The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  ‘I could use another pair of hands,’ he said. ‘You could stay in the trailer with me and help out with the perch study.’

  I was glad to be asked. I was glad, at first, to stay in the trailer and not in one of the shabby tents. The trailer, ugly and green, was parked on a grassy slope fifty yards back from the reservoir. When the wind blew, the undersides of the maple and basswood leaves near us shone soft and silvery, and at dusk swarms of swallows darted low over the water. The canvas tents where the students slept were surrounded by scrub and had no view at all. The students made fires down there in circles of blackened stones, and they played their radios and danced on the silty shore. Sometimes they pulled their sleeping bags out and slept under the stars. At night their voices would drift up to me, along with the sweet smell of marijuana and occasional shrieks of laughter, and sometimes I wished that I could join them.

  The trailer had two bedrooms – one for me and one for Walter – along with a combination living room and kitchen and an attached laboratory that ran the trailer’s whole length and held the deep freezers, the scales, the dissecting equipment, the microscopes and buckets and nets and poles. Walter’s students had parceled out the birds and mammals and amphibians among themselves. Walter and I were working on the fish. Each day we rose at dawn to row across the reservoir and haul the nets we’d set the night before. The water was so cold that it numbed my hands, and often I wouldn’t feel my stabs and scratches until later, back at the dock, where we hunched together over the net and disentangled the fish from the meshes. Trout, yellow perch, sunfish, suckers, bass. Their scales, under the dissecting scope, showed rings like trees.

  Walter, wild with enthusiasm, lectured to me all day. In the boat, on the dock, during the afternoons in the makeshift lab as we dissected hundreds of fish in the shimmering heat and weighed testes and ovaries, determining fertility indexes and rushing to get through the day’s catch before the fish rotted in our hands. We froze the reproductive organs so we could test them for pesticides later. My hands always smelled of fish. I never felt clean. At night I dreamed of legions of perch standing up on their tails and chasing me, and during the day I listened in a trance as Walter colonized my brain, transplanting huge wads of knowledge from his head to mine. When I sat at my lab bench he stood over me, wrapped his long arms around me, used his fingers to guide the scalpel in my hands. He leaned his thighs, cool on the hottest days, against my back. He told me I had a wonderful mind and lovely hair, and he made me first author on the paper we wrote together. He fed our data into the university computer, cross-matching it with his students’ data on insecticide use, acid rainfall, wind patterns, temperature change, and one night he said he couldn’t imagine how he’d lived without me.

  That was the night of July Fourth, and so everyone everywhere was celebrating. In the small towns surrounding us, people marched in parades and waved flags and roasted themselves at cookouts. Aging men injured themselves at softball games. We worked, a day like any other, and when the fireworks splattered the sky that night, Walter looked up from his papers and cupped his ears and identified the displays by sound. ‘Ware,’ he said. ‘Barre. Athol.’ He might have been a bat. He listened rather than looked because we weren’t outside, standing in the water with his students and waving sparklers and catching the occasional high explosion over the trees. We were inside the trailer. I was lying on the floor, my legs up on the arm of the couch where Walter sat, reading his manuscript to me. It was sixty-three pages long and had to do with the effects of changing water pH on the reproductive success of various fish. The effects of acid rain.

  He read to me for three and a half hours, pausing only to sip at a lukewarm glass of water. I listened. I listened hard, trying not to be distracted by the pop and thump of the fireworks, by the celebrating students, whose laughter occasionally rose and broke, by the low bass notes that emerged from someone’s tape player and moved through the ground and up the hill to me until I felt them in my back. I listened, knowing I’d have to ask intelligent questions when he was done. Wanting to ask those questions – the work was good, it was interesting, part of it was mine. All of it was what I thought I wanted to do.

  Walter finished reading just before midnight. ‘Well?’ he said. His face was tired and drawn, but he looked happy.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said, and it was. It was original and interesting and well-written. It wasn’t hard to praise.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Really?’ He slid down the couch to the end where I’d draped my legs, and he touched me shyly on the shin. I raised myself up on my elbows and looked at him.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘This is wonderful stuff.’

