by Yiyun Li
Dolores had asked Lilia again to join the memoir class. Imagine what treasure you can leave to your children and grandchildren, Dolores said.
Other than her collection of baubles, Lilia had not much to bequeath to her children and grandchildren. Photo albums they could share among themselves, and Lilia suspected that one day, sooner rather than later, they—her grandparents, her parents, aunts and uncles, long-lost cousins, her siblings, and herself—all of them would end up in antiques shops. A customer might finger the pages while thinking about a lover or a family trouble. Another customer, out of habit, might look at the price tag and put down the album without opening it. In time the dead no longer remain individually dead. You’re all bundled together, and no one is deader than any other.
Lilia did not believe in that nonsense about keeping the dead alive through love, but she wouldn’t mind having someone to keep her from being generally and generically dead. Family members you might be able to trust for a short time. A year, perhaps two years at most. Then what? Sometimes it’s the unexpected people, those you’ve forgotten or those you’ve never met, who keep you from oblivion. Look at Roland. And Sidelle. Were it not for Lilia, they would not have survived their deaths. (Sidelle wouldn’t have cared, but Roland would’ve suffered in his grave.)
After Lilia’s death, who would do that for her? And for them all?
If there was one thing Lilia had been unwilling to leave to her offspring, it was her own life story. They knew bits and pieces, from being parts of it, but what she had not intended for them to know would never become their possession. Let her past remain unknown and burned to ashes with her. Let her offspring gather on a rented boat and scatter the ashes into the Pacific. When Lilia had first let her children know that this was her wish, they had questioned her. Her two latter husbands were buried next to their first wives. She could see that her children thought it appropriate that she be buried next to Gilbert. They didn’t understand that Lilia had only her own heart’s orders to follow, but then she couldn’t really blame them. She never cared for her heart to be known. Every time Lilia heard the phrase “the key to my heart” she laughed. A lock only invites a burglar.
Understanding or not, her children would do their best to send her off, Will calling his pals to arrange a discount for a boat, Tim dragging his family back from Tacoma, Carol and Molly making everything look as sentimental as in a movie. Katherine and Iola? They would look out of place among the family, but they were the two people who would miss Lilia the most. She would miss those two, too, if a dead person could miss the people left behind.
Halt, halt, easy now. Better not to go down that path.
Lilia would not mind ending up landlocked in the backyard of 23 Roosevelt Road. Gilbert and she had bought the house in 1956. Orinda, separated from San Francisco by the Bay and further by the Caldecott Tunnel, was hardly a town then. His parents mourned as if their son was to move to another country. Lilia was disappointed about leaving the city, though this she did not show; and what she decided not to show, Gilbert would never have guessed. He had set his heart on a three-story house with a large backyard. He wanted something concrete and affordable, so why not let him have it. She herself could make a life anywhere.
Lilia never liked the phrase “rest in peace,” a saying, she believed, invented to make death sound both ordinary and rewarding. What about “rest in oblivion”? Less pressure for both the living and the dead! Still, if she wanted to give an RIP version of her life, that house would tell her stories. There she and Gilbert had raised five children, a granddaughter, plus three puppies and generations of hamsters. She had made a garden, where the dogs and hamsters had been buried. They had received the policemen in the living room when they had come with the news of Lucy’s death, insisting that everyone sit down, as though that would have made any difference. In the last months of Gilbert’s life he had slept in the living room, but when he was near death he asked to be removed to the hospice. It would be good, he said, that he died elsewhere so as not to dent the house’s value. Who cares about the house’s value now? Lilia argued. He said the house was the only thing he could leave her, and he wanted it to be in its best possible condition.
Gilbert, Lilia knew, wouldn’t have minded that she remained his widow, but she had not liked to live as a widow. She had held on to the house when she remarried, and true to Gilbert’s wish, the house, sold in the summer of 2007, would sustain Lilia as long as she didn’t live forever. In an ideal world it would make sense for her ashes to return to that place, but Lilia could not insist on nourishing a stranger’s garden after this life. People there might think of her as an intrusive ghost. The truth was, her ghost would have zero interest in them. But put a ghost in any story and you’ll get many volunteers to be haunted!
Ah well, off she’ll go, to the water.
“What are you doing?” Nancy said.
The door, which Lilia had kept ajar so one of the girls could come in and change her sheets, had been pushed open. Nancy was harmless, and Lilia had nothing against her except that Nancy thought of herself as a darling Shirley Temple. Lilia had always resented that dimpled starlet with her shiny shoes and saccharine smile. She had once told Nancy that, as a child, she used to fantasize about cutting the curls off the little dolly. It was not true, but Lilia had wanted to hear Nancy gasp. And Nancy more than gasped. She told Lilia that her older sister, who was not as pretty as she was, had once sheared all the curls off Nancy’s head when she was taking a nap. Even my mother cried, Nancy had said.
Lilia looked at Nancy, waiting to hear what she wanted from her. “Why were you flapping your hands like a bird?” Nancy asked. “I was invited to watch a documentary the other day and they said that was a sign of autism.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in science.”
