Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Grace,’ she said. ‘Meet Jim. Jim, Grace.’ Jim was still staring at me and I was staring at him, my feet edging me closer and closer. I felt like I might kiss him any second, and that if I did it would only be an accident, something I couldn’t help. Page smiled wickedly and ran her hand down Jim’s back. ‘Jim’s my little secret,’she said. ‘He paints houses. He amuses me.’ She turned and headed for the kitchen again.

‘Why don’t you take her for a ride?’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Keep her entertained until the others get here.’

Jim laid his broad, warm hand on my shoulder. ‘Would you like that?’ he said. ‘You want to be entertained?’

I nodded dumbly, trying not to shiver as he gathered up my long hair and twisted it into a rope.

‘You’re a pretty thing,’ he said. ‘Where’d Page find you?’

‘In class,’ I said faintly.

‘In class,’ he mocked, his voice as high and tremulous as mine. ‘Well, put your coat on, missy. We’re going for a ride.’ He stomped down the stairs in his heavy black boots, leaving me to follow.

‘Have a good time,’ Page called after me. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.’

Her laugh followed me down the stairs. Outside, Jim was already sitting on a huge black Harley Electra-Glide with a headlight as big as a grapefruit and sleek, curved fenders.

‘Hop on,’ he said, handing me a helmet. ‘Ever ride one of these?’

‘Never,’ I lied, putting out of my mind the boys I had known in high school. I sat behind Jim and he pulled me close to his back.

‘Settle in,’ he said. ‘Wrap your arms around me. All you have to do is remember to hold on tight and lean with me on the curves. Don’t fight the machine. Don’t fight me. It’s like dancing. Like sex. You understand?’

I nodded and tucked my hair into the helmet. He jumped hard on the starter and then we were off. Through the back streets of Northampton, down by the railroad tracks and the warehouses; then up through the edge of the Smith College campus, startling pale, thoughtful girls; then into Florence, past the diner and around the square. Up Route 9, through the dark parking lot of a silent factory, down quiet residential streets. The engine roared. Fast, then faster, my chest mashed against his back, my hands clutched across his stomach, my hair tumbled from my helmet and whipping across my face; Jim shouting and laughing, taking corners hard, screaming at me to lean. Me leaning, finally screaming too, my mouth open wide and stretched as the night air roared past us and the buildings passed in a blur. When we screeched to a stop in front of Page’s building I was trembling all over, and Jim bent with laughter when he pulled me off his machine.

‘You liked that,’ he said. ‘You loved it.’ He pulled me roughly to him and I buried my face in his chest. He was very tall.

That was it. That was all that happened, but I felt as if I’d been in bed with him for a week. I walked up the stairs on shaky legs, acutely aware of Jim behind me, and when I entered the living room, now full of people and noise, I felt as exposed as if I’d shed my clothes on the ride. I met the rest of Page’s friends but I hardly noticed them; I ate couscous and drank too much wine and tried to keep myself from creeping across the floor to Jim. All night long he watched me, smiling whenever he caught my eye, and when I finally got up to leave he smoothed my hair away from my cheek and ran his thumb along the curve of my ear before he turned away. For years after that I dreamed of his back: that back, that beautiful back. I went home to Walter that night, my knees rubbery with lust, and if ever I should have conceived a child it should have been then.

A Row of Glass Jars

That fall, I discovered that I couldn’t share Walter’s joys. I wanted to; I meant to. But once I entered graduate school, all I felt was duty, pressure, grinding work.

Biochemistry, embryology, research methods — everything suddenly seemed harder and much less fun than it had when I was an undergraduate. Hundreds of textbook pages blurred past me; grainy films flickered by; a fertilized egg cleaved into two, four, eight cells, formed the hollow ball known as the blastula, indented as if pressed by a thumb into the double-walled gastrula. Everything went by too fast. I grew weak and faint, stunned by all I didn’t know, the mornings I sat in the lecture hall. When I went home to Walter at night, I lied through my teeth.

‘It’s fine,’ I told him. ‘The work’s really interesting.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he’d say, his eyes sparkling. While I bent over my books he leaned over me, his chin in my hair and his hands warm in mine. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? ’ he’d say. ‘I can still remember learning this for the first time. The archenteron, the blastopore, the growth of the neural plate …’

When I looked in his face I saw true joy, true excitement. Oh, he loved his work — and that was one of the things that had drawn me to him at first. Sometimes, when I wandered the halls of the zoology department, I’d stop outside his classroom and listen to his voice crackling with enthusiasm. But even with him to help me I fell behind. My teachers grew more and more distant, the students in my lab sections grew openly contemptuous, and Page and her friends, who had initially welcomed me, began to pull away.

My worst course was embryology, which confused me completely: an endless sequence of movements and changes to memorize. These cells move here, those move there, this turns into that and that into something else. An eye is derived from this structure, a finger from another. Black magic. When I said, ‘How? But how does this happen?’ my teacher spread his hands in the air and said, ‘Answer that and you’d win a Nobel Prize. But you can’t begin to ask how until you know the sequence of development as well as you know the alphabet. You’re learning a language here. Vocabulary.’

But I was stuck on grammar. He was trying to teach me ‘what’ and I wanted ‘how’ and ‘why,’ and our classroom became a battlefield. I grew to dread it, and as I lost confidence there I dreaded, even more, the switch I had to make three times a week from student to student teacher.

Our department ran thirty sections of lab for Zoology 101; I had to teach three of these, as did all the graduate students. For weeks I’d stood in front of the blackboard, my hands shaking as I tried to discuss the basic properties of animal cells. I’d talked into my bosom, eyes lowered, head ducked, and I’d tried to make up for my lack of knowledge by covering the board with colored drawings. The students stared at me coldly in that huge dim room, squirming on the wooden stools that surrounded the lab benches, and when they grew bored they hung paper airplanes from the plastic human skeleton that guarded the door. They smirked and whispered among themselves when I put the wrong slides in the microscopes, the wrong transparencies in the overhead projectors, assigned the wrong workbooks. They yawned through the endless afternoons and galloped away when I ran out of breath hours before their labs were meant to end.

One November afternoon, after I’d stayed up for two nights studying for a huge embryology exam, I walked into the lab late and found all twenty students at the back of the room, clustered around the specimen jars arrayed on the windowsill. Pickled fetal pigs floated in cloudy liquid, next to pale corrugated brains and bifurcated sheep uteri, but the students weren’t studying those. Instead, they were staring at the series of human embryos I’d always avoided. Brian Mankowski, a student from Boston whom I’d come to dislike for his slyness and stupidity, was perched on a stool and lecturing in my place.