‘Has your mum got this many clothes?’ she asked me once.
I didn’t know what to say: her mum’s clothes were cheap and pretty ordinary looking. I couldn’t understand their appeal.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’
‘One day I’m going to have even more than this.’
She held up a red, silky blouse, smelt it, and then passed it to me.
‘That’s the perfume she wears,’ she said. ‘It costs thirty-two pounds, and that’s just for a tiny bottle.’
It was in her mum’s bedroom that she showed me the photographs. She got them out of a drawer where they’d been hidden under piles of underwear. They were of normal size, bad quality. A woman bending over and spreading her bum cheeks; lying on her back with her legs splayed; on all fours like a dog. On and on. Barbara looked at each of them carefully, seriously, before passing them to me. Someone was playing a radio outside, and apart from that it was deadly quiet.
‘Why’s your mum got these?’ I said at last.
“They’re of her, stupid.’
‘They’re disgusting,’ I said, and Barbara said, ‘I know,’ and gathered them up and hid them away again.
A few days later I met her mum for the first time. I was sitting in Barbara’s room, listening to her practise her trumpet. She couldn’t play a note on it; she just blew into it as hard as she could and wiggled her fingers about. She told me that the best musicians in the world were self-taught. We heard the front door open, and then someone’s feet coming up the stairs. Barbara stopped and shouted, ‘Mum?’
‘You don’t need to holler like that, Barbara,’ said her mum. She stood in the doorway, a dumpy, baggy woman wearing jeans and a denim jacket. Her brown hair was tied in a ponytail, and she had a weary, fleshy face that looked like it couldn’t be bothered to decide on an expression. She looked round the room blankly; she didn’t say hello, or ask me my name, as all the mums I’d ever met did.
‘Do you want to hear my trumpet Mum?’ said Barbara in a plaintive voice I’d never heard her use before.
‘Not just now,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve got to go out again.’
I felt myself staring at her, and turned away. Trying to connect her with the woman in the photographs was like trying to imagine what ice-cream sprinkled with salt would taste like. Except more disturbing.
‘Where’re you going?’ said Barbara.
‘Phil’s taking me out.’
She left and we heard her bedroom door close.
‘You need to go now,’ said Barbara, pushing me towards the door. ‘I want to see my mum.’
I got home, relieved at how normal and orderly everything looked. The gate, the curtains pulled efficiently at either side of the window. They made Barbara’s house seem a Gothic extravagance of my imagination, and my involvement in her life slipped away: I forgot her.
The kitchen door was open. I could hear Mum’s voice. And then a man’s voice. They were at the kitchen table drinking tea.
‘I ask you,’ Mum was saying, ‘whoever heard of Lady Macbeth urinating in the middle of the stage? And then the three witches wearing sunglasses! I nearly fell off my seat.’
‘It’s just shock value these days,’ the man said. ‘They want to grind your face in the shit, as Pinter said.’
‘Oh,’ said Mum, and paused. I could tell she didn’t know who Pinter was. ‘Just lamentable,’ she said after a few seconds, ‘that’s what it was.’
‘What was?’ I said suddenly, walking into the kitchen. They hadn’t noticed me and Mum was surprised.
‘Well hello to you too,’ she said. ‘Cara, this is Brian from the group, Brian this is Cara.’
‘Hello there,’ he said.
‘Hi.’
I walked over to the cupboard and got out a packet of crisps. ‘Put those back,’ Mum shouted over. ‘It’ll be lunch soon, I don’t want you stuffing your face with rubbish.’
‘I’m starving.’
‘You don’t look starving. Quite the opposite.’
I sat down at the table and Mum told me they were talking about the play they’d seen last night. I’d been asleep when she came in.
‘To be fair,’ said Brian, talking precisely as if he were picking insects from his food, ‘the ending was good. It meant we got to go home.’
Mum flashed him a brilliant smile. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And the seats,’ she said, ‘those little hard seats!’
‘We should go to the pantomime next time,’ Brian said, ‘I bet you get a comfy seat there.’
Mum started talking about how she’d never been to the theatre until she was seventeen – ‘It was Death of a Salesman,’ she said. ‘I just sat there, gripped’ – and how she’d hardly been since because she had no one to go with.
‘You’ve never invited me,’ I said.
‘That’s because you wouldn’t like it.’
She looked at me absent-mindedly and then directed her attention back to Brian. ‘She’d fidget, like her dad. I took him to see The Silver Darlings once and he fidgeted the whole time. He only perked up when I bought him a Cornetto at the interval.’
Brian started talking about his ex-wife, the one Mum told me about who had tried to poison him and phoned him up late at night to screech at him. He didn’t look the kind of man anyone would screech down the phone at. There was something well tended and carefully refined about him – his fine black sweater, gold-rimmed glasses, the considered smile on his face. A certain amount of woody aftershave floated around him and got up my nose.
Mum made us bacon and eggs for lunch. It took her ten minutes to notice I hadn’t touched my bacon.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you eating?’