  He reached for my leg just as the students galloped up the hill and pounded on the door. Each night after supper, they all came to the trailer for a general meeting, to discuss the plans for the following day. But they had never burst in like this before. Walter glared at the door, his fingers an inch from my leg. I scrabbled to my feet and went to intercept the students. There they were, the six of them, and in the front stood the dark-haired one named Tony, whom I had sometimes stared at. I was twenty-four then, no older than most of them; Walter was thirty-six and old for his age.

  ‘You guys,’ Tony said, peering through the door at Walter surrounded by his papers. ‘I can’t believe you’re still working.’

  ‘We’ve been going over the new manuscript,’ Walter said stiffly.

  ‘Come on,’ Tony said. ‘It’s a holiday. We’ve got some beer down there, and some barbecued chicken, and some tunes …’

  ‘I can’t,’ Walter said. ‘But thanks for asking. You enjoy yourselves.’

  My hand was resting against the doorframe and Tony covered it with his. ‘What about you?’ he asked, so softly that Walter might not have heard him. ‘You don’t have to stay – just come down for a while, get high, relax a little …’

  I turned my head over my shoulder and saw Walter, watching me intently. I turned my head back to Tony, who was smiling. Whose hand still covered mine. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, more drawn than I wanted to admit. ‘Maybe …’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Great.’

  But when I turned my head again I saw that Walter’s face was stricken. We hadn’t finished talking about his paper; we’d only barely begun. He’d read to me for all those hours and I’d hardly given him anything back. ‘Um, actually,’ I said to Tony, ‘maybe not. Or at least not till later.’

  Tony laughed and made a curious face, almost a smirk, almost a leer. One of the students behind him whispered something to another and then both of them giggled. I realized, for the first time, that they all assumed Walter and I were sleeping together.

  I shut the door. I sent them away. For an hour I told Walter, in great detail, how good his paper was, and then we went to our separate beds and Walter had one of his frequent nightmares, which he never discussed but which I knew about because he sometimes called out in his sleep. That night, while I lay awake listening to Tony and the others party on the stretch of sand below us, I heard Walter make his broken cry; he sounded so unhappy that I crept across the corridor to his room and woke him up. I led him gently to the living room and made some coffee, watching as the still invisible sun began to lighten the sky. Walter sat heavily in his striped pajamas, his face droopy and fogged.

  ‘I dreamed I lost my research grant,’ he said. ‘That I had to go back and work for my old advisor. As a technician. Jesus.’

  The window in the living room was half-hidden by a pair of ugly fiberglass curtains framing it on either side. We kept it open for the breeze, even though the screen had long since rotted away. Walter had talked about fixing it for weeks, but the plague of bugs we’d dreaded had never materialized, and so he kept putting it off. Because the window faced the woods, I had never drawn those curtains closed. I had never touched them until that morning, when I tugged at the drawcord and tried to open them wider, so the dawn could lighten Walter’s clouded face.

  The curtains
hardly moved at all. When I pulled the cord again, we heard a noise. ‘What’s that?’ Walter asked. I heard a tiny scritching sound, like toenails on glass.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I moved to the center of the window and grasped a fold of curtain in my hand, peeling it away so I could examine the rod. Rusted hooks, maybe. I rolled the fabric over and then froze, staring at what I held in my hand. The curtain was lined with tiny brown bats, a solid mat from edge to edge and floor to ceiling, like a moth-eaten moleskin coat. The bats hung upside down by their claws with their wings wrapped around them like shawls and their small faces, cross with interrupted sleep, peering out at me. I screamed when two of them moved, and Walter rushed to my side.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘This is fantastic! A whole colony, probably sleeping here every day after they finish feeding for the night …’ He turned back the other curtain, which was similarly lined, and at that second touch the bats stirred themselves, the whole mass shifting and unwrapping their wings. When I started crying, they poured out the window in three streams that looked like smoke.

