‘I failed Home Ec,’ I told her. ‘In seventh grade. My teacher wore false eyelashes and spent all her time trying to show us how to use lip pencil and waggle our butts like the models do. Doreen Sandowsky and I brought a shoebox full of field mice into the kitchen and let them loose, and Mrs Kriner broke her ankle trying to jump up on the windowsill. She flunked us both. I weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds my junior year of high school. Then I got thin, then I was fat again, then thin again. Now this.’
Connie laid her soft hand over mine. I guessed her weight at a hundred and forty. Small shoulders, large breasts, most of her weight in her hips. ‘Diets,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried them all.’
‘Who hasn’t?’
‘You’re married?’
I told her about Walter. ‘Zoology,’ I said. ‘Lake ecology, acid rain …’
‘Children?’
‘We can’t. Walter …’
‘School?’
‘I quit,’ I said. ‘More than a year ago. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do since then.’
She smiled at me fondly and pushed up her glasses. ‘So,’ she said. ‘We’re bright, not bad-looking, educated. We live nice lives. Why are we chasing after stupid jobs? Why aren’t we having fun?’
‘Because we’re not doing anything?’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘What we want is something to do.’
What we did, in the few months we had together before Connie got a job in a New Age bookstore, was to get together twice a week for lunch. We took turns cooking; we turned out exotic meals and then ate them secretly, in the middle of the day. While we cooked and ate we picked our lives apart, as if going over our old tracks would show us where to go next; and so when I was browsing through the Times one Sunday and came across a review of Randy’s first one-man show in New York, it seemed natural to save it and show it to Connie. She dipped her finger in the sauce that had enveloped our Thai chicken, and she said, ‘You were married to him?’
Together, while the coffee burbled and plunked in the pot, we studied the photo of Randy and of one of his pictures: an abstracted, wildly skewed view of the block of rowhouses where we’d lived. He’d turned the people who walked our street into cockroaches, earwigs, city bugs; the sky was a jagged field of blue and green. ‘What a nutball,’ Connie said. ‘You sure know how to pick them.’
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I really do.’ Randy had earrings in both ears and hair so long it fell over his shoulders; beneath a leather vest his chest was bare. His thumbs were hooked in his belt and his fingers pointed toward his groin. He looked dangerous, even deranged, wholly improbable as a candidate for fatherhood – but the article said he shared a loft with a set designer and their infant daughter, Persia.
‘Persia?’ Connie said. ‘What kind of a name is that?’
‘Maybe her mother picked it,’ I said. The woman had nerve, I thought. Enough to pick a name like that; enough to force Randy to keep their child. She had everything I lacked.
A Bowl of Neon Tetras
I ended up with a cheap aquarium full of fish. I bought them to comfort me after Connie found a job and we had to give up our lunches, but my first tank was a disaster. The plants died. Algae flourished. The fins of my angel-fish molded and tore within days. A sleek black-and-silver creature, which I’d been unable to resist at the pet store, turned out to be a fierce and undiscriminating predator. After I bought him I woke each morning to find one fish gone, two, three, until finally I had only him, cruising sullen and big-eyed in my tank. I gave him back to the pet store and tried again, and my second time I bought only neon tetras, which were harmless and easy to keep.
Walter was writing a textbook then, the Introduction to Ecosystems that would seal his fame, and while I drew the figures for his manuscript I watched my fish swim back and forth and waited for them to tell me what to do. When I saw Page at departmental parties, when I ran into Connie at the store, I came home and told my fish how outcast I felt. When my family visited and my brother’s twins snapped the stems from my wineglasses, I whispered my rage to the fish. I bought new copies of the books Chuck and Mark and I had once read together, and on the nights Walter worked late I sat by the tank and read out loud. But the books had gone dead and had nothing to say to me.
Uncle Owen died that February. He went out one morning to pick up a paper and a blood vessel burst in his head, felling him before he reached the street in front of his Cambridge house. By the time Dalton, his current companion, reached him, he was already gone.
