by Yiyun Li
You’re a true stickler.
You’re the one to say precision, precision, precision.
What about this? We grownups quickly feel at a loss for words when what words we have can’t do half of what we want them to do.
Half, or a quarter?
We feel at a loss for words when they can’t do fully what we want them to, I said.
They never can, Nikolai said.
Precisely.
Why not make do with the percentage they can achieve? he said.
Imagine writing a letter of condolence, I said, like this: I know my words are not enough to express my devastation at your loss and my words will not do much to alleviate your pain, but these words are all I have…
Sounds reasonable to me, Nikolai said.
I’m not done yet, I said. These words are all I have and we must make do with them, believing, both you and I, in the largesse in even such paucity.
So people are too modest to say that?
Or self-conscious, I said. Not knowing what to say. Not wanting to say the wrong thing perhaps.
What’s the right thing to say?
There’s no right thing or wrong thing to say in this situation. Your friends all seem to know what to say.
That’s because they are my friends.
No, not only that. They are your friends, but they are young, too.
That’s so ageist, he said. You should not hold it against anyone because he or she is young.
Rather the opposite, I said. What I’m trying to say is, we were young once. And your friends one day will grow up and become as gormless as we are. They will lose that one thing they have now.
What is it?
Your friends meet you where you are.
Where else can they meet me?
Yes, but think of what extraordinary courage they possess to meet you where you are. We grownups tend to get stuck with a fact, and for many people you have become a fact. Hard to accept. Impossible to understand. Still, you are a fact and that is how they will prefer to think of you and remember you now.
Not me, but my death, he said.
Important correction, my dear.
What do people do when they can’t accept something they don’t understand?
They ask, How could that happen? What went wrong? Or, they say things to the effect that in the direst situation there is a bright side if we let words like love and hope work their magic.
Does that bother you?
No.
Why not?
Because people who know you and people who know me meet us where we are. People who don’t know you and people who don’t know me are only facts. Flawed or limited, whichever adjective you prefer.
Just as we are flawed facts for them.
Exactly, I said.
Do facts meet then?
In fairy tales, I said, but not in this life.
Or in any life, Nikolai said.
11
Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again
Wishing you were somehow here again, wishing you were somehow near.
The line had been circling in my head. A little over a year ago I had lost a dear friend, and for days I had been listening to the song. Help me say goodbye, as though the departed had the wisdom, the courage, the inclination to lend a hand to us. Who helps them say goodbye? Not us, the living, limited by our living selves.
So many songs, like so many people. They come and go, or are never encountered. There must be a time in one’s youth when real life seems to be in a thousand songs yet to be discovered, or another thousand songs destined to slip out of reach, not heeding one’s wish to make them permanent. Does the shift come to all—or to some of us only—that the few songs that do stay, by fortune or by fate, are more prodigious than the whole world can offer?
I wish you were here today, I said.
You say that every day, Nikolai said.
I don’t, I said.
You think that all the time, he said. If you don’t say it aloud it’s because you don’t want to sound wimpy.
I don’t want to sound wimpy, I said, and I’m not wimpy all the time. But I do wish you were here today. It’s been snowing.
The snow, the first of the season, had begun in the morning. By late afternoon, the tiny prints of paws and the not-so-tiny prints of sneakers, left early on the patio by the dog and J., who had both seen snow falling for the first time, were covered again. For a while I had been sitting still, my chin cupped in my hands, my elbows on the table, watching the snow fall, until I realized that the pose was a reproduction of a famous still from a 1970s Taiwanese film, of a dreamy high school girl looking out of the window.
There is an idiom describing that, Nikolai said.
How strange and comforting, I thought, that my mind could wander but never far from his reach. Do you mean, mutton dressed as lamb? I said.
Yes. I always have trouble remembering it.
You lose nothing by not remembering it, I said. It’s irreverent.
I like phrases of all kinds. I’m not as judgmental about words as I am about people.
It occurred to me then that the pose also belonged to Charles Bovary, who, with his chin in both hands, watched Emma with “stupid serenity.”
Serenity is an overused word, Nikolai said.
Stupid is a necessary adjective here, I said.
I wonder if stupidity is one of the things that make the world go round, he said.
I hope not, I said.
We can argue about that, he said, but we will get nowhere. To think about it, stupid is a difficult word to use.
Why?
Because a three-year-old can use stupid correctly, he said.
Not so fast, I said. I happened to look up the word the other day. I encountered enough extreme stupidities for me not to investigate the word. Stupid, from Latin stupidus, be numbed, be astonished.
So?
So in a way the word is abused. It’s deprived of its more feeling root, I said. Something happens, and it stuns us, it numbs us, it dulls us. There is much more sense and feeling involved in stupidity.
