by Yiyun Li
“And what are you going to do here?”
“That can be decided later,” Moran said. “Unless you oppose this move with all your heart.”
Josef sighed. “This is a free country,” he said.
“Would it leave you in a difficult situation with your children? Would they oppose it?”
“You can’t change your life at this moment just for me.”
“Why can’t it be for me, too?” she said, though her voice was low, and she was not sure if he heard her. What he’d called her life was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.
The café was filling up, the warmth of people and their everyday contentment pressing in. It was a Wednesday. This must be the day of the week for the four gray-haired ladies two tables away to meet up and laugh, and for the two young mothers by the window to compare notes on motherhood, their infants sleeping in carriers next to them. A few couples had come in, all of them Josef’s age, and Moran had dreaded recognizing them as his friends, though he had only smiled and nodded at them in the friendly way one smiled and nodded at strangers. Other than two college-aged girls, who were doing some intense work over their coffee, the café seemed to be a place for people who were either at the beginning of their stories or, more befittingly, at the end. Even the college girls, in a way, were only starting out. What one did not find at this place was someone in the middle of a story—but perhaps those people, like Moran herself a week earlier, did not have the luxury of idleness on such a morning. They would be sitting in a cubicle somewhere, secured and entrapped; sometimes they look up at the ceiling, a forgotten memory from their childhood or a glimpse into their old age passing through their minds like the fleeting shadow of a bird flying by, before their thoughts are reined in to the immediate present. No, to be in the middle requires one to be practical: one does not walk away from a stable job; one does not take a sojourn from life. Yet was it her true position to be in the middle—without a future to look forward to, was she, despite her age, already at the end?
“Are you going to look for a job here?” Josef asked.
“Only if it’s flexible enough,” Moran said. “Though maybe not for a while.”
“Then how are you going to spend your time?”
“I’m coming back to be near you. Unless—” she paused, a sudden fear hitting her. “Unless you have a lady friend now. I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”
“I would’ve told you,” he said. They had circled the topic in the past, but had always managed, at the end of each meeting, to inform each other of their love lives, or of the lack of love in their lives. He had gone out with a woman for a while, but by the time Moran came for his next birthday, the relationship had fizzled. There had been other interests, though nothing fruitful had come of them, disappointments for him perhaps, but she had felt relieved each time, and guilty about her relief.
“Then what prevents you from saying yes to my proposal?”
“Wouldn’t you say no, too, if you were in my shoes?”
“No.”
“But you would, Moran,” Josef said gently. “You know you would.”
“There’s this old tale in China. An ironsmith boasted that he had built the sharpest spearhead—one that could pierce all armor; then he boasted that he had built the sturdiest armor that no spearhead would be able to pierce.”
“So he was asked to test his own products on each other?” Josef said.
“Very good thinking, my dear Josef,” Moran said. “But the lesson is, I think, that each and every one of us has flaws in our reasoning, and we should not take advantage of that in another person. What I would do if I were in your shoes doesn’t matter. What matters is what I would decide in my own shoes.”
“Of course it would be … wonderful to see you more.”
“Then why don’t we settle on this?”
“But I won’t be here forever.”
Of course it was like Josef to remind her of a fact that she never forgot. “Shouldn’t that be more of a reason for me to come back?” she said, and abruptly asked the waitress walking past to bring them the check.
“We still have some time,” Josef said.
“Can’t you see that I don’t want to be a fool and cry in here?” she snapped, and leaned her face into her hands, warning herself not to fail her first test. He did not need a weepy woman; facing death, he was more defenseless than she was.
The waitress came with their check. Moran did not change her posture and let Josef take care of it. When he asked if she was ready to go, she took a deep breath and looked up. The effort to ensure that her eyes stayed dry had exhausted her, but she was glad that the dam inside her had not broken. “Now, don’t look so worried,” she said. “I’m not here to bring a scandal to your name.”
“Man in seventies bullies visiting ex-wife into tears in public,” Josef said. “No, no, we don’t want to see that in the paper.”
“But that ex-wife is not visiting anymore,” Moran said. “The big news is, she’s moving back to haunt him.”
Josef made a gesture of being caught in a spotlight, his hands raised halfway in an effort to shelter his face, which was flushed by the sudden movement. Momentarily they were back in a better time, when he had made her smile with a few unexpected improvisations. Were these moments, she wondered, enough to be called happiness this late into their story?
Later, when she dropped Josef off at his place, he asked if she would like to go up and sit for a while. She hesitated, and then said she would let him rest. She wanted to make a few appointments to look at some rentals before everyone headed out of town for Thanksgiving.
“Moran, enough fooling around. Let’s drop the subject.”
“Why?” she asked. In his voice she’d detected the weariness that belonged to people who were too tired to feel responsible for how they spoke.
“You and I both know that you should not leave your job.”
