Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“Where are you?” Celia said.

“About to open my door.”

“Edwin said you looked unwell. What’s wrong?”

Was belated honesty a form of deception? “Nothing is wrong,” Ruyu said.

“Did you catch a cold?” Celia said. “Your voice sounds funny.”

“Maybe it’s the signal.”

“Or maybe not,” Celia said. “Listen, you don’t have to tell me, but if talking it out helps, I’m all ears.”

“All ears for what?”

“Edwin seems to think that someone important died,” Celia said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I would’ve told you if it had been someone important,” Ruyu said. “The fact that I only randomly mentioned it to Edwin but forgot to tell you — shouldn’t that be enough to prove that nothing is the matter?”

“Was it a woman? Edwin thought it might be one of your exes’ lovers?”

Perhaps there was nothing but true compassion in Edwin’s curiosity, but Ruyu could not help feeling resentful: passive-aggressively, he had enlisted his unsuspicious wife to ambush Ruyu. She sighed. “Let’s talk about this later, Celia.”

“Can you come for coffee tomorrow? Before you go to the shop?”

Ruyu looked at her watch. She had fewer than twelve hours to come up with something reasonably good to stop Celia from pursuing the topic. Yes, Ruyu agreed. She would come after Celia dropped the kids off at school.

But by the time Ruyu had settled in for the night, she could no longer follow through with her resolution to prepare a tale for Celia. Any planning required her to imagine the future — a day or a month to come — but the moment she set such a task for herself, her mind stubbornly vacated itself. People went to yoga studios and meditation retreats to achieve the same effect; too bad she could not share her secret with the world, Ruyu thought, feeling already lethargic. She had noticed that since the news of Shaoai’s death arrived, she had become more prone to feeling tired. All that arguing with a god from the past must have affected her more than she had expected.

Ruyu had long ago realized that her grandaunts, religious and pious as they had believed themselves to be, had only held on to a faith that had been more of their own creation, and the god they had given her, too, had not been the god in other people’s prayers. But what did it matter if they had given her the wrong faith, now that she had gone astray from that faith? All the same, Ruyu knew that she had to credit her grandaunts: by giving her a god they had given her a position of superiority, when an orphan like her could easily be devoured by the world; by leaving them and their god behind, she had gone beyond destructibility.

Ruyu filled the bathtub and then turned on the CD player, which contained the piano concerto she had been listening to earlier, by whom at the moment she did not care to remember.

In the warm steam, she drifted off a little; here and there a phrase from the concerto caught in her head, and she seemed able to see it printed clearly on a music sheet before the notes swam away like tadpoles. One easily lost tadpoles, as one could lose anything. Once, at eight, Moran and Boyang had gone to a nearby pond to catch tadpoles, which they had carried in wax paper tubes filled with pond water and secured on both ends by vines; they thought of running back to the quadrangle and depositing the tadpoles in the giant barrel in which Teacher Pang kept two koi fish, but for one reason or another, they took a detour to visit a classmate, and for a while the three of them bounced up and down in the classmate’s bed, the tadpoles completely forgotten by their captors.

They never dared to ask the classmate about his bed, Moran had said when she told Ruyu the story. The poor tadpoles, Boyang had said guiltily; and the poor friend, Moran had added, the voice so clear and close to Ruyu’s ears that she opened her eyes abruptly. The steam had not dispersed. She must have dozed off for only a moment, yet she felt confused; she thought she had seen and heard Moran and Boyang, not only as the teenagers retelling the story, but also as eight-year-olds, carefree children who should have been strangers to her, yet they had looked familiar in her dream, if, in fact, it was in her dream she had seen them.

Why they had told her the story Ruyu had no recollection. They had told her all sorts of things, but little remained in her memory. The last thing she would ever want to dwell upon was other people’s childhoods, yet Moran and Boyang had seemed, a moment ago, so vivid that she could almost feel their astonishment at losing the tadpoles.

Ruyu did not remember what she had looked like at that age; of course she remembered her grandaunts well: their voices and gestures, their neatly plucked eyebrows and well-combed buns, which never blurred when she saw them in her mind’s eye. But she could not see herself then, or at any age when she had been in their care. Had her grandaunts had a mirror in their apartment? Ruyu remembered an oval one, not larger than a hand mirror, standing on a metal stand on top of a tall dresser, which her grandaunts would consult before leaving home. Had she ever been handed the mirror, Ruyu wondered, and she could not answer with any certainty. The dresser, she remembered, was extraordinarily tall, with eight levels of drawers, two on each level. It was one of the few of her grandaunts’ possessions that had survived multiple visits by the Red Guards: unlike the smaller items, the dresser could not be hidden, yet the revolutionary youths had spared the heavy furniture, perhaps deeming it too heavy to move downstairs and throw into the fire, or not having the right tools to ax it apart. By the time Ruyu could reach an object on top of the dresser, she must have been nearly ten, she calculated. No, she did not remember looking into a mirror; there must have been times when she had been allowed to do so, but what difference would it have made? She had already missed the opportunities — no, she had not missed them, because they had never been granted her in the first place — for a normal childhood. There was no disappointment in that: disappointment is for those who begin with a plan, those who sow seeds and refuse to accept the barrenness of life.

Much more had been planned for her, much more expected from her at one time or another, and her achievement — could this be her only one? — was to have sabotaged everyone’s good script. But why not? She had never asked to be part of anyone’s interior life, but people, with too much confidence or perhaps too little, seemed ill at ease unless they found some way to change that.

Ruyu’s first marriage had ended when the man to whom she had been married for two years had lost control and beaten her. She had not defended herself other than to shield her face from his fists, and afterward she had watched with equanimity as the man broke down and cried, calling her a monster who had turned him into a wife beater like his father. What had she done but remain the same person he had seen only twice before marrying her, she had thought later, studying her bruised body in a mirror so that she could have a better sense of the pain she should feel. When she had, through an acquaintance, met the man nine years her senior, it had not been for the prospect of a good life or a happy marriage in America, but for an exit from her grandaunts’ charge and her own Chinese life. When he, with only two weeks of vacation time and the goal of finding a wife, had decided to marry a stranger, a girl not yet twenty, shouldn’t he have prepared himself for all that could possibly come? Surely he had thought of practicalities: his bank account he had never shared with her, each week allocating her an allowance of twenty dollars on top of the grocery money; he had given her the choice of pursuing a degree in either accounting or biostatistics, both of which would allow her to find a job easily and make a substantial contribution to the household; he had, at the beginning of each university semester, registered her for her classes, so that he would know her exact whereabouts at any moment of the day, and he never enrolled her in evening classes, because in the evenings she was expected to waitress at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, which hired immigrants on student visas who had no legal right to work and would work for less than minimum wage. If their marriage was a transaction, Ruyu had accepted his terms, offering, in return for lodging and food and tuition money, her consent to be wifely. To be wifely, to sign over her future for a one-way plane ticket: she had never agreed to love, and had not expected his love; yet it was in the name of love he had raged, and called her the coldest person he had ever met. Even a chunk of ice would have melted after his two years of trying, he had said, calling her names she had not imagined him able to. She wondered if his father had used the same names for his mother.