Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

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.

‘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.