Must I Go

by Yiyun Li

  I would not call myself a perfect mother, but I did give special attention to Lucy. Still, I knew that the moment people heard about Lucy’s death, they would ask themselves: What did that mother do to that poor child? How did that mother fail so terribly?

  When Lucy died people sent condolence cards and letters, calling it a tragedy. I didn’t understand them. Her grandparents died in a train wreck, and yes, what a tragedy that was for a young couple. Is it so much of a tragedy if you live your life a little differently from most people? And choose to die in a different way than most people?

  When Lucy died, I used the words that other people used. I said my heart was broken. That her death took something out of me. Can a broken heart have pumped blood steadily for thirty-six years, no, thirty-seven years now? A heart cannot break because none of our hearts is made of glass or porcelain. And a tragedy, does it tear you up like a monster with claws and teeth, or does it do so with a surgical knife or even something like what Nancy’s daughter had for her eyes, some advanced technology involving lasers and computers? Sometimes when I hear people use those expressions I want to say: Show me your heart, show me where it’s broken; and what has been taken from you, a kidney or a liver or several ribs?

  Words are like grass. Like weeds. Having lived in this building—this life—long enough, I would not mind being a weed whacker. Chop chop whack whack. All those useless words gone. And then we could eat our meals in peace, like they always promise in their brochures.

  But if I stopped saying things, even the simple words, they would think that I’d gone cuckoo. And they’d ask you for more money so they could pack me off to another unit. So you see, words are the most useless things that we cannot afford to lose. You can claim bankruptcy if you lose all your money. You can’t do that with words.

  We let go of so many important things because letting go, we are told, is a good, virtuous, courageous, and healthy thing to do. And all we end up holding on to are weedy words. As a lifelong gardener, I can guarantee you this: Few words are worth cultivating.

  30 DECEMBER 1933.

  I spent the evening with Sidelle and Mr. Ogden. If the curtains were not pulled close, if someone in the street looked at us longingly, perhaps we presented the perfect tableau: Sidelle reclining on the sofa; Mr. Ogden and me on two chairs drawn close, he having the full view of her sculpture-like head, me huddling near her leather-clad feet. At one point I had an urge to empty my brandy on her stocking and watch the liquid leave a trace in the fabric.

  I have not figured out their marriage. It is a forbidden topic. Mr. Ogden has only given her a chaste pat on the hands while I was around. Not even a kiss. Sidelle seems to have no qualms about her infidelity. In an early letter to me she wrote: “Of all the people in the world Harry is the only person I remain truly faithful to in my way.” What this means she will never explain.

  I made a toast to history, and Sidelle said every generation must have made the same toast.

  May the future generations help enlighten us about this moment we live in, I said.

  Aren’t you happy none of us here has to think as a parent would? Sidelle said. To live with future generations in mind?

  Yet she was a mother once. Mr. Ogden’s only son had died in the Great War. There are also two grown daughters born to his first marriage. But if Sidelle had negated their existence and Mr. Ogden did not protest, I saw no point in bringing them up. With enough alcohol I could believe that we have all we need on this island made by the three of us: time, peace, beauty, harmony. Yes, there is a mainland or a continent out there, but from where we sit they may as well remain infinitely offshore.

  Mr. Ogden informed me of his plan to buy a house in the countryside. I feigned interest, as it was not the first time I had heard of it. In the past few months he has begun to look weary. More than ever his presence makes me appreciate what I have: youth, energy, an appetite for life.

  * * *

  WHEN ROLAND WROTE THESE words he was younger than Lucy when she died. He had no idea what it would be like to have a child, or to think about the future with that child in mind. Lucy, on the other hand, thought of your future, Katherine. That’s why she left that note. She didn’t address it to anyone in particular. “Please take care of the baby for me. I’m too tired.”

  Katherine, we’ve never told you much about Lucy’s death. It’s okay for me to tell you now. By the time you read this I’ll be as dead as a doornail. (By the way, why a doornail? Life is mostly made up of dead things. What’s so special about a doornail? I’m not the kind to be hammered. Maybe I can say, I’ll be as dead as a garden hose. Or a potholder, a clothespin. How about a shoe tree? I always love those dead things that go by the names of living things: a shoe tree, a drain snake, pigs in the blanket.)

  Lucy walked out in the middle of the day. She left the note next to your bassinet, Katherine. It was Steve who found the note, and he didn’t even think of calling us until two hours later. He thought Lucy might have gone out for a walk. He said it was not the first time he had come home and found you alone. You were a good sleeper. It was just like Steve to say later that if only you were one of those colicky babies, Lucy might not have taken off so easily.

  When Steve called, I knew right away that Lucy was dead. I can’t explain how. A mother knows. I didn’t say anything immediately to Gilbert. You can call that an act of kindness. I didn’t murder his hope when it seemed there was still reason to hope. Or you can call it an act of cruelty. I allowed him to go on believing something I knew to be false. Those two days I kept the secret: It was the only time I was truly disloyal to him, down to my last nerve. It was exhausting. Cheating on a husband always is, but cheating on a husband with death?

