The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  Zillah hadn’t grown up at all. I had grown into something I despised. The darkness came and went, a cool sponge passed over my arms and legs, a trickle of warm, aromatic soup flowed down my throat. ‘At the university,’ Dr Yu said, ‘they pulled the foreign-language books from the shelves and burnt them in the courtyard.’

  I tried to listen, but Zillah’s voice took over. She walked me through my body and gave me a guided tour of my life – the skin stripped off, the deep and superficial fascia pushed aside, the muscles reflected gently until the cavities lay open. Then the brain wrapped in its meninges; lungs and bronchi tucked in the pleura; trachea, esophagus, and heart confined in the mediastinum. Below the diaphragm, the abdominal organs hid modestly behind the fatty omentum. I found that I knew my way around, that it was no great leap from the animals I’d once studied to me.

  Pay attention, Zillah said. These are the rest of your places.

  ‘The place where they sent us was like another country,’ Dr Yu said.

  My organs lit up one by one, as they had in the film strip I’d seen in college before our first dissection. Stomach, esophagus, small intestine: smooth, pink, slick. Spleen, gall-bladder, liver: softer, darker. Uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes: tangled, twisted; kidneys and bladder firm like fists; lungs and trachea hollow.

  ‘The pigs had parasites,’ Dr Yu said. ‘We had no grain to feed them.’

  Can you see the places? Zillah asked.

  I could. I could see my body as if it lay below a hanging cold light, each organ well lit and clearly defined.

  You are a palace, Zillah said. Rocky had called me a temple.

  ‘These people here,’ said Dr Yu, ‘the ones here side by side with my husband, they are the same who stood against us in struggle sessions. The same who broke our things, destroyed our papers, labeled us bad elements. When we were rehabilitated we returned to them, to our danwei, and now we all must act as though the lost years never happened.’

  These organs are your places, Zillah said, overriding Dr Yu. These pictures are the ones you need to find your memories. In the beds across from me, rows of bodies tossed and turned and sought some bit of comfort, some form of peace. I plucked at the damp sheet between my legs and struggled to hang onto Dr Yu’s voice, to hear what she was giving me. Zillah’s voice drove out everything else, recounting my past deeds and telling me truly the whole week long the history of my heart.

  III

  LOST LIVES

  1974–1986

  PATIENT’S

  HUSBAND: Doctor, I am sure my wife has become mad. Half an hour ago, I went home with my son. As soon as we walked into the yard, then I saw a woman standing under the big tree. Oh! What a dreadful sight! A rope was hanging on that tree. The very woman preparing to hang herself was my wife, so immediately we brought her here. We trust you, Doctor, you can save her.

  DOCTOR: (turning to patient) What’s the matter?

  PATIENT: I am tired of life. I cannot sleep. Everything irritates me. I feel that everything in the world and even my life is senseless to me. I am not only useless but also a burden on other human beings. I think that killing myself will benefit other human beings. I wish to die.

  DOCTOR: Everyone has something bothering him, but they don’t always look at the world through dark-colored glasses; they can correctly deal with such things. I am sure we can cure you, if you co-operate. From now on, you don’t have to be upset about such trifles.

  —adapted from A Dialogue in the Hospitals

  A Green Painting Marked with Blue

  Chief among the things I had wished to forget was my brief marriage to Randy Martone.

  We’d met in 1974 at an art class at the University of Massachusetts, when I was a freshman and he was a junior and only a little crazy, just crazy enough to be irresistible to me. He showed up in my dorm room after our second class together, armed with a sketchpad and a box of charcoal, and when I opened the door he said, ‘Let me draw you. You’re beautiful.’

  I weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds then, after six months of crash-dieting to celebrate my escape from home and my entry into college. Forty pounds less than I’d weighed during much of high school – not slim, not by anyone’s standards, but not bad for me. My breasts and hips had emerged like lost islands from my adolescent sea of flesh, and I had a shape, a very ripe shape. I had a navel unencumbered by a roll of fat, wrists and cheek-bones and a notion of a waist, long blond hair and pretty shoulders. I looked better than I had since I’d been four, but no one ever called me beautiful. In our figure-drawing class, I sketched nudes like everyone else and had plenty of time to draw the body I wished I had.

