by Yiyun Li
Lilia’s father said the only room he could spare was the cottage near the stable. What about the guest room upstairs, Lilia said.
Right away Roland said he didn’t mean to intrude on family life.
There was no guest room in the house, but to offer what was not there was a way to make a fool out of someone. People felt gratified or flattered. That Lilia was offering something that she did not have would never occur to them. It was like a game, with its rules only known to Lilia.
And they often gave something in return. Something they did have.
Here, no one will intrude on your quiet stay, Lilia said after she showed him the cottage, which had a small sitting area and a cot in a corner. It was clean enough.
How’s your business here? Roland asked, watching Lilia change a set of bedding.
Good, Lilia said. How did you find us?
I saw an ad in the paper. I thought I would bring my friends for a change of air.
What are they?
You mean, who are they?
They’re foreigners, no? Which countries are they from?
Europe, Roland said.
They’ve probably stayed in better places.
Nothing wrong here, Roland said. They’ve had a war there.
Are you from Europe, too? What are you?
Who am I, you mean? I’m Roland Bouley. I’m from a lot of places. And who are you?
I’m Lilia Liska, from Benicia, California.
You make it sound like a poem. Or a song. Have you practiced?
Lilia had never had to introduce herself to anyone like this. People in her world were those who knew her name (and her parents’ and her grandparents’ names). The visitors to the ranch did not mind not knowing her name. Men liked how her face and her body looked. They would put their arms around her waist or press their lips on hers if she let them, but most men did not bother to fake curiosity, just as they did not bother to hide their desires.
Why do I need to practice being myself? she said.
You’re a natural poet, then.
Who needs poetry, Lilia had said on that day, and she now said it again aloud: “Who needs poetry?” Lilia had too much life in her to be contained by rhymes and rhythm, pauses and stops. The next two nights she had slipped into the cottage—perhaps other women, weaker and more sentimental, would remember the time spent with Roland as poetry, but calling it poetry would be like reducing an endless field of poppies and lupines to patches of yellow and purple. Once, a visitor did just that. He came by himself and stayed for a week at the inn. Several times Lilia had tried to strike up conversation, but he had not looked at her as he had looked at the flowers. She scoffed at him then. Why settle for something dull and dead on a small canvas, when you can have the live and the real?
12 MAY 1945.
An outing planned with Mr. T and his two colleagues, but I have promised myself this is a personal diary and no work is allowed to enter this space.
15 MAY 1945.
We came back to the conference yesterday. A pleasant surprise at a true Californian Ranch. L: vivacious, refreshing, young (how young?). And audacious. While shaving this morning I could hear Mr. Dalsin explaining the word audacious. My mind started right away to conjugate. Audeo, audes, audet, audemus, audetis, audent.
Who, between L and myself, is risking more? Who is daring whom? But these questions need not be answered. We have returned to a global stage where L has no place. I could not even feign melancholy at the farewell yesterday, clandestinely carried out before daybreak. She and I said things to each other, sure, but things are always said when two people lie in a bed meant for one, more intimately than two people sitting at the smallest table in a restaurant.
L looked perfectly willing to believe that we would meet again. Such confidence. She is too young to understand that it is almost always a miracle that two people meet. I, too old to be taken hostage by any miracle.
* * *
—
“But we did meet again, didn’t we?” Lilia retorted, as she often said to Roland when she reread this page.
ON MONDAY AFTERNOON A VISITOR, someone’s daughter, brought in a giant bouquet of flowers to the dining room. They were from a wedding she had attended the day before—it took no time for Deb to find it out. “Can you guess how much the family spent on the flowers—eighty thousand dollars!”
“You must’ve heard it wrong,” Frank said. “Must be eight thousand.”
“I double-checked. My late husband was an auditor. I’m good with numbers.”
“I had a client once who asked my wife and me to design a garden that would bloom all year round in white,” Michael said. “Guess what her budget was? Three hundred and fifty thousand.”
To feel incredulous as though there was still much to marvel at about life—Lilia wondered if by growing old, by forgetting, by pretending, they had reached the point where the world was new all over. New in what way, though? The world is your oyster but once. The second time all you have are the oyster shells, ready to be ground into powders to fertilize someone else’s garden.
The brochures advertising Bayside Garden boasted of the intelligence and the longevity of its residents: an average age of eighty-seven, with sixty-seven percent having advanced degrees. Yet Lilia, below average as measured by those criteria, could easily understand the boundless strangeness of life, which seemed equally boundlessly inexplicable to her peers. It took her some effort not to point out that everyone present must have done something similarly nonsensical. Didn’t Bill spend an enormous amount of money to buy his two sons VIP tickets to a Giants’ game, but they left the game still not on speaking terms even though the team had won that night? And everyone had heard Gwen yelling on the phone at her sister in New Jersey, who called every time the weather forecast looked ominous on that coast. I told you before and I’ll tell you one more time—Gwen, who was in general on the quieter side, would raise her voice—there’s a solution. One word: California. What? What about earthquakes? We sleep through earthquakes all the time. A big one? No, it won’t happen while you and I are alive.
