by Yiyun Li
Amelia nodded.
I asked them for their address, and in their glowing joy they did not hesitate to give it to me. Though now, thinking about it, I feel a tinge of envy, and a tinge of shame, too. They knew exactly how to find a prospect in a foreign country. What has stopped me?
* * *
NOT EVERYONE CAN SAIL the sea and discover a new continent. Not everyone can have a dynasty named after him. Some people are born to be settlers and pioneers. Some people are born to live a comfortable life on a couch. Roland’s mother’s side were settlers in Nova Scotia and his father’s side were settlers in America. What I don’t understand is why everything sounded so hard for him.
On the other hand, why am I complaining when my children and grandchildren are nothing like my mother or my grandmother or my great-grandmother?
23 AUGUST 1929.
Went to see Mrs. Ogden again this afternoon. Out of politeness I queried her well-being in the past few days. The heat has not abated.
No one has died so far, she said, in your absence.
I was so taken aback that I didn’t know how to respond. She smiled and said it was from a poem she had thought of writing.
I asked if I could have the honour of reading it when it is finished. Just then the manager arrived with a telegram on a silver tray. Mrs. Ogden gave it a cursory glance. For a moment I felt an odd jealousy, convinced that it came from a man who would send her multiple telegrams a day.
Her husband, she explained, was delayed by illness. They were to travel to the desert in the Southwest, but now the plan has to be postponed.
This is the first time Mr. Ogden has entered our conversation. I knew nothing of him, and Mrs. Ogden offered no more information. I decided that he must be one of those men with everything, who can always make a man like me feel wretched. (Last night I started reading The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and couldn’t help but think perhaps one day I would publish a collection of these entries, under the title The Journal of an Undistinguished Dreamer—no, that has to wait until I become famous. Wretchedness itself is not interesting.)
* * *
NO ONE HAS DIED so far in your absence. Whoever Sidelle had in mind is lucky. Imagine those on their deathbeds holding their last breaths waiting for this person. Or maybe he’s unlucky. The moment he shows up—ashes, ashes we all fall down!
I’m not a poetry reader. Roland recorded so many of Sidelle’s words but only this one time about her poetry. Why? My theory is that her poetry was not about him.
She liked to talk about death. Did that make her attractive to him? He was the kind of man who wanted to live forever and have everything. Maybe he couldn’t tear himself away because she played everyone’s death on her finger like a puppet.
Roland didn’t record many of Hetty’s words. I imagine she would have talked about pressed flowers and cake recipes and goldfish and birds and wallpaper even when someone was dying next door. She might have been thinking of those things when she herself was lying there, dying, dying, and then dead.
Imagine them at your age, Iola. Hetty would be collecting butterflies and putting them into a killing jar for a quick execution, and then pinning them in neat rows. She would be careful about the wings and the antennas, and when she wrote down the names of the butterflies her handwriting would be as neat as the dead butterflies, all perfectly lined up.
Do people still collect butterflies? Gilbert used to work for a Mr. Dupree. When he died he left his collection of butterflies to Gilbert. Good wooden cases with glass tops, each shared by many butterflies. I said we should get rid of them. They occupied space and gathered dust. Gilbert said they were left to him by Mr. Dupree, so we must keep them. Besides, he said, we might not understand the value of such a collection.
Value, I thought to myself. What value is there with so many deaths? But I knew when to stop pestering him.
Sidelle would not collect butterflies. She would rip the wings off them.
You may think I was the kind of girl who would torture a bug or a frog, but the truth is that I’ve always known there is no point in making other creatures suffer because you occupy a higher place in the order of things.
(If you think the last sentence comes out of nowhere, this is what happened: Once a week Karen takes one of those IQ tests on the Internet. Yesterday she convinced Jinny to do it. Jinny didn’t get a score as high as Karen. Jinny said it was because she was tired and so she started to choose the answers randomly. Fair enough, but what a big show Karen made of laughing at Jinny behind her back.)
* * *
I READ WHAT I wrote this morning, about Roland wanting everything, and remembered a day a long time ago. Lucy was three months old, and Gilbert and I took her out one evening for a walk. There was a full moon over the Bay Bridge. Round and golden, just as you’d see on a postcard. Gilbert said to Lucy, Look, the moon, and then kept pushing her forward. After a moment, he turned and asked me what was wrong. I was crying so hard the moon was all smeared in the sky.
I said that when Kenny was a baby my mother liked to take him out to see the moon. I said I missed my mother now I had a baby. Gilbert said he understood. Poor Gilbert, always ready to accept the easiest excuse. Roland would’ve said something better about the moon, like it belonged only to Lucy. He would make things sound special. By lying if he had to.
But don’t all people lie when they call something or someone special? If not to others, then to themselves.
That was the first and last time I placed Gilbert and Roland side by side in my head. It was not fair to Gilbert. And not good for me, either.
Where did that collection of butterflies go, by the way?
