Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  After the first weeks of our marriage, I thought Sarah and I made fairly happy newlyweds. To her credit, she worked hard to warm our union. For example, one night as we lay in bed, I was startled by Sarah’s hand, which reached gently for my own. Chang was snoring. What was odd was that this caressing hand did not feel odd. The other, lonely existence I had led until just a few months before felt so far away that it and my wedded present seemed separate, the lives of two distinct people.

  “Marriage will be wonderful for both of us, Sarah,” I said to her, because her darting eyes looked unsure, and I gave her palm a little pinch before slipping my fingers out and away from hers. Chang wheezed beside me, his nose in my ear. Oh, could it be that this arrangement might actually turn out happily?

  My wife—I still could not believe the sound of that—was now asleep. I pulled the covers over this woman I barely knew, kissed her lovely hair, and blew out the candle on the night table. The unease I’d had about marrying a quiet stranger was now replaced by a wave of nervous contentment that seemed to make my body dissolve. I heard myself murmur something about loving her. I wish I had more memories as joyful as this one.

  As brightly as I felt the newness of love, Chang seemed to feel it even more so. He had no trepidation whatsoever. Whenever I brought up the idea of touring again, this man who had once flown to absurd peaks of joy at the applause of strangers now seemed upset at the thought of leaving Wilkesboro even for an hour. But I was not surprised. As much as ill health or retirement, love can exchange a first life for a second—once a man assumes a new role, the charm of the old loses its allure. Being a newlywed was giving Chang his cherished rations of attention, and he had forgotten the similar nourishment he had once drawn from performing.

  Still, we continued to spend our days and nights practicing feats.

  We were out on our property one afternoon, vaulting from our hands to our feet and back again. My wife was inside with an aching stomach; Adelaide sat with us on the grass, watching.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” my sister-in-law asked after a time.

  “Our father,” Chang said, from our downside-up situation. “Ti-eye the great Mekong fisherman,” I added. We flipped and were back on our feet. And then we flipped again.

  “That’s a trick.” Adelaide was trying to whistle. “That is some trick.” We were not talking seriously, just the repartee of new intimates. “I can’t even whistle, and you boys can do that.”

  Adelaide shifted her weight. “My father never showed me any tricks,” she said. “Once the old man tells us, ‘If you was boys, I’d show you how to hunt.’ But that’s it for tricks.”

  “That sound nice,” Chang said.

  She lost her smile. “What’s that supposed to mean?” She looked us up and down. “I just said he never showed me anything.”

  We somersaulted again. Chang said, “I was just—”

  “What somebody promises and don’t give you, that’s what you take away from them,” Adelaide said. “That’s my father’s line, he’s always saying that.”

  “Then he did pass something on to you,” I said, upside down.

  We jumped back to our feet. “You know I make promises to you, Adelaide,” Chang said. “I keep my promises to you.”

  “You know something about your brother, Eng?” she asked me. “He’s quite a talker. He says he ain’t never been around a woman before, and it’s obvious I believe him.” Adelaide shook her head. “But how come he knows the way to be such a talker?”

  My brother and I remained in our standing position for a moment, catching our breath. “Perhaps Chang obtained the mouth,” I said, “and I, the brain.” She laughed. Back into a handstand.

  “Eng!” Chang whispered in my ear, not amused. He had never heard me tell a joke before, not successfully, whereas that was all I’d heard him do when we were on tour.

  “You know”—Adelaide was sitting on her hands in the grass—“my father always said not to trust big talkers.”

  I could have attempted to be funny again, or not. “Another gift he gave you,” I said. Into another somersault.

  “You can do it, Adelaide,” Chang said. “I can show you.”

  “What are you talking about now, boy?”

  “To stand on hands,” he said. “Easy trick, I give you.”

  “Hey, Chang.” She was gazing at something above our heads and squinting. “Don’t be squirrelly. Do you want a wife or a circus attraction?”

  Supporting half of us, Chang’s arms began to show strain, his shoulders shook a little, and his neck craned forward awkwardly. He panted when we got back on our feet.