Gwen, Lilia said once, can’t you understand that your sister doesn’t need your advice, doesn’t want to die next to you, but only wants you to listen?
You don’t know half the history between us, Gwen replied.
So? Lilia thought. History is like a credit score. Do you live your life in constant consultation with it? You take this or that action, the score gets better or worse, and you live with the result.
Lilia’s decision to move to Bayside Garden had baffled her children. She was healthy and self-sufficient, and she could see that they had envisioned a different scenario for her, living an independent life until the very end. What they did not understand was that she had no use for solitude. No, she was not afraid of being alone, but she preferred to be alone among people.
Rightly remembered, everyone is a curio decorating someone else’s mental mantel, Lilia quoted to herself Roland’s words. They often put her in a lenient mood toward her peers at Bayside Garden. They might not become a stately bust or a peacock feather or an antique vase, but together they would make a good collection of marbles. (Don’t you lose them, Lilia.)
Though what does “rightly remembered” mean? Timely remembered? That would explain Roland’s recording his life in such detail, but what is timely remembered can be timely forgotten, too. Or, perhaps all things timely remembered are wrongly remembered, and it’s only when we pass a certain point, after we forget those things, that we can re-remember them and call it the right way. When does that happen? Middle age? On becoming a grandparent? After an unexpected death? Or an expected death? Hello there, Lilia imagined asking everyone she met. Have you walked through that door already? What door, the person would ask. That door, she would say, the one that opens only once, and when you enter you cannot return. The
person might be confused, or incensed, or, if he had a good sense of humor (fat chance), he would say, do you mean the door between life and death? Pah, she would answer. The door you’re talking about is far less interesting than the door I have in mind.
Lilia had not passed through that door yet. There were so many things she hadn’t forgotten. She knew this with the certainty that she knew her own name and age and the first day of her last menstrual period, which at her checkups she was still asked to fill in on the questionnaire. Oct. 19, 1987. (Black Monday), Lilia would note it. No one ever asked what the parenthesis meant. You would think people would have a decent level of curiosity.
Rightly remembered, everyone is a curio decorating someone else’s mental mantel. Those words described an encounter with another woman, which had happened in the same month Lilia had met Roland. He was in a San Francisco pub with a few friends, and a queenly woman with a flawless accent and an enchanting manner came over and asked: Would you mind if I took this chair?
The group of friends competed to consent. You’re not from this part of the world, ma’am? one of them asked.
No, I’m from across the Bay, the woman said. Oakland.
Roland wrote that subsequently he had been informed the woman was one of the Mitford sisters. When Lilia read the entry it had been decades later—even then she had had to go to the library to look up the Mitford sisters. Mrs. Anderson, the librarian, had been elated by Lilia’s questions. Mrs. Anderson was Lilia’s age, and had received a Ph.D. in Russian literature but worked in the local library till the week before she died. Once a year, Lilia asked Mrs. Anderson about a Canadian author, Roland Bouley. He had told her, when they first met, that one day he would become a well-known author, and she should watch out for his name. Mrs. Anderson, though never asking Lilia for an explanation, had taken up the search as a kind of professional challenge. How strange that one woman’s obsession could become another woman’s, but those who pick up fragments of other people’s lives must be the loneliest ones. The Andersons did not have children. Mr. Anderson practiced family law for a day job and coached Little League after work and on weekends. Perhaps Lilia’s constant questions and requests were exactly what Mrs. Anderson needed. When she eventually found Roland’s diaries—god knows how she did it, patient and persistent woman she was—she ordered two copies, one for Lilia, one for herself. Did you know the author? Mrs. Anderson had said after she told Lilia that she had paged through Roland’s diary. He’s a distant cousin on my mother’s side, Lilia had replied. One of those relics of our century, wasn’t he? Mrs. Anderson had said.
Mrs. Anderson might have never found Roland’s diaries. But then Lilia might have never met Roland. A different sequence of events, yet life would be the same, full of strange things that can’t be remembered rightly.
People are like flowers. Some are born rare species, and they are assigned certified gardeners, and people line up to catch a glimpse when they bloom. Some demand cultivation and maintenance even though they live in an ordinary garden. Some are as common as lupines and poppies. Yet in the end all flowers blossom for the same purpose, and none of them last unless you press them between pages. Once preserved, they take on a gray tint, half transparent, with the lifeless thinness Lilia had always pictured Hetty Bouley’s skin to have. Lilia had never met Hetty, but she’d learned from Roland’s diary that it was one of Hetty’s hobbies to press and preserve flowers. Imagine the sixty or seventy years of flowers Hetty would have left for Roland. No, Lilia could not imagine. There was something wicked about it. Marianne, whose room was across from Lilia’s, had once invited Lilia to see her pressed flowers, a hobby begun, Marianne said, after her husband’s death. It took great discipline for Lilia not to call Marianne a serial killer of flowers. Well, she shouldn’t chastise Marianne, who was a minor criminal compared to Hetty.
