Must I Go

by Yiyun Li

  Jean clapped her hands to herd the residents toward the snacks. Lilia prompted the boy to thank her for the interview. He did, and instantly began rolling on the rug with another boy.

  From the corner, on a baby grand piano left to the facility by a man who had lived to 104, someone started to play, tentatively at first, and then, when even the noisiest boys calmed down, more boldly. Frank moved close to Lilia and told her that it was a Bach minuet. Frank took pride in his knowledge and could not refrain from sharing it with Lilia whenever he deemed it necessary.

  Ever so expectedly, it was Lilia’s girl interviewer who was enchanting the roomful of people. Always eager to be more than what she is, Lilia thought. Those who had finished their snacks were looking for a spot to sit down. Walter, one hand on his cane, was conducting with the other arm. When you’re closer to death, you don’t need much of an excuse to play at being alive again.

  Lilia walked around the room, looking for the boy orphan. He was sitting under a table, on which sometimes cut flowers would be on display but today the vase was empty. Again his face took on that obtuse look. Lilia beckoned him, and he did not move.

  The world might not love the boy. The world might never be in love with him. But that was okay, because there was a secret, which nobody but Lilia could reveal to him: Let me tell you something that most people don’t know. They’ll expect you to always remember the sweetness of being your mother’s child or the bitterness of losing her. They’ll bring you replacements, thinking they’re doing you a favor. But trust me. The days after love are long and empty. It’s up to you and me to make them less so. Those others, they are of no use to us.

  LILIA, YOU’RE THE KIND OF girl my future wife would disapprove of.

  Roland had said that to Lilia the second time they met, the day Lucy had been conceived. Sometimes Lilia thought she could recall the exact tilt of Roland’s head and the expression on his face when he said it, but when she tried harder, the man she imagined began to look more like Humphrey Bogart. How do you remember a moment as precisely as it happened sixty-five years ago? Roland’s words were all that Lilia had. And Lucy, though Lucy too had become a memory. Nothing about her could be forgotten, but if Lucy had left a book, Lilia would have never opened it.

  Every time Lilia turned to page 154 of Roland’s diaries, she relished that line: L—the kind of girl my future wife would disapprove of. Roland had a habit of repeating things in his diaries. The same verdict was delivered again two pages later, though this time Lilia was mentioned alongside several other women, all of them deemed unsuitable as his wife. All went by single letters.

  Roland spared no one from his repetitiveness. There was G, a ballerina, who showed up three times within ten pages in 1943, and in all three entries Roland had compared her to a pinwheel that would not last a month or two. There was S, “a doll who mistakes sentimental for romantic,” and the short-lived affair (three weeks in 1956) was twice called “a bath taken out of self-hatred, in the tepid water already used by another body, with a stranger’s suds clinging to one’s skin.” In 1972, C was said to be “widowed just at the right time.” This was repeated a few pages later, with the additional words “C is a godsend. I am a godsend to her, too.” But C disappears within the next twenty pages, while Hetty has another fifteen years to live as Roland’s wife.

  On that day, when Roland spoke of his future wife to Lilia, he had been sitting in the hotel bed and smoking what he said would be the last cigarette. It was late afternoon, and the fog from the Pacific was coming in. The Golden Gate Bridge, framed by the west-facing window, was half suspended in the mist, and it would soon become invisible when the night fell. Lilia was incredulous that they were there alone. It was a perfect movie set for a perfect love affair. He was worldly and handsome, she was young and seductive. Where were the people who should be busying themselves around them with cameras and lighting?

  Why so quiet? Roland asked when Lilia didn’t reply. I meant it as a compliment.

  Why would your future wife disapprove of me? Lilia asked.

  Why else would I marry her?

  Later, when Lilia was getting ready to leave, she asked him when their next meeting would be.

  Why? Roland said.

  Because there’s always a next time, Lilia said.

  Nobody can guarantee that, he said. I could be run over by a streetcar the moment I step out of the hotel. You could fall in love tomorrow and be married by Saturday.

