Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

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 himself 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.