How about—Nikolai said—stupid sentences so afraid of tripping on an Oxford comma that they have to avoid it.
Oh, those poor sentences should not shoulder the blame for decisions they cannot control, I said. Nikolai was an adamant advocate for the Oxford comma.
Stupid yeast that goes on strike in scalded milk, he said.
I laughed. The first time he had made squash bread he had not waited for the milk to cool down before adding in the yeast. We had had a good laugh about the dough that refused to rise to the occasion.
Your turn, he said.
I didn’t realize we were competing.
I thought for a moment. Stupid salt that thinks of itself as camouflaged snow, I said.
I won, he said.
Not really. The snow is so cold the salt is bound to feel benumbed, I said.
Benumbed, that was a word to describe myself all these weeks, benumbed yet un-astonished.
Stupid river that allows a stone to bounce on its surface, he said.
My heart ached. A few days before he had turned sixteen, I had brought Nikolai and two other children kayaking. It was a perfect afternoon, sunny, breezy, quiet on the river, the trees on both banks beginning to show the first hues of gold and red, a few dead branches floating along the canal. The children had been talking and singing and later taking a long hike along the tree-lined path, stopping now and then to skip stones. They had been confident in their happiness as the last days of the summer are confident in their everlastingness. While I was watching them, my heart had begun to ache with such vehemence that I had thought I was being assailed by a sudden illness.
You’re only thinking back from a different place
and adding your feelings, Nikolai said.
No, I protested. Some memories cannot be revised. They are what they are.
Fine, if you say so.
We were quiet for a moment. The snow, I said. You would have loved it.
Nikolai did not speak. The last time we had lived in a place with snow was more than twelve years ago. He was three, and with parental help had made a snowman thrice his height. I wondered if he had any recollection of the snowman.
Chopped down by two barbaric boys, he said.
Barbaric, I said, uncertain if that was the best adjective.
Used without any political connotation, he said. How sensitive people are these days. I speak from the point of view of a three-year-old.
It was true that the snowman had not lasted, born and destroyed on the same day. Two boys, seven or eight, had charged at it. Before we could rescue the snowman, its head was smashed, its body kicked around.
What else do you remember about that apartment?
Not much, he said. The playground. The red rock there.
Ah yes, I said. There had not been a red rock but he had cut his toe once, and bled so much that a rock turned red. In his confusion he had thought the red rock had done the mischief and all red rocks from then on were dangerous.
The apartment compound, of concrete and metal, used to be military barracks but by then served as inexpensive housing for graduate students and visiting scholars from around the world. Walk twenty minutes in one direction and one would meet cornfields. Ten minutes in another direction, a former campsite where thousands of Mormons, of English and Welsh descent, had begun their trek west, with near nothing but empty handcarts they had built for the migration—the city where we lived had been the end of the westbound railroad in 1865. Two hours’ drive to the north was a house where Antonín Dvořák had spent a summer in 1893, composing American Quartet. The week before Nikolai’s death he had been surprised that no one had recognized a Dvořák theme during an orchestra class.
Do you know Dvořák lost three children? I said. I only found out today.
I didn’t know, he said.
When we said farewell to Nikolai, a dear friend played on her violin Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” I had not taught him many songs, I had not told him many stories. But I had watched him live a rich life worthy of the songs and stories of the enduring kind.
Yikes, he said. Sounds like a bad sentence from a sentimental biography.
A parent should never be a child’s biographer, I thought. How about, I said, you’ve lived a life with a richness both congruous and incongruous.
Congruous and incongruous with what? he said. How I hate your habit of using the opposite forms of the same word in one sentence. There is no precision. And no point to make whatsoever.
I flinched. When he was eight, he had shared a cab ride with an editor friend and criticized a story of mine she had published, explaining to her that she should have pressed me to work harder on the backstories.
Oh that, he said. I was giving you both a hard time because I just felt like it. Still, you need to know richness is an overused word, congruous or incongruous.
Intensity?
Equally bad.
Elegance, ingeniousness, perspicacity?
Gosh. Perhaps you should just stay with simple nouns like trees and flowers and leaves and birds and stars.
And snow, I said.
Yes, he said, why not?
Why not, I thought. Because a noun does not always remain a wall. Even the simplest noun can turn into a tunnel, a trapdoor, a maze, a vacuum, the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, Starry Night Over the Rhone, the songs a mother has yet to teach a son, the stories a mother chooses not to tell. One can put one’s trust in solid nouns—house, garage, road, breakfast, lunch, dinner, weekdays, weekends, holidays—as one can play the simplest tunes on the piano with a single finger. Twinkle twinkle little star, I’m a little teapot, Mary had a little lamb, Hey diddle diddle, but all of a sudden it’s not an inexperienced finger picking out one note at a time but an uncontainable piece for four hands. Two strangers playing. One meticulously, the other recklessly; one exquisitely, the other mercilessly. Who are you? Are you improvising to entertain yourselves, or are you assigned to play this incongruous music called life?
