by Yiyun Li
The other to Hetty.
Between you and me, Hetty, let me always be the selfish one—but this I do not have to say to her.
* * *
LUCY WAS THREE DAYS old on this day. I’ve noticed that we often count days after a baby is born, or after a child dies. After anyone close dies, maybe.
Sidelle would disagree with me, but I still think we measure life by births and deaths.
* * *
[There used to be a book on Hetty’s shelf: A Girl’s Guide to Amusing Yourself and Others. Reading through my diary entries from during the war, it becomes obvious that I would have been the perfect man to pen the book: A Coward’s Guide to Surviving a World War. Yet even a coward can be made a fool by his ambitions to have a place in history. Mine, dwarfed by the war, were inflated by the UN peace conference. Invested in the possibility of offering an alternative to a world whose fate was determined by those rogue superpowers, I did my share of diplomatic manoeuvres among the concerned parties. That endeavour, however, was cut short by a fallout with a Polish associate, who had introduced a blonde colleague to me to undermine my effort. But what do these things matter now? Stalin is dead, so is Truman. Sidelle is dead, so is Hetty. No, the book I should have written is not about war. I would be the perfect author for: A Man’s Guide to Surviving a Life of Disappointments.—RB, 4 July 1990]
* * *
I DON’T HAVE ANY ambitions. And nobody will ask me to write a book. But if I could, what would mine be? A Woman’s Guide to…what? To Life!
27 FEBRUARY 1946.
A blur of events, leading to the last day I am a bachelor. Nova Scotia in winter, cold enough to preserve my youth. On the way back here I felt like Chekhov in his coffin, transported in the oyster train. Except no crowd greeted me at my destination, no one mourned, no history was made.
Is this where I am going to be domesticated, to live a happy life with a wife and a number of offspring? Well, there will be no offspring, of that I am certain. Hetty is turning thirty-four.
All the relatives have been polite to me since my return. There is confusion among some of the oldest cousins, who thought Hetty and I had been engaged, and if not for the war would have married long ago.
The cousins on the Ferguson side, prosperous as ever, no longer intimidate me. If I do not have their wealth, I have made up for it by my worldliness. They have Nova Scotia on their side. I have America and Asia and Europe on mine.
Married life brings a list of practicalities, none too thrilling, but thank goodness Hetty is good with practicalities. We will wait to purchase a house, and for now we are renting Taftwood from the Gillises, fully furnished. I imagine Hetty imagining that one day we will move into our own house, bringing with her what she has accumulated through her maiden years. I feel like a pauper marrying into royalty, with only the shirt on my back. I am exaggerating, of course. How else can a deprived soul feel prodigious?
The question remains unanswered: What am I going to do after my marriage? Take a position at a provincial newspaper? Or become a clerk in a municipal office? Someone I met in town suggested that I enter local politics. Are you sure you or anyone in this town is ready for me? I almost asked. This pond is large enough for your pebbles, not, I am afraid, ready to be made into a meteor crater.
Hetty said I should take my time, and perhaps I could focus on a project I would like to pursue. It was charitable of her not to hint at that novel, now decades overdue. I am no novelist, I now realise, but I can certainly impersonate one, supported by his wife, working on a masterpiece to be discovered posthumously.
I told her I was mulling the possibility of starting a bookshop specializing in maps. The world is changing quickly and the borders are redrawn every day, I said, so that someone had better keep old maps for those who still want them.
Hetty listened with an attention that could turn any whimsy into sensibility. If I said I would have a shop selling dodo birds, would she applaud my ingeniousness?
Maybe it’s only a niche interest for myself, I said.
But it’s a brilliant idea, Hetty said, the way a spinster aunt would praise a baby whose toothless smile leaves an impression that ends only at the retina.
And botanical books, I said. Plants remain unchanged even if the borders get redrawn.
Maps and plants, Hetty said. The world will be well covered.