‘He died an easy death,’ Dalton told me over the phone. ‘We have to be happy with that.’ But it was hard to be happy with anything. At the funeral, Dalton laid his head on my shoulder and cried, and I cried too. I sobbed, I gasped, I moaned. The two of us made a spectacle in that quiet church, where all the rest of my family sat dry-eyed and stony-faced. Walter made comforting noises and passed me his handkerchief, but I turned away from him.
Five years of Christmas dinners had not made Walter and Uncle Owen friends, and so each time I’d visited Uncle Owen and Dalton I’d left Walter in Sunderland. Which had never been a hardship; Uncle Owen and Dalton had treated me like a princess. We had strolled down Newbury Street together and window-shopped. We’d had tea at the Ritz-Carlton. I’d had my hair done in fancy salons while the two men looked on and gave advice. We’d gone to auctions and bid on Sarouks and Tabrizes and fine old Isphahans, and then returned to Uncle Owen’s tiny shop and consoled ourselves for the bargains we’d missed. Back at his house, he’d shown me some of the priceless objects he’d bought so cheaply during the siege of Beijing, and then we’d sat in his living room, drinking port and eating the savories Dalton had made. We had danced to Judy Garland records, and when it was late enough, when we’d had enough to drink, we had sometimes talked about Walter and about my inability to carve out a life of my own.
‘You’re so smart,’ Uncle Owen used to say to me. ‘There’s a million things you could do …’
He and Dalton proposed handfuls of job ideas and I rejected them. ‘Too easy,’ I said of some; ‘too hard,’ of others. Too dull, too repetitive, too much travel, too much work – what I was, although I couldn’t tell Uncle Owen, was too scared. Walter’s wild success, now that our lives had fractured, seemed somehow to guarantee my failure, and I couldn’t imagine finding work that wouldn’t seem trivial next to his.
After the funeral, we all went back to Uncle Owen’s house. Dalton had done his best, laid out Scotch and sherry, cheese straws and scallop-stuffed pastry shells, homemade angelfood cake. But no one was comfortable. No one in my family seemed to know what Dalton was doing there. They thought of him – they wanted to think of him – as someone who had worked for Uncle Owen and no more. My mother asked him point-blank what he was doing there.
‘I live here,’ Dalton said, and then his kind face crumpled. He was thirty-five then but looked ten years younger.
‘You used to,’ my mother said. ‘I mean, live-in help is one thing, but …’
I wrapped my arm around Dalton’s waist and watched as my mother moved away and toured the living room, fingering the heavy drapes and the jade animals and the celadon bowls and jars and the lovely old rugs. ‘All this stuff,’ she said, almost to herself. Dalton and I looked at each other and winced when she picked up a willowy porcelain figurine. ‘And then all that stuff in the shop …’
We knew what she was thinking. My father was Uncle Owen’s only nephew, and my mother had every reasonable expectation that all this – the house, the shop, the furnishings – would fall to my father and her. Finally she’d be able to live the way she thought she’d always been meant to. Finally, my father was going to come through.
I don’t think my father even thought about it. He’d been as dry-eyed as my mother and Toby throughout the funeral, but his face was creased with grief and I knew he was mourning the end of his real family. Mumu gone, now Owen; me as distant as if I’d married an Arab and moved to Abu Dhabi. Him in that ho
use in Westfield with only his bitter wife for company, and once each weekend a visit from Toby and Linda and the kids. He sat heavily in a green Victorian chair much too small for him, and while the sun set he stared out the window and ate cheese straws absently.
I wouldn’t have minded if everything had gone to him, but Uncle Owen surprised us one last time. Months later, when the estate was settled, we found out that Uncle Owen had left ten thousand dollars to my father and an equal amount to Toby. The rest, the bulk of the estate, he’d split between Dalton and me.
Dalton got the house,
in which I hope you live (Uncle Owen had written), long, happily, with the companion of your choice. May you be as lucky as me.
Dalton also got the shop and all its contents. I got everything stored in the warehouse in Natick – all the pieces Uncle Owen had accumulated over the years, which he’d used to restock the shop whenever he ran low – and a fair bit of money he’d salted away.