  Poor Gilbert. He tried to stay optimistic. He tried so hard he started to sound like the newspaper articles during the UN peace conference. All those words like “future” and “temporary setback.” I could tell that he was frightened and that he didn’t know what he was frightened of. He raised Lucy and he loved her, but there was something in her that was beyond him. There is always something that makes people foreign to one another. Eighty percent of the world’s population coming together to love and to live in peace? What a joke that UN conference was.

  During those two days before they found Lucy, Tim called every day from Canada, asking if he should come home. All of a sudden he was not a boy anymore, but a grown man. We told him to stay where he was. We didn’t want him to get into trouble. Will was working in the city then, and he left work early in the afternoon, taking Molly to the park, to the ice cream shop, and even bought her an expensive doll.

  I was grateful to Tim, who called long distance, during the daytime, multiple times, even though I told him to only call at night to get the discount rate. I was grateful to Will. It didn’t feel I had given him a lot, but he was like Gilbert, a goodhearted man. But I pitied them, too. You could see that they had that feeling that as long as they could do something, everything would be all right. I pitied them because I couldn’t tell them that nothing would be all right in the end.

  And then there was Carol. She skipped school and waited around, weeping, weeping, so I sent her to her friend Bonnie’s house for an afternoon. That was when the police came. Had I had a choice, I would’ve had all my family there when the news arrived. Family reunion after a death is horrible. It is as though the death has to happen again. And the second time, someone has to act like a murderer.

  It was me who called Tim, and it was me who sat Carol down when she came home.

  Carol, oh, poor Carol. Of all my children she’s the only one who’s not equipped with something special. Lucy had her fierceness and her wildness (which served her well until she decided she had no further use for them). Will was a good kid and he turned out to be a solid man. He doesn’t have a lot of ambitions, but he has more friends than my other children do. Tim is the smartest one. Molly is a
bully and she uses that to her advantage. But Carol, I don’t know. I used to think if there were an earthquake or wildfire she would be the first child I would lose. I could keep my eyes on her all the time, I could shackle her wrist to mine, but she would still simply melt like a candle when something unpleasant happened.

  Poor Carol. At least she didn’t marry badly. Chris may be the blandest man in the world, but a bland man is unlikely to cause a natural disaster at home. Do no harm, that should be the first requirement for any husband.

  But why do I go on about the others when you’re waiting to hear about your parents? Steve was with us in those two days. He had trouble returning to their apartment, and Gilbert said we must let him stay, he was part of the family. And I have to be fair to Steve for once, and tell you that during that time he shed more tears than any man I’ve known. Sure, we could blame him for many things, but what could you say to a rascal crying so uncontrollably? There had to be something real behind those tears.

  When the police brought the news of Lucy’s death, Gilbert started to sob while Steve’s tears all of a sudden stopped. Oh, these men, crying for reasons they didn’t understand, and because they didn’t understand, when they stopped crying they thought they did something honorable or brave.

  They found Lucy’s body in the reservoir. She had always been a good swimmer.

  I didn’t cry. Crying is not my way. Arguing is. I haven’t stopped arguing with Lucy for thirty-seven years. The children I’ve raised, the husbands I’ve seen die in their beds, my gardens, my reading Roland’s diary—everything in my life is a part of that long argument with Lucy. She was my daughter. She shouldn’t have quit so easily.

  The first holiday season after Lucy’s death was the most difficult. Any birthday, any holiday, any day with blue sky or rain is a reminder of the child who’s decided to choose not to live in these days. But we had other children to take care of. We had you, Katherine. Gilbert’s mother was in the hospital that fall, for some surgery. I made soup for Gilbert to take in a thermos to his mother and a second thermos to his father, who would not come to stay with us because of his pride. No, he didn’t want to feel he was a burden to us. But what’s the burden? I could chop up all the vegetables and meat in the world and I could feed an auditorium of mouths, but where was the burden in those things? For a while—ah, this would make you laugh—I couldn’t make my mother’s recipes of spinach dip or spinach pie. Spinach is a funny vegetable. You start with a giant bunch. There is never something called too much spinach for a family of seven, but you end up with a pitiful bowlful. So much easier to bake bread. Always rising! Baking bread makes you think that miracles might happen, and someday you could even raise the dead.

  Oh, Lucy did something to me. Nothing felt like a weight to me after. Everything was light. Featherweight. I’d always known the term, but ever since Lucy’s death it has nothing to do with boxing anymore. Feathers have weight, but to weigh the feathers you have to kill the bird and strip it and with so much ado you get a small handful of…nothing much. That’s how I felt about Lucy when she died. Only so little of her left.

  Oh, what nonsense. I see this is the danger of writing anything down. Happy people have no use for words. I’ve always been a happy person, but you see now that I’ve put these words down on the page I’m becoming a downer.

