Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

Eng moves closer. She comes up to the side of my bed, but doesn’t touch the hand I’m holding out. She’s a fighter.

“I feel fire-hot, Dad. My bones feel pain.”

“Sharon?” I want to deserve this woman. “Sharon, I’m so sorry.” It isn’t anybody’s fault. You need uppers to get through peace times, too.

“Dad. Let’s go. Chop-chop.”

“You’re too sick to keep food down, baby. Curl up in here. Just for a bit?”

“I’d throw up, Dad.”

“I’ll carry you back to your room. I’ll read you a story, okay?”

Eng watches me real close as I pull the quilt off. “You got any scars you haven’t shown me yet? My mom had a big scar on one leg. Shrapnel. Boom boom. I got scars. See? I got lots of bruises.”

I scoop up my poor girl and rush her, terry robe flapping, to her room which Sharon fixed up with white girlish furniture in less complicated days. Waiting for Eng was good. Sharon herself said it was good for our relationship. “Could you bring us some juice and aspirin?” I shout from the hallway.

“Aspirin isn’t going to cure Eng,” I hear Sharon yell. “I’m going to call Dr. Kearns.”

Downstairs I hear Sharon on the phone. She isn’t talking flu viruses. She’s talking social workers and shrinks. My girl isn’t crazy; she’s picked up a bug in school as might anyone else.

“The child’s arms are covered with bruises,” Sharon is saying. “Nothing major. They look like … well, they’re sort of tiny circles and welts.” There’s nothing for a while. Then she says, “Christ! no, Jason can’t do enough for her! That’s not what I’m saying! What’s happening to this country? You think we’re perverts? What I’m saying is the girl’s doing it to herself.”

“Who are you talking to?” I ask from the top of the stairs. “What happened to the aspirin?”

I lean as far forward over the railing as I dare so I can see what Sharon’s up to. She’s getting into her coat and boots. She’s having trouble with buttons and snaps. In the bluish light of the foyer’s broken chandelier, she looks old, harrowed, depressed. What have I done to her?

“What’s going on?” I plead. “You deserting me?”

“Don’t be so fucking melodramatic. I’m going to the mall to buy some aspirin.”

“How come we don’t have any in the house?”

“Why are you always picking on me?”

“Who was that on the phone?”

“So now you want me to account for every call and every trip?” She ties an angry knot into her scarf. But she tells me. “I was talking to Meg Kearns. She says Dr. Kearns has gone hunting for the day.”

“Great!”

“She says he has his beeper on him.”

I hear the back door stick and Sharon swear. She’s having trouble with the latch. “Jiggle it gently,” I shout, taking the stairs two at a time. But before I can come down, her Nissan backs out of the parking apron.

Back upstairs I catch Eng in the middle of a dream or delirium. “They got Grandma!” she screams. She goes very rigid in bed. It’s a four-poster with canopy and ruffles and stuff that Sharon put on her MasterCard. The twins slept on bunk beds. With the twins it was different, totally different. Dr. Spock can’t be point man for Eng, for us.

“She bring me food,” Eng’s screaming. “She bring me food from the forest. They shoot Grandma! Bastards!”

“Eng?” I don’t dare touch her. I don’t know how.

“You shoot my grandmother?” She whacks the air with her bony arms. Now I see the bruises, the small welts all along the insides of her arms. Some have to be weeks old, they’re that yellow. The twins’ scrapes and cuts never turned that ochre. I can’t help wondering if maybe Asian skin bruises differently from ours, even though I want to say skin is skin; especially hers is skin like mine.

“I want to be with Grandma. Grandma loves me. I want to be ghost. I don’t want to get better.”

I read to her. I read to her because good parents are supposed to read to their kids laid up sick in bed. I want to do it right. I want to be a good father. I read from a sci-fi novel that Sharon must have picked up. She works in a camera store in the mall, right next to a B. Dalton. I read three pages out loud, then I read four chapters to myself because Eng’s stopped up her ears. Aliens have taken over small towns all over the country. Idaho, Nebraska: no state is safe from aliens.

Some time after two, the phone rings. Since Sharon doesn’t answer it on the second ring, I know she isn’t back. She carries a cordless phone everywhere around the house. In the movies, when cops have bad news to deliver, they lean on your doorbell; they don’t call. Sharon will come back when she’s ready. We’ll make up. Things will get back to normal.

“Jason?”

I know Dr. Kearns’s voice. He saw the twins through the usual immunizations.

“I have Sharon here. She’ll need a ride home. Can you drive over?”

“God! What’s happened?”

“Nothing to panic about. Nothing physical. She came for a consultation.”

“Give me a half-hour. I have to wrap Eng real warm so I can drag her out in this miserable weather.”

“Take your time. This way I can take a look at Eng, too.”

“What’s wrong with Sharon?”

“She’s a little exercised about a situation. I gave her a sedative. See you in a half-hour.”

I ease delirious Eng out of the overdecorated four-poster, prop her against my body while I wrap a blanket around her. She’s a tiny thing, but she feels stiff and heavy, a sleepwalking mummy. Her eyes are dry-bright, strange.

It’s a sunny winter day, and the evergreens in the front yard are glossy with frost. I press Eng against my chest as I negotiate the front steps. Where the gutter leaks, the steps feel spongy. The shrubs and bushes my ex-wife planted clog the front path. I’ve put twenty years into this house. The steps, the path, the house all have a right to fall apart.

I’m thirty-eight. I’ve let a lot of people down already.

The inside of the van is deadly cold. Mid-January ice mottles the windshield. I lay the bundled-up child on the long seat behind me and wait for the engine to warm up. It feels good with the radio going and the heat coming on. I don’t want the ice on the windshield to melt. Eng and I are safest in the van.

In the rear-view mirror, Eng’s wrinkled lips begin to move. “Dad, can I have a quarter?”

“May I, kiddo,” I joke.

There’s all sorts of junk in the pockets of my parka. Buckshot, dimes and quarters for the vending machine, a Blistex.

“What do you need it for, sweetheart?”

Eng’s quick. Like the street kids in Saigon who dove for cigarettes and sticks of gum. She’s loosened the blanket folds around her. I watch her tuck the quarter inside her wool mitt. She grins. “Thanks, soldier.”

At Dr. Kearns’s, Sharon is lying unnaturally slack-bodied on the lone vinyl sofa. Her coat’s neatly balled up under her neck, like a bolster. Right now she looks amiable, docile. I don’t think she exactly recognizes me, although later she’ll say she did. All that stuff about Kearns going hunting must have been a lie. Even the stuff about having to buy aspirins in the mall. She was planning all along to get here.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s none of my business, Jason, but you and Sharon might try an honest-to-goodness heart-to-heart.” Then he makes a sign to me to lay Eng on the examining table. “We don’t look so bad,” he says to my daughter. Then he excuses himself and goes into a glass-walled cubicle.

Sharon heaves herself into a sitting position of sorts on the sofa. “Everything was fine until she got here. Send her back, Jase. If you love me, send her back.” She’s slouched so far forward, her pointed, sweatered breasts nearly touch her corduroy pants. She looks helpless, pathetic. I’ve brought her to this state. Guilt, not love, is what I feel.