  But things like that don’t happen to us.

  Why not? What makes you and me different from others?

  We aren’t nice people, Lilia said. Tragedies only happen to people nicer than us.

  And love at first sight?

  To fools.

  Roland laughed. You’re the kind of girl who could charm Sidelle Ogden, he said, when she’s in the mood to be charmed.

  On that day Lilia didn’t ask herself why Roland mentioned Sidelle. Later she would understand two things: Roland’s need to talk about Sidelle with someone was urgent, and Lilia mattered so little that she might as well be the headboard.

  The kind of woman who is a cross between a nymph and a witch, Roland had said when Lilia asked what Sidelle was like. This did little to help Lilia. Yet what did she fear? She was sixteen. Sidelle, even though Roland did not reveal her age, was much older. The younger woman always wins.

  I don’t see why I should care about charming Miss Ogden.

  Mrs., Roland corrected her. There used to be a Mr. Ogden.

  He died? Lilia asked.

  He did, unfortunately.

  You must be happy.

  Happy? No. I appreciated Mr. Ogden as much as Sidelle. I would even say we both have to bear the unbearable loss. But of course you’re too young to understand that.

  You didn’t think of me as too young to be a lover.

  You don’t think of yourself as too young to take a lover, Roland said. Look, I don’t mean it lightly when I say someone can charm Sidelle. Or that someone would be disapproved of by my future wife.

  Have you said these things to other girls? Lilia asked.

  As a matter of fact, I have not.

  What do you say to them, then?

  Oh, different things.

  Lilia thought for a moment, and asked again, Why would I want to charm Mrs. Ogden? She’s probably old enough to be my mother. I didn’t even care to charm my mother when she was alive.

  Lilia’s mother had died the month before. A more dutiful daughter would not have allowed a dead mother to enter this conversation, but what other woman did Lilia have in her life to call on to battle Sidelle Ogden?

  You don’t charm Sidelle as you would charm your mother or your aunt, Roland said.

  But as your mother or your aunt?

  Don’t be clever. All I’m saying is, I could see her being tickled by you.

  Would that make you want to marry me? Lilia said.

  You, Lilia, or you, a little girl from California?

  What’s the difference?

  I can’t possibly marry a little girl from California.

  But if I’m only me, if I’m only Lilia, you would marry me then?

  You’re too young to think about marriage.

  In the old days girls my age would’ve had children by now.

  In the old days I’d have long abandoned you, Roland said. Don’t come here again. I know where to find you. Let me be the one to make decisions, will you?

  So there were, Lilia calculated, future possibilities. Is that how it works with Mrs. Ogden, too? she asked. That you’re the one to make the decisions?

  Listen, Lilia, Roland said. Between you and me, let me always be the selfish one. There’s nothing else I would ask of you, I promise.

  POSTED IN THE ELEVATORS AND on the bulletin boards of each floor were flyers announcing an upcoming memoi
r-writing class. “Wisdom to share, memories to preserve, discover the inner writer” and so on and so forth. It was the talk of the day. Lilia could already guess who had signed up, who would be coerced to attend, and who would refuse only to regret it later. The class would run for eight weeks, and the announcement called it “perfect timing,” ending just before the holiday season, as everyone would produce “a precious record,” “a priceless jewel,” “a special gift for the special ones.”

  Eight weeks! Long enough for any one of them to drop dead from an accident. Or for one person to fall in love with another person, though love was a trickier business than death. The week before, Calvin’s children had terminated his contract abruptly and whisked him to Portland, Oregon. Bewitched, they had said of him. At least that was the word reaching Lilia’s ears, as though she had gone out of her way to cast a spell on Calvin so that he would strike them all out of his will and put Lilia’s name in instead. Foolish children, foolishly vigilant. At that reunion in the next world, she would be busy enough without Calvin tugging at her elbow. He might insist on introducing Lilia to his wife. Would she be glad to see him again, or would she scurry away, hiding her face in her shawl and upsetting a drink in someone’s hand while fleeing? You never know who a person really is when she is alive. Dead people will have more surprises for us.