  28 APRIL 1934.

  A day with sunshine. Signs of spring everywhere. The tulips in the flower bed are like drunken dancers, dishevelled at just the right level but still beautiful, recovering from a long night of party-going that ends in the morning light. A girl walking past a magnolia tree picked up from the ground a fallen petal, which was large enough for one to write a short love poem on it. On a day like this it is hard to imagine that this marriage with life (yes, show me one living creature that is not wedded to life!) will disappoint one. We have trees and flowers and birds and fountains, we have poetry and music and youth and wine, and we will always have them, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Who would make me a better bride than my life?

  Later.

  Out to picnic, just Sidelle and me, like new lovers, except we know each other so well, in a marriage of a kind, of our own making. Afterward we stopped at a small church. Let’s see what’s in store for humanity, she said, opening a random page of a Bible. Listen to this, she said. Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.

  I’m glad neither of us is Amnon, I said.

  Was I being honest? There have been times when I would have borrowed Amnon’s lines and used them against Sidelle. No other woman has driven me to that extreme.

  How do you know? she said, and held out a hand to me—an odd gesture. I kissed it.

  Do we love each other so much that we’re bound to hate each other one day? I said. I thought we were beyond that common error.

  How meagre we are to each other, she said.

  The day, still sunny, turned unkind.

  Charles died nineteen years ago today, she said. In Gallipoli.

  I never seem to be able to believe in the existence of her first husband. Or the child born in that marriage. Or even Sidelle as a young wife. Her past matters so little to me that she might as well be a woman without one.

  I was imagining today what Charles would be like as a middle-aged man, she said.

  And?

  I couldn’t, just like I couldn’t imagine Harry as a young man.

  I thought that Harry Ogden would offer a model of a middle-aged man and eventually an old man for the dead first husband, but this I did not say. You don’t always have to live through everything to know something, I said. You only need to live through something to know everything.

  You missed the point, Sidelle said.

  I know, I said, and I insist on doing so.

  Why?

  Oh, selfishness, I said. Unless the point you’re making includes myself, I don’t see why I should bother to meet that point.

  You don’t suffer from self-doubt as you used to, do you? Sidelle said.

  Self-doubt is like truffles. I wouldn’t mind flavouring my days with a sprinkle, but too much wouldn’t do. Who wants to pay a hefty price for something so…dispensable? I said.

  How sensible you sound.

  Sensible, yes, and sensitive to my own need, too, I said. I then explained my recent theory concerning selfishness and sensitivity. People who are insensitively selfish and people who are unselfishly sensitive are equally demanding, and one should do what one can to avoid them in life. Insensitivity and unselfishness combined would make a hell for everyone. People who are selfish and sensitive, well, I said, wouldn’t the world be a less boring place if they were the only ones left?

  I suppose you’re one of them, Sidelle asked.

  I count you as one, too, I said. Mr. Ogden, I did not say, is selfish but insensitively so.

  Sidelle did not reply, so I pressed her: Why, do you see a problem with my theory?

  Oh, no, it’s an ingenious theory, she said. At your age a man should always be building some sort of system.

  How I resented her for that. What about someone at your age? I said. If she was unsympathetic enough to comment on my age why shouldn’t I remind her of hers?

  When one has lived through enough systems…

  You stop believing in them? Start tearing them down?

  One simply adapts oneself to wherever one settles.

  So one system is as good as the next?

  And as imperfect, she said.

  No thing is more extraordinary than other things? And no one is more special than everyone else? I asked. That familiar bitterness gripped me again. I felt like a specimen she had come across, a bird with a rare defect that makes me sing better, or a fox with an odd patter
n to its fur. She is interested in me, yes, but only till teatime.

  Oh, we’re both getting tiresome, she said. Let’s take a walk down the lane. Wouldn’t it be fun to catch sight of a fox.

  It alarmed me, it touched me, it made me want to announce my love for her like a young man when our thoughts, coming from two directions, merged at the thought of a spring fox.

  Later.

  Is this what I am? Nobody special but someone Sidelle has known as a young man, whose every stage of life will unfurl before her eyes. Am I occupying the space of a husband who died too young, or a child lost too early?

  It is a surprise that Sidelle has not written me off yet as a study, completed and ready to be filed away. But perhaps a superb specimen should be able to secure for itself a position of eternity in the heart of even the most demanding examiner.

  * * *

  DID SIDELLE REALLY MAKE Roland a specimen that was a combination of a husband and a son from a long-gone marriage? I don’t think so. He was wrong most of the time when it came to women. Oh no, Roland, you don’t explain a woman through the deaths that have happened in her life.

  But I like Roland’s system.

  My father was selfish and insensitive. I imagine many bullies are. My brother Hayes, Milt (I know, none of you knows that side of him), Elaine, no need to go on.

  My mother was sensitive and unselfish. A perfect example of those who make others miserable with their own misery.

  Gilbert was insensitive and unselfish. I wouldn’t say he made life a hell for anyone, but he avoided that by pure luck—by marrying me. If he had married someone else—say, my sister Lucille, his insensitiveness and his unselfishness would have made a monster out of her. She would have thrown tantrums because he was too good for her and because he was not good enough. If he had married a woman like my other sister, Margot, he would’ve smothered her with his kindness.