Kinder Than Solitude (30 page)

She imagined he had picked them out of different bottles—he must do this every time he left for the hospital, lest he forget or feel too sick to do it afterward. Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible state of existence. Moran had always thought she had crossed that line long ago—but when, she asked herself, and she could not come up with an answer. It could have been when she extricated herself from Josef’s life, or earlier, when she had sat in that dingy apartment in Beijing, paralyzed and ashamed by the sight of Shaoai’s oversized body and mindless giggling. But she would have been too young for that crossing to count as real experience, and her solitude,
which had not chosen her but had been chosen
by
her, was different from Josef’s solitude: hers was a protest, his a surrender.

Josef dozed off on the sofa, his mouth slightly open, his breathing shallow. She picked up an old blanket from the sofa and laid it softly on him. His eyelids, too pale—as though they were a naked part of a body that should be kept out of sight—made her look away. If she left now, he would wake up to the empty room, thinking she was only a phantom in a dream. If she stayed, he would open his eyes and be momentarily disoriented; but however meager her offer was, it must be better than a dream.

Moran walked to the window, which overlooked the parking lot. A man, the manager of the building judging by his looks, was unloading bags of rock salt from his pickup truck. Earlier, at the café, two or three tables of people had been discussing the coming snowstorm, which the forecast said would hit the area hard by the end of the week; would it affect holiday traveling, the people at the café had wondered, worries about their children’s homecoming lining the old women’s faces. The nurse, too, when saying farewell to Josef, had said glumly that they were going into another long winter, as though, in her tired eyes, last year’s stale snow was still sitting in gray piles by the roadside, never melting with time.

Moran remembered the delight in the eyes of the Thai couple and the Indian students from years ago upon seeing their first snowfall; back in their home countries, the news must have left ripples of marvel in many hearts. She herself had not shared their relish. One can always go back to another moment in history to negate the present; only the impressionable and the inexperienced—in that case, the people from the snowless tropics—are liable to christen a moment
memory
. The snow-covered hills west of the Back Sea; her bicycle tires skidding on rutted, hard-pressed snow before crashing into Boyang’s; a squad of snowmen they had lined up in the courtyard during one of the biggest snowstorms—if she wanted, she could always assign more meaning to those memories, diminishing others.

Yet her connection to the Midwest had begun with snow. Before she met Josef, she had been in Madison for two and a half months, but those days, like the time since she had left Josef, had been willfully turned into the footprints of seabirds on wet sand, existing only between the flow and ebb of the tide. Is it possible for one to develop an attachment to a place or a time without another person being involved? If so, the place and the time must make a most barren habitat. Beijing in her memory had remained two cities, the one before Shaoai’s poisoning and the one after, yet in both places she had not been alone. Guangzhou, where she had gone to college for four years, had been marked by the absence of any communication between her and her old friends in Beijing, but even that lack had been meaningful: people, absent, could claim more space. The Massachusetts town Moran had lived in for the past eleven years, however, did not offer a memorable emptiness; in shunning people, she had turned the place, with its abundant sunny days in the summer and its beautiful autumn colors, into a mere spot on the map, the time she’d spent there collapsed into one long day of not feeling. No, solitude she did not have; what she had was a never-ending quarantine.

The snow on the day when Moran had first met Josef had been light and flaky, and in the parking lot he had swept a layer of it off the windshield with his gloved hands. He had offered to drive her back to the Westlawn House, and she had not known how to decline, even though she would have preferred a long walk in the snowy dusk.

It was time to get a new scraper, he said, and when he saw her puzzled look, he asked if things were all right.

She said everything was all right, though he looked concerned still, and wanted to know if her headache was bothering her and if she needed some medicine. She would not have said anything more, but she knew that if she did not tell the truth, she would make a good-hearted man worry unnecessarily. She reassured him that she was perfectly fine; except that she did not know what he meant when he talked about a scraper.

Their relationship—a friendship before it evolved into love or companionship—had begun where little common ground could be found between them. It was a matter of paying attention that had brought them together. For Josef, the objects and sights that had been familiar to him had become less so. For Moran, it was making an effort to find new things—and there were plenty in a new country—so that she could stop looking inward for an explanation that could make her recent history less puzzling.

Sitting in Josef’s car that day, for the first time Moran had looked at the world from the passenger’s seat. The traffic signs and lane dividers lit by the headlights as though they were taking turns becoming visible; the rushing and swirling of snowflakes toward the windshield at an angle and speed she had never thought possible; the dashboard, with its circles and numbers in pale neon green—all these made her look at the world more closely, as she had not done for a long time. At Westlawn, several of her housemates had cars, but Moran preferred walking, and had arranged her life within a walking distance radius and occasionally a bus ride: she walked to school and to a nearby grocery store for food, and on weekends she rode the bus to town to look at the shop windows and the people who shopped behind the windows. Once she had taken a more adventurous route, climbing up a hill and then trekking down a long, grassy slope, stirring up insects, which had reminded her of her intrepid younger days, hunting for crickets and katydids with Boyang. To stop herself from reminiscing, she ran downhill, and when she reached the edge of the state highway, she waited for over five minutes, until no car was in sight in both directions, before sprinting across the six lanes to the other side, where a spreading Wal-Mart had amazed her with its abundance of everything one needed—or would never have imagined one would need—for a life in America.

“Is this the first time you’ve seen snow?” Josef asked as they were waiting for the red light to turn green. She must have looked wide eyed, leaning forward.

She said no, and then asked him what was making the clicking sound.

“The engine?” he said, and turned off the car radio, which had been tuned to a classical music station at low volume. He listened. Strange, he said, he couldn’t hear anything. He had just had the car checked at the mechanics’ a few weeks earlier, he said, and all had seemed well then.