  ‘I have to see your legs,’ Randy said. ‘Why are you being so shy? This is all part of learning to be an artist.’

  I wanted to believe him. I could believe his interest in my body was artistic – we were art majors, both of us, full of grand plans – but I hadn’t willingly let anyone see my thighs in years and it took weeks for Randy to talk me out of my clothes. I embarked on the world’s longest striptease – my arms one week, and then my arms and shoulders; my feet and then my calves and then my knees. Working always toward the center, draped demurely in a sheet; the sheet eventually dropped to expose the tops of my breasts and then, a week later, my whole chest. Randy went into raptures and I almost believed him – my breasts, overblown as they were, were the only parts of my body I’d ever liked.

  A week later the sheet dropped entirely and Randy set aside his drawing pad and led me to bed, what he’d wanted all along. What I’d wanted too, although I couldn’t admit it – Randy was beautiful, black-pelted and swarthy and strongly muscled, and when I curled my arm around his waist his strength and solid roundness amazed me. He felt like a tree: that rooted, that alive. I felt like a thief. I couldn’t believe I could get away with touching him. I couldn’t believe he wanted me. He praised every part of me, the soft flesh swelling my inner thighs, the endless reaches of my hips, and in his drawings I looked voluptuous and rich. Under his hands and eyes my flaws seemed to melt away, so that on certain mornings I’d cross the room in front of him without clutching a towel to my waist. Sheer miracle, I thought, and I dove in fast.

  Randy was a skilled draftsman, with a line as pure as Picasso’s, but he gave up on that while we were still in school and turned to painting instead. Color, vibrancy, thick blobs of paint; paint thrown and dropped and swirled. His paintings were startling and full of bite, and meanwhile I drew plants with a pen and finished them with quiet watercolor washes. I hated oils and acrylics and froze when I had to work with them. Randy made fun of my timidity, but he did so gently and when, after two years, he said, ‘Let’s get married,’ I said yes, not caring that I’d have to drop out of school or that neither of us had any money or any prospects. Randy loved my ass and that was all I needed.

  ‘Let’s go to Philadelphia,’ he said, his square-palmed hands on my knees.

  He figured New York was too expensive but that Philadelphia was close enough. He had a cache of paintings and ideas for more and was sure that he could sell them, and I had faith in him. I’d waitress, I thought. Or drive a cab. Something romantic and bohemian. And at night I’d work on my own drawings, under Randy’s guiding eye. Randy had visions of us in a loft somewhere near South Street, celebrating the sales of his huge paintings and smiling under the flattery of gallery owners.

  But nothing worked out the way he wanted. No one wanted Randy’s paintings, which bore a disconcerting resemblance to the work filling the gallery windows. And we couldn’t afford to rent a place even remotely close to downtown. We ended up banished to the blue-collar northeast, where rows of three-story houses stood welded together at the sides. Rank after rank, stone and brick alternating with asphalt shingles: they were dark and airless, with windows only front and back, and the top floor we rented in one proved to be noisy as well. Our landlords argued downstairs, their voices rising and falling with the passage of the commuter train that ran behind our block. Our neig
hbors drove buses, worked in factories, built buildings and roads, typed and filed, ran day-care centers in their living rooms. Everyone struggled simply to get by. Women walked back from the grocery store with single bags of food, which they pulled behind them in metal carts. The dogs were thin. The cats were wild and dirty. The children had scabs on their lips.

