The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ Walter said, detaching his arm from my mother’s grasp as he followed her over to my father’s chair.

  ‘My father,’ I said. ‘Edwin Doerring.’

  Dad rose slowly and swallowed Walter’s hand in his, silent as always in my mother’s presence. ‘He’s a cook,’ I’d told Walter, but I hadn’t explained where, nor had I told him how, when my father came home from his job in the cafeteria, he used to slip me the treats he’d hidden in his huge black coat. He never ate supper with us; he’d been working with food all day and he had no appetite. Instead, he’d take a long shower and then retreat to the room he’d made for himself in the attic. After supper, after we’d done our homework, Toby and I were sometimes allowed to go up to his room and play quietly while Dad worked on his stamp collection. He shuffled tiny, jewel-colored bits of paper from Cameroon and Mozambique, Belize and New Guinea and Chile, and because he liked me fat he sometimes met me in the kitchen late at night, after my mother and Toby had fallen asleep, for a shared, stolen snack.

  I had never told Walter that either – not how my cheeks puffed, my thighs swelled. How my belly grew high and wide, an echo of my father’s, or how my mother fumed when the salesgirl at Filene’s steered me toward the chubby section, toward vertical stripes and concealing navy blue. I was big-boned, thick-waisted – chubby, but not much worse than that until my last two years of high school. Girl-chubby, genetically chubby; chubby because I was built that way and also because my father and Mumu and Uncle Owen liked it.

  Walter thanked my father for inviting us and then moved toward my brother Toby, who rose from the floor where he was playing with Cindy and Samantha, his twins.

  ‘Grace,’ Toby said dryly. ‘How nice of you to honor us.’

  He pushed his girls forward and then tugged his wife, Linda, up from her seat on the hassock. My mother murmured introductions. Toby took after her – small, neat, precise. When I was two, he had tried to gouge out my right eye with one of his long, thin thumbs, and our relationship had never changed much after that. He had never gotten over the humiliation of me running around with his high-school friends.

  Walter stood in the center of this crowd, uneasy, nervous, damp. ‘You’re a marine biologist?’ my mother said. ‘Is that what Grace told me?’

  ‘Freshwater, actually,’ Walter said. ‘I’m a lake ecologist.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting,’ Linda said.

  ‘Grace was your student?’ Toby said. He knew; although I hadn’t brought Walter home before I’d spoken about him often enough when I’d called.

  ‘One of the best students I’ve ever had,’ Walter said.

  ‘Makes sense,’ Toby said. ‘She used to be a real teacher’s pet.’

  Meanwhile Uncle Owen sat in the easy chair near the fireplace, in which a fake fire of electric logs glowed. Always, until Mumu died, he had sat in that chair on one side of the fire, while Mumu pulled her wheelchair across from him. My father’s uncle, not mine; Mumu’s brother. But where Mumu was crumpled and soft and pale, her legs useless from the nerve damage caused by her diabetes, he was broad and tanned and vigorous. And wealthy, too – he had a flourishing business in Boston, dealing in Oriental art and antiques, and his apartment in Cambridge had been my favorite place in the world. Silk hangings, a blue enamel bird in a cage, music boxes, black lacquer chairs, old rugs, plants in huge pots, and a succession of handsome young male companions who kept house for him and answered his phones and petted me when I visited. Uncle Owen had stayed with us often, all throughout my childhood, and he had rescued me from my mother many times in minor ways and once spectacularly.

