Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Are you sure you want that?’ he’d said, sounding exactly like my mother. ‘A third helping — you look like you’re putting on a little weight.’

‘That’s my business,’ I’d snapped. But after that I’d taken to eating in secret, concealing my habits from Walter the way I’d concealed them from my mother as a child.

In the basement below us, our washer and dryer stood against adjoining walls, leaving a small corner of empty space between them. I’d always kept our clothes hamper there, but after Walter’s comment I began keeping our dirty clothes in plastic bags and I used the hamper for hiding food. I kept flat tins of anchovies there, jars of jam and peanut butter, bars of dark chocolate, nuts and sour-balls, cookies in tins, fruitcakes and canned pâté and maraschino cherries. At night, when Walter groaned beside me, I crept downstairs in my robe and slippers and headed for the hamper.

I ate like an animal, ripping and tearing the food from the packages, greedy, furtive, fast; half-asleep while the night passed by like a dream. The emptiness in me was so deep I could never fill it, and each time I found myself in the basement, my mouth smeared and my stomach so taut it hurt to touch it, I hardly recognized what I was doing. The food hit my brain like a club, sedating my confusion and pain until I could lumber back to bed. Night after night I’d done this, making something of myself. But when my mother asked how I’d let this happen, I looked at the table and said, ‘I don’t know. My metabolism must be changing.’

‘How’s the latest house?’ she asked me then.

‘I’m selling it,’ I said. Nothing about my business seemed interesting anymore. By then I’d had fantasies of living in one of my houses, away from Walter, away from our lives, but I went ahead and sold the last one and then, instead of buying another, put the money in the bank. I was tired. I couldn’t understand what I was doing. Walter was so glad to see me out of the rehabbing business that he threw a New Year’s party.

Because I couldn’t manage much of anything then, Walter’s colleague, Tyler Robertson, made most of the arrangements and brought over most of the food. I cleaned up a little and then wrapped myself in a new dress: white, soft, cut low and tight around my breasts but floating gently elsewhere, obscuring (I thought) the weight I’d gained since September. Page showed up; since Hank had returned to her lab she’d forgiven Walter for trying to steal him, and I think she even felt sorry for him. Stuck with this idle, crazy wife; she and Walter were colleagues now, and had more in common than she’d ever had with me. She’d shed her girlish shell somewhere, when I hadn’t been paying attention, and she’d turned into a formidable woman. Where once she’d made me feel old and sedate, now she made me feel like a child.

She took one look at me and said, ‘What’s happened to you? Are you pregnant?’

‘I wish,’ I said.

She raised her eyebrows and looked me over more carefully. ‘So?’ she said. ‘What in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you pull yourself together?’

‘No,’ I said. I couldn’t tell her what had happened. ‘Not right now.’

Her disapproval was so strong that I could smell it. She moved toward the bar Walter had set up in the kitchen, and I forced myself to circulate among the other guests. Tyler was so drunk he was prancing around in a rhinestone tiara. His shirt was hiked above his pleated pants, displaying six inches of freckled paunch. His third wife, Elena, a Hungarian graduate student four years younger than me, kept rubbing her fingers on his stomach. The two of them circled our living room together, filling glasses from a big jar of something they referred to as glog.

‘Scotch, brandy, spices, lemons, sugar, gin,’ Tyler recited gaily, pushing his tiara into his thinning hair. Elena had crowned him King of the Night and he was taking his role seriously.

He and Elena smooched and fondled each other, stuffing food into their open mouths; they’d been married for less than a year and Elena had cooked goulash and pierogies and potato pancakes, onion dumplings and a huge ham, shaming me completely. Tyler had invited all his students to the party, as well as his ex-students and post-docs and protégés, and all Elena’s foreign friends, Russians and Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Koreans. Almost everyone there was dependent on Tyler in some way, and so he was a happy man and this was a happy party for almost everyone but Walter.

While the party bubbled and tumbled and roared, Walter sat in a corner and sulked. He was wearing a hat shaped like a giraffe’s head, with ears and painted eyes and a long, quivering nose that seemed designed to express his slights. My own hat bore pink stuffed hands that clapped when I pulled a string; Tyler had crowned us all earlier and now the headgear he’d brought as party favors bobbed as our guests sweated and jiggled to the old Motown tapes he’d also brought. It was Tyler’s party, almost completely; only the house was ours.

I got trapped against the wall with a clump of comparative-literature types, Elena’s friends, and I stood there miserably. I wanted to dance with the students. I wanted to wear, as one girl did, a spaghetti-strapped green cotton undershirt and black Lycra pants. Instead, I stood in my white tent and listened to a discussion about folktales and the wish-fulfillment of barren couples.

‘This occurs so often,’ one black-haired woman said. Her hair was swept in a complex knot below a pale blue, Carmen Miranda-like hat sprouting blossoms and fruits — one of Tyler’s favorites. The woman spoke as if she’d forgotten she was wearing it. ‘A woman begs an old witch for a tiny girl and then finds a baby in a tulip: Thumbelina. A woman beneath a juniper tree pleads for a child and then eats some berries and is granted her wish, but then she dies. A queen pricks her finger sewing and then begs for a daughter as red as blood and as white as the snow. The wish is always granted, but there is always a twist.’

She smiled at me; she had lipstick on her front teeth. I turned and stared out the window, at the snow lying over the grass, and I thought how I could prick my finger with the marcasite brooch Uncle Owen had given me. The drops might fall, harden like sugar-on-snow, leap up as triplets. Life might leap up in my womb. I had had too much to drink but I thought I knew how the women in those fairy tales had felt: yearning, burning, brooding, dreaming, wishing, wanting. Despairing, sometimes. Lost in an inner world. I still dreamed that I might get pregnant somehow; that I might, like a marsupial, have a baby no bigger than my thumb.

A man wearing a silver alien’s helmet said, ‘Remember the man who said, “I want a son so bad it could even be a hedgehog”? And then he gets one who’s half hedgehog, half boy?’

The people around him smiled knowingly and their voices rose and fell, confident, self-satisfied, dry. Here at a party where all was permitted, even encouraged, they could find nothing better to do than to talk about their work and insinuate that if I was finally granted a child I’d either die or bear some sort of monster. Two girls were dancing near us, eyes closed and hair flying, ignoring us completely. I tapped my feet and longed to join them but knew I couldn’t; I was too old, too heavy, too respectable. I had just turned thirty, and I thought no one would ever dance with me again.

As I moved away from the folklorists I bumped into a plump Pakistani who lowered his lids and confided that his astral body could fly. ‘I fly over mountains and deserts,’ he said, waiting for me to be impressed.

‘Desserts?’ I pricked up my ears.

‘ Deserts ,’ he said. ‘Dunes, oases, date palms …’