She wondered if the visit to the hospital had made him change his mind. He had introduced her to the nurse as a friend, and the nurse had asked about Rachel and her family before they left. Could it be that there was a settled rhythm to his life that he did not want her return to disturb? Or that his time, already limited, had little extra to spare for her?
“Will it be too much for you? Will I be taking you away from your family and friends?” she asked, tightening her grip around the steering wheel, even though she had parked the car, perfectly centered between the two lines, just as he had taught her.
“You know that’s not the reason.”
“Then what is?”
“You still have half a life to live.”
“Why can’t moving back here be part of that half?” she said. His face looked ashen, much sicker than it had earlier; he must be exhausted from spending the morning with her. What if she, despite good intentions, was only toxic for him?
“You know it means the world to me that you came,” Josef said. “It’s too flattering by half that you’re talking of moving back. But we ought not to indulge ourselves.”
“You may need someone,” Moran said, though she knew that the role of caretaker could easily be filled by another person: Rachel, for instance, or his other children; down the line, it would probably be a hired nurse, or else he would be moved from the condo to a facility. Many stories of his generation would end that way, and he would argue that there was no point in being different.
“You’re being stubborn,” Josef said.
She exited the car and opened the passenger door. “Come,” she said, bending down and reaching for his hand. “I’ll walk you up after all.”
Moran had not been in Josef’s condo before, but a place, like the person who inhabits it, can become close to one at the first encounter. Of course there were the things from the old house: the framed pictures of the children and Alena; the oil painting of a lone, whitewashed farmhouse dwarfed by the
rolling green hills behind it, which used to hang in the family room; the sofa and the coffee table, both of which, Moran had once calculated, must be about her age, if not older. But more than these objects, it was the unclutteredness that reminded her of her own house. One could easily trace a life lived in solitude. The footprints, though invisible, were not hard for her to see: the steps to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, all taken out of necessity.
Moran asked Josef if he would like to lie down, and he said it would be better that he sit on the sofa. On the coffee table, five pills of three different colors lined up on a coaster, next to a glass of water. She asked if he needed to take the medicine now, and he said yes, and thanked her when she handed the water and the pills to him.
She imagined he had picked them out of different bottles—he must do this every time he left for the hospital, lest he forget or feel too sick to do it afterward. Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible state of existence. Moran had always thought she had crossed that line long ago—but when, she asked herself, and she could not come up with an answer. It could have been when she extricated herself from Josef’s life, or earlier, when she had sat in that dingy apartment in Beijing, paralyzed and ashamed by the sight of Shaoai’s oversized body and mindless giggling. But she would have been too young for that crossing to count as real experience, and her solitude, which had not chosen her but had been chosen by her, was different from Josef’s solitude: hers was a protest, his a surrender.
Josef dozed off on the sofa, his mouth slightly open, his breathing shallow. She picked up an old blanket from the sofa and laid it softly on him. His eyelids, too pale—as though they were a naked part of a body that should be kept out of sight—made her look away. If she left now, he would wake up to the empty room, thinking she was only a phantom in a dream. If she stayed, he would open his eyes and be momentarily disoriented; but however meager her offer was, it must be better than a dream.
Moran walked to the window, which overlooked the parking lot. A man, the manager of the building judging by his looks, was unloading bags of rock salt from his pickup truck. Earlier, at the café, two or three tables of people had been discussing the coming snowstorm, which the forecast said would hit the area hard by the end of the week; would it affect holiday traveling, the people at the café had wondered, worries about their children’s homecoming lining the old women’s faces. The nurse, too, when saying farewell to Josef, had said glumly that they were going into another long winter, as though, in her tired eyes, last year’s stale snow was still sitting in gray piles by the roadside, never melting with time.
Moran remembered the delight in the eyes of the Thai couple and the Indian students from years ago upon seeing their first snowfall; back in their home countries, the news must have left ripples of marvel in many hearts. She herself had not shared their relish. One can always go back to another moment in history to negate the present; only the impressionable and the inexperienced—in that case, the people from the snowless tropics—are liable to christen a moment memory. The snow-covered hills west of the Back Sea; her bicycle tires skidding on rutted, hard-pressed snow before crashing into Boyang’s; a squad of snowmen they had lined up in the courtyard during one of the biggest snowstorms—if she wanted, she could always assign more meaning to those memories, diminishing others.
Yet her connection to the Midwest had begun with snow. Before she met Josef, she had been in Madison for two and a half months, but those days, like the time since she had left Josef, had been willfully turned into the footprints of seabirds on wet sand, existing only between the flow and ebb of the tide. Is it possible for one to develop an attachment to a place or a time without another person being involved? If so, the place and the time must make a most barren habitat. Beijing in her memory had remained two cities, the one before Shaoai’s poisoning and the one after, yet in both places she had not been alone. Guangzhou, where she had gone to college for four years, had been marked by the absence of any communication between her and her old friends in Beijing, but even that lack had been meaningful: people, absent, could claim more space. The Massachusetts town Moran had lived in for the past eleven years, however, did not offer a memorable emptiness; in shunning people, she had turned the place, with its abundant sunny days in the summer and its beautiful autumn colors, into a mere spot on the map, the time she’d spent there collapsed into one long day of not feeling. No, solitude she did not have; what she had was a never-ending quarantine.