What about that, Roland. Do you want to dedicate the rest of your life to being a dealer of miscellanies? Trees and bushes, roses and violets—they are gone before we realise it, and they come back before we notice them. No wonder every Russian or English novel features an old tree. Split into halves by lightning, burned down by a careless fire. And yet they always revive themselves. Perhaps true immortality requires a root system. A pale existence in the darkest place on earth. No human has yet sprouted some roots between his toes. No human has yet sacrificed mobility for longevity.
Of course, there are always Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Catherine the Great, immortalized by biographies. But those books are just made of words, words, words. Words are more rootless than we, the makers of words.
* * *
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS. SOMETIMES I pity Roland because he didn’t have the courage not to marry Hetty. Did Sidelle also pity him?
What a marriage they were heading into! Convenient for him because Hetty was as cold as marble and as malleable as clay. How many times did she turn a blind eye to his love affairs? It’s extraordinary to think she did have an explosion over Sidelle in 1954. We don’t know what kind of explosion, but all the same, Hetty picked out one woman in the world to be her enemy. A world war by itself.
What did Roland want from Hetty? Nothing. What did she want from him? Not much. With a marriage like that, you throw a few ingredients you happen to have at hand into a cooking pot. You don’t expect a fancy dish. A tolerable stew would be fine, good to feed a few hungry stomachs, and sometimes you even get something decent if you add a pinch of this and a pinch of that. (Hetty didn’t have a pinch of anything. Roland, on the other hand…you could always count on him for that.)
The worst kind of marriage is the one that aims for happiness. Don’t tell me that every marriage should have that grand aspiration. A marriage reaching for happiness is like any average Joe wanting to make a cake as tall as Mount Everest and as colorful as a tropical island. And on top of that, to make it edible. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But tell me how many people can afford that kind of happiness? We can make do with a sloppy cake as long as it doesn’t topple over. Cracked, fine. A bit dense, no problem. Oversweetened, we can live with that. Underbaked, it won’t kill you.
Once I watched a movie in which a woman baked a birthday cake for her husband. And then she thought it was not perfect, and she dumped it into the trash can. Oh, I laughed so hard someone had to shush me in the theater.
But people can be stubborn. I shouldn’t have laughed at the woman in the movie. Lucy wanted her life to turn out like that perfect cake. It did not, so she dumped it, along with everything else.
Katherine, perhaps your marriage to Andy will still have some hope: if you both can learn to love a lopsided cake.
31 MARCH 1946.
While I am adapting to my serene, month-old marriage, the world is busy producing headlines. Stalin, Churchill, Truman; another war threatening the fragile peace; Nazi collaborators executed by firing squad in Eastern Europe; Greenwich, Connecticut, voting against becoming the site of the United Nations headquarters; the general assembly of Nova Scotia in place for their terms; war brides arriving in Halifax. The last piece of news induced in me a misty melancholy. Another man travelling on a ship full of the war brides might not have ended up in the same state of doomed bliss as me. This morning I studied my hairline for a long time. Is it my imagination, or am I losing my vitality, turning into an ape of idleness?
* * *
ROLAND WILL C
RY WOLF like this for the next forty years. Don’t take him too seriously. The problem with idleness is not that it leads to sin. Most people don’t understand what it means to be idle.
Here’s a lesson for you in how to be idle wisely. I was never idle when I was keeping a house and raising my children. So much work! A weaker woman would dream about idleness, like a handmaiden dreaming about being a princess. But how often does that happen? I let idleness do the dreaming for me. Like when Lucy was two and Timmy was one. When I put them side by side and fed them soda crackers in the afternoon, I would say, One for you, Lucy, and one for you, Timmy. Children like things that can be repeated. But what I was really thinking when I handed the cracker to them was this: One for your daughter, Roland, and one for your son, Gilbert. Or, like when I did dishes at night. There was a special one that Lucy chipped when she was little, so for all the other dishes I washed and dried, I told myself the lovely things Gilbert did for me. I saved the chipped plate to the last, and when I did that I would remind myself of the words Roland said to me. No one looking at me—not even Gilbert’s mother—could find any fault or say that I was idle. But I was, you see. I placed idleness in everything I did.
