. Now press all the buttons at once. Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.