Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

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.

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 neighbors 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.