by Yiyun Li
“See, that’s how you play the accordion. It’s a one-man band, and you have to be a bit of everything yourself. You have to know how to sing and whisper and bellow and talk and croon and even weep,” Teacher Shu said, unstrapping the accordion and handing it carefully to Ruyu. “Imagine yourself as one of those bullfighters, and a giant bull is charging at you. What feeling does it give you when you launch into the song?”
Ruyu stared at him. She did not know if it was a question requiring an answer from her.
Teacher Shu scratched his head. “Well, that may be asking too much of you. All right, you can’t be a bullfighter. But picture yourself in a long, sweeping dress being waltzed around a ballroom in Vienna,” Teacher Shu said, and hummed a few measures of the “Blue Danube” and swirled himself around, his arms held up properly, his chin lifted. Boyang laughed, but was right away stopped by Moran.
“Now, how does your body move in a dance like that?” Teacher Shu said when he circled back and stopped in front of Ruyu.
“I don’t know how to dance.”
“You don’t have to know. Just imagine. Think of yourself as Princess Sissi. Think of yourself as Romy Schneider in Sissi’s shoes,” Teacher Shu said. “Do you know the movie I’m talking about?”
“No.”
Teacher Shu paused, and then made a gesture of resignation.
Ruyu wondered if she had failed her interview. Apart from Teacher Shu and her former accordion teacher, an older man her grandaunts had paid to teach her twice a week, she had not met another musician and had not given much thought to music or to those who played it. She neither liked nor disliked music, as liking or disliking anything in life was beside the point. She could just as easily have become a chess master or a painter or a ballet dancer—anything that would have differentiated her from her peers in the provincial city. That music had been chosen for her, that the accordion had been the instrument—these things Ruyu had accepted because they were part of the necessities of her life. She did not see the point of imagining herself into a princess’s body.
Teacher Shu nodded to Headmistress Liu, and they withdrew to a small office adjacent to the music room. Moran beckoned to Ruyu, and she hesitated and then moved closer to the door, carrying the accordion case with her. “Isn’t Teacher Shu the most fun person?” Moran said.
“Is he?” Ruyu said.
Moran blushed. “Oh, he may look off-putting at first, but trust me, he’s really one of the best teachers.”
“Just so you know,” Boyang whispered to Ruyu, “Moran has had a crush on Teacher Shu for three years now.”
“Hey,” Moran said. “Hey!”
“And Teacher Shu is not married,” Boyang said, still addressing Ruyu but grinning at Moran, who was about to say something when Teacher Shu and Headmistress Liu came out. He handed a folder of music sheets to Ruyu and told her that he would teach her every Tuesday at four, starting the following week. She was welcome to leave the instrument there, too, he said, and handed her two keys, a small one for the security room where all the instruments were kept, and a big copper one for the cottage door.
Ruyu’s grandaunts had not said anything about accordion lessons, and she wondered if she would have to explain to Teacher Shu that she did not have money to pay him. Would that affect her status at school? Later she voiced her doubt to Moran and Boyang. “Why would you pay him if you’re a student at the school?” Boyang said.
“Why else should he teach me?” Ruyu said, and explained that at home her teacher was paid ten yuan every time he taught her, plus round-trip fare for the bus.
“Doesn’t Teacher Shu get a salary from the school?” Moran said.
“But is the school going to pay him extra to teach me?” Ruyu said. “I could’ve not come here. He would’ve earned the same salary without the bother of teaching me, no?”
Moran turned to look closely at Ruyu, but her face was inscrutable as always. Ruyu’s concern sounded sensible, but Moran could not help but think something was wrong with Ruyu’s logic. There was more to life than money, Moran wanted to explain to Ruyu, and in her mind she could do it well, patiently, as when she had had to resolve a conflict between two neighborhood kids. Like the other families in the quadrangle, Moran’s family was not well-off, but their struggles were the same ones experienced by most people they knew, of having to calculate well to make ends meet, of spreading the ration of eggs, meat, and other food wisely throughout the month. Even so, Moran’s parents never failed to make extra dumplings to give to neighbors or to share the fresh fruit her father sometimes got free from working with those in the quadrangle. This kindness was returned by others, too, and the life Moran knew, which took place as much within her family as outside it with neighbors and friends, was not one in which wealth, or the lack of wealth, was much thought of as an important factor. But even as Moran went over this argument in her mind, she knew it was not merely Ruyu’s monetary concern that unsettled her. To envision Teacher Shu’s life without her seemed natural for Ruyu; it must be equally easy for her to imagine a life without Teacher Shu, or, for that matter, without Boyang and Moran herself. Moran, who did not know what was out of her reach, unconsciously moved closer to Ruyu, as though looking for reassurance.
“If you ask me …” Boyang said.
“But nobody is asking you,” Moran snapped, taking both of them by surprise.
“All right, even if you’re not asking me, I say let’s not worry ourselves about this,” Boyang said. Things, he added, would work out one way or another, and instead of standing in front of the school gate like three idiotic new students, how about going to the Back Sea, renting a boat for the rest of the afternoon, and enjoying the last day of summer before going back to the cage?