  “Yes, let us show you.” I tipped a nod to Adelaide. “All you would have to do is fuse yourself with your sister, and we would have twice as much money in the family.”

  She laughed and I laughed, and even Chang laughed, in a manner of speaking.

  “Please, just let me be a mother,” she said. “That’ll be enough, obviously.”

  “Okay,” Chang said, frowning. Why couldn’t he enjoy it when I finally made another person laugh?

  Adelaide walked up to us, coming within a few inches from our faces. “Stop bobbing, you’all, for a minute,” she said, and when we stopped she rested her hands on our shoulders with affection. “I want to do something,” she said, smiling as wickedly as a gambler who’s just cheated profitably. “Just go along now.”

  And she took Chang’s hand and mine, slowly, gently, with a womanly delight that surprised both Chang and me, and left us speechless. But we were not frightened; we were smiling. She began to move the three of us in a delicate waltz for three, perfect in its rhythm despite the absence of music in the afternoon air.

  “What are we doing, there is no song?” Chang said in a tremulous voice.

  “We’re dancing, boys,” she said, “ain’t that obvious?” My head was nearly brushing against one of her cheeks, and Chang’s brushed against her other one, and she asked us didn’t we find this fun. Yes, we did. It’s lovely to dance, I said. See, boys, if we waited for music, we’d miss the chance for a lot of good times around here. You are absolutely right about that, I said. Eng, maybe you can teach your brother to dance as well as you’all. Chang said he did not need teaching from me. But his feet were getting tangled, and Adelaide held us upright, her hair fragrant with soap and near my nose and I found myself smelling.

  That evening, we retired very early. I was reading in bed silently with Sarah at my back and Chang facing me, both of them asleep (I rested the spine of the book on my brother’s forehead). At least I thought they were both asleep. But Sarah whispered : “Eng, are you’all reading that Shakespeare?”

  I looked over my shoulder and squinted at my wife. I had been reading from the Bard every night of our marriage, and she knew that.

  “Do you want to read to me, Eng?” She was blinking, her smile toothy and delicate.

  “What’s that, my dear?” I was using Chang’s head as a placeholder.

  “I would sure like to hear you read to me, Eng.” She kept up that smile; I couldn’t help seeing there was desperation in it. “It might help my stomach. Would you please?”

  I never enjoyed performing; my brother was the showman, not I. But a husband should work at marriage, I thought, and I was as lucky a man as any in history simply to have the chance to attempt that work.

  For the first time in my life I began to recite a passage aloud, the second sonnet. But I did not read it well. My voice was high and stumbling where it should have been deep and certain. I kept my eye on the page, even as I could feel her staring at me. Out of the corner of my vision I saw my brother’s eyes open, and I felt my sleeping half twitch awake slowly, with the covers bunched over his shoulders. He groaned extravagantly before closing his eyes again and snorting a bogus snore.

  That was one indignity too many. I stopped reading. The words had lost their meaning, and the syllables lost their elegance. I leaned over Chang’s body and put the book down on the night table
beside him.

  “I am sorry, Sarah.” I pulled the sheets up and across Chang and me. My eyes felt very heavy, and itched as if I had grit inside my lids. “My dear, I—”

  “I thought it sounded well,” she said.

  I realized how loudly the breath whistled in and out of my nose as I thought of how to respond. “Good night,” I whispered, facing away from her.

  A long time passed before she asked in a soft voice, “Eng, are you asleep?” She nudged my shoulder tenderly, shaking my brother and me a little, but I did not know what to say. How to explain why reading like that was so unpleasant for an attraction as exhibition-shy as I was? My wife lay there for a bit, curled up against my back, quiet and still, breathing softly. I could feel that she was trying to emulate the pattern of my breathing.

  But she could not sleep, and she kept me awake with her loud inhaling and exhaling, and her turning, and also the little squeak in her nose. It sounded like she had begun to cry, her face against the pillow. But I did not turn around to see if she was, because I would not have known how to react if I’d found her sobbing. Whatever was making her cry must have been more substantial than my failure to read to her, I thought. I would begin again tomorrow the work of making my marriage happy, I told myself.

