Kinder Than Solitude (4 page)

For a split second, Shaoai regretted her eruption—after all, Ruyu was a young girl, a provincial, an orphan raised by eccentric old ladies. Shaoai would have willingly softened, and even apologized, if Ruyu had understood the source of her anger, but the younger girl did not make a gesture either to mollify Shaoai or to defend herself. In Ruyu’s silence, Shaoai sensed a contemptuous extrication. “Haven’t your grandaunts taught you anything useful?” Shaoai said, angrier now, both at Ruyu’s unresponsiveness and at her own temper.

Nothing separated Ruyu more thoroughly from the world than its malignance toward her grandaunts. To ward off people’s criticism of her grandaunts was more than to justify how they had raised her: to defend them was to defend God, who had chosen her to be left at their door. “My grandaunts have taught me more than you could imagine,” Ruyu said. “If you don’t like my coming to stay with your family, I understand. I’m not here for you to like, and my grandaunts are not for you to approve or disapprove of.”

Shaoai had stared at Ruyu for a long moment, and then shrugged as though she no longer was in the mood to argue with Ruyu. When
they had reached Shaoai’s home the episode seemed to have been put behind them.

Please—Ruyu folded her hands on her chest—please show me that a big city is nothing compared to you. The bamboo mattress under her was no longer cooling her off, but she refrained from moving to a new spot and stayed on the edge of the bed Shaoai had pointed to as her side. The only window in the room, a small rectangular one high on the wall, admitted little night air, and inside the mosquito netting Ruyu felt her pajamas sticking to her body. A television set, its volume low, was blinking in the living room, though Ruyu doubted that Uncle and Aunt were watching it. For a while they had been talking in whispers, and Ruyu wondered if they had been talking about her or her grandaunts. Please, she said again in her mind, please give me the wisdom to live among strangers until I leave them behind.

Ruyu’s grandaunts had not taught her to pray. Her upbringing had not been a strictly religious one, though her grandaunts had done what they could to give her an education that they had deemed necessary to prepare her for her future reunion with the Church. They themselves had not attended any services since 1957, when the Church was reformed by the Communist Party into the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association; nor did they keep any concrete evidence of their previous spiritual lives. Still, from a young age, Ruyu had understood that what set her apart from other children was not the absence of her parents but the presence of God in her life, which made parents and siblings and playmates and even her grandaunts extraneous. She had begun to talk to him before she entered elementary school. “Our Father in Heaven,” she’d heard her grandaunts say when she had been a small girl, and it was with a conversation with him that Ruyu would end each day, talking to him as a child would talk to an imaginary friend or to herself, a presence at once abstract and solidly comforting. But he was neither a friend nor a part of herself;
he belonged to her as much as he belonged to her grandaunts. None of the people she had met so far in Beijing, Ruyu knew, shared with her the secret of his presence: not Uncle and Aunt, who had told her that she was one of the family now and had asked her not to feel shy about making requests; not the neighbors, the five other families who had all come out to the courtyard upon her arrival, talking to her as though they had known her forever, a man teasing her about her accordion, which seemed too big for her narrow shoulders, a woman disapproving of her outfit because it would give her a heat rash in this humid weather; not the boy Boyang or the girl Moran, both of whom were quiet in front of their seniors, but who, Ruyu knew from the looks the two exchanged, had more to say to each other; and not Shaoai, who, queenly in her impatience toward the fuss the neighbors made over the newcomer, had left the courtyard before they had finished welcoming Ruyu.

Please make the time I have to spend with these strangers go fast so that I can come to you soon. She was about to finish the conversation, as usual, with an apology—always she asked too much of him while offering nothing in return—when the front door opened and then banged shut; the metal bell she had seen hanging from the door frame jingled and was hushed right away by someone’s hand. Aunt said something, and then Shaoai, who must have been the one who’d come into the house, replied with some sort of retort, though both talked in low voices, and Ruyu could not hear their exchanges. She looked through the mosquito netting at the curtain that separated the bedroom from the living room—a white floral print on blue cotton fabric—and at the light from the living room creeping into the bedroom from underneath the curtain.

The house, more than a hundred years old, had been built for traditional family life, the center of the house being the living room, the entries between the living room and the bedrooms open, with no doors. The smallest bedroom, no larger than a cubicle and located to the right of the main entrance, was the entire world occupied by
Grandpa—Uncle’s father, who had been bedridden for the last five years after a series of strokes. Earlier in the evening, when Aunt had shown Ruyu around the house, she’d raised the curtain quickly for Ruyu to catch a glimpse of the old man lying under a thin, gray blanket, the only life left in his gaunt face a pair of dull eyes that rolled toward Ruyu. He had said something incomprehensible, and Aunt had replied in a loud yet not unkind voice that there was nothing for him to worry about. They were sorry they could not offer Ruyu her own bedroom, Aunt said, and then pointed to the curtain that hid Grandpa and added in a low voice: “Who knows. This room could be vacant any day.”

The bedroom Ruyu was to share with Shaoai was the biggest in the house and used to belong to Uncle and Aunt. Aunt apologized for not having had time to make many changes, besides installing a new student’s desk in the corner of the room. The other bedroom—Shaoai’s old bedroom—was not large enough to accommodate the desk, so it wouldn’t do, Aunt explained, since Ruyu needed her own quiet corner to study. Ruyu mumbled something halfway between an apology and an acknowledgment, though Aunt, flicking dust off the shade of the desk lamp—new also, bought on sale with the desk, she said—did not seem to hear. Ruyu wondered if her grandaunts had considered how their plan for her would change other people’s lives; if they had known anything, they had not told her, and it perplexed her that a small person like herself could cause so much inconvenience. At dinnertime, Shaoai had scoffed when Aunt reminded her to show Ruyu how to clip the mosquito netting, saying that even a child could do that, to which Aunt had replied in an appeasing tone that she just wanted to make sure Ruyu felt informed about her new home. Uncle, reticent, with a sad smile on his face, had come to the dinner table in a threadbare undershirt, but had hurried back to the bedroom when Aunt had frowned at him, and returned in a neatly buttoned shirt. From the expectant looks on Aunt’s and Uncle’