“The cage?” Moran said. “If your parents heard you talk about school like that, they would take you into their charge.”
“Then I’d be in trouble for real,” Boyang said, pantomiming a caged monkey and emitting bitter screams.
Ruyu watched his performance, and when she did not smile as Moran did, Boyang asked Ruyu if she was still worrying about her accordion lesson. She shook her head. “How do you know you’re not in a cage here and now?” she asked.
“Ha ha, you’ve got me,” Boyang said. “The best jokes are always told by people like you, who don’t even smile when they say funny things.”
Moran glanced at Boyang, and brought up the boating proposal again. The day, with its bright sun still high in the cloudless sky, had taken on an unreal quality. The glimpses Ruyu had seen of their coming school life, when Boyang and Moran had shown her the campus, seemed strangely distant from what they were used to in the summer. Classrooms, newly painted, with chairs still resting on top of the desks, their legs pointing upward and forming a small metal forest, had looked familiar yet unwelcoming; the science annex, where in one room Bunsen burners clustered on a bench next to the door, and in another a few new posters covered up old ones, the insides of frogs and human beings vividly portrayed, had felt cold and lifeless; next to the track field, a gym teacher had been hosing down a few cement Ping-Pong tables; at the far end of campus, the students who boarded at the dorms had already moved in, and a few colorful blankets were airing out on the clotheslines; two girls had been standing at the entrance to a dorm, looking perplexed: one of them had placed her thermos a little too close to the edge of the steps, and it had fallen, almost soundlessly, hot water pouring down the steps, steaming along the way.
All excitements were pointing to tomorrow, when actions and interactions would decide who each of them would be in a new grade, among a new group of people; today thus became a vacuum, having turned into nothing before its time.
Listlessly, Moran looked at Ruyu, hoping she’d agree to the impromptu outing, dreading that she would say no. Spending the day alone, at least for Moran, seemed unimaginable: rarely was a day in her life passed without Boyang; yet with or without their companionship, Ruyu seemed undisturbed all the same.
“Anothe
r day by the lake?” Ruyu asked, though her tone was as vague as her face, and Moran could not detect any preference.
Moran and Boyang could easily cycle to their favorite spot by the lake, hop into a rowboat, and spend the rest of the afternoon afloat, listening to the cicadas in the trees, watching the peddlers in the alleyways, and talking about trifles, but this prospect, which a month ago would have been the perfect picture of a summer day, with its familiar mindlessness, now felt incomplete, as though by entering their world, Ruyu had made it smaller. Already the three of them felt, at least to Moran, more of a unit than just Boyang and herself. “Do come along,” Moran said, and the begging note in her own voice made her shiver slightly in the shade of the trees.
9
Twice Moran had read through her employees’ manual, but an ex-spouse’s sickness, however terminal, was not listed as a legitimate reason for an extended leave. This was not unexpected, though it reminded her again that, when a death was pending, all connections but those defined by blood or marriage were dismissed as inconsequential. She wondered what other options there were. Or perhaps the idea of a leave was too greedy: deaths, like memories, required one’s entire heart, leaving little space for negotiation.
On a piece of paper, Moran listed things that she needed to look into, possible expenditures, and resources available. She had some vacation time saved—other than the annual holiday trip with her parents, she rarely took time off. The lease to the house would expire at the end of next August, but if she was unable to sublet the place, she could keep making payments from afar. Her savings account would last her two years or longer; she had always lived simply, and would continue to do so after the move. Her portfolios had posted some minor gains, as she was a conservative investor, unambitious and thus mostly unscathed by the recent financial recession. Her company’s stock, which she had accumulated some shares of over the years, she would hold on to as emergency backup. These concrete things—numbers and columns and lists—calmed Moran, as they gave this evening a purposefulness that was absent on other evenings. She would keep her car, a secondhand Saab; and she would keep her clothes and those few things she had grown attached to. The house could be cleaned out more or less with a weekend tag sale; what she could not sell she would drop off at the Goodwill store downtown. Back in the Midwest she would not need a place the size of her current rental; she could easily get by with a studio apartment. Already she could envision the place; no, not the place in its physical reality, but its imperturbable solitude, which had become a necessity for her, a habitat.
It comforted Moran that many things could be done, and they would be done without complications or difficulties. Sixteen years earlier she had come to this country with two suitcases, in which she had packed everything she had imagined necessary to begin a new life: clothes, a quilt and a pillow pressed and bound tightly to make space, two bowls, a pair of chopsticks, a folding knife, a meat cleaver, two tins of tea leaves, an umbrella, two packs of sanitary napkins, and a Chinese-English dictionary. What she could not fit into her luggage—her Sony Walkman and her many cassettes, her books, a few girlhood diaries, and the single photo album her mother had put together, containing pictures and snapshots from different stages of her life—those her mother had promised to keep safe until she came home the next time. But she had not gone back to reclaim them—people rarely reclaim what they have lost, somewhere she read that; they only replace them. Her parents, when it had become clear that she might never do so, had brought with them the photo album and the diaries on one visit to America. Moran had put them away without taking a look inside.