“Dale invited me. You know how he’s always into these things.”
“I don’t know,” Lilia said. “And I’m too old to have autism.”
“Then why were you doing this?” Nancy asked, turning her own arms into a pair of undulating wings.
“Pretending to scatter ashes,” Lilia said. “Cremains.”
“Whose cremains?”
Lilia took on a thoughtful look, prolonging the moment before Nancy’s gasp. “Mine,” she replied finally.
Nancy gasped. “That’s morbid, Lilia! Besides, you can’t scatter your own ashes.”
“Why else would I be pretending? Do you pretend to be your husband’s wife? Do you pretend to eat your food at breakfast? Do you pretend to sleep in your own bed? You can, however, pretend that you sleep in a coffin.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nancy said.
“Pretending is a way to do things that otherwise you don’t get to do.”
“Including things we could do in the past but no longer can?” Nancy said, looking coy as though she were blushing. She was not, Lilia decided. It was just the rouge she wore. “Oh, Lilia, I need your advice. Should I say yes to Dale?”
“Did he propose to you?”
“No, but he asked if we could spend more time by ourselves.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We can watch some programs he likes. Take walks. Do you know he has ten siblings? The only one who didn’t live to ninety was their littlest brother.”
“How old is Dale?”
“Not that old. He has good genes. Do you know he was a policeman before he became a private detective? I thought the lady who used to visit him was his wife. Turned out she was only a neighbor. Peggy Horn. When her husband was alive, he and Dale were not on speaking terms.”
“Was she being naughty with Dale? Were they caught by her husband?”
“Lilia! Dale is a good man,” Nancy said.
“We can’t really be sure about that,” Lilia said. “Why did she visit Dale then?”
“He didn
’t know! She insisted on visiting him.”
“Maybe she was doing that to annoy her husband in his grave,” Lilia said.
“You always make people sound weird,” Nancy said.
“Why isn’t she coming anymore?”
“She died in April.”
“Is that why Dale wants you to be a special friend, now that Peggy Horn is gone?”
Nancy closed her eyes. Lilia had noticed that when Nancy didn’t want to answer a question she would blink in a slow-motion manner. “If I don’t say yes he may ask another person,” Nancy said when she opened her eyes. “It’s not that I’m particularly fond of Dale, but I don’t want to see him sit with someone else after he already asked me.”
“By all means say yes!”
“You make it sound like an engagement.”
“Trust me, I’ve married three times and it’s always fun to say yes,” Lilia said. Even Hetty, that woman made of marble, must have felt a moment of thrill when Roland proposed.
BETWEEN FURNITURE AND GARDENS, LILIA had always preferred gardens. This was not a confession. Nevertheless it was a fact worth sharing aloud with her room, for which she had no fondness. The dresser and the armchair, from her marriage with Gilbert, had moved in with her. Some other furniture had been shed like skin when she married Norman and again when she married Milt. The move to Bayside Garden, however, was not about shedding skin, but cutting loose a few fingers. No, a limb or two. Lilia had not let herself feel sentimental. Having outlived her three husbands, the table and the chairs and the buffet and that old armoire Gilbert’s parents had given them as a wedding present had taken on a kind of coldness. Like friends and family all of a sudden looking distracted after throwing the flowers onto the casket. They were thinking about their suppers, or their toes pinched by new shoes in need of breaking in, or the dry cleaning fee for their black suits.
What Lilia did miss, when she moved around her room or watched the world from her seventh-floor window, were her gardens. They were what she had to surrender with each move. Gardens never uprooted themselves for anyone. A garden stays put, nonchalantly and disloyally blossoming for the newcomers.
“If I want to write about my life I would write about the gardens,” Lilia said. No one was listening, and that was what she wanted. Lilia had two voices, one for other ears, one for her own. She was not alone in this, but people often made the mistake of letting the latter voice bleed into the former. A sign of weakness, or a sign of aging—Lilia allowed neither. The voice she used with her fellow residents was the one she had long settled on between the world and herself—one size fits all! When her children called, she sounded friendly, accommodating, cheerful, busy—whatever would put them at ease. The tricky case was Katherine. Lilia couldn’t be merely fuzzy and warm and absentminded, like a grandmother; and she couldn’t be demanding or polite or passive-aggressive, like a mother. Katherine was Lucy’s daughter before she was Lilia’s granddaughter, and it was on Lucy’s behalf that Lilia brought up the girl. But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother’s stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?
A mother is always a cautionary tale for a daughter. Lilia did not mind if Carol and Molly treated her as one. Lucy? But it was too long ago, and Lilia did not want to think of herself in Lucy’s eyes. Lilia’s own mother, greedy for happiness that would never be reached, had settled for the rapture of misery. Even when she should have felt contented, she had wasted no time in feeling the injustices done to her. For instance: Kenny as a baby, rosy-cheeked, sleeping in a white wicker bassinet under the weeping cherry in their garden. Lilia calculated—she was eight then, so her mother was thirty.