I would invest the money (he’d written to me). Although of course you may do as you wish. But I hope you invest it wisely, in your own name, not Walter’s, and that you use the proceeds to get on your feet. Consider a visit to China – I have always regretted not returning. You would be happy there. If you go, visit the Forbidden City for me.
Keep the antiques if you can – you know which ones are good, and their value will only increase. Remember that I have always loved you.
‘He meant that,’ Dalton told me, when I made my last visit to him. ‘You were always his favorite.’
‘But I never did anything,’ I said. ‘I only got to college because he sent me, and I made a mess of that – and then Randy, and Walter, and look at me now … I never know what it is I want to do.’
‘You’re a late bloomer,’ Dalton said. ‘Owen used to tell me how he’d been the same way, thrashing around for years before he finally figured out who he was.’
‘I wish I’d known him then.’
‘He always had faith in you.’ Dalton smiled and touched my hair. ‘There’s something here in the house I know he wanted you to have.’ He went into the living room and returned with a big glass bowl I’d always admired. Narrow-mouthed, melon-shaped, with a filigree silver rim; Uncle Owen had always kept flowers in it.
‘It’s a fish bowl, really,’ Dalton said. ‘He picked it up in Hong Kong years ago. It was meant to house one prize goldfish, but we were laughing together one night after you’d told us about your first aquarium, and Owen said we ought to give you this. It’s older than the three of us put together.’
I drove home with the precious bowl cradled in styrofoam and the lawyer’s list of my inheritance in my purse. The bowl was thick and slightly uneven and rested on a carved rosewood base, and when I walked in the door with it, Walter’s mouth dropped open.
‘That’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘That must be worth a fortune.’
‘It’s for my fish,’ I said. I filled the bowl with distilled water and scooped my flock of neon tetras from my ugly aquarium into it. Immediately the fish looked serene and proud.
‘What a nice thing for him to leave you,’ Walter said. And he meant that, I think; there was no greed in him. He’d always been proud of his ability to provide for us.
‘Wait,’ I said. I showed him the lawyer’s papers. Those sums of money, invested here and there; the catalog of rugs and screens and vases and bowls and dainty figurines, all labeled and numbered and waiting for me in Natick.
‘I want to invest the money,’ I said. ‘That’s what Uncle Owen asked me to do. I want to move the antiques here.’
‘Here?’ Walter said.
I looked around and saw for the first time that we might have a problem. The house was full of his and Eileen’s things. We had room to add a bowl of fish, but hardly more than that.
‘We’ll get rid of some things,’ I said firmly. ‘Make room. I want Uncle Owen’s stuff near me.’
Walter puffed up. ‘This is my house,’ he started, but then he backed down when he saw my face. ‘I mean, it’s our house, but you know – we’re all settled here. We don’t need anything. We’re comfortable.’
We argued long into the night and all the next day, and when we got nowhere we retreated into our customary silences. Walter won, in the end: he refused to have the house cluttered up with what he referred to as ‘all that Oriental stuff.’
I smiled at him when he said that, because I’d already hatched a plan. ‘Fine,’ I told him. ‘If that’s what you want.’ I took the money Uncle Owen had left me, and I bought another house.
A Light Like a Laser
My house was run-down, almost falling down, with a leaky roof and a crumbling chimney and ancient wiring. But it sat on a ridge overlooking the river, and it was clean and cheap and spacious and had pleasant lines and a dry basement. It couldn’t be lived in right away, but I didn’t care; I never had any intention of living there. The house was for my furnishings, not for me, and at first I only meant to use it as storage space.
I had all Uncle Owen’s treasures shipped there from the warehouse in Natick, and as the men carried the crates to the basement I checked them off against my list. The rugs were rolled in brown paper, the screens were boxed, the fragile porcelains and vases were double-crated, and the furniture was draped with white canvas. I couldn’t see what anything was and could only match the numbers on the parcels to the numbers on my list. I’d started the day in a hum of exhilaration, but as the parcels vanished into the basement, their contents unseen and unappreciated, I began to wonder what the point of this had been. That night, when I returned home, I was depressed.
