Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Ruyu’s grandaunts had not said anything about accordion lessons, and she wondered if she would have to explain to Teacher Shu that she did not have money to pay him. Would that affect her status at school? Later she voiced her doubt to Moran and Boyang. “Why would you pay him if you’re a student at the school?” Boyang said.

“Why else should he teach me?” Ruyu said, and explained that at home her teacher was paid ten yuan every time he taught her, plus round-trip fare for the bus.

“Doesn’t Teacher Shu get a salary from the school?” Moran said.

“But is the school going to pay him extra to teach me?” Ruyu said. “I could’ve not come here. He would’ve earned the same salary without the bother of teaching me, no?”

Moran turned to look closely at Ruyu, but her face was inscrutable as always. Ruyu’s concern sounded sensible, but Moran could not help but think something was wrong with Ruyu’s logic. There was more to life than money, Moran wanted to explain to Ruyu, and in her mind she could do it well, patiently, as when she had had to resolve a conflict between two neighborhood kids. Like the other families in the quadrangle, Moran’s family was not well-off, but their struggles were the same ones experienced by most people they knew, of having to calculate well to make ends meet, of spreading the ration of eggs, meat, and other food wisely throughout the month. Even so, Moran’s parents never failed to make extra dumplings to give to neighbors or to share the fresh fruit her father sometimes got free from working with those in the quadrangle. This kindness was returned by others, too, and the life Moran knew, which took place as much within her family as outside it with neighbors and friends, was not one in which wealth, or the lack of wealth, was much thought of as an important factor. But even as Moran went over this argument in her mind, she knew it was not merely Ruyu’s monetary concern that unsettled her. To envision Teacher Shu’s life without her seemed natural for Ruyu; it must be equally easy for her to imagine a life without Teacher Shu, or, for that matter, without Boyang and Moran herself. Moran, who did not know what was out of her reach, unconsciously moved closer to Ruyu, as though looking for reassurance.

“If you ask me …” Boyang said.

“But nobody is asking you,” Moran snapped, taking both of them by surprise.

“All right, even if you’re not asking me, I say let’s not worry ourselves about this,” Boyang said. Things, he added, would work out one way or another, and instead of standing in front of the school gate like three idiotic new students, how about going to the Back Sea, renting a boat for the rest of the afternoon, and enjoying the last day of summer before going back to the cage?

“The cage ?” Moran said. “If your parents heard you talk about school like that, they would take you into their charge.”

“Then I’d be in trouble for real,” Boyang said, pantomiming a caged monkey and emitting bitter screams.

Ruyu watched his performance, and when she did not smile as Moran did, Boyang asked Ruyu if she was still worrying about her accordion lesson. She shook her head. “How do you know you’re not in a cage here and now?” she asked.

“Ha ha, you’ve got me,” Boyang said. “The best jokes are always told by people like you, who don’t even smile when they say funny things.”

Moran glanced at Boyang, and brought up the boating proposal again. The day, with its bright sun still high in the cloudless sky, had taken on an unreal quality. The glimpses Ruyu had seen of their coming school life, when Boyang and Moran had shown her the campus, seemed strangely distant from what they were used to in the summer. Classrooms, newly painted, with chairs still resting on top of the desks, their legs pointing upward and forming a small metal forest, had looked familiar yet unwelcoming; the science annex, where in one room Bunsen burners clustered on a bench next to the door, and in another a few new posters covered up old ones, the insides of frogs and human beings vividly portrayed, had felt cold and lifeless; next to the track field, a gym teacher had been hosing down a few cement Ping-Pong tables; at the far end of campus, the students who boarded at the dorms had already moved in, and a few colorful blankets were airing out on the clotheslines; two girls had been standing at the entrance to a dorm, looking perplexed: one of them had placed her thermos a little too close to the edge of the steps, and it had fallen, almost soundlessly, hot water pouring down the steps, steaming along the way.

All excitements were pointing to tomorrow, when actions and interactions would decide who each of them would be in a new grade, among a new group of people; today thus became a vacuum, having turned into nothing before its time.

Listlessly, Moran looked at Ruyu, hoping she’d agree to the impromptu outing, dreading that she would say no. Spending the day alone, at least for Moran, seemed unimaginable: rarely was a day in her life passed without Boyang; yet with or without their companionship, Ruyu seemed undisturbed all the same.

“Another day by the lake?” Ruyu asked, though her tone was as vague as her face, and Moran could not detect any preference.

Moran and Boyang could easily cycle to their favorite spot by the lake, hop into a rowboat, and spend the rest of the afternoon afloat, listening to the cicadas in the trees, watching the peddlers in the alleyways, and talking about trifles, but this prospect, which a month ago would have been the perfect picture of a summer day, with its familiar mindlessness, now felt incomplete, as though by entering their world, Ruyu had made it smaller. Already the three of them felt, at least to Moran, more of a unit than just Boyang and herself. “Do come along,” Moran said, and the begging note in her own voice made her shiver slightly in the shade of the trees.

Twice Moran had read through her employees’ manual, but an ex-spouse’s sickness, however terminal, was not listed as a legitimate reason for an extended leave. This was not unexpected, though it reminded her again that, when a death was pending, all connections but those defined by blood or marriage were dismissed as inconsequential. She wondered what other options there were. Or perhaps the idea of a leave was too greedy: deaths, like memories, required one’s entire heart, leaving little space for negotiation.

On a piece of paper, Moran listed things that she needed to look into, possible expenditures, and resources available. She had some vacation time saved — other than the annual holiday trip with her parents, she rarely took time off. The lease to the house would expire at the end of next August, but if she was unable to sublet the place, she could keep making payments from afar. Her savings account would last her two years or longer; she had always lived simply, and would continue to do so after the move. Her portfolios had posted some minor gains, as she was a conservative investor, unambitious and thus mostly unscathed by the recent financial recession. Her company’s stock, which she had accumulated some shares of over the years, she would hold on to as emergency backup. These concrete things — numbers and columns and lists — calmed Moran, as they gave this evening a purposefulness that was absent on other evenings. She would keep her car, a secondhand Saab; and she would keep her clothes and those few things she had grown attached to. The house could be cleaned out more or less with a weekend tag sale; what she could not sell she would drop off at the Goodwill store downtown. Back in the Midwest she would not need a place the size of her current rental; she could easily get by with a studio apartment. Already she could envision the place; no, not the place in its physical reality, but its imperturbable solitude, which had become a necessity for her, a habitat.