  Lilia imagined her parents, her three husbands, some of her siblings. Lucy? Oh, Lilia, let’s not go there.

  It must be a chaotic puppet show up there, every figure pulled by too many strings. If she went, Lilia thought, she would have to bring a pair of sharp scissors. Snip snip snip. What she wanted was to sit under a tree, on a bench, with a sign that said, DO NOT DISTURB. If only god had been considerate enough to install such a bench for Eve at the beginning. You know god is a man because he thinks a woman is always waiting to be approached.

  No, at that party Lilia would make her stance known. Nobody would disturb her, except Roland. If a man approached a woman sitting next to a sign saying DO NOT DISTURB, it would have to be Roland.

  “What do you think?” Dolores asked. She had taken the seat next to Lilia before some man could.

  “About what?” Lilia said.

  “The memoir-writing class. Won’t it be fun?” Dolores said.

  Isn’t it enough, Lilia thought, that already most of them sit around doing nothing but reminisce about the good old days? To spend extra time spelling them out—what lengths do people go to to make themselves believe that they have lived a memorable life?

  “There’s so much we can talk about. I for one already have several ideas brewing,” Dolores said.

  “And we can all look like mutton dressed as lamb?” Lilia asked.

  Dolores did not look as though she had comprehended Lilia. Was it the wrong idiom?

  No need to cry over cracked eggs, Lilia’s mother had said shortly before she died. Her hip bone had fractured, but no one expected her to die that night—not from the broken bone but from an injury to her head. Earlier that day she had gone up to the attic. Looking for a pair of overalls, she said when Lilia’s father called from below, demanding to know what she was after. Make a list of what you need, he said. Hayes or Jack can get them for you.

  He had not understood that her journeys to the attic, increasingly frequent in that last year of her life, had been a protest. There were other places on the ranch if she had wanted simply to escape her husband. Instead, she insisted on climbing up to the attic, but only when he was around. When she slipped and tumbled down the ladder, he said that a lesson must be learned.

  No need to cry over cracked eggs, but who was crying then? The jumbled idiom had baffled Lilia. She was the only one to stay at the hospital. Her father, having predicted little emergency, had forbidden her younger siblings to accompany them, and he himself had left for home just in time for supper. He was a man of strict routine.

  Perhaps her mother had been consoling herself. All women must have spoken to themselves words unheard by their husbands.

  “So you will say yes?” Dolores said.

  “To what?” Lilia asked.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER LILIA’S MOTHER married her father, an uncle of hers died and left her and all of her female cousins a small amount of money each. Long after the money was gone, Lilia’s father had still not tired of complaining. The uncle, who had never married and had not left Missouri for the west as several of his siblings had done, kept a tobacco shop and only sold it toward the end of his life. A bad deal, was what Lilia’s father called it, because no one would hesitate to cheat a dying man. At least he could have arranged for a family member or two with some brains to help him, Lilia’s father said. His audience all knew that he was thinking of himself as the ideal candidate, and they all knew that he had no business sense.

  The money, equally divided among the old man’s nieces—he had not included any nephew in his benevolence—had not been much, and Lilia’s father had thought of that as an insult to the ones who could use some real help, Lilia’s mother among them. That money was only a pittance to Cousin Essie, who had married into a Greek family developing estates in Sacramento, so why include her? Or Cousin Maude who wasn’t even on speaking terms with most of the family? Surely it’s good for anyone to be thought of by a man who’s about to die, Lilia’s mother had replied once. He looked at her contemptuously, and she looked back blankly, as though to say she had given him a genuine answer to the questions he had asked.

  Such a trick you could do with money. Lilia’s mother had met the uncle only twice when she was small, and she had had little recollection of him. But he had successfully turned himself into a residential ghost in Lilia’s family. Maybe in the families of other cousins, too. Money always makes a good ghost story.

