The Middle Kingdom by Andrea Barrett

Author:Andrea Barrett [Barrett, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-007-39688-7
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1990-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

A Black Harley Electra-Glide

When spring came, I still wasn’t pregnant, and I began to worry.

‘We’ve only been trying for eight months,’ Walter said. ‘That’s nothing.’ He was calm about it, he was fine, but he began making love to me twice a week instead of once, and when his parents called he ducked their questions. ‘Don’t worry,’ Lenore told me. ‘It’ll happen when you least expect it. You have to relax.’ But then she’d follow up these soothing words with tales of women in her church who’d spent years and fortunes trying to conceive. Thermometers, ovulation charts, special douches and positions – all that lay ahead of us if my body failed, and then doctors, operations, eggs teased apart under a microscope and gently washed with sperm. ‘There’s always a way,’ Lenore said as the months passed. ‘Always.’ She sent me bookmarks inscribed with prayers and words of comfort for the barren. For God indeed punishes not nature, but sin, read one. And therefore, when He closes a womb, it is only that He may later open it more wondrously, and that all may know that what is born thereof is not the fruit of lust, but of the divine munificence. The bookmarks made Walter fume.

‘She’s just trying to help,’ I told him.

‘We don’t need her help,’ said Walter. ‘We’ll be fine. Once you graduate, you’ll relax and it’ll happen.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That’s probably it.’

I had never told him about the abortion I’d had when I was married to Randy, or about the infection I’d had afterward; and although I dreamed about my lost child each night, more and more sorry for that life I’d rejected, by the time Walter and I were trying to make another life I couldn’t confide in him. I’d lent my past actions so much weight by not disclosing them sooner than now, almost by accident, I had a big secret. Maybe a guilty secret – when I bent double once each month, stabbed by ovarian cramps, I refused to go to the doctor. ‘This is normal,’ I told Walter. ‘It’s just the egg passing through.’ Meanwhile I was sure my insides had been scrambled and fused by my past mistakes, a nest of adhesions and scars and wounds, nothing left pink and shining.

As the spring wore on, I found myself making love by the calendar and not enjoying it at all, my pelvis propped up on pillows to help the sperm swim in. I worried about the thickness of my vaginal secretions and about the tilt of my uterus. I wondered about the patency of my fallopian tubes. All my attention was focused on my physiology, and I couldn’t concentrate on school. My worst class was an upper-level population ecology course – half graduate students, half seniors like myself – which was taught by a pompous fool with whom Walter often collaborated. ‘I ought to drop the course,’ I’d told Walter. ‘It’s making me tense.’ He’d pointed out that this was my last

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