Let’s hope he doesn’t break too many girls’ hearts when he grows up, her mother had said.
Even at eight, Lilia could see through her mother. She was hoping for the opposite. The many hearts Kenny would destroy would make his mother proud.
But by then there won’t be a place in his heart for his old mother, Lilia’s mother added, kissing each of the baby fingers. Lilia looked on with abhorrence. Her mother was only waiting for Kenny to get older, as the witch waited for Hansel to fatten up. Lilia and her other siblings did not give their mother the same appetite.
They all had mothers to judge or to love, but not Katherine. She did not know where her life came from.
I’m the oldest of six children. My father’s side came to California from Lithuania. My mother’s side came from Missouri. We are: Lilia, Hayes, Lucille and Margot (twins), Jack, and Kenny. Our father liked a big family so our mother gave him that. She tried her best to love all her children. She only achieved that with one of us, and I believe she chose the wrong one.
Erase? Erase, yes. Lilia did not like that her mind was making up its own mind to talk about these things as if for an audience. Lilia never cared for the stage, not out of shyness or timidity but because the stage was a set thing, and anything set bored her.
Most people live on a stage, though. Some feel they are pushed onto it. Others constantly seek it. Life would have been bleak for Roland if not for all those people he imagined were observing him with admiration or envy. Did he count Lilia among them? As much as he counted other women who had once been known to him and then forgotten?
On the way back from the pub David said, I didn’t realise you knew so many people in this town. Have you visited before? No, I said, and I don’t know any of them. The point is, I explained to David, they see me greet people and think to themselves, look at that lucky bastard with so many friends. Then when I greet them they will think themselves lucky because they now appear to be connected to me.
That entry from July 1929—Lilia did not have to open the book to remember it, though she liked to reread these words. Roland had written it when he and his friends traveled to Prince Edward Island. Those people whose eyes he had so cherished had long been dead. It was his fortune that someone was still here, watching him, seeing him, seeing through him, but with fondness, so he wouldn’t feel that he was strutting around naked. (Oh but, hohoho, he would’ve loved that.)
Longevity is required for loyalty, and true vindictiveness is like true loyalty, neither of which you can boast of unless you have outlived the shelf life of those perishable feelings called love and hatred. To live a long life is to weed out the people who do not deserve either loyalty or vindictiveness. Lilia always preferred those flowers that blossomed all season long.
DEAR ROLAND, I’M SORRY THAT you never learned about the birth and the death of your daughter. She was very much your and my daughter: good-looking and difficult.
Time and again Lilia began this letter in her head whenever she reread Roland’s entries of February 1946, but she had never written it down until now. He was sailing from England to Canada, toward his future bride. Lilia was a week overdue with Lucy. She didn’t mind carrying the baby longer. Her mother-in-law and women like her would pay close attention to the calendar when a marriage happened hastily.
What if Lucy had died as an infant? You hear such stories, babies stillborn or having only a brief life. Of course, Lilia might have died giving birth, but she was not the kind of woman who would die in labor. Just like the mares—one look and you’d know which would be the troublesome ones at foaling. You can’t explain that to people who don’t understand. Some creatures are just born with more life in them.
But suppose Lucy had never really lived but for the short period in Lilia’s womb? Would it have been felt by Lilia as a punishment? Or a liberation? The slate between Gilbert and her would have been wiped clean. What would have become of their marriage then?
An untimely death always has mystery in it. And hypothetically untimely death? Lilia might have set out to look for Roland. But equally possibly, she might have forgotten him. Perhaps Lucy lived so Lilia would remember Roland. And Lucy died young so that there was no way for Lilia t
o forget Roland. There was no way to get even with him, was there? To be forgotten was a defeat. To be doomed to remember someone was a defeat, too. Lilia hated to be defeated.
Lucy broke many hearts. Except Roland’s. He was not heartless, but he would not let his precious heart receive even a scrape. Poor Lucy. No, poor Gilbert. Having his heart broken when someone else should have suffered in his place.
Oh shush! There was no reason to get upset now, except Lilia felt funny this morning. Indigestion, heartburn, palpitation, but not one of them was quite what she was feeling. Perhaps she was simply disturbed by the conversation at breakfast about the writing class. The instructor, a Kurdish-Iranian-American woman, was said to be fiercely funny by some, hard to follow by others, impossibly impertinent by Elaine.
“Too bad you’re not taking the class,” Dolores had said to Lilia at breakfast. Repetition was the only aggressive behavior Dolores had mastered (or retained), a weak weapon, like a toy knife in a toddler’s kitchen set, yet it left a mark on Lilia. No, no blood drawn, but who knew the leathery skin of old age could become sensitive to nuisance?
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” Lilia said.
“I sure am,” Dolores said. “I only wish you were part of it, too.”
Lilia imagined Dolores as a plump, well-dressed, golden roasted turkey looking pitifully at a wild turkey outside the window and saying: Too bad you have to walk in the darkness by yourself. The thought braced Lilia for a few more sympathetic words from Dolores. If Lilia were to trek anywhere down memory lane, she wanted to do it alone.