  Walter put his arm around me, genuinely puzzled. ‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked softly.

  What makes you cry in your dreams? I wanted to ask him that, ask him why he’d kept me up in this trailer, listening to him, while everyone else played below; why he’d let me live in his house for a year when he didn’t travel all that much and had no plants to water, no pets to feed.

  ‘They won’t hurt you,’ he said, his hands stroking my hair. ‘There’s nothing scary about them. They’re like spiders – very friendly and smart. Useful. They eat bugs – that’s probably why we’ve been so comfortable here without the screen.’

  Stroke, stroke; very calm and rational, as if he were afraid of nothing in the night. I hated spiders almost as much as I hated bats, and I wasn’t comforted. The bats had been there all summer, roosting secretly after their nighttime expeditions, and I had never noticed them. They could have nested in my hair. I couldn’t stop crying.

  Walter stroked the back of my neck and then my back and then my hips. I’d lost thirty pounds since I’d started school and so I didn’t feel I had to fling his hand away. Gently, he closed the curtains and led me to the couch, where the manuscript he’d read to me still lay in a yellow heap.

  ‘Ssh,’ he said, laying me down among the papers. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.’

  The bats made a whispering noise as the last of them left, and we made love surrounded by fish. People gave these to Walter, because of the work he did: fish pictures and fish statues and fish cups and vases and bowls; fish lapel pins and cufflinks, fish ties, fish hats. Walter had arranged these along the shelves and walls, and all summer I’d smiled at this evidence of something warm and boyish in him. I thought any man who’d keep these things and display them so proudly must have a sweet inside. Walter was shy, I thought. The fish eyes glinted at me. Walter was reserved. But I knew him better than anyone, I could find what was hidden in him.

  ‘You’re so soft,’ he said to me later, and his clumsiness told me he meant it. ‘So smooth.’

  Walter screened the window for me and the bats never returned. In the weeks that followed, we worked at the lab or on the lake all day, and when dusk fell we showered and made dinner and met with the students and then read. Walter read old volumes of natural history, liking to know every creak and call and whistle and song in the woods, while I, years behind, always behind and ashamed of it now, read the journals Walter marked for me. Each night we read until eleven and then went to bed, and on the nights Walter decreed, when he wasn’t too tired and we didn’t have to get up too early the next morning, we made love.

  A Family Photograph

  Thanksgiving in Fargo, North Dakota, with Walter’s family; Christmas in Westfield, Massachusetts, with mine. That was the deal we worked out the first year we were married and stuck to every year after that.

  In 1980, those holidays were also our first meetings with each other’s family, because our wedding had been private, secret, almost furtive. Walter had wanted it that way. Him in a blue suit, me in a simple dress; two of his students for witnesses; two plain rings and a civil ceremony. ‘It’s a second wedding for both of us,’ Walter had said. ‘Why fuss?’

  And that was fine with me. He had proposed to me over the kitchen table – upright, not on his knees – ticking off on his fingers the reasons we should join our lives, and I had liked that too. I liked that he was so sensible and sane. I liked that he had a plan for our lives. Budgets, goals, investments. Lists and planned recreations. On Sundays we were to sit by the fire or, if the weather was good, outside, and eat lunch from trays and read together happily. And in time, when we both felt ready, we were to start a family. Two children, we decided. A boy and a girl, two years apart. We’d start savings accounts for their college tuition as soon as they were born. Walter’s calm predictions for our future thrilled me.

  On our first Christmas we woke in Walter’s house – our house – and had coffee in bed and exchanged presents and made love clumsily, buried beneath the blankets. Walter’s fish watched over us, as they had since our return from the reservoir; he’d brought his collection back when I’d told him I liked them. And if our lovemaking no longer had the edge and fervor it had had in the trailer, still it was good enough. Our bodies fit well together, and Walter was patient and gentle. Sometimes Randy, so strange and wild, appeared when I closed my eyes, but when he did I chased him away and tried to focus on Walter instead. When I whispered that his hands were cold, he warmed them on his own thighs.