  I thought I was prepared for that life. I thought I wanted it. During my first two years of high school, before my grandmother Mumu died and I got fat and strange, two boys – Mark Berman, Chuck Saylor – had been my best friends. Most of our classmates had referred to us as the Nerd Patrol, and it’s true that we were an odd trio. Me chunky, in chinos and my father’s cast-off shirts, no make-up, no blow-dried hair, no anything my mother liked; Chuck with his almost albino curls and pale freckled skin and watery eyes behind black-framed glasses; Mark gangly and goofy-faced and floppy-jointed. Chuck had five brothers and sisters and lived in a rambling, broken-down house that smelled of kielbasa and sauerkraut and had dim halls leading to rooms that went up two steps, down three. Mark had no father and lived with his mother in public housing down by the river, down where Zillah used to live. All three of us were embarrassed by the ways we lived, and we tried never to bring each other home. Whenever we could, until it grew so cold we couldn’t bear it, we hung out behind the Star Market or beneath the railroad bridge or in the woods, and we yearned to be old enough to have a car. Not that any of us could have bought one – but we didn’t think about that. We thought about rolled windows, a heater that worked, privacy.

  ‘Marx was poor,’ Chuck used to say, when we paced the woods in our old coats. ‘No food, no money, never a decent place to live.’

  ‘Lenin was poor,’ Mark said. ‘Dostoevsky. Van Gogh. We’re supposed to be poor. Everyone interesting was poor when they were young. I think it’s a rule.’

  ‘Some rule,’ I said. Oh, we were pathetic, always sitting together in class, ignoring the teachers, ignoring the other students while we buried ourselves in books we hardly understood, books we carried around so that people could marvel at their strangeness. We read dark things, foreign things, things beloved of troubled teenagers. Kafka, Baudelaire, Henry Miller. Dostoevsky (never Tolstoy), Celine, Camus, Marx. Nietzsche. Schopenhauer. Always in cheap paperbacks that we bought secondhand, the thin, tightly printed pages heavily marked by strangers’ notes. We read to escape, to make sense of a world in which we had no place. We read because we were so impossible socially that we could do nothing else. We read to kill time, to obliterate the awful years until we could emerge as adults.

  Chuck and Mark played chess and wrote. I drew and played the guitar. We agreed that our families were unbearable, pawns of a capitalist system, and we knew that we’d be different when we grew up. Mark was going to be a writer, Chuck a socialist. I was going to be some sort of artist. We worked after school at the Star Market, Chuck and Mark stocking shelves while I fried doughnuts in the bakery, and while our plans were vague they always included a moment when we emerged full-grown from our disfiguring skins and startled everyone: larvae into luna moths.

  Chuck and Mark had vanished from my life when Mumu died and I dove into my motorcycle stage, but I thought my time with them had set me up for life with Randy. I told myself that the kind of poor we were living wasn’t the poor of my childhood but the right poor, the interesting poor, the kind of poor Chuck and Mark and I had dreamed about. Virtue. Solidarity. We were having an adventure. We set aside one of our three rooms for Randy’s studio, so he could paint the pictures that would make him famous and change our lives, but he couldn’t work.

  ‘Too ugly,’ he said disdainfully. ‘Look at those people. Look at those streets.’

  Our neighborhood wasn’t so bad – it looked like Westfield, where I’d grown up, or like Holyoke, where Randy had. Maybe a little worse. ‘The light’s bad,’ Randy complained. ‘There’s no one to talk to. No stimulation. The streets look like shit. What do you want me to do?’

  Get a job, was what I was thinking by the time we were six months into our marriage. I wasn’t finding our poverty so interesting after all. Teach, I thought. Do something. But he wouldn’t consider working, not even part-time; he said work interfered with the flow of his energy, and that I’d have to support us for a while.

  I got a job out of self-defense, typing income-tax forms for three Swedenborgian accountants. Randy resented this wildly, especially during the late-spring crunch. ‘How can you work for these people?’ he said, although he was glad enough to have money for beer and paint and pot. ‘They wear suits. They drive station wagons. They think they have a pipeline to God.’

  ‘You have a better idea?’ I asked. I would have taken that pipeline myself if I could have found it; it was months since I’d touched a pencil or a pen, months since I’d done anything.

  ‘You have to have faith,’ Randy said. ‘In me. If you had more faith in me, I’d be doing fine. It’s because you took this stupid job that I can’t get a break. You jinxed me.’ He rambled on and on, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As spring passed into summer and fall, winter again, spring again, he developed a new theory – that if we let ourselves go completely, gave ourselves over to the flow of luck and life, we’d be rescued by good spirits before we hit rock bottom.