  The next evening, Chang and I were going through our ledgers in our study, figuring out exactly how far our savings would carry us, when the girls came back from town. Through the hall we could hear them giggling as they undid their bonnets.

  “Adelaide is home,” Chang said, as if he did not know by now that if he observed something, I probably had, too. He skipped us out of the study and over toward our wives.

  “Hello,” he smiled.

  My wife looked at Chang and me. “Ain’t that so sweet?” Sarah cooed uncharacteristically, trying to make her demeanor more winning by adopting the voice of a five-year-old. She turned to her sister. “Your little boy”—she substituted the l in “little” with a young girl’s w—“is happy to see you.” Then my wife directed her gaze to me. “I wonder if my little man’s as happy to see his mama?”

  I had never heard a grown woman speak in that manner, and it confused me. I had to look away from her, and I found my glance resting on Adelaide’s face. She commiserated with a smile.

  “Well, obviously, you don’t want your husband too happy to see you, Sarah,” said Adelaide, rolling her eyes. “Keep a little mystery in a marriage; the man can’t be a puppy, now.” She patted Chang on the shoulder.

  Sarah asked if we’d gone over our books. I told her we had.

  “Good,” said Adelaide, taking her sister’s hand and beginning to lead her to the kitchen. “Sarah and me already tried poor.” Our wives stepped past us.

  My brother had a look on his face like that of a whelp. I do not think he had moved a half inch since his wife quit talking. “What she means, ‘puppy’?”

  “Probably,” I laughed, “she was speaking in jest, Chang.”

  “Oh,” he said, still whelp-faced and looking into my eyes as if he wasn’t sure whether to trust my gaze. “What we do when they do that?”

  I stopped chuckling. I did not know the answer. We had never learned how to comport ourselves with women.

  Since we had decided not to tour for a while, we needed some way to raise money. I must admit that my father-in-law, though he had opposed our marriages at first, was helpful during this time. The townspeople, too, seemed to grow accustomed to the sight of us on Main Street. Fewer in Wilkesboro sneered.

  My brother and I decided to farm, as we had done years earlier in Siam, and Mr. Yates presented us with so many tables, tools, fertilizers, almanacs, and dictums to memorize that we became immersed in modern farming. Yates told us that after years of intense use and misuse, North Carolinian soil produced diminishing returns. Most plots in Wilkes County were less than thirty acres and consisted of corn or tobacco, but Chang and I raised hogs mostly, although we did plant a few rows of corn as well. Chang and I purchased three more slaves, Nathan, Basel, and Guillaume, and we became strict taskmasters.

  Meanwhile, my marriage was beginning to feel like a house from a dream, pleasant at first but shrinking a bit every day. “Eng?” Sarah said one night as she was sitting on the bed and brushing her hair before sleeptime. She had been brushing it for minutes and was still not ready for bed. Chang and I were under the covers and I wanted to blow out the candle.

  “Eng?” Sarah’s voice high and in the nonsensical tone some people use to greet little animals. Though we had been married only a short while, I hankered for some time apart from her. I would feel more certain of my affection for her eventually, I believed. I just wanted to do it at my own pace.

  “Eng?” Her voice still singsong.

  “Sarah calling you.” My brother nudged me. My temples throbbed, and I did not want to open my eyes.

  “Eng?” (Why hadn’t she let me know—before the wedding—that that was the way she sometimes spoke?) “Eng, my stomach feels not bad tonight.” She winked in a way that made me not like myself, for the animosity it aroused in me. She leaned over to place her brush on the chest of drawers, and her dressing gown traveled up her thighs, which were ashen and doughy.

  “All right, dear,” I said, and smiled. I tried to make the smile affectionate, but it was not easy to overcome the foolishness of her tone. I didn’t stop smiling until my cheeks ached. “All right.”

  During this time, my brother and his wife were so ardent in their copulation, I tried to be the same with Sarah—loving and enthusiastic about affairs of the flesh. But the strong current that had swept me up at the beginning of my marriage had started to dwindle. Love was now a mild streamlet that advanced in drips around my feet; despite how hard I worked at tenderness, I could not drown in a thing that shallow. And so, of course, I would still caress her—out of affection or some other substance—but after a few months I was reaching less and less often for my wife, who never asked why. I hoped for some other sort of connection, some additional intimacy to arrive and fill the absence. Sometimes I imagined Princess Xenga in Sarah’s stead.

