The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  ‘Here,’ I said. ‘I guess. Same department as you.’

  She groaned and then laughed. ‘Why would you want to come here?’

  ‘I’m married to Walter Hoffmeier,’ I confessed.

  Most of my classmates knew that; it was why they avoided me. Page’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Him?’ she said. ‘No kidding. He’s so much older …’

  ‘It’s not like he’s ancient,’ I said. ‘You probably don’t know him.’

  She laid a placating hand on my arm. ‘I don’t, really,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he’s nicer than he looks.’

  ‘He is,’ I said. ‘It’s just that he’s so private. He really only opens up to me – we pretty much keep to ourselves.’

  She made a wry face. ‘I bet. I was going to ask if you wanted to come to a party – a bunch of us first-year graduate students get together every Friday, and this week we’re meeting at my place. But I guess you wouldn’t want to come.’

  ‘I would,’ I said, surprising myself. ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘With Walter? That might not be so good.’

  ‘I’ll leave him at home,’ I said. It was true that we kept pretty much to ourselves – Walter kept me so close to him that I’d had no chance to make friends my own age. But I yearned for some company just then, some entry into the graduate-school world I felt I was being forced into.

  Page seemed ready to welcome me despite my connection to Walter, and all that week we sat together in class and mocked Professor Tinbergen’s papery voice. ‘Animals associate in different ways,’ he said. He read directly from our textbook, his thin hand fussing with the buckle of his belt. ‘Varieties of association include mutualism, competition, commensalism, parasitism, and predation.’

  ‘Food and sex,’ Page whispered to me. ‘That’s all he’s saying – who they eat and who they fuck and how and when.’

  ‘Something you’d like to share with us?’ Professor Tinbergen said.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Page replied.

  While he droned on, Page drew butterflies on a notebook page, fantastic creatures with humanoid eyes and legs and oversize antennae and ridiculous clothes, pompous creatures engaged in silly acts. One was a caricature of Tinbergen. One was the department chairman. One, inevitably, was Walter, a pair of wings drooping sadly from his thorax and scalpels bristling from his feet. I laughed at that, and then felt immediately guilty, but Page was so open and friendly at first that before I’d known her a week I’d told her entirely too much. When she asked me how I came to marry Walter I described our summer in the trailer at the reservoir, cutting up fish and weighing gonads. She contended that I’d been overwhelmed by all that biology, and I couldn’t offer a better explanation.

  Page told me tales about our classmates. ‘Stay away from Timmy,’ she said. ‘He gets weird when he drinks. John Webster sleeps in the woods for weeks at a time, watching hawks. Suzanne is married to Lon Brinkman, over in botany, but she’s fooling around with Tony Baker. The one who works in Wasserman’s lab?’

  ‘I’ve seen him,’ I said; Tony was the student who’d worked with us at the reservoir and who had tried to invite me to the July Fourth celebration. My throat still got dry when I looked at him.

  ‘They’ll all be at the party,’ Page said. ‘You’ll meet everyone.’

  It was easy enough to get Walter’s permission to go – all I had to do was tell him it was a meeting of my fellow students. ‘So I’ll know some people,’ I explained the evening of the party. ‘So I won’t feel lost next fall.’

  ‘You know all the professors,’ he told me, straightening some piles of paper on his desk. ‘You’ve been having dinner with them for two years.’ Then he checked his calendar and looked at me sheepishly. ‘Tonight’s one of our nights,’ he said, meaning I was mid-cycle. ‘Try not to be late?’

  ‘I won’t be,’ I said. ‘I just want to meet some of these people I’ll be working with.’

  ‘Have a good time,’ he said.

  I went off to Page’s place alone. All the windows were open in her small apartment, letting in the warm April air. When I came up the stairs, I found only Page and a man in a black leather jacket, who had a beaked nose and a shock of dirty blond hair that fell in his eyes when he moved.

  ‘Hey,’ this man said, fixing me with a hawk’s predatory glare. ‘Fresh blood. Who’s this?’

  I blushed dark red. Before I could answer him, Page came out of the kitchen. Her hair was frizzed from the steam of the couscous she was cooking, and her breasts swung soft and loose under her Indian smock.

  ‘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.

  ‘These are the results of abortions,’ he said. ‘Pure and simple. These are human children that someone killed and removed on purpose, and then pickled like cucumbers, and then sold to this department for money.’

  He looked up when I walked in, but he kept on talking. ‘This is an outrage,’ he said. ‘We should refuse to work in this room. The people who bought and sold these have no respect for human life, no respect for those of us who have accepted Christ and the holy scriptures. We should refuse to tolerate this.’

  One of the girls giggled nervously and a boy stabbed a pair of dissecting probes into the pockmarked black wax of a tray. ‘Brian,’ I said. ‘That’s enough. We have work to do.’

  I knew I had never had any control over this group and that I was about to lose them for good. I tried to imagine how one of the other teaching assistants would handle the situation. They had tips and tricks and favorite students. They always seemed to know what to do.

