Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

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 …’

‘Six extra days,’ he’d said. ‘For a three-day visit — Grace, we have to fly.’

And so we’d flown. In Chicago we waited for two hours while our plane was de-iced, and then after we boarded we sat for so long that the wings iced up again. Men in padded suits rolled steel towers up to the wings and then stood high above the ground shooting jets of steaming liquid from thick hoses. I took another Valium and tried not to hear the passengers discussing the weather.

‘Thirty below,’ I heard someone say.

‘Minneapolis is closed,’ said another.

‘I hear the air gets thinner when it’s this cold,’ said a third. ‘So there’s less left, which must make it harder for the plane to stay up …’

I plucked feebly at Walter’s sleeve. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Let’s stay overnight here. We could find a hotel.’

‘They wouldn’t let us fly if it wasn’t safe,’ he said.

The rolling towers pulled away and the plane began to back up slowly; if I’d been the praying type I would have prayed. In the absence of that, I tried to distract myself by calling up a picture of the cat I’d been dissecting in my vertebrate anatomy class. My teacher was a plump man with a red toupee, whose idea of fun was to place loose bones in a silk bag and have us plunge our hands in, identifying tibias and fibulas by feel. He and Walter had been friends forever.

‘Splenic flexure, cecum, bladder,’ I muttered, my eyes shut and my fingers clawing at the armrests. We took off; we flew. The ride was turbulent all the way to Fargo and the attendants couldn’t serve drinks, and by the time we arrived I’d sweated through all my clothes. My mascara ran. My hair was plastered to my forehead. Walter’s parents looked concerned when they first saw me.

‘Have you been waiting long?’ Walter asked them. He kissed his mother’s cheek and shook his father’s hand.

‘Three hours,’ Ray said placidly. ‘Not so bad.’

I could picture them sitting there, plump legs spread, hands folded in their ample laps. Ray, who taught agronomy at the state university, could talk for hours about the wiles of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. ‘I have a passion for legumes,’ he’d confided shyly on my first visit. Walter’s mother, Lenore, had taken me on a tour of their Lutheran church, where she was head of the women’s committee. She’d needlepointed seat cushions for the pews, embroidered banners for the walls, organized bake sales, knitted sweaters for raffles. Now she slipped her soft hand beneath my elbow. ‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘I brought you some coffee — it’s in the car. In a thermos. You’re so pale.’

‘Bad flight,’ I said weakly.

Walter and his father, ahead of us, were already discussing work. They settled themselves in the Jeep’s front seat, leaving Lenore and me in the back.

‘Drink this,’ Lenore said. Black coffee, boiled with eggshells, the way Mumu used to make it. While I sipped at it, Lenore showed me the seat cover she’d been needlepointing in the airport. On a field of dark purple she’d worked a bible verse in violet and cream and pale pink. ‘See?’ she said, and then she read the text to me in her thin girlish voice. ‘For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid that shall not be known and come abroad.’

I shuddered and closed my eyes.

‘That’s good coffee,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? Strong.’ Then she stroked her seat cover again. ‘Luke,’ she said happily. ‘Eight-seventeen. It’s part of a series I’m doing for the choir stalls — all from Luke. Twelve-two: “For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be made known.” Twelve-three: “Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the house tops.” Pastor Lundquist has been using the denunciation of the Pharisees and the discourse against hypocrisy as his texts all fall, and you wouldn’t believe how interesting his sermons have been …’

‘Mother,’ Ray said soothingly, ‘now don’t you go bending her ear.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said faintly. Usually Lenore’s bible chatter rolled right off me, but that evening I listened with sick fascination. Luke had been Mumu’s favorite reading and I knew those verses from her, although I’d heard them first in Swedish. Hearing them in English, from Lenore’s mouth, was like hearing the dead speak.

We drove through the snow over land as flat as the sea, and as we did Lenore stopped quoting Scripture and pointed out Walter’s elementary school, Walter’s high school, the fairground where Walter had won first prize with a calf. ‘Remember when you won the science fair?’ she asked, leaning forward to touch Walter’s shoulder. ‘Those rats you bred?’

‘Genetics,’ Ray said happily. ‘Even then.’ We’d had the same conversation the year before, passing the same sights.

‘And remember the flatworms?’ Lenore asked. ‘And the project you did with the Lycopodium? ’

It was dark by then, and I couldn’t tell if Walter was blushing. I couldn’t imagine growing up with such proud parents.

That was the way our visit went, the way it had gone the year before and the way it would always go. Peculiar, sometimes funny; and yet somehow also touching. In the Hoffmeiers’ neat white house were the bookcases Walter had built; in the yard were the trees Walter had planted and the fence Walter had designed. Lenore fixed the same meals Walter had always eaten. Walter and Ray strode off in the afternoons, looking at land, talking science, discussing each other’s work, and Lenore and I sat warm in the white house, watching TV and drinking coffee and cooking huge feasts. Part Swedish, part Finnish, part German, Lenore loved the idea of my Swedish grandmother and paid homage to our shared ancestry by digging out her old recipes. We made cardamom bread, krum-cakes, Swedish meatballs scented with nutmeg. In between, while dough rose and sauces simmered, we leafed through books of old photographs and examined Walter at two, four, ten, twenty; every age and situation.