Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

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.