by Yiyun Li
Sensitive and selfish people: Roland was one. I am one. Lucy, too. Pains in the neck, you might say, but imagine a world without people like us.
8 AUGUST 1934.
Harry Ogden and Sidelle and a few friends are in Spain. I was half-heartedly invited even though she knew that I had committed to overseeing the department while Jenkins goes on holiday. One step closer to lifting yourself out of the pool of nobodies. All experience will come in handy in the end, once I succeed as a novelist. If not for this belief I would be sinking, not into a fatal despair but into a waist-deep, then chest-deep slush of self-hatred.
And the women who stumble into my life: What are they but a few leaves floating on this pond called Roland’s world?
* * *
I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT ROLAND was exaggerating when he talked about this hatred of himself, but I wonder now if he did mean it. Can you love yourself as much as Roland did and still hate yourself? Maybe there is no difference between loving yourself with a passion and hating yourself with a passion. You can’t have one without the other.
I don’t suffer from self-hatred. But that’s because I don’t love myself to an extreme.
Hate and love are funny words. You would think they’re the most serious of words but in fact, they are not. You could conduct an experiment and count how many times a person says love in the course of a day. I would do it, except I would lose my mind by nine o’clock in the morning. You would think with so much love around, the world would be a great place for everyone. O love, O love, O love. We watched a cooking show the other day where a woman dripped the salad “generously” with some “herb-infused oil.” Yes, love is like that, you can drip it generously, in a greasy flood.
Hate is not any better. People use the word with even less care than love. At lunch someone grumbled, I hate broccoli. Really, I thought of turning around and asking her, Did a broccoli murder one of your ancestors? Did your husband take broccoli as a mistress?
I had a dream of Lucy last night. Odd that I still dream about her. She was in her teens, and I ran into her in an empty space, indoors—no windows, so there must have been some sort of lighting, but I couldn’t tell. She was sitting on top of a painted block of wood, in a pink dress. When I saw her I said, Oh, Lucy. I was about to say something more but she looked at me furiously, with that angry look she used to give me, the look that said, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
Back then she often said those words to me. And gave me that look. In life I had never let her stop me from saying anything I wanted to say, but in my dream I paused. I became, truth be told, a little shy in my dream. Not feeling wrongly accused, or provoked, but shy. Like when you want to say something tender but can’t find the right words. How many times in my life have I felt that way? Never.
I was sad when I first woke up that I hadn’t said anything to her. But now I wonder if shyness in a dream is fine. Just as in real life, shyness is an underrated virtue. Imagine if people stopped dripping love and hurling hatred around, but achieved shyness instead. That’s one thing that all those dignitaries and politicians have never thought of as an aim for a peace conference. Or for a brighter future for mankind.
I dream more often about Gilbert, and sometimes Norman and Milt, and once in a while my siblings. I rarely dream about my children. I think about them. What’s better, to be thought of or to be dreamed of?
I wonder if Gilbert used to dream about Lucy. If he did, he never told me. For the first months or perhaps the first year after Lucy died, he liked to talk about her—all sorts of things, from her infanthood to her marriage. I was the one to turn cold every time Lucy’s name came up. No, I didn’t want to live like that. I didn’t want, every time I heard her name, to tell myself again, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.
After a while, I said to Gilbert, Do me a favor, will you? Let’s stop talking about Lucy.
He looked sad. But I don’t want to forget her, he said.
We won’t, I said. Even if we don’t say her name for the rest of our lives we won’t forget her for a moment.
He agreed. But now I wonder if it was because I refused to talk about Lucy with him that he went on talking about her with our children. Behind my back. He might have told the children more about Lucy when they were older. It was unlike Gilbert, but what did Molly mean when she said the other day that Dad told them more about Lucy than I did?
After Lucy’s death I not only thought of walking out on my family, but also getting in touch with Roland. Not that he would offer any comfort. He would be the last one to do that. No, the reason was that I wanted to be with someone who had little space in his heart for another person.
I didn’t contact Roland. I decided to remain loyal. Not only to my marriage and family. To my grief, really. People say grief this, grief that, but let me tell you, sometimes grief is the greediest lover. The moment you think of walking away you commit infidelity. Then what? Grief announces that you’d never have the right to it again. Grief turns its back to you. Grief is a good punisher.
I suppose in the end I wasn’t brave enough.
But I did go to the library every year and ask Mrs. Anderson, my favorite librarian, if there was a book published under Roland’s name. When I finally got this book, I regretted not having written him about Lucy’s death. It would’ve made a difference to see her name in this book, and to read what he would’ve written.
Better late than never, people like to say. Sometimes I want to remind them, but no later than death, please.