But don’t let yourself be carried away. Once I asked Lucy—she must have been four or five—if she wanted children when she grew up. Yes, she said, seven children. Seven? I said. Why, that’s a lot. And I asked what she would name them. That caught her unprepared. If you can’t come up with seven names, maybe you don’t want that many children, I teased her. And she started to cry. I said, I have a good name for you. How about Roland if you get a baby boy? That’s a stupid name, she said. Still it’s better than all the names you know, I said.
Oh my, she went into a tantrum. I waited for her to calm down, and after a few minutes, I thought I would just take Timmy and Willie out for a walk. When we got back, Lucy was still having a fit. I was amazed. I would’ve been exhausted if I had to cry even one-tenth of those tears.
When Gilbert returned from work, he asked Lucy why her face was all swollen like a red apple. Lucy said it was because she didn’t like the name Roland. There’s nothing wrong with not liking the name, Gilbert said. I don’t like it, either.
That was the last time I ever said the name aloud to my family.
2 OCTOBER 1946.
A letter from Sidelle. The twenty-first since I married, but it is the first that has made me question my marriage. I reread her previous letters to be certain. Until now Sidelle has sounded contented, her life run like a train with a reliable timetable, well-served by an engine of teas and dinner parties and theatres and concerts and weekend visits in the countryside and motoring trips in Ireland and Portugal. She seems a perfect model of someone who lives with the kind of pleasure that she never takes too seriously.
But this letter has a darker undertone. Sidelle has accompanied a friend to Paris for the peace conference. She mentioned his name, Michael Giles, in her last letter, but I did not think of him as anyone special. He is going to the conference as a journalist, and Sidelle said she was interested to see Paris in its current incarnation.
For some reason I do not imagine this Giles as much older than me. I wish she had gone with someone I knew. A new name, without a face attached, crushes one with its unfamiliarity.
But it wasn’t just the man that bothered me. She also sent a clip from The Manchester Guardian, which compared the peace conference to a Sartre play, a reference she found tasteless. “One supposes each generation has to remake the old hell as though it were unique to them,” she wrote. It occurred to me that her generation must feel they are going out of fashion quickly. Soon this will be my generation.
In the letter she describes a concert at Notre Dame, observing the autumn equinox, which she attended alone. “Handel and Haydn, celestially rendered by the organist and the three vocalists yet giving little assurance. What a strange thing music is. In this world of ugliness, music can still give the pretence of beauty. Think of the abhorrence we feel when we see Goya’s war prints. For some people, even reading the words describing such atrocities would be more than enough. But music, how cruelly it has deceived us.”
Ugliness—such a crude word—is not in Sidelle’s vocabulary. Her arguments were full of holes. Had I been next to her we would have had a debate. We would have stayed up all night, invigorated by the cold bath in the intellectual sea.
Is this darker mood of hers in any way connected to that faceless Giles?
Hetty and I have been to plays and concerts, too—provincial fare, soothing like the nice dry hands of a fair-minded nanny tucking one in at the end of the day.
At the concert in Paris, Sidelle wrote, she was unfortunately seated in front of a few loud Americans. “One voice, full of vulgar confidence, reminded me of the man we met in Santa Fe. Or do you think half of Americans would fit the bill? The women, talking and laughing as though in their chests they hosted a symphony, made me wonder if in your new life you are enjoying the same trait, that trait one only finds in a woman from the New Continent.”
She knows Hetty is not that kind of loud woman, so why such unkindness? Or was she hinting at other women with whom I will cheat on my wife? I had thought we had an agreement that she will say nothing about my marriage, just as the agreement between Hetty and me is that she will never ask a single question about my past women. As far as Hetty is concerned my history has been cleansed by her diligent housekeeping.