  Which was yet another thing I hadn’t told Walter – how it was that I, from a family like this, in a town like this, had managed to go to college at all. No one knew about the deal Uncle Owen and I had made. When Mumu died, my sophomore year in high school, I had put on fifty pounds as an act of grief and sympathy, also as a blow against my mother and Grandpa Jack. I cracked a hundred and eighty pounds and discovered that fat girls came in two flavors: mousy, lank-haired, scholarly; everybody’s maiden aunt. Or loose, sluttish, wisecracking. I shed Chuck and Mark, my bookish, freakish friends, and I chose the second way – danger. Boys. Dangerous boys. I let my grades slip and started hanging out with boys in Toby’s class, boys who had motorcycles and leather jackets and slim pints of whiskey in paper bags. Boys who had parties in basements and didn’t mind a fat girl if she was good-humored and easy. There was a tradition here, old and honorable; I discovered how easy it was for a fat girl to get laid. I loved the rumors that flew around, the prissy mouths the cheerleaders made when I flaunted a hickey in the showers after gym. I loved Toby’s fury and my mother’s shrill dismay. I let myself go for a year like that and might have gone on forever if Uncle Owen hadn’t taken me aside and proposed his plan. The fall of my senior year he had said, ‘Where are you applying to college?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ I told him. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘You want to live in Westfield forever?’ he asked. ‘You want to be like your mother? Like Toby?’ Toby was working as a salesman for a lawn-care service then.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So I’ll make a deal with you. You apply to school now. And if you lose forty pounds by June, I’ll pay your tuition. You have to get out of Westfield, Grace. Introduce yourself to the world.’

  My grades had slipped so far by then that the best I could do was UMass, but I applied and got in and lost all forty pounds. By the time I entered college I was thin enough to pass for normal, thin enough for Randy.

  I trusted Uncle Owen more than anyone else in the world, and I wanted very much to see how he’d respond to Walter. He sat and watched and listened without saying anything or rising from his chair, and when Walter stepped into the kitchen with Toby and the others moved into the dining room, I went over to him. He kissed my hand and then shook his head sadly and looked at me. ‘Grace,’ he said. ‘My dear. Two in a row?’

  ‘He’s not like Randy,’ I bristled. ‘You don’t even know him.’

  ‘I know what I see,’ he said. ‘He’s not like Randy. He’s worse.’

  ‘You’re not being fair,’ I said. I was furious; also scared. Uncle Owen was famous for his snap judgments, which were almost always right.

  Uncle Owen shook his head again. ‘Well, it’s done,’ he said. ‘We have to live with it. And the good news is that you look marvelous – do let me see your hair.’

  I turned sullenly so that he could examine my festive French braids. ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’

  All that afternoon I stared at Walter, trying to determine what had set Uncle Owen off. Was it Walter’s thinning hair, his stooped shoulders, the way he barked when the twins tied his shoes together? Perhaps it was his deference toward my mother or the way that, during dinner, he failed to remark on the plate my mother handed me, which bore only a thin slice of white meat, a mound of squash, and a dab of cranberry sauce. No stuffing, potatoes, gravy. No creamed onions.

  ‘Your weight,’ my mother said brightly, as she passed the plate to me. ‘Can’t be too careful.’

  Uncle Owen traded plates with me and then, without comment, sent his new plate back to be filled properly. So perhaps it was that, or perhaps it was the way Walter flushed angry red when Linda spilled wine on his coat. Or maybe it was what happened later, when Walter caught sight of the photograph hanging from the plastic Christmas tree.

  This was a family photograph – blurred, black-and-white, framed in red and green construction paper and edged with a crumbling white doily. A loop of ribbon glued to the top suspended it from the tree. I had forgotten about it, and Walter might never have seen it if the twins hadn’t pulled him down next to the tree to examine their loot. Cindy tossed her Nerf ball at him and his hand swung back to catch it, and as it did he caught the edge of the picture and pulled it down.

  ‘What’s this?�
� he asked. Oh, I couldn’t believe he held it in his hand. Every year I had tried to steal it, burn it. Every year my mother had rescued it.

  ‘Our family,’ Uncle Owen said sternly. ‘All of us.’

  Before I could snatch the picture from Walter, Toby moved into place. ‘All of us,’ he told Walter smoothly. ‘Have you ever seen what Grace used to look like?’

  ‘Never,’ Walter said.

  I sank down on the floor next to Uncle Owen’s chair and buried my head in my arms. That picture had been taken when I was ten and Toby was twelve. My mother was thin, my father was fat, Toby was thin and sharp-featured, and I was at my worst stage, made worse by the way my mother had dressed me. My round face made rounder by the ribbon pushing back my hair, my round body emphasized by the tight white dress, my round arms sticking out from the sleeves like clubs. I was standing by Uncle Owen, whose arm cradled me protectively and did its best to conceal my deforming outfit.