10 OCTOBER 1934.
Hetty’s letter today brought the news of the death of Aunt Geraldine. People die. On the ship to the Far East, an unobtrusive Japanese gentleman died unobtrusively, and we held a solemn gathering, letting the Pacific grant him final peace. In Hong Kong I once saw an old man, a load of bamboo poles carried on his severely bent back, collapse in the heat and never get up. In Shanghai people died from bombs, from coldness, from hunger. In the news last week a young woman’s body was discovered in a canal, pregnant with a new life and an old despair. People die, but a harmless woman like Aunt G, so contented with life, why wouldn’t she live forever? No one did better at holding on to life’s mediocrities and making something of them. One would think all those weightless thoughts would make for her a permanent zeppelin, floating above the swamp called life and the whirlpool called death.
Some people only begin to live when they find a way to live their lives as tragedies. For the grander ones among these people—Hamlet, me, or even my mother—there is something delectable in that fate. But Aunt G should have been kept safe from even the most inevitable tragedy. How I hate to think of her death as a violation of that contract.
Later.
When is the funeral? Sidelle asked.
I don’t think I can make it, I said.
What if we go together?
To Halifax?
I was thinking of going to America. You could meet me there after the funeral. We should travel while we can still do it freely.
Freedom is not a poor man’s birthright, I said.
Neither is self-pity, she said.
That’s precisely the reason I’m going to stay here, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t say that I wanted to make enough money to have a splendid flat, with expensive decorations, and with women who would not leave me feeling squalid about myself.
What about Harry? I said. Doesn’t he want to travel with you?
Sidelle waved her cigarette without answering me.
* * *
THIS MORNING EAMON SAID to me, Breakfast is always my favorite meal of the day. I said, Is it? He said, Yes, guess why. I said, Why don’t you tell me because whatever guesses I make, you’d say they’re wrong. He said, It’s a meal hard to brag about. I hate it when people talk about their dinners, the wine, the champagne, the different courses. Breakfast is easi
er to digest, harder to present, don’t you think?
I thought to myself, You don’t know the world half as well as I do. I read in the newspaper the other day that a mother is considered a failure these days if she doesn’t serve two different kinds of fruit at breakfast for her children. Just someone’s opinion, of course, but as a gardener I can tell you these opinions don’t sprout for no reason.
You may start a new trend talking about breakfast, I said.
I’m sure all the trends we’ve thought of have already been started by someone else, he said.
I bet there’s something no one has done yet, I said. Look at you and your friends, busy writing your memoirs. Not the most practical activity, if you ask me.
What’s a practical activity?
A flower-arranging class so you can plan your own funeral display, I said.
Eamon looked pained and said, I don’t know about that. Sounds rather morbid to me.
Why? Thinking about death doesn’t make it come faster, I said. Once you have a design you love, you can leave instructions for the florists. Wouldn’t that be nice? Or come up with a tasting menu for your own funeral reception. How about that?
You think differently from most of us, Eamon said.
* * *
WWII IS COMING. ROLAND’S war diaries are not as good as the war movies. The only thing we can learn is that not everyone dies in a war, not everyone is a hero, not everyone is a traitor, and not everyone suffers.
3 MARCH 1940.
The war drags on like a half-hearted engagement, with no reason to dissolve and no wedding in sight.
* * *
THE WORST KIND OF engagement is not the one that should not have happened in the first place. No, the worst engagement is the one you know will fail but you still talk yourself into letting it happen. Here’s something you should know, Katherine. When Steve came to Gilbert and asked for Lucy’s hand, the only thing that kept us from saying no was that neither Steve nor Lucy would ever take no for an answer. Steve may change, Gilbert said. Gilbert was an optimist through and through.
I thought sooner or later Lucy would realize that the marriage wouldn’t work out. I thought she would become the first person in our family to divorce. A record in itself. But I was also an optimist. I thought once things failed, Lucy would take action.
I never doubted her ability to do so. I wish that she had had the inability to take action. Indecisiveness is a virtue unappreciated. But I’m the one to blame. Roland was better at indecision. If the world were made up of men like Roland, we would be spared some catastrophes. Minor ones we can’t avoid. In fact, some men are specialists in causing minor catastrophes. Like Roland, Steve, maybe my father, too.
Now, Katherine, let me hope by the time you read this you’re free from that husband of yours. Andy is one of them.
If you can’t marry the right man, at least marry a good man. Someone like Gilbert. I used to tell him that his heart was so large it was like one of those play structures in a park. The kids can play real-life chutes and ladders in your heart, I would say. What I didn’t say was: All those secrets could go around and he would not catch any one of them. My secrets, I mean.
After Lucy and Steve were engaged, sometimes I would be cooking and all of a sudden feel jolted out of a bad dream. And then I would go back to chopping and stirring. She’s your daughter, I would say to myself. You reap what you sow.
14 MAY 1940.
The war has begun again, more earnestly now. Belgium and Holland are invaded, small countries on a small continent. Europe is still a stranger to me. One dismisses a stranger’s suffering easily.