Walter was already furious – he hated the house, and hated that I’d gone and bought it without him. He hated the time I’d spent arranging the closing, seeing lawyers, passing papers. His book was due at the publisher’s that summer, and I’d been less and less able to help him; and when I came home that night and said, ‘This isn’t what I wanted at all. I can’t even see what I’ve got,’ he blew up.
‘What did you expect?’ he said, scratching at his neck. He’d just finished writing a huge grant application, and he’d developed eczema from the stress. ‘What difference does it make whether the stuff’s in a warehouse in Natick or in a basement in Whately? If you’d listened to me in the first place …’
I told him what I’d been thinking in the car. ‘I’m going to renovate it,’ I said. ‘Fix the whole thing up, decorate it, and then furnish it with the stuff in the crates.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That’s great. Then what?’
‘Then I’ll see what I feel like,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll turn the house into a shop like Uncle Owen’s. Maybe I’ll sell it. I’ll see.’
Walter hardly spoke to me for a month. He was writing about food chains, coprophages, nitrogen-fixing bacteria; he’d hung the walls of his office with scribbled flowcharts and food webs that were screaming to be redrawn. When I went to him for some plumbing advice he looked meaningfully at the walls and refused to help me.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How would I know these things? Eileen and you have always taken care of whatever broke.’
‘But this is interesting,’ I told him, turning the pages of a home-repair handbook. ‘Remember when you first started teaching me biology, and I was so excited? This is just as interesting. We could learn it together.’
‘You’re ruining your life,’ he said. ‘First you drop out of school. Now you won’t help with my book. Before you know it, you’ll have blown everything your uncle left you and you’ll have nothing to show for it.’
I was hurt by Walter’s lack of interest – as he, I suppose, was hurt by mine – but I went ahead with the renovation anyway. At a small dinner at the Faculty Club, I overheard two women I’d always avoided discussing shingles, and when I asked them if they knew a good roofer they looked at me with sudden interest. We pulled our chairs together and talked about slate and cedar shakes, detabbing, nails, cements. They gave me a name, the roofer came; the r
oofer suggested a man who could refinish floors. The floor man knew a good painter. The painter knew a good electrician. The electrician knew a plumber and a mason and a carpenter, and by the following winter, after nine months of delays and reversals and small disasters, the house was almost done. It stood clean and sturdy and functional, the oak floors smooth and bright again, the moldings and woodwork refinished, the roof and chimney tight. The outside was white with black shutters and trim, the way it had been a hundred years ago. When spring came, and I had only the interior walls to refinish, I started bringing up Uncle Owen’s things.
As I unwrapped and uncrated the objects, bringing up treasures one by one, I was amazed again by Uncle Owen’s eye. Lacquer tables, black and silky; gilt mirrors carved like bamboo. Twelve fret-back Georgian dining-room chairs. A bronze Japanese wind god, cases of blue-and-white export ware, carved cinnabar floor screens, red-lacquer panels inset with hardstone and jade. A Japanese folding screen with a flock of sparrows and leafy twigs scattered on gold foil, a pair of Victorian slipper chairs, an eighteenth-century marquetry chest. An umbrella stand painted with dragons and scrolling flowers. A celadon lamp with an ivory silk shade, more and more. I bought books and read about what I had and learned the vocabulary: urn finials. Scroll-carved chamfered corners. Plinth bases, dentil-molded cornices, trellis-diaper borders. Names I learned as easily as I’d once learned the names of birds and fish.
At night I came home and tried to explain this all to Walter, but I couldn’t interest him. I sat in one chair, flipping through the latest issue of Antiques and Collectibles Guide and murmuring magic words to myself. Cloisonné. Coromandel lacquer. Underglaze. Across the table from me, Walter wrote about the forests of the southern Appalachians. ‘Food webs are enormously complex there,’ he said. ‘The black bear, at the top, rips up trees and logs and digs out honeycomb and eats acorns and berries and drops seeds in his scat that spread the vegetation.’
The Middle Kingdom Page 16