After the divorce, Moran moved again with the same two suitcases and an even smaller collection of things. All that had mattered she’d left behind. Her ring she had returned to Josef; the thought that he had two pairs of rings to discard, or to keep, made her heart ache, yet she did not know what to do—nor did she want—to alleviate her own pain, as it must have hurt Josef more. The wedding photos and the snapshots taken on their honeymoon—a week off the coast of South Carolina (Josef had proposed the Bahamas, though Moran’s Chinese passport at the time had made it hard to travel anywhere outside the States)—she had asked Josef to keep with his family pictures. You travel so lightly, he had said when he dropped her off at the airport, his blue eyes filled with gentle sadness, though what he had meant, what had really let him down, was that she took everything so lightly. Blame that on the mental state of an immigrant, she had said, a ready excuse she had used again and again as she continued to live in a state that in Josef’s and other people’s eyes should have been transitory but had acquired a permanency over the years. To be able, at any moment, to pull up roots minimally put down, to be able to exit without being noticed or missed—these things gave her an odd sense of virginal freedom. Anything concerning the heart leaves it in confusion; she had found this motto in one of the Buddhist books she had read after Shaoai’s poisoning; to desire nothing is to have no vulnerability.
But how many hearts could truly succeed in keeping themselves immune to all that would make them susceptible? With discipline Moran had lived in unperturbed calm since the divorce; no, even in her marriage she had longed for nothing but placidity. But peace like that was only a locked gate, and more than anyone, Josef had been gently pointing it out to her, not pushing it, yet not pretending he hadn’t seen it, either. Was that why she had broken her wedding vow? Moran had married Josef for all she could inherit from his past—his friends, children, and grandchildren—so that she would not have to build a life of her own; she had thought the crowdedness of his world would allow a young wife to exist quietly, and his first marriage, long and happy, would provide enough of a sheltering shadow for her to be nothing more than a replacement. Yet she had been proven wrong. Josef had not taken marriage as lightly as she had. Life, fair as it is, unexpectedly so at times, sets up trapping webs for even the most inconspicuous creature: Moran, panicked at the predicament in which she had found herself—love offered where she had asked only for kindness—would not have spared a limb or two in her scrambling to get herself untangled, and in doing so she had left a few scratches on Josef’s life, too. Any wound deeper than that she would not allow herself to believe. The thought that she could be ruthless was too much for her to bear: ruthlessness was a trait she associated with Boyang, and before him, Ruyu; before her, no one, as in those days, blinded by her eagerness to love, Moran had found the world a loving place.
Moran had met Josef at the county jail the first year she’d been living in America, on a tour organized by a local church group to introduce international students to the American legal system. The group had sponsored other gatherings—potlucks in the park, free English lessons on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and a fundraising concert for the church—but Moran had not gone to any of them.
There had been only four students—two boys from India and a young couple from Thailand—when Moran arrived at the jail. A man, pudgy, bald, and dressed soberly in a dark-colored jacket, came in a few minutes later and introduced himself as Josef. He said that the woman who was in charge had come down with the stomach flu, so he’d had to step in to help.
The sheriff hosting the tour seemed undeterred by the less than promising attendance. His initial remarks in the lobby lasted almost an hour, during which he gave a detailed account of his being shot at by a teenager, of the psychological trauma he’d had to overcome, of the everyday challenges a law-enforcement officer had to face, of America and its justice.
The Thai couple smiled and nodded, their hands clasped behind their backs. The two Indian boys gallantly volunteered when the sheriff produced handcuffs with which to demonstrate the more painful and the less painful way of being arrested, depending on one’s willingness to cooperate. Moran wondered if she could slip away, but Josef, standing behind his charges, dutifully blocked her way to the exit. Once again she read the visiting hours posted on the wall, which she had already memorized. It was a Saturday, the only day that the inmate
s were not allowed visitors. A needle of pain pulsed in Moran’s head, but surely there was more in life for one to endure than an afternoon in a county jail, which would, at some point, come to an end.
Once the sheriff unlocked the metal gate, both a relief and a hushed reverence settled over the foreign tourists. Through the barred door of a low-security cell, they saw a few men in orange outfits sitting around a table playing cards, none of them looking up at the procession in the hallway. All sorts of reasons, the sheriff answered when the Thai couple guiltily asked what had brought the inmates here. In an unoccupied cell the sheriff showed them a metal toilet with neither a lid nor a seat, and a brown mattress folded up in a corner. With a tape measure he demonstrated the size of the window, not wide enough for the skinniest man to climb through, yet offering a plentiful view of the world outside: the bare tops of the trees, the low, lead-colored clouds in the sky.
One of the four high-security cells was occupied, and the sheriff stopped in front of the door to give an introduction. He unlocked the inspection window and peeked inside before locking it again. A woman’s voice could be heard, whimpering, then screaming, then lowering again to a whimper. A metal basket affixed to the door frame held a toothbrush and a tiny tube of toothpaste.