  ‘Tell me why we should put up with this,’ Brian said.

  I searched my mind for what the department head had told us. ‘Because what you’re saying isn’t true,’ I said. ‘Those specimens are miscarriages – spontaneous abortions. They were already dead. They came from hospitals. It’s perfectly legitimate.’

  I wasn’t sure I believed this myself – the specimens disturbed me and I’d always avoided the back of the room where they stood. ‘They’re the best way for you to understand the sequence of human development,’ I said. ‘They’re meant to teach you respect for human life. Not to cheapen it – look at them. You can see how early they have a shape, hands, a heart. You can see what a miracle life is.’

  ‘They’re pickled,’ Brian said. ‘Like meat. Where’s the respect in that?’

  On another day, I might have had an answer for him. But I was unfed, exhausted, wired from too much coffee, and when I looked at the jars again, at the gray, faded bodies with their folded knees, their shadowy faces, their eyes closed in endless sleep, I burst into tears. Brian was right; they were horrifying. Plastic models, pink and cheerful, would have served just as well.

  The students moved silently toward their seats, leaving me alone with the jars. One of those embryos – fifty-six days, eight weeks – might have been the child I’d given up for Randy. A recognizable small person, with an enormous head, tiny arms and feet, a ghost of an ear, an eye. I had gone to the clinic alone, more frightened of the pain and invasion than of what I was actually doing. The doctor had been quiet, steady, slow. ‘I’m removing the products of conception,’ he’d said in his soft, flat voice. ‘Breathe slowly. It won’t hurt.’

  It hadn’t hurt much then, but it hurt now. I looked at the jar, and as I did my right side was stabbed with a pain so sharp and startling that I fell to the floor.

  I woke to a ring of faces above me. Students, the department chairman, Page. Walter. ‘Grace,’ Walter was saying. ‘Grace?’

  ‘I think it’s my appendix,’ I said weakly. It might have been; the pain was in the right place. But I knew it wasn’t. It had to be my ovary, struggling to pass another egg through the tangled web of tissue. I would have welcomed appendicitis: let it rupture, let it burst. Dark poisons spreading through me, an operation and a stay in the hospital between cool white sheets. No classes, no tests, no labs. I fainted again.

  What I got for my pains was an evening in the Emergency Department at Cooley-Dickinson, just long enough for the doctors to rule out appendicitis, a strangulated bowel, gallstones, pyelonephritis. Just long enough for the resident gynecologist to examine me and to announce gravely, in Walter’s presence, that I had chronic pelvic inflammatory disease that had probably damaged me already.

  ‘Is that serious?’ Walter said. His face was tired and drawn in the cruel hospital light. He’d left a class behind, I knew. And a grant that was due, and a ringing phone, and a thesis committee. I’d never been sick before, in all our time together, and I was surprised how much I’d frightened him. ‘I hate hospitals,’ he’d muttered, as we waited in the curtained cubicle. He’d rubbed his fingers along
my arm, stroking, smoothing, soothing. Soothing himself as much as me.

  ‘It’s not an emergency,’ the doctor said. ‘She fainted from the pain of a cramp, and there’s nothing acute going on. But these chronic inflammations are serious enough. She needs long-term antibiotic therapy, and frequent exams. But she doesn’t need to stay here now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Walter said. He let go of my arm and stood to shake the doctor’s hand.

  The doctor smiled and turned to me, and Walter moved away to gather my clothes. ‘Have you ever had an abortion?’ the doctor asked.

  I made a face at him, trying to signal that yes I had and no, I didn’t want to discuss it. The doctor read only half my face. ‘It’s no crime,’ he said gently.

  Walter looked over his shoulder at me. ‘I had one a long time ago,’ I muttered. The white paper drape in my lap was as stiff as a placemat.

  ‘What?’ Walter said carefully. He looked from the doctor to me.

  ‘Before I knew you,’ I said.

  The doctor made some notes in a chart. ‘Have you had trouble conceiving since then?’

  I answered yes again. Walter dropped into an orange plastic chair and buried his head in his hands. He was so upset that he couldn’t spare a word to comfort me, and when I was discharged we drove home in silence. He put me in bed and draped a heating pad over my sore side, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I can’t believe you never told me,’ he said hours later.

  I thought of all the other things I’d never said. ‘It wasn’t your business,’ I said. ‘I didn’t even know you then.’

  ‘So?’ he said. ‘So what else don’t I know about you?’

  ‘I hate school,’ I said. ‘I’m not going back.’ I pressed my hand to my mouth as if I could stuff those words back in. They surprised me at least as much as they did Walter.

  He didn’t believe me at first. He thought I was sick, that I had a fever, that I was just run-down, and when I went to drop out he made me take a leave of absence instead. ‘Health problems,’ I wrote on the withdrawal form, and Walter chose to believe that.