  I couldn’t stand for Walter to see me like that. He knew I had to watch what I ate, that I had a small problem with my weight, but I didn’t think he’d ever suspected my fat past. And there Toby was saying, ‘Why yes, of course that’s Grace. She was such a little butterball.’ And my mother was adding, ‘If you knew what a struggle we had trying to get her to slim …’ And the twins were puffing their cheeks out and giggling, and still the worst was yet to come. Because in the picture were two people absent from our gathering, the two people I had never meant Walter to know.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Walter asked politely.

  I knew he was pointing to Mumu, whose wheelchair was pulled up beside Uncle Owen and me in the picture. Mumu was sixty-two there – four years before she died. But she was sick already, already in her wheelchair and confined to the downstairs den that my mother had grudgingly made over into her room. She weighed two hundred and eighty pounds and wore black dresses and hairnets and thick elastic stockings and steel-rimmed glasses, and I suppose she looked awful to someone who didn’t know her. But she had been my chief escape in the years between losing Zillah and finding Chuck and Mark. Between her and my mother was a dislike so strong that it could only be managed by good manners and endless small courtesies, and I had always known whose side I was on. Mumu had read to me in Swedish, translating and embroidering as she went, and she’d told me fairy tales with such authority that for years I believed they were true. She told the story of the Snow Queen as if she’d been the little girl whose childhood companion had had his heart pierced by the sliver of evil mirror, as if she’d ridden the back of the talking reindeer through the Scandanavian wastes herself and had carried the message written on a dried cod from the Lapland woman to the Finland woman who had sent her to the frozen palace. She told me about the summers when the sun never set, and about the ocean her mother had crossed as a young woman, frightened and alone. She told me about her husband, who had died before I was born, and about the bakery her parents had run, where she and my Uncle Owen had worked in clouds of flour like snow.

  I raised my head and looked at Uncle Owen, who’d been watching us silently. ‘That was my grandmother,’ I told Walter. ‘We were very close.’ And then I drew a breath and answered the other question he was sure to ask. ‘The other man, the one in the tweed cap, was my Grandpa Jack. Mom’s father.’

  ‘He died years ago,’ my mother said. ‘We were all very fond of him.’

  I blinked at her stupidly. Fond? Grandpa Jack was an old man smelling of chewing tobacco, who had lived in the small Virginia town where my mother was raised and who had visited us each Christmas. He came empty-handed, wearing that cap, and he slept in Toby’s room but crept into mine each morning to wake me up.

  I had always hated him; I had never mentioned him to Walter.

  I had never told him how, when I was in high school, an earnest English teacher with unshaven legs had spent a month trying to interest our class in old-fashioned poetic forms. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles – we were sixteen and plagued by hormones and parents, and we had other things on our minds. My mind, particularly – Mumu had died that summer and I had shed my friends and my books and was busy laying on the lard that would recreate her.

  ‘Write a villanelle,’ the teacher told us one week, and we laughed at her, but then, trapped in the stuffy room, set about to do as she’d asked. Something about the villanelle’s shape, the obsessive repetition of lines, induced a kind of trance in me. I wrote as if a voice were dictating to me, and this is what slipped out:

  Villanelle for a Grandfather

  You touch me, and your skin is pale and cold—

  You kiss me, and your kiss could kill the day.

  Tonight, I notice you are old.

  Your fingernails are iced with milky mold—

  The cuticles an epileptic gray.

  You touch me, and your skin is pale and cold.

  You sit by me, and often try to hold

  My hands, and other things, and then you pray

  I will not notice you are old.

  You twirl your cap and crease its faded fold—

  You kiss me, and your lips are crumpled clay.

  You touch me, and your skin is pale and cold.

  And recently, you have become quite bold—

  You touch, and do not ask me if you may.

  Always, I have known that you were old.

  These days your antics seem not quite so droll—

  These days I hesitate to let you play.

  Tonight, I noticed you were old.

  You touched me, and your skin was pale and cold.