‘You’ve given me all the fatty bits,’ I said, looking down at my plate and pushing the bacon around with my fork.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.
I was angry and more upset than the situation warranted. I sat staring at the table until Mum cleared the plates away and said that it was up to me if I didn’t want to eat it.
‘Missing a meal won’t kill you,’ she said.
I never saw Brian after that, although Mum went out with him at night. He waited for her in his car, the engine purring. They still went hill-walking on Saturdays, and during the week there were poetry readings, plays, the foreign cinema, folk-singing evenings at the Scotia bar.
‘Why don’t you go along?’ I said to Dad one night. He was sitting in the living room, reading the paper. Mum was getting changed in the bedroom.
‘It’s not really my cup of tea,’ he said. ‘I just get bored at that kind of thing.’
‘You might like it,’ I said. ‘You won’t know if you never go.’
‘Who’d look after you?’ he said, and I said I could look after myself. I wanted to say something about Brian, although I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how to say it.
‘Do you want to try and beat me at chess?’ Dad said.
‘No thanks.’
‘Scared I’ll thrash you,’ he said, tugging me gently on the arm. I was angry at him suddenly, angry because he seemed so piteous, so clumsy and needy in his affection.
‘I just don’t feel like it,’ I said, and left the room.
During this period – I remember it as a few weeks, although it was probably longer – Mum was positively incandescent. She laughed all the time, she acted silly, thrilled at her own silliness, and spoke constantly about what she’d seen and done, and who said what to whom. She didn’t speak about the old house any more, she said moving to Glasgow was the best decision she’d ever made. ‘This is my renaissance,’ she was fond of saying. She enrolled for an Open University course in English literature after the summer, and read through the brochures during dinner.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Dad said. ‘You might find it too difficult. It’s been years since you’ve had to write an essay.’
‘I’ll manage,’ said Mum serenely. She was as untouched by him
recently as a Buddha is untouched by worldly possessions. She ate her dinner, enchanted with whatever she was thinking about. When Dad told her about his day, she didn’t even feign interest.
One night she never returned home. We’d bought my school uniform that afternoon. It was a week till the end of the school holidays. I’d woken up because Dad had fallen against the Welsh dresser, which banged off the wall.
‘Is Mum not home yet?’ I said, rubbing my eyes.
Dad shrugged and let his hands fall into his lap. ‘She’s old enough to look after herself,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back.’
I stood at the window and looked out at the street. It was two in the morning. The street was empty and all the lights in the houses were off.
‘Phone her friends,’ I said, turning round to Dad. ‘Ask them if they’ve seen her.’
‘At least she has friends,’ said Dad. He was holding his head in his hands as if it were a piece of precious, over-ripe fruit. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘Loneliness. Having no one care about you. They say, they say you can’t name things you can’t see, but try loneliness. You can’t see it but it’s there. It’s in me.’
He patted his chest and shut his eyes very slowly and then opened them again.
‘Try the soul,’ he said.
I went through to the kitchen to look for her address book, but I couldn’t find it. When I went back into the living room Dad was snoring. I emptied his vodka into the sink, and then stood at the window again. Still nothing. At some point I must have fallen asleep. I woke up on the couch the next morning. It took me a few minutes to remember something was wrong, and then I ran through the house, checking all the rooms. All her clothes were still there, everything she owned still there. I woke up Dad. He phoned the hospitals, police stations, all the people they knew in Dorset, Gran and Grandpa. No one knew anything. We couldn’t find any numbers for the hill-walking group.
‘We’ll just have to wait,’ said Dad.
A letter came for me the next day. I knew right away it was Mum’s writing. Dad read it after me. He didn’t say a word. Then he put his arms around me and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ I pushed him away and shouted that it was all his fault. I ripped the letter up, but later Dad Sellotaped it together and brought it up to my room.
‘You might want to keep it,’ he said, and put it down on my desk. And in the end, I did.
A few days later I was with Barbara. We were straddling the roof of a tenement flat, having climbed up the scaffolding on Barbara’s insistence. It was windy and I grabbed onto the edge, terrified.
‘I’ve not seen you for a while,’ she said. She was hardly holding on at all. I shrugged and looked over the rooftops.
‘I’m going to jump,’ she said. She slid down the roof on her bum and disappeared. I shouted her name, but there was no reply. My voice echoed into the silence. I kept shouting, expecting her to reappear, but she didn’t. I was scared to move and had to force myself to slide down. There was a narrow row of steel stairs scaling the building, and I went down them gingerly, my hands sweating. She was lying on the pavement, one arm flung out behind her head. I was crouched over her, screaming, when her eyes flew open and she began to laugh.
‘Got you,’ she said.
‘That’s not funny,’ I said, walking away. I was still shaking.
‘As if you’d care,’ she said, ‘if I was dead.’ She looked at me out of the corners of her eyes as if she had asked me a question and was waiting for a reply.