And then, in Sidelle’s letter: “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if you were here, Roland. Paris is not good for ponderousness.”
I wonder if Sidelle feels lonely. But she has so many friends to fill her days. The truly lonely one is this fool here, waiting for the clock to strike ten so I can pretend that I have had a fine evening of reading and then join my wife in our unruffled marriage bed.
* * *
DID SIDELLE FEEL LONELY? Did Roland feel lonely? Loneliness must be like a craving. I never craved anything when I was pregnant. But whenever the news of pregnancy comes up around here—a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a niece, a grandniece, a granddaughter, you name it, anytime it comes up—a few women will start comparing their pregnancy cravings. What’s the big deal about wanting pickles for breakfast, or milkshakes for lunch, or fried green tomatoes for dinner? No one is going to be remembered by their cravings. Imagine the gravestone: HERE LIES ROSEMARY BETHANY WALKER, BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER, WHO LIKED TO CHEW JALAPEÑOS DURING HER PREGNANCIES.
Cravings—I have nothing to say about them. But I have a few words about loneliness. All those songs we used to listen to on the radio about loneliness when someone is in love, out of love, betrayed by love, stricken by love—why do people lump love and loneliness together? It’s bad advertising for love. Or maybe love is a perfect commercial, selling loneliness that otherwise nobody would buy. If there is a higher power, maybe his job is to peddle all the loneliness of today before tomorrow’s loneliness gets delivered.
When we moved to Orinda, Gilbert planted an olive tree for each of the children in the backyard. We started with two, for Lucy and Timmy, and soon we had three, and then four trees. We didn’t plant one for Molly because by the time she was born, all the trees were infected with olive knots. They didn’t die, but they didn’t look pretty. Lonely people are like those olive trees. They don’t have to say anything. Loneliness is written all over them.
We planted a flowering quince for Molly, which made her think she was special. I wish we had planted one for every child, instead of those sad trees. Or a hydrangea bush. Hydrangea is my favorite. Katherine, do you remember those bouquets we delivered to the public library and to Mrs. Yoshimatsu’s shop? She gave you candies and made you small Japanese dolls. You may not have them anymore, but I have a pair of earrings in the shape of a sushi roll from her. After I die you should have them. I’ll remember to make a note about that. And the gold ring from my great-grandmother Lucille.
That’s yours, and one day you can give it to Iola.
If only Lucy were the one to pass it to you.
Mrs. Yoshimatsu was a lonely woman. Remember the Japanese servant I told you about? That old man Gilbert and I met on our first date? His name was also Yoshimatsu, and later he had sent his epic poem to us. The copy we received was written in this beautiful calligraphy, one part in English, one part in Japanese. God knows how many copies he had sent out if he took the trouble to send one to us, two kid strangers. But Gilbert was never a stranger to anyone. He wrote back an effusive letter, and then he became friends with Mr. Yoshimatsu. How strange that people can meet this way and never part until one of them dies. Mr. Yoshimatsu died in 1952. When we moved to Orinda I noticed the flower shop in the village was called Yoshimatsu. It was run by a widow, Mrs. Yoshimatsu. She was not related to Gilbert’s Mr. Yoshimatsu, but that didn’t stop me from becoming her friend. Later I started supplying her with the hydrangeas from my garden, on the condition that she did not give me a penny in return. She died in 1985. A few years before that she could no longer manage the shop. Physically she was okay. But her brain began to go soft and she started to speak only in Japanese. Gilbert and I helped to find a place for her in Japantown. The florist’s shop passed to another family, Chinese this time. I did not like them so I stopped sending the flowers to sell.
All those beautiful hydrangeas. Now they belong to someone else.
You don’t have to be a widow or a widower to feel lonely. I know Gilbert felt lonely at times in our marriage. He never talked about it. He felt lonely not because I wasn’t a good wife, or we didn’t have good children, but because there was still so much he couldn’t do for us. And there was a lot we couldn’t give him, either.