  Two feet of snow buried everything that day. On the drive to Westfield I got carsick and threw up, but I couldn’t convince Walter to turn around and take me back home. ‘It’s Christmas,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t you want to be with your family? Don’t you want me to meet them?’

  Yes and no, yes and no. Secretly, I’d feared Walter might bolt if he saw my family before we said our vows, and all fall I’d made up excuses for why we couldn’t visit them. Now I was sick with all I’d hidden. Walter’s parents, whom I’d met a month earlier, had been tidy and respectable. ‘They’re a little … unusual,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you won’t like them.’

  ‘How bad can they be?’ he said, but his smile faded when he first saw the house. The asphalt shingles were loose in several places; a squirrel had tumbled one of the garbage cans and tossed orange peels and paper across the snowy yard. Great-uncle Owen’s BMW contrasted oddly with my father’s old station wagon and my mother’s tired Pontiac. The windows had been sealed with plastic for extra insulation, and a ragged corner on the hall dormer flapped in the wind. The front door was framed with strands of plastic holly and decorated with a cardboard Santa Claus.

  My mother greeted us. She wore a red dress, red high heels, red lipstick; she’d dyed and teased and lacquered her hair into a coarse black helmet. When she opened the door she smiled as if she were glad to see us. ‘Merry Christmas, darlin’,’ she said, with a trace of the Virginia accent she’d somehow held onto for years.

  ‘This is my mother,’ I murmured to Walter. ‘Roxanne Doerring.’

  ‘Call me Roxy,’ she said brightly to him. ‘Everyone does.’

  She led us inside, where nothing had changed since I was small. We’d had the green plastic tree since I was in elementary school, along with the white plastic candles and the dusty bulbs and the poinsettia-printed tablecloth. My mother laid her delicate hand on Walter’s long arm. Always the smallest one in the room, always the most noticeable, she’d stayed tiny through an act of will, five feet of skin and bone and sinew.

  ‘She works as a school librarian,’ I’d told Walter earlier. ‘She raises roses. She tapes books for the blind.’

  But I hadn’t told him how she and I had been at war for as long as I could remember. She was from Virginia and I was not; I was half my father’s child and his half was all that showed. I’d weighed ten pounds when I was born, and although my father called me healthy
and his mother, my Mumu, called me pleasingly plump, my mother was appalled. She kept her own weight down by rigorous dieting, and by the time I was five she was already hiding food from me.

  ‘You have your father’s metabolism,’ she’d say, setting down my afternoon snack of carrots and celery sticks. ‘Look at him. Look at his family. You have to be careful.’

  Behind her back I’d eaten everything I could find. I cleaned out my friends’ refrigerators, spent my allowance at the candy store, hid the chocolates Uncle Owen brought me from Boston and ate them at night. When I grew old enough to babysit, I swooned over my employers’ cupboards and ate everything but the baby. Morning and night I sat down to my mother’s skimpy, carefully balanced meals, and when she weighed me each Sunday she shrieked in horror as I tried to look bewildered.

  ‘Are you doing this to spite me?’ she’d ask.

  Perhaps I was. My mother had had no outlet for her intelligence beyond raising me and Toby, changing the wallpaper every three years, nagging my father. She didn’t go to work until Toby and I were grown, and so during my childhood she focused on me, trying to make me into what she’d wanted and missed. Harping on the things I wasn’t to do: I was not to marry a man who’d meant to be a New York chef and had ended up as a cook in a Westfield school cafeteria. I was not to have children so young that they ruined my life; not to live with my Swedish mother-in-law; not to have to scrimp and scrounge over every penny. I was to hold myself dear, be somebody; beautiful and aloof and fastidious, well-dressed and socially adept. My mother wanted my next-door neighbor and enemy, Luellen Barnes, and what she got instead was me.