Today Sidelle said, Harry and I could put our fingers on a map with our eyes closed, and in any of the countries there would be someone we know whom we may lose in this war.
I took that as a criticism but did not defend myself.
The memory of the frozen pond of Regent’s Park last December, when S and I huddled in the cold dampness. I would rather live in that moment than this one, the refugees popping up in this spring light like haphazardly transplanted flowers.
* * *
THIS MORNING WE WATCHED the news about the fire in Martinez, in some old factories. The staff in the building ran around, making sure all the windows were closed. The field trip to the Japanese Garden was canceled. There are many disappointed souls, and I count myself lucky not to be one among them. I don’t mind being in my room, remembering my own flowers growing in my own gardens. What’s the difference between loving the roses that bloom now and loving the roses that bloomed fifty years ago?
The fire reminded me of a song that was passed down from my great-grandmother Lucille. I could only recall this one line. “Bring me back to old Mar-ti-nez.” Such a sad line, and you know whoever was singing about old Martinez would never see it again.
But poor Martinez has come down a few pegs since then. Who sings about it these days? Who knows what kind of dreams the miners used to have about Martinez? Warm food, clean beds, women wishing them good luck and promising to marry them once they returned with gold? I wonder if Martinez is now half dead because all the men who once dreamed about it are gone. Imagine if all the people in the whole wide world stopped dreaming about Paris or London or New York. They would all be as dead as that city buried by the volcano, you know the one I’m talking about.
Great-grandmother Lucille could say something like this: If I point my finger at any of the mines on the map of the valley, I will find men from all those countries in Europe. Better than what Sidelle said, don’t you think?
It’s not peace that brings people together, but gold. I wish I could tell Gilbert.
18 JUNE 1940.
I have not been to France. I have not set a foot in Paris. Now Paris has fallen, and I want to grab a passerby and say, How can this be? How can we be duped into thinking that the world is established to make us happy?
But even as I voice the same astonishment as everyone else, I wonder if I am merely posing. I still think my life, to me, is larger than Paris. I am mourning the end of a life that I might have had. Indeed ought to have had.
Mr. Ogden believes that Britain will be invaded. He has begun to talk about moving to America or Canada.
Unpatriotic, isn’t it? I said to Sidelle today.
Sidelle reminded me that Mr. Ogden had sacrificed a son for the Empire.
In Mr. Ogden’s absence Sidelle always defends him. When Mr. Ogden is around, it’s the opposite: I commend him for his farsightedness and Sidelle pokes fun at his caution.
Later.
Reading the news tonight I felt a pang for Yvette, the little French dressmaker. Did she and Amelia return to France? Or perhaps they both married in New York? Yvette would have had no trouble making any man marry her. Amelia? She has enough cunning to make up for her homeliness.
* * *
GILBERT WAS FINE-LOOKING WHEN he was young. He didn’t have those movie-star qualities Roland had, but all the same he was handsome enough.
What if he had married someone like Amelia, that little dressmaker who probably looked like nothing but a radish? Would he still have been a husband with a giant heart? What if a plain and meek wife had made Gilbert into a different man?
Last week an author came to give a lecture, and I went along to hear if there was anything new about the world. And this woman said, We human beings don’t change, we only become more ourselves as time passes.
What baloney. I have plenty of evidence that men change, oftentimes depending on whom they marry. For instance, Milt. Remember, Katherine, before I married him you all thought of the idea as a joke. Have a final fling if you want, Molly said to me, but we don’t really need another set of stepsiblings, and you don’t need another husband.
However, you were all so wrong. I married him for a reason.
Milt married my childhood friend, Magg
ie Williamson. He was not a good husband to Maggie. There’s no point going into details, but what I can say about that marriage is: Maggie was neither pretty nor fierce, and Milt took himself too seriously. (Maybe that’s the problem with all bad marriages, a husband or a wife taking himself or herself too seriously.)
In any case Milt made Maggie suffer. I remember, when their four kids all had grown up, I told Maggie that she should get a divorce. She was horrified. I’m turning fifty next year, she said. What would I do with myself?
Fifty! Maggie should’ve listened to me. Anyone at fifty is still a babe. But she stuck it out in that marriage for twenty more years. Aren’t you tired of him? I asked her often. And she only replied with the news of another grandchild on the way.
So why did I marry Milt if I wasn’t crazy? I know that’s what you’re thinking. First of all, Milt might not have been such a good husband, but he mourned Maggie sincerely. You could see him age ten years overnight after the funeral. Just like my father. I have a soft spot for men who grow lost when they become widowers.
Norman had died the year before. And I said to myself: Lilia, you were lucky you married two good men. What if this time you go for someone who’s not half as good as Gilbert or Norman? Maybe you’ll put Milt in his place. Maybe he’ll put you in your place.