24 AUGUST 1929.
Letter from Hetty the day before yesterday but I only now opened it. Picnics and dances, coming and goings of family and friends, melancholy and tedium masked by her elegant words and elegant penmanship. It would be dishonest to say I don’t miss her, though only because she is the yardstick I can use to measure this new life against the old. My affection for my uncles and aunts fades quickly. Perhaps some feelings are written in vanishing ink. What if all feelings are?
I live like a Trappist monk at the moment. I have stopped greeting the parrot by its name. It has never harboured any goodwill toward me. I have not made friends in the city. (Does Mrs. Ogden count as a friend? Dream away, Roland.) I have spoken to no more than five people today, two of them the young brothers who sit on the stoop outside the building from early morning till late night. There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object. But any failure is hell.
* * *
LUCY USED TO THREATEN ME that she would kill herself. From when she was young, eleven, twelve. She didn’t try that on Gilbert. I didn’t allow her to provoke me so I ignored her. I thought the threat would become a joke between us one day. She could be a furious girl, yes, but when she was not caught by rage she was the most joyful one among my children. Sometimes she laughed uncontrollably. About any little thing. She called it her magic laugh. Timmy and Willie and even Carol imitated her, but they didn’t have the magic. You have to be able to let yourself go completely to laugh like that.
I didn’t understand her rage, just as I didn’t understand that laugh of hers. I thought my job was to be a lightning rod, or a circuit breaker. Was this a mother’s failure? But how many mothers are not failures?
25 AUGUST 1929.
Sunday after a storm. My indolence washed off. On my morning walk I made a detour to West Twenty-fourth Street, arriving just too late to catch Yvette.
Yvette has arrangement on Sunday, Amelia told me. She insisted on speaking English to me. She wanted to practise the language, she said. Her struggle made her a bit more attractive. Any young woman looking hesitant in finding the right words has an air of coquetry, with just the perfect tinge of defencelessness.
Yvette holds a Sunday job as a mode
l for a school of painters. The way Amelia said school made me resent the painters right away.
Why would she still stay in dressmaking? I asked. (Why not just live a life among parties and champagne, with soft fabric easily slipped off and shoulders thrown back, head tilted?)
The painters, they are poor, Amelia said. But Yvette likes to do something different so she can talk about it when we go back to France.
You plan to go back?
But yes, when we make enough money, Amelia said.
What’s wrong with America? I asked.
People here don’t really know anything about hats and dresses.
I didn’t realise that a homely girl could be so judgemental. That’s harsh, no? I said.
Pah, Amelia said, people in Berlin and London and New York think they understand fashion. It’s like one who doesn’t have an ear…
Tone-deaf?
Yes, Amelia said. It’s like tone-deaf people talking about music.
Beethoven was deaf.
He could hear even when he was deaf. Just like us—Yvette and I—we cannot afford the clothes we make, but we see things others don’t see. And we know how to make women think they are stupid if they don’t have the right clothes.
How?
We make things different every season, so anything six months old looks silly on a woman.
So that’s how it works, I said. (Does Hetty know this? Does she follow each season’s fashion? And Mrs. Ogden? Surely she knows everything.)
The conversation was more interesting than I expected, so I asked Amelia about her life in France. She was born in the countryside, close to a town called Besançon. It is near the border to Switzerland, and like most men living there her father was a watchmaker. They had a comfortable life until he went blind and could no longer work. She was six. There were five children in the house, and her two older brothers became apprentices to a watchmaker. Her mother planted vegetables. She used to read a lot of books, so people laughed at her, Amelia said, but when she started to sell her vegetables at the market they realised they had made a mistake. She is good at what she does.
Does she still do it?
Yes, with my younger sisters.
And your father?
He is still blind. My mother reads books to him, but she hasn’t much time. She’s busy with the garden, Amelia said.
The French countryside, what a romantic place. I would not mind settling down among the flowers and vegetables and the local girls, with a little cottage to myself, living a writer’s life. Did you like growing vegetables? I asked.
I liked to go to the market. It was a fun day for us. We sat in the horse cart, on top of the vegetables, holding our lunch in napkins. Our dog Léon ran behind the cart, and no matter how loud we yelled at him and ordered him to go home, he always followed us.
I thought of making a clever comment about dogs and men, but did not do so when I saw Amelia’s eyes grow misty. In her reverie she looked less plain. Perhaps memories are the best adornment for a woman.
After a few years, Amelia continued, her mother realised that she, Amelia, unlike her sisters, was not much help in the garden. She had the patience, as everyone does in her family, and her hands were far from clumsy, but she did not have a green thumb.
So you went into dressmaking?
Had she been a boy, she explained, she would have entered watchmaking, and she wouldn’t have had to leave home. But to learn dressmaking she had to go to Paris. There she met Yvette, and they were the two youngest girls at the shop.
I asked about the shop’s name, which I had pretended to be familiar with.
