Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘This is Walter when he was four,’ Lenore said, showing me a picture of a small lean child making a terrible face. ‘He was so fussy about his food — I’d just given him a Saltine, and he was making a face because it was ugly. He couldn’t stand the way some of the crackers had those little blisters.’

Another picture, Walter at two in a high-chair, smiling. ‘Ray took this,’ she said. ‘We were so happy that day — every time we fed him, we’d wait to see if he’d look at his plate and start screaming. It took us the longest time to figure out what was upsetting him — the food was crooked on his plate. Ray took this picture the day we arranged the food symmetrically and Walter stopped crying. Such a relief — you have no idea.’

‘I have an idea,’ I murmured.

‘He’s still fussy?’ she said.

‘A little. About how his shirts are ironed, and where I get his jackets dry-cleaned, and how I clean house, and how I cook …’

Lenore smiled. ‘Hoffmeier men. That’s the way they are — Ray’s just the same, and so was his father. I remember cooking Thanksgiving dinner with Ray’s mother, out at their place on County Line Road. The two of us scared half to death that the men would find something wrong with it — but then that’s the fun, too. The pleasure of pleasing them. Praise from a Hoffmeier man means something. He takes good care of you?’

‘The best,’ I said, and I meant it. He sheltered me the way Uncle Owen had, keeping my family at bay. ‘He’s always helping me with school,’ I told her. ‘Always trying to improve me.’

‘And he’s affectionate?’

‘Pretty much,’ I said, knowing I couldn’t tell her how our lovemaking had turned into a weekly event. Always Saturdays, always at night, always with the lights off. Always the same words, touches, moves. The science of love. We slept in Eileen’s bed, on Eileen’s sheets, with Walter’s fish looking down on us and Randy and Eileen as present, sometimes, as if their bodies were there. Eileen, whatever her faults, had had a dancer’s body, and I knew Walter still thought of her now and then. Sometimes his hand, running up my inner thigh, would stop and seem to stutter there, as if he found the excess flesh unfamiliar.

‘So,’ Lenore said, leaning toward me. ‘So you’ll have a child?’

I blushed. There seemed to be no harm in telling her, cementing our alliance. ‘We’re trying already,’ I admitted. ‘I’m graduating in June, and we thought any time after that …’

She wrapped me in her yeasty-smelling arms. ‘I’m so glad,’ she said. ‘I always hated Eileen because she wouldn’t. Such a selfish woman, so caught up in herself — all that dancing. Never taking care of Walter. But I knew you were different. And Walter will be such a good father.’

I’d had sneaking doubts about that, now that I knew him better, but I’d put them aside since we’d started trying. We had a lovely home, he was up for tenure, I was almost educated. Our lives stretched before us, secure and changeless. Any child of ours would lack for nothing.

‘A grandchild,’ Lenore said. Her face was radiant. ‘Oh, I can’t wait.’

When I looked at her, I couldn’t wait either. ‘Maybe this time next year …’ I said.

‘Whenever,’ she said. ‘The Lord will provide.’ She ran her eyes approvingly over my broad figure. ‘You have a good pelvis,’ she said. ‘You’ll have an easy time. But after, you’ll have to — you know. Work together. Balance Walter a little — he and his father are firm men. They have firm ideas.’

‘They do,’ I said.

‘So you’ll soften that a little. Provide the comfort, the flexibility — you’re a good girl. You can do that.’

‘I can try,’ I said.

‘Of course you will. And as far as church goes — if you can find a pastor like our Sven Lundquist, you’ll be ahead right there.’ She vanished into the bedroom and returned a minute later with a small book covered in blue watered silk. ‘Walter’s baby book,’ she said. ‘Pastor headed all the sections with appropriate verses, and then Ray and I filled in the rest. First step, first tooth, first words … I’d like you to have it.’

I thanked her, thinking how, when we were home, Walter mocked his mother’s soft ways and simple piety. No child of Walter’s would ever set foot inside a church.

‘A girl,’ Lenore said. ‘You’ll have a girl, with hair like yours.’

‘A girl,’ I echoed, and suddenly I yearned for one. Small, pink, sweet-smelling. Someone all my own.

The men came home then, from their Saturday afternoon in the fields. Walter showed me his high-school track trophies, as he had done the year before. He showed me his old bed, his old room, his old microscope; he grew wistful there in Fargo, something I’d never seen in him before. He handled his old rock collection as if the rocks were jewels, and when I showed him his baby book he turned the pages carefully. As he did, I made a connection I had failed to make earlier: Walter yearned for the past. He mourned for it, grieved for it, wept for a time when, in his eyes, the world was simpler, kinder, more at one with nature. He’d frowned on the drive from the airport, when his parents had pointed out a new apartment complex, but I hadn’t thought of how, at home, he refused to go to shopping malls and averted his face from new houses. He gave money to save the whales, save the snow leopards, save the Amazon, the Arctic, the Serengeti, but he voted Republican and seemed not to want this messy, peopled world of ours at all. What he wanted was what he’d once had, what his grandparents had had on their outlying farms. Empty land. Land where the snow could start blowing and drift for twenty miles.

Down in the basement, Ray showed us his woodworking shop and pointed out the cherry chest of drawers he’d made.

‘Next year,’ Lenore said, ‘maybe this time next year, you’ll be making a crib.’

‘Yes?’ Ray said. He looked from Walter to me and smiled broadly. ‘Yes? You’re expecting?’

‘Not yet,’ Walter said. ‘But we’re hoping.’

I slipped my arm through his. We might have a child, I thought there in that basement. Live in the dense network formed of our child’s accomplishments. Buried in my mind was another, secret wish — if we had a child I might not have to go on to graduate school, might not have to work as Walter’s helper for the rest of my life. Already, although I could hardly admit this to myself, I was losing interest in school. It seemed as if all I’d really wanted was to be able to walk through the woods and name every bird and tree, and somehow I hadn’t understood that watching and naming was natural history, while picking and prying was real science. And I wasn’t a scientist after all. Scientists trusted in planes — the curved shape of the airfoil, the stream of air bending over the top, rushing below, thrusting up. The air pushed; the plane flew; a cell revealed spindles and mitochondria and microtubules. Walter had showed me those things, but I had trouble believing in them.

And yet in that house, in that flat, plain land, everything felt simple and possible. We felt like a family there, and I could forget what our lives were like at home — Walter’s driving ambitions and fussy ways, my secret discontents. I could even forget the dreams I sometimes had of Randy. I had chosen my life: adult, dignified, settled. And if I itched sometimes, if I ached from the confinement, I had Fargo and my dream of a family to anchor me.

A Black Harley Electra-Glide

When spring came, I still wasn’t pregnant, and I began to worry.

‘We’ve only been trying for eight months,’ Walter said. ‘That’s nothing.’ He was calm about it, he was fine, but he began making love to me twice a week instead of once, and when his parents called he ducked their questions. ‘Don’t worry,’ Lenore told me. ‘It’ll happen when you least expect it. You have to relax.’ But then she’d follow up these soothing words with tales of women in her church who’d spent years and fortunes trying to conceive. Thermometers, ovulation charts, special douches and positions — all that lay ahead of us if my body failed, and then doctors, operations, eggs teased apart under a microscope and gently washed with sperm. ‘There’s always a way,’ Lenore said as the months passed. ‘Always.’ She sent me bookmarks inscribed with prayers and words of comfort for the barren. For God indeed punishes not nature, but sin, read one. And therefore, when He closes a womb, it is only that He may later open it more wondrously, and that all may know that what is born thereof is not the fruit of lust, but of the divine munificence. The bookmarks made Walter fume.