What is music to life? Nikolai asked suddenly.
When Nikolai was in sixth grade, he had written a poem, remembered by my friends when they had come to say farewell to him, recited by his friends when they had said farewell to him on the other coast. I had put the first stanza among his photos in my office:
My life
is Kansas
and music
What is music to life? I said. You tell me.
Do you still have all those oboe recordings?
Yes, I said. His oboe teacher had given him recordings of several oboe masters.
When you listen to them, you realize how perfect they are, he said. I only wish I had played a single note as perfectly as they did.
I had not been able to listen to any of the recordings past a phrase. Any music with oboe in it was too much to bear.
You’re still learning, I said.
Was, he said. I was learning. But this is what I’ve realized. Music can be perfect.
Life cannot be? I asked.
I don’t mind that life is not perfect. I do mind that I cannot perfect myself in an imperfect life.
Perfection is like a single snowflake, I said. It melts.
A perfectionist melts too, Mommy.
12
Inertia
We bought a little tree yesterday, I said.
e. e. cummings’s little tree? Nikolai said.
Goodness, I said, I forgot all about that.
So you just went out and bought a little tree for no good reason?
For Christmas, I said. Wouldn’t that be a good enough reason?
No, he said. I thought you bought the tree because of the poem, and I was considering forgiving you.
In sixth grade Nikolai had chosen cummings’s poem for an assignment. He was not often drawn to warmth and brightness in literature, and his commentary was as loving as the boy in the poem.
put up your little arms
and i’ll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won’t be a single place dark or unhappy
He speaks from a place dark and unhappy, you know? Nikolai said.
I know, I said. You also called the tree an orphan.
Did I? he asked. I don’t remember.
Oh, you and I write about orphans often, I said.
And now you’ve made one more orphan out of a tree.
Orphan, widow, widower, I thought, but what do you call a parent who’s lost a child, a sibling who’s lost a sibling, a friend who’s lost a friend?
I told you nouns are limited, Nikolai said.
Words are, I said.
Both Nikolai and his little brother had strongly opposed buying live trees, cut down to decorate a human holiday for a few weeks. We had kept an artificial tree, brought out every year along with ornaments we had begun to accumulate since Nikolai’s first Christmas. But the tree had not moved with us, and we could not, I thought, go out and buy another one. The life of an artificial tree is devastatingly long.
Isn’t that the point, to have something lasting, Nikolai said, instead of killing a tree each year?
It’s a tiny tree, I said. More like a plant in a pot. Barely big enough for Alice after she shrinks herself.
A tiny tree is still a tree, he said.
We can keep it growing after the holiday, I said. It won’t get dumped on the curb.
Whatever, he said.
Oh, judgmental as ever, I protested in my thought.
And unforgiving. And unyielding.
Yieldingly and forgivingly I inquire, he said, Did you decorate it?
Thank you, I said. We did.
The day before, I had chosen five ornaments, the least weighty ones in our possession: a house, a snowman, a mitten, a penguin, two dog brothers sharing a stocking. The thin, supple branches held up well.
And presents, any little boxes under the little tree?
Only if they’re the size of matchboxes, I said, but we can’t put any presents in them. The moment I said it, a memory that was long gone resurfaced. Before I had learned to read, my father had saved used-up matchboxes for me. They had been versatile. I connected them into trains because I had never traveled on a train, I arranged them into sofas because I had seen sofas only in pictures, and I made fortresses out of them, following the war epics I had listened to on the wireless.
So, Nikolai said, they were like Legos?
Legos be damned! I said. The matchboxes were priceless.
Wobbly statement, he said. They were priceless only because your memory makes them so.
Okay. You’re right.
Also, I don’t like the word priceless.
It’s an adjective, I said. I didn’t want to say that I had learned the word from the television commercials for Mastercard when I had first arrived in America.
I know, I know, Nikolai said. But it’s a derivative of a revolting noun. Like marrying a toad for unseemly gain. It comes at a price.
Everything comes at a price, can we not say that? I said. The flowers on the table, the photos in the frames, the stuffed penguins—forty-one of them—cuddled together, a livable life, an inevitable death, sorrow and stoicism, fear and despair. A self that, too close to one, does not stand self-injuring scrutiny; a self, too far removed, becomes a phantom limb.
Almost everything but one, he said. Time does not come at a price.
Sure it does.
You don’t have to do anything for the minutes and hours and days to arrive, he said. You, meaning anyone living. You can’t even stop time from coming at you.