‘I would care,’ I said, ‘and so would your mum.’
‘Shows how much you know,’ said Barbara. She started walking alongside me.
‘Would your mum care?’ she asked me. She spoke in her usual flat voice, but she was looking at me slyly.
‘Yeah, of course,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ said Barbara. ‘I thought friends were meant to tell each other everything,’ she said.
I stopped and stared at her. ‘Well, you’re not my friend,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want to know your stupid secrets anyway. I don’t want to go to your smelly house, and look at your smelly mum’s photographs.’
‘At least my mum doesn’t abandon me,’ Barbara shouted. ‘Shows how much she loves you.’
‘She does. I mean, she’s not. Abandoned me, she’s not.’
‘Everyone knows. Everyone,’ said Barbara in a quieter voice.
And the next thing I knew, I was hitting her as hard as I could. I gave her a black eye, but the next day she came to my door and acted as if nothing had happened.
‘You okay?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You?’
‘Yeah. Want to go to Superdrug?’ she said, and I said okay.
For years I looked for her. In the street, on buses, in shops. I felt she would look exactly the same as she did when I was twelve. Even when I was almost definite it wasn’t her, I had to check. Always a strange tugging of my heart when it wasn’t her.
She moved to Nice with Brian, and wrote me letters that I didn’t reply to. She remained, remains, colossal.
I graduated with a good maths degree. Dad and Peter, my boyfriend, came to the graduation. Dad stood in the middle of the aisle and took my picture. And then again, outside in the quadrangles, drinking complimentary Bucks Fizz, laughing, toasting the end of my university days. Even then, throughout the whole time, I could hear Mum say, in her tone of tender and complicated disappointment, ‘Anyone can be a counter, Cara.’
After a Life
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li (b. 1972) is a Chinese American author. Her debut short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the 2005 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and her second collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, was shortlisted for the same award. Her debut novel, The Vagrants, was shortlisted for the 2011 international IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.
Mr. and Mrs. Su are finishing breakfast when the telephone rings. Neither moves to pick it up at first. Not many people know their number; fewer use it. Their son, Jian, a sophomore in college now, calls them once a month to report his well-being. He spends most of his holidays and school breaks with his friends’ families, not offering even the most superficial excuses. Mr. and Mrs. Su do not have the heart to complain and remind Jian of their wish to see him more often. Their two-bedroom flat, small and cramped as it is, is filled with Beibei’s screaming when she is not napping, and a foul smell when she dirties the cloth sheets beneath her. Jian grew up sleeping in a cot in the foyer and hiding from his friends the existence of an elder sister born with severe mental retardation and cerebral palsy. Mr. and Mrs. Su sensed their son’s elation when he finally moved into his college dorm. They have held on to the secret wish that after Beibei dies – she is not destined for longevity, after all – they will reclaim their lost son, though neither says anything to the other, both ashamed by the mere thought of the wish.
The ringing stops for a short moment and starts again. Mr. Su walks to the telephone and puts a hand on the receiver. “Do you want to take it?” he asks his wife.
“So early it must be Mr. Fong,” Mrs. Su says.
“Mr. Fong is a man of courtesy. He won’t disturb other people’s breakfast,” Mr. Su says. Still, he picks up the receiver, and his expression relaxes. “Ah, yes, Mrs. Fong. My wife, she is right here,” he says, and signals to Mrs. Su.
Mrs. Su does not take the call immediately. She goes into Beibei’s bedroom and checks on her, even though it is not time for her to wake up yet. Mrs. Su strokes the hair, light brown and baby-soft, on Beibei’s forehead. Beibei is twenty-eight going on twenty-nine; she is so large it takes both her parents to turn her over and clean her; she screams for hours when she is awake, but for Mrs. Su, it takes a wisp of hair to forget all the imperfections.
When she returns to the living room, her husband is still holding the receiver for her, one hand covering the mouthpiece. “She’s in a bad m
ood,” he whispers.
Mrs. Su sighs and takes the receiver. “Yes, Mrs. Fong, how are you today?”
“As bad as it can be. My legs are killing me. Listen, my husband just left. He said he was meeting your husband for breakfast and they were going to the stockbrokerage afterward. Tell me it was a lie.”
Mrs. Su watches her husband go into Beibei’s bedroom. He sits with Beibei often; she does, too, though never at the same time as he does. “My husband is putting on his jacket so he must be going out to meet Mr. Fong now,” Mrs. Su says. “Do you want me to check with him?”
“Ask him,” Mrs. Fong says.
Mrs. Su walks to Beibei’s room and stops at the door. Her husband is sitting on the chair by the bed, his eyes closed for a quick rest. It’s eight o’clock, early still, but for an aging man, morning, like everything else, means less than it used to. Mrs. Su goes back to the telephone and says, “Mrs. Fong? Yes, my husband is meeting your husband for breakfast.”
“Are you sure? Do me a favor. Follow him and see if he’s lying to you. You can never trust men.”
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 72