The snow on the day when Moran had first met Josef had been light and flaky, and in the parking lot he had swept a layer of it off the windshield with his gloved hands. He had offered to drive her back to the Westlawn House, and she had not known how to decline, even though she would have preferred a long walk in the snowy dusk.
It was time to get a new scraper, he said, and when he saw her puzzled look, he asked if things were all right.
She said everything was all right, though he looked concerned still, and wanted to know if her headache was bothering her and if she needed some medicine. She would not have said anything more, but she knew that if she did not tell the truth, she would make a good-hearted man worry unnecessarily. She reassured him that she was perfectly fine; except that she did not know what he meant when he talked about a scraper.
Their relationship—a friendship before it evolved into love or companionship—had begun where little common ground could be found between them. It was a matter of paying attention that had brought them together. For Josef, the objects and sights that had been familiar to him had become less so. For Moran, it was making an effort to find new things—and there were plenty in a new country—so that she could stop looking inward for an explanation that could make her recent history less puzzling.
Sitting in Josef’s car that day, for the first time Moran had looked at the world from the passenger’s seat. The traffic signs and lane dividers lit by the headlights as though they were taking turns becoming visible; the rushing and swirling of snowflakes toward the windshield at an angle and speed she had never thought possible; the dashboard, with its circles and numbers in pale neon green—all these made her look at the world more closely, as she had not done for a long time. At Westlawn, several of her housemates had cars, but Moran preferred walking, and had arranged her life within a walking distance radius and occasionally a bus ride: she walked to school and to a nearby grocery store for food, and on weekends she rode the bus to town to look at the shop windows and the people who shopped behind the windows. Once she had taken a more adventurous route, climbing up a hill and then trekking down a long, grassy slope, stirring up insects, which had reminded her of her intrepid younger days, hunting for crickets and katydids with Boyang. To stop herself from reminiscing, she ran downhill, and when she reached the edge of the state highway, she waited for over five minutes, until no car was in sight in both directions, before sprinting across the six lanes to the other side, where a spreading Wal-Mart had amazed her with its abundance of everything one needed—or would never have imagined one would need—for a life in America.
“Is this the first time you’ve seen snow?” Josef asked as they were waiting for the red light to turn green. She must have looked wide eyed, leaning forward.
She said no, and then asked him what was making the clicking sound.
“The engine?” he said, and turned off the car radio, which had been tuned to a classical music station at low volume. He listened. Strange, he said, he couldn’t hear anything. He had just had the car checked at the mechanics’ a few weeks earlier, he said, and all had seemed well then.
It turned out to be the blinking of the turn signal, for, after the light changed and the car turned, the sound went away. When the small mystery was solved, Josef seemed genuinely shocked, while Moran was rather happy. At the beginning of the semester, she had taken a ride with her lab-mates to a welc
ome picnic; sitting in the backseat among the more talkative Americans, she had felt baffled by the clicking sound, though she had been too shy to ask.
That winter—long, brutal, as everybody had warned Moran—seemed to be forever connected to the joint effort between Josef and Moran to understand each other through the gap between their ages, and between their origins. Nothing could be left unsaid or unexplored; everything deserved a closer look. Snow, which was simply snow in her mother tongue, gave rise to a new vocabulary, as Josef patiently explained when the season brought different forms of snow: as flakes, as powder, as sleet, as drifts. What the snow trucks and plows spread was a mixture of sand and salt, he explained, a novel practice to her, since back home the only way to tackle snow was to brandish a shovel, and sometimes a whole work unit or school had to pause for half a day to clean the road.
All she did was ask questions: anything else she said would have had some connection to Beijing, and it was to forget the other place that she had welcomed Josef’s friendship. The graininess of the sand and rock under her soles did not go away, even between snows, and the coarseness gave her an odd impression of a boldly announced uncleanness. Back in Beijing, winter brought another kind of uncleanness: dust, never settling and hurled everywhere by wind, gave the sky a tinge of yellow and covered everything with a layer of gray; on the days of dust storms, she had to cover her whole head with a gauzy scarf, and even then, when she arrived home, the first thing she would have to do was rinse her mouth and wash the dust off her face. Once, when she and Boyang had gone to a science exhibition, she had been both amused and appalled when, reaching their destination, even the folds of their eyelids were filled with fine dust. But such memories would have made no sense to Josef, and she always redirected the conversation when he asked her about China. She preferred being told about things she did not know, and in retrospect she wondered if her interest in even the most mundane details had been good for Josef that winter. He had not been a talkative person; all the same, it must have made a difference for him to have been listened to with such attention.