  I didn’t know where that had come from or why I let Mrs Dorfman read it. After she read it she sent me to the school psychologist, who wanted to know what was going on with me at home.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I was kidding.’ Perhaps I thought I was. ‘I was just trying to yank Mrs Dorfman’s chain.’

  ‘Oh?’ the counselor said. He made a note in his file. ‘You don’t like her?’

  ‘She’s a jerk,’ I said. ‘She’s always trying to get us to express our feelings. I just made that up because I knew it would upset her.’

  The doctor let me go. I went back to Mrs Dorfman’s class and never wrote anything like that again. But her response gave me an idea, and later that week, when I was doing my homework at the kitchen table, I let that poem fall out of my notebook and onto the floor, where my mother had to see it. When she read it she slapped me and demanded to know who I thought I was, making up such dreadful trash. But after that, until Grandpa Jack died, my mother made sure he slept downstairs on the couch, away from me.

  I looked at my mother, daring her to say more. She blushed. ‘Actually,’ I told Walter. ‘I wasn’t all that fond of him.’

  ‘Well,’ Walter said.

  On our ride home from Westfield Walter was silent, and for several weeks after that he treated me with extra kindness. A few times he tried to ask me more about my family, but when I shrugged his questions aside he backed off.

  ‘It’s so hard to imagine,’ he said then. ‘So hard to imagine you growing up like that. I’m just trying to understand what it was like.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘It’s done.’

  And I believed it was. That year, as I had every year, I fled my old house in Westfield so fast that I left chunks of flesh behind. That house, that family, that sense of everyone holding me back, tripping me up – I cut that part of my life right out, the way I’d cut out Randy, and when my parents called I shut myself behind chatter about work or the weather. Walter said he understood and, although I knew he didn’t, I liked it when he tried to shield me from them. I let him cast himself as a rescuing knight, swooping me up from the muck and the mire, and when he blamed my moodiness on what he could guess of my strange past I never once discouraged him. Sometimes I was tempted to tell him more, to tell him everything. But I held back. I had a sense, even then, that he could only deal with so much of me, and I woke some nights to find him staring at my face, as if he’d found himsel
f in bed with a stranger and was trying to figure out who I was.

  A Silver Plane

  Each year, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Walter and I stood in airports struggling with our baggage. Bulky clothes, food, gifts – we struggled with those, and we struggled for precious seats, and both of us struggled to calm me down. Our first Thanksgiving trip had been my first time on a plane, and although I’d looked forward to the journey my body rebelled, as if I’d been exposed to some exotic pollen. After that, I was allergic to flying. I broke out in hives, sweat, tears when I got near a plane. I took tranquilizers, sleeping pills, dry Martinis; I tried self-hypnosis and biofeedback. Nothing made a dent in the panic I felt when the plane first began its unholy levitation.

  On our second trip to Fargo there were blizzards in Milwaukee and Cleveland, ice storms in Detroit and Buffalo, a cold wave seeping across the continent. I huddled in my seat from Hartford to Chicago, drugged to a near-coma, and I tried to persuade myself why planes should fly. ‘Airfoils,’ I whispered. ‘Lift. Drag. Aerodynamic force.’ My palms still sweated. My heart still raced. In Chicago, the stewardess had to help remove me from the plane, and when a bland voice announced that the next leg of our trip would be delayed because our plane needed extensive de-icing, I wept.

  ‘Grace,’ Walter said. ‘Don’t worry. Please.’

  He held me with one hand and thumbed through the new issue of Science with the other, looking for the article he and a student had published there. They’d mentioned me in the acknowledgments, but I didn’t want to look; I leaned into his shoulder and sobbed. I liked his parents, and I looked forward to visiting them, but I had wanted to go by bus or train or car. The way we did all our other trips – when Walter had meetings in New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore or Charleston, we took a little extra time, and we drove. I packed picnic baskets full of delicacies, thermoses of hot coffee and cold drinks, books to keep us entertained. When Walter drove, I read to him and kept him supplied with food and drink. When I drove, he did the same for me. We had a good time, and I couldn’t see why people raised their eyebrows at us. So we needed a few extra days. ‘It’s a two-day drive to Fargo,’ I’d told Walter that second year. ‘Three at most …’