  What Lilia’s father had deemed unforgivable was that Lilia’s mother had kept the inheritance from their household, where every corner was in need of money, every child’s arrival a threat to the bank account. Without consulting anyone, Lilia’s mother signed up for a writing course at a correspondence school, with the hope of making some money if she could publish stories—at least that was what she had said to Lilia’s father.

  Lilia was four then, Hayes two, the twins mere sucklings. Jack and Kenny would come along in a few years, and all of them would listen to their father’s lament until the woe became their own (Hayes and Jack) or a private joke (Lilia, Lucille, and Margot). Not Kenny, though. He had been eight when their mother died. Some people blamed this early loss for his going to the wrong side of life. But there are many motherless sons. Not every one of them rushes through life until landing behind the bars.

  Lilia did not have any recollection of her mother’s literary pursuit, but she had saved the folder of papers before her father could burn them along with the letters her mother had received and bundled by year, most of them from two school friends. Lilia did not know the two correspondents. Perhaps those long letters from her mother to them had survived, though what could she have written? Lilia was not a sentimentalist, but even a sentimental woman had only so much to say about a ranch life that rarely changed from day to day, season to season. Husband and children? It was away from them that her mother had been running in her letters. Lilia thought about Peter Wilson’s complaint about Roland’s repetitiveness. Show me one person who has not lived in repetition. Only many people, unlike Roland or her mother, dare not keep a record.

  It remained a mystery where Lilia’s mother had got the idea of taking the correspondence course. She had been a dreamer, no question about that, but why not dream about something more concrete. She was a handsome woman, and never went out to the vegetable garden or to milk the cows without combing her hair carefully and arranging a spray of bridal wreath or a cluster of asters in her hair. Her short-lived enthusiasm for writing stories was, for a time, replaced by an interest in sewing. She made clothes for herself and her children, a bit fanciful for anyone living on a ranch, and
when the boys were old enough to grumble, she gave up sewing, becoming more distracted by the day.

  What a bunch of disappointments they must have been for her mother. Someone—a ranch hand, a shop owner, a traveling salesman of ballpoint pens—should have fallen in love with her and provided her with another dream, but she had remained a faithful wife, ever impractical while enduring a practical husband.

  When Lilia’s mother was alive, and especially when she was within earshot, Lilia’s father liked to repeat the tale of her literary failure. He acted out his agonizing over the monthly remittance to the school in Chicago. All humbug, he said, but she had become so absentminded. The way she fed her chickens while thinking about princes and castles, he said, he could’ve married another woman and had another litter of children and she wouldn’t have noticed.

  I wish you had, Lilia’s mother once replied. Lilia’s father and his friends, who had been throwing horseshoes, all paused, while she placed a jug of punch on a bench, as though she had just made a comment about the weather.

  Most men are undertakers of their women’s dreams. And, of course, most women are undertakers of their men’s dreams, too. But for Lilia’s father, there was the extra obsession that he kept exhuming what he had buried. He was never violent, and he did not drink excessively. A man with little capacity for joy or vice, he derived his only pleasure from tormenting his wife with a tale in which he did not have a place. And she did that to him, too.

  “I’VE LIVED A LONG AND good life among husbands and children and gardens. I’ve lived a self-contained life. I’m what you call a happy woman.”

  What nonsense! Lilia erased the words that she was writing in her mind. All good lives are self-contained. All happiness, too. Who wants to pull open that drawer called life for others to see? Here’s how I’ve bundled up some old flame in wrapping tissue. Here’s where I’ve placed husbands, separated by dividers. Here are children and grandchildren, all fitted together like Lego pieces. Parents and siblings? Their photos are stacked up there. The dried flowers covering them are forget-me-nots. And now, have you had enough of the view? Lilia laughed when she imagined herself shutting the drawer to a pair of gawking eyes. No, the better thing was not to open it for anyone.