As I’ve mentioned, my brother didn’t pay much attention to me while we were growing up. That weekend, however, spurred on by his new mania for observation, Chapter Eleven took a new interest in me. On Friday afternoon while I was diligently doing some advance homework at the kitchen table, he came and sat down. He stared at me thoughtfully for a long time.
“Latin, huh? That what they’re teaching you in that school?”
“I like it.”
“You a necrophiliac?”
“A what?”
“That’s someone who gets off on dead people. Latin’s dead, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know some Latin.”
“You do?”
“Cunnilingus.”
“Don’t be gross.”
“Fellatio.”
“Ha ha.”
“Mons veneris.”
“I’m dying of laughter. You’re killing me. Look, I’m dead.”
Chapter Eleven was quiet for a while. I tried to go on studying but felt him staring at me. Finally, exasperated, I closed my book. “What are you looking at?” I said.
There was a pause characteristic of my brother. Behind his granny glasses his eyes looked bland, but the mind behind them was working things out.
“I’m looking at my little sister,” he said.
“Okay. You saw her. Now go.”
“I’m looking at my little sister and thinking she doesn’t look like my little sister anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
Again the pause. “I don’t know,” said my brother. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
“Well, when you figure it out, let me know. Right now I’ve got stuff to do.”
On Saturday morning, Chapter Eleven’s girlfriend arrived. Meg Zemka was as small as my mother and as flat-chested as me. Her hair was a mousy brown, her teeth, owing to an impoverished childhood, not well cared for. She was a waif, an orphan, a runt, and six times as powerful as my brother.
“What are you studying up at college, Meg?” my father asked at dinner.
“Poli. sci.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“I doubt you’d like my emphasis. I’m a Marxist.”
“Oh, you are, are you?”
“You run a bunch of restaurants, right?”
“That’s right. Hercules Hot Dogs. Haven’t you ever had one? We’ll have to take you down to one of our stands.”
“Meg doesn’t eat meat,” my mother reminded.
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” said Milton. “Well, you can have some french fries. We’ve got french fries.”
“What do you pay your workers?” Meg asked.
“The ones behind the counter? They get minimum wage.”
“And you live out here in this big house in Grosse Pointe.”
“That’s because I handle the entire business and accept the risk.”
“Sounds like exploitation to me.”
“It does, does it?” Milton smiled. “Well, if giving somebody a job is exploiting them, then I guess I’m an exploiter. Those jobs didn’t exist before I started the business.”
“That’s like saying that the slaves didn’t have jobs until they built the plantations.”
“You got a real live wire here,” Milton said, turning to my brother. “Where did you find her?”
“I found him,” said Meg. “On top of an elevator.”
That was when we learned how Chapter Eleven was spending his time at college. His favorite pastime was to unscrew the ceiling panel on the dorm elevator and climb up on top. He sat there for hours, riding up and down in the darkness.
“The first time I did it,” Chapter Eleven now confessed, “the car started going up to the top. I thought I might get crushed. But they leave some air space.”
“This is what we’re paying your tuition for?” Milton asked.
“That’s what you’re exploiting your workers for,” said Meg.
Tessie made Chapter Eleven and Meg sleep in separate bedrooms, but in the middle of the night there was a lot of tiptoeing and giggling in the dark. Trying to be the big sister I never had, Meg gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Chapter Eleven, swept up in the sexual revolution, tried to educate me, too.
“You ever masturbate, Cal?”
“What!”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed. It’s natural. This friend of mine told me you could do it with your hand. So I went into the bathroom—“
“I don’t want to hear about—“
“—and tried it out. All of sudden, all the muscles in my penis started contracting—“
“In our bathroom?”
“—And then I ejaculated. It felt really amazing. You should try it, Cal, if you haven’t already. Girls are a little different, but physiologically it’s pretty much the same. I mean, the penis and the clitoris are analogous structures. You gotta experiment to see what works.”
I put my fingers in my ears and started humming.
“You don’t have to have any hang-ups with me,” Chapter Eleven said loudly. “I’m your brother.”
The rock music, the reverence for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the avocado pits sprouting on the windowsill, the rainbow-colored rolling papers. What else? Oh yeah: my brother had stopped using deodorant.
“You stink!” I objected one day, sitting next to him in the TV room.
Chapter Eleven gave the tiniest of shrugs. “I’m a human,” he said. “This is what humans smell like.”
“Then humans stink.”
“Do you think I stink, Meg?”
“No way,” nuzzling up to his armpit. “It turns me on.”
“Will you guys get out of here! I’m trying to watch this show.”
“Hey, baby, my little sister wants us to split. What do you say to a little nookie?”
“Groovy.”
“See you, sis. We’ll be upstairs in flagrante delicto.”
Where could all this lead? Only to family dissension, shouting matches, and heartbreak. On New Year’s Eve, as Milton and Tessie toasted the new year with glasses of Cold Duck, Chapter Eleven and Meg swigged on bottles of Elephant Malt Liquor, going outside every so often to secretly smoke a joint. Milton said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about finally making that trip to the old country. We could go back and see papou and yia yia’s village.”
“And fix that church, like you promised,” said Tessie.
“What do you think?” Milton asked Chapter Eleven. “Maybe we could take a family vacation this summer.”
“Not me,” said Chapter Eleven.
“Why not?”
“Tourism is just another form of colonialism.”
And so on and so forth. Before long, Chapter Eleven declared that he didn’t share Milton and Tessie’s values. Milton asked what was wrong with their values. Chapter Eleven said he was against materialism. “All you care about is money,” he told Milton. “I don’t want to live like this.” He gestured toward the room. Chapter Eleven was against our living room, everything we had, everything Milton had worked for. He was against Middlesex! Then shouting; and Chapter Eleven uttering two words to Milton, one beginning with f, the other with y; and more shouting, and Chapter Eleven’s motorcycle roaring away, with Meg on the back.
What had happened to Chapter Eleven? Why had he changed so much? It was being away from home, Tessie said. It was the times. It was all this trouble with the war. I, however, have a different answer. I suspect that Chapter Eleven’s transformation was caused in no small part by that day on his bed when his life was decided by lottery. Am I projecting? Saddling my brother with my own obsessions with chance and fate? Maybe. But as we planned a trip—a trip that had been promised when Milton was saved from another war—it appeared that Chapter Eleven, taking chemical trips of his own, was trying to escape what he had dimly perceived while wrapped in an afghan: the possibility that not only his draft number was decided by lottery, but that everything was. Chapter Eleven was hiding from this discovery, hiding behind windowpane, hiding on the top of elevators, hiding in the bed of Meg Zemka with her multiple O’s and bad teeth, Meg Zemka who hissed in his ear while they made love, “Forget your family, man! They’re bourgeois pigs! Your dad’s an exploiter, man! Forget ’em. They’re dead, man. Dead. This is what’s real. Right here. Come and get it, baby!”