  Some theory. He stopped making love to me except on weekends, when my skin no longer carried the film he said fell over me at work. I started eating doughnuts, cannolis, cream puffs, cookies from the Italian bakeries nearby; I gained twenty pounds, thinking that was why, and Randy stopped sleeping, stopped eating, stopped going outside except to buy beer or score some pot. He decided he could live on air and sunshine, like a plant. He lay on the balcony all day, convinced he was photosynthesizing, and at night he paced and painted and drank beer. ‘For the minerals,’ he said. ‘Like fertilizer for a plant.’ I wasn’t scared of him – I didn’t think he’d hurt me – but I was scared for him, scared for us. And by then that ‘us’ included more than just him and me.

  Just after our second anniversary, I learned that I was pregnant. For a few days I held the secret to myself – the pregnancy was an accident, the timing was all wrong, and I was terrified at first. But then, to my own surprise, I found myself wildly happy, and it was in that mood that I told Randy the news.

  We were eating dinner when I told him, or rather I was eating and Randy was pushing his noodles around on his plate and carving holes in the table with the bread knife. He looked at me as if I’d grown a second nose before his eyes. ‘We can’t afford it,’ he said. ‘We can’t have a baby now.’

  ‘You could get a job,’ I said – something I hadn’t mentioned in a long time. ‘Even part-time. Or you could stay home with the baby, and I’ll keep working afterwards.’

  He pricked his knife into the table again and chipped out another hole to add to the halo around his placemat. ‘I am at a turning point in my career,’ he said. By then he’d lost as much weight as I’d gained, and his paintings, when he painted at all, swirled out of control. ‘I can feel it,’ he said. ‘Everything’s changing for me. You understand?’

  ‘But we’re having a baby.’

  ‘You’re having a baby. You want a baby, you’re on your own.’

  We argued and argued about it, all the rest of that week, but in the end he won and I went to a clinic where they vacuumed me out. I got an infection that kept me in bed for six weeks and distracted me from the real pain of what I’d done, and afterward I felt as though all the nerve and courage had been sucked out of me, along with the soft bits of tissue and blood.

  Things turned bitter for us after that. One night, the following spring, I came home from the accountants’ office and found that Randy had set up his easel in the living room. He’d spread newspapers around and laid out tins of paint in shades of blue and green. A platoon of brushes marched across the floor, and a Joan Jett album was blasting from the stereo. Randy was prancing around in time to it, as naked as a stone.

  ‘Painting time!
’ he called when I came in the door. ‘Time for Grace to paint.’

  He had a glitter to his eyes that made me nervous. ‘Randy,’ I said quietly, ‘I don’t like to paint. And I don’t have time to draw these days. As soon as things straighten out for us I’ll go back to school. I promise.’

  ‘Who needs school?’ he said. ‘Grace has Randy. Grace has me.’

  He started undressing me and I was happy for a minute; I thought he wanted to make love or even, possibly, start another baby. But when he’d stripped off all my clothes he put a long-handled brush in my hand and then, with a pencil, drew a faint line diagonally across the huge canvas he’d stretched.

  ‘Paint,’ he ordered. ‘You take the top half. I’ll do the bottom.’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, Grace. You used to be creative. Remember? Back when you believed in me and I believed in you …’

  He was chanting his words, almost singing, and as he did he danced around the canvas, dipping his brushes in blue and green paint and flicking them at the taut surface. Green and blue fire, green plants in a blue sea, green teeth in a deep blue mouth.

  ‘Paint,’ he commanded.

  I laid down a base of light green and started a pattern of blue boxes over it, precise and geometric and repetitive, pretty in the worst sense. The pattern resembled expensive drapery material; it was horrible, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to paint with my ass canted away from Randy, so he couldn’t see where those doughnuts had landed. I tried to keep one arm across my stomach. I needn’t have bothered; Randy wasn’t looking at me. For every stroke of green paint he laid on the canvas he laid one on his body, so that he was green almost everywhere when we were done. His half of the canvas radiated weirdness, green and blue and blue and green and blue, and he looked like the stem of some strange flower. I feared that he might hack off an ear at any moment.