Sidelle Ogden died in 1969. Hetty Bouley died in 1987. But as long as Roland had lived they must have retained some realness. That thing people say about memory keeping the deceased alive—there’s no harm in believing in that nonsense just as there’s no harm switching to another brand of toothpaste because you like its commercial. When Roland was alive Sidelle and Hetty must have been like flowers that still bloomed in the sunroom of his mind. But they had become dead specimens in his diaries when he died.
He would, too, once Lilia died.
Oh, Roland, someone had better come and inherit you before we become flowers pressed between pages. We can’t be as dead as Hetty.
ON THE DAY ROLAND AND his friends visited, after Lilia showed him his room, he had walked with her to the stable. He asked about the land, the weather, and the history of the region. One of his friends, he said, wanted to botanize. To what, Lilia asked, and Roland replied that his friend was interested in collecting some plants.
We have plenty here, Lilia said, pointing to her mother’s garden. It had gone wild since her death. As it went toward its irreversible deterioration, Lilia felt the kind of pleasure similar to that of seeing someone, with bad eyesight, hard of hearing, slow in movement, being stolen from by a pickpocket. Could Lilia raise her voice on behalf of the victim? Sure, but why would she? When such a thing happened in a Charlie Chaplin movie you were supposed to laugh.
Lilia was waiting for the day when the garden would become a complete eyesore, and her father would have to order them to hack down the plants and set them on fire. No, Lilia would refuse to feel sad to see the garden go. Her mother had not had much in life, and she should be allowed to take her garden with her.
What had surprised Lilia, though, was that the twins, Lucille and Margot, did not lift a finger to save the garden either. Lilia could understand Lucille—anything Lilia did not do around the household Lucille would not take up as her responsibility. She was all about fairness, but how could she not see life was not meant to be fair? Lilia was older, taller, prettier, and no matter how much Lucille resented these facts she could do nothing to change them. But Margot? Margot had a soft heart. She had cried the most of all of them after their mother died, and she alone had saved a few articles of their mother’s clothes when their father told them to bundle things up for the secondhand shop. Margot would surely have adopted the garden, so Lucille must have forbidden her to do so. She needed Lucille more than she was needed by her, and between a dead mother and a live sister she had to choose.
To botanize, Roland explained, requires visiting native plants in their native habitat.
Native habitat—they were not the kind of words Lilia or anyone she knew would use. Why do you even care? she asked. Only native animals need the plants, and you aren’t one of them.
Roland studied Lilia. Till then, she knew, she had looked to him not much different from a native plant. Of course we aren’t animals, he said. But we do things animals can’t do.
Like being able to botanize?
Precisely.
And feeding on animals we raise? Lilia said.
What a good observer you are, Roland said.
Who feeds on us?
Who?
Animals, Lilia said. She had once seen a mountain lion jump up almost to tree height to catch a bird, and she had wondered if a small child playing in the tree would also have been torn to pieces. A coyote had taken a kitten from the barn when Kenny had just begun to crawl, and their mother had been consumed by the fear that the coyote would come back, taking Kenny next.
In some places, maybe, but in most places people feed on people. We’re cannibals who don’t recognize our lot, Roland said. But it’s also that lot that allows us the capacity for happiness.
Our dogs are happy, Lilia said. And they don’t eat each other.
Not happy in the way you and I can be, Roland said.
Lilia liked how he talked, chewing hard on each word, too greedy to give them away lightly. She shrugged, all the same, as though bored by his nonsense.
You’re a
bit young to understand, aren’t you? Roland said.
Are you calling me stupid?
By all means no.
Then you’re one of those men who think it’s okay for girls to know nothing when they’re young, Lilia said. And when they are no longer young you call them stupid.
Roland laughed. You surely know a lot.
And I know what makes animals better than us, Lilia said. Devils feed on our souls, not theirs.
And who feeds on devils?
Lilia hesitated. God? she said.
Roland laughed. Annoyed, Lilia asked when he wanted the horses to be ready. He brushed a piece of hay from her hair. I’m not laughing at you, he said. Only you remind me how hard those fusty theologians worked without understanding half of what you’ve intuited.
I don’t understand, Lilia said. I’m not educated enough for this conversation.
It isn’t so much a question of whether a person is educated enough to understand the world. It’s whether a person understands the world enough to be able to make something out of a life.
And you’re saying I do? Lilia said.
How else can we be happy? Roland said.