  More often I found myself an unenthusiastic bystander during the nights when my brother was familiar with his wife. The trance I attempted rarely held for as long as I would have wished—nor as well—but on occasion I discovered myself finding Adelaide’s accidental touches not as entirely unpleasant as one would expect. And Adelaide herself was agreeable, too, especially in her manner toward my brother. She fell into the habit of teasing him, amusingly exposing his foibles—in a good-natured way, of course, with an ironic twist and that smile at the end of her sentences. Usually his expression around her was meek to the point of unintentional comedy, until she would tell him she had been kidding.

  Soon came the morning of our six-month anniversary, a Saturday. Chang had the idea that we should have an outdoor meal on the Yadkin, and as he began to convince us with talk of warm clear air, I found myself envisioning bright flowers abuzz with insects ; I could feel the gentle radiance of the summer sun he spoke of, and was easily persuaded.

  But the idyll described was not at all the way the Yadkin appeared that forenoon. Sweltering humidity overcast the air, the flowers neglected to sound with life, and the water was brown. We sat on the banks of the river. The ground was covered in a drab dry dust. Though fall was months away, a few of the trees were starting to go leafless. Dust and hot wind got in the eyes. We spread out our lunch blanket as close to the river as possible.

  “Well, it’s obvious to us all what a good idea this was, Chang,” Adelaide said, breathing out through her nose and frowning with enough spite to make Chang fall apart. “It’s only about one hundred degrees out.” Chang looked down into the grass.

  “Shall we eat?” I asked, and grinned at our women. Each wife sat with her legs gathered under her hips. Sarah was flushed and sweaty, her skin blotchy where it emerged from under her dress. Adelaide did not perspire as noticeably as did her sister.

  “We shouldn’t have eve
n bothered to cook this chicken.” Adelaide gave Chang a sidelong look as she reached for the food in the picnic basket. “You’all know we’ve got the kind of sun to bake everything right here.” I hadn’t heard her use this sarcastic tone with anyone else.

  “Sorry.” Chang’s voice sounded as small as if it had sprung from a body two feet tall and shrinking.

  I asked my own wife to hand me a piece of chicken, but she did not hear. She wore a babylike, innocent expression about her big blue eyes, her long, straight, and crinkled nose, and childishly sucked-in lower lip. She glanced at me a second before looking away as if she hadn’t noticed my gaze.

  “Isn’t this just the kind of excitement you had in mind?” Adelaide was saying to Sarah. “Get yourself married, see the world. A picnic by the old Yadkin where it is obviously ninety-nine in the shade.”

  “Maybe we just stay and eat and try smiling?” Chang said, startling the girls, who seemed not to have expected him to respond. “Just stay and eat and talk?”

  I would have sworn Adelaide’s slanted frown was a look of embarrassment had I not seen the same expression on her face when Chang first slipped the ring on her finger six months before.

  “It’s too hot, you’all,” said Sarah. “Excess sun messes my stomach.”

  “Stay and talk about what, Chang?” Adelaide’s eyes burned with emotion one hopes not to see in one’s loved ones. “Some people can talk well, some people can walk well. Obviously he can’t do neither one.” She pointed a disparaging thumb at her husband.

  Sarah laughed, and so Adelaide went on reciting: “Most men lose their sense of taste when they’re drinking, and those who always talk are no good at thinking.” Then she looked at me and smiled, anger gone from her face. “That’s another one my father passed on.” But before long Adelaide saw her husband pouting, and she said in a playful tone: “I’m just joking, Chang.”

  She rested her hand in his and leaned in to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. Adelaide was one of those country women people usually write off as fools when they first meet them. She neither knew nor cared about the events of the world beyond Wilkesboro, was crude in conversation and bored by the majority of it, and had been unmarried for too many years before Chang and I arrived. But I was coming to see that, underneath the leavings of decades of obscure small-town life, she had a whimsical soul.