Rouff. Yvette’s aunt worked there, Amelia said. She was always snappy, and she even made Yvette cry. Sometimes she would make clothes for the children and the poor women on their street. She prayed after she gave them the clothes. One day, she came down with a fever, and in a few days it was obvious she would die. She had been a wicked woman, she cried to the two girls. This early death was a punishment for her wickedness. The girls thought she was delirious, but the older woman said that the material she had used for the poor people had been stolen from the patrons. She had prayed often but not enough to make up for this sin. She died very unhappily.
That’s when Yvette decided to come to America, Amelia said.
And you wanted to come, too? I asked.
She shrugged. I didn’t mind.
How long will you work here before going back?
A few years, Amelia said. Sometimes I miss my maman. I used to think her arms were like the best radishes. When it was hot she put a cabbage leaf on her head. My sisters and I too wore cabbage leaves. My maman hemmed in some flowers from our garden at the edge of the leaves. We all looked wild and happy, not that we couldn’t spare some money for proper hats.
I glanced at Amelia’s arms, pale and even, though perhaps not as plump as her mother’s. I tried to come up with something to say, and when I could not, she smiled at me forgivingly. People usually come to visit Yvette, she said. I don’t mind that.
I like listening to you talking about your life.
Is that so? she asked. But of course you do. It’s because we don’t really know each other.
* * *
AMELIA WAS A PLAIN GIRL, but she made everything into a story. She knew in that way she would be remembered. People living in stories come across a little prettier than they are. And we’re lenient toward people we remember. We forget many of their flaws.
What does it feel like to be born without much beauty to speak of? You must think I sound crazy, like a rich man wondering what it feels like to be poor. But what I mean is: I cannot imagine what kind of person I would have turned out to be if I had been born a plain girl. Or an ugly girl. Would I still be this Lilia? No one says a plain girl or an ugly girl can’t make something out of her life.
One thing I’m certain about: I don’t have to rely on telling stories to make myself feel special. That’s what they’re doing in that memoir class. Storytelling—they keep repeating the word like it’s a magic spell. Show me one person who doesn’t have a story. But it’s how they emphasize the telling part that makes me laugh. With a fancy dress and the right amount of makeup, any story can pass as something more memorable. Someone could turn this little seamstress’s story into a movie, and we’d all forget she was nothing to look at.
Actually, I must make a correction. Hetty didn’t have a story to tell. She was not plain-looking. She was not poor. But can you cook over a toy oven and serve plastic food with tiny plastic utensils that wouldn’t cut a baby’s fingers? That was Hetty’s life. No danger of anything or anyone getting burned or wounded or ruined.
If you think I’m being harsh on her, well, I am. And why shouldn’t I be? Once you live to my age, you’ll know there’re some real pains in life. There’s no getting around that. It’s not like a minefield you see on TV, where people with special equipment mark the landmines, and then people with other special equipment get rid of them. Oh no, you don’t know when and where something will happen to you, but it will, sooner or later. The only difference? You may not end up walking around with a missing limb. You look the same to the world.
Most people, even Roland, have to live with a few of those surprises. But not Hetty. She was so careful with her life that she probably never sprained her ankles or got caught in the rain. Accident-free, pain-free, no inconvenience whatsoever. No, it’s not that I envy her. I pity Roland. He was afraid of being bored. And all he got himself in the end was a boring wife.
26 AUGUST 1929.
Mrs. Ogden asked me today if I wanted to accompany her on a trip to Pittsburgh. I assumed her husband’s delay made it necessary for her to seek a male companion, but why me?
When? I asked.
Any time, she said. Unless your schedule doesn’t allow it?
Why me? I asked.
A young man should not doubt everything, she said.
I was only assessing my capacity to be a good companion.
There are a dozen men in this city willing to be what you call a good companion to me, she said. You don’t have a dozen women in this city to offer your service, nor a dozen women willing to show you the world you haven’t seen, do you?
What makes a woman think she knows a man better than he knows himself? I said, feigning equality between Mrs. Ogden and me. Amelia would have stories about watchmakers and dressmakers were I to ask. Yvette might be willing to introduce me to the poor artists. But they’re women with limited prospects. They cannot be my prospect.
You’re a young man in search of a future, Mrs. Ogden said. The question you should ask yourself is how to get there, not why people do what they do to make it possible for you.
I’ve often thought what makes us human is that we do everything possible to stop others from having any kind of future, I said.
Mrs. Ogden looked at me, not willing, I resentfully thought, to engage in a conversation she deemed pointless. I pressed on. Isn’t that true? Animals don’t care about other animals’ futures. They don’t even care about their own, as long as they have food.
Mrs. Ogden smiled, then started talking about a sculptor she’d met for dinner the night before. I’ve noticed her doing this. She changes subjects when I begin to sound tiresome. Yet I cannot stop myself. She has that effect on me, changing me into someone stupider. Worse, not only do I have to rely on her to guide me out of that mire of foolishness, but I find some pleasure and reassurance in being thus led by her. She never makes a fuss about my gaffes. Never pauses to question me. I feel grateful for that, till when I can get free again to make another argument.