It turned out to be the blinking of the turn signal, for, after the light changed and the car turned, the sound went away. When the small mystery was solved, Josef seemed genuinely shocked, while Moran was rather happy. At the beginning of the semester, she had taken a ride with her lab-mates to a welcome picnic; sitting in the backseat among the more talkative Americans, she had felt baffled by the clicking sound, though she had been too shy to ask.

That winter—long, brutal, as everybody had warned Moran—seemed to be forever connected to the joint effort between Josef and Moran to understand each other through the gap between their ages, and between their origins. Nothing could be left unsaid or unexplored; everything deserved a closer look. Snow, which was simply
snow
in her mother tongue, gave rise to a new vocabulary, as Josef patiently explained when the season brought different forms of snow: as flakes, as powder, as sleet, as drifts. What the snow trucks and plows spread was a mixture of sand and salt, he explained, a novel practice to her, since back home the only way to tackle snow was to brandish a shovel, and sometimes a whole work unit or school had to pause for half a day to clean the road.

All she did was ask questions: anything else she said would have had some connection to Beijing, and it was to forget the other place that she had welcomed Josef’s friendship. The graininess of the sand and rock under her soles did not go away, even between snows, and the coarseness gave her an odd impression of a boldly announced uncleanness. Back in Beijing, winter brought another kind of uncleanness: dust, never settling and hurled everywhere by wind, gave
the sky a tinge of yellow and covered everything with a layer of gray; on the days of dust storms, she had to cover her whole head with a gauzy scarf, and even then, when she arrived home, the first thing she would have to do was rinse her mouth and wash the dust off her face. Once, when she and Boyang had gone to a science exhibition, she had been both amused and appalled when, reaching their destination, even the folds of their eyelids were filled with fine dust. But such memories would have made no sense to Josef, and she always redirected the conversation when he asked her about China. She preferred being told about things she did not know, and in retrospect she wondered if her interest in even the most mundane details had been good for Josef that winter. He had not been a talkative person; all the same, it must have made a difference for him to have been listened to with such attention.

As the winter drew on, the town started to take on a grimier look. People, though tired of the snow, never seemed to tire of talking about it. At a café where they had gone a few times, the owner, Dave, joked about putting up a sign that said “no whining.”

Moran asked Josef to spell the word “whine” for her, and asked for the meaning. He thought for a moment and then took on a high-pitched voice:
“Everybody crowds round so in this Forest. There’s no Space. I never saw a more Spreading lot of animals in my life, and all in the wrong places.”

She looked at him: the first glimpse of his jocular self changed him into a different person. When he asked her to guess to whom the lines belonged, she shook her head.

“Here’s the clue. I only did that to give you a sense of a whiny voice. What he really sounds like is this—” Josef pulled both sides of his face downward with his hands and lowered his pitch into a grumbling voice.
“There are those who will wish you good morning. If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”

Moran smiled. There was a mischievous light in his eyes when he made his face morose.

“Have you heard of Eeyore?” Josef asked when she could not guess the answer.

“Eeyore?” she said.

“Or Winnie-the-Pooh?”

Moran shook her head again, and Josef seemed to be at a loss for words.

It must be a boring business for him when every subject needed an explanation, Moran thought, feeling self-conscious. So much could be left unsaid between herself and Boyang, as must have been the case between Josef and Alena, though the analogy made Moran uneasy. Neither she nor Josef had designated these weekend meetings—movies and coffees and sometimes a visit to a local museum—as anything consequential. She liked to believe that she was an international student he was helping to get to know America better. She could see, when she and Josef ran into his friends in town, that they approved of this side project of his because it was a distraction from grieving.

Josef explained that Winnie-the-Pooh was a character from a children’s book. He had read it so many times to his four children at bedtime, he said, that he could not help memorizing many parts. She imagined him acting out the book, though she could not envision him as a young father, nor his children at a young age. At Thanksgiving she had met his family, three sons and one daughter: Michael, whose wife’s name was Sharon, and whose children were Todd and Brant; John, who had come with his fiancée, Mimi; George, by himself; and Rachel, the only one still in college. They, including the two boys, both under age five, had intimidated Moran. She had tried to explain to herself that it was only her diffidence about her English that had made her ill at ease, though she knew that was not the only reason.

“If you like,” Josef said now, “I can bring the book to you next week. Or else we can stop by the bookstore to get a copy for you.”

How befitting, she thought, and all of a sudden felt angry. In his
eyes, she must be a young woman raised in an underdeveloped country, exotic but also pitiable in her ignorance. Do you have chocolates in China? a friend of Josef’s had asked her once, with perfect kindness; or else: Did your parents bind your feet when you were young? Will they arrange a marriage for you?

Moran said that if Josef wrote down the title of the book, she could find it in the library. She did not know if he could detect the change in her voice.

Josef found a pen in his jacket pocket and wrote the title and the author’s name on a napkin, doodling a plump animal at the bottom. She watched him, both annoyed by him and ashamed at her annoyance. Her graduate advisor had been lending her the picture books his two children had outgrown—the best way to improve her English was to start with children’s books, he had said, and added that when he had been in graduate school, a woman from China in his lab, who had since become a professor at Arizona State, had read through the entire children’s section at the local library.

Moran had not minded her advisor’s giving her the exquisitely printed cardboard books. He was a good man, she knew, and he wanted her to thrive in this country. But to be offered a children’s book by Josef seemed a different matter. What happened to
Doctor Zhivago
, she wanted to ask. In her backpack was an English translation of the novel, which she had checked out from the university library; the last stamp had been from nine years ago. On the previous Sunday, they had talked about the novel. She had told him that there was a line toward the end of the novel that she had underlined many times in the Chinese translation, though when he had asked her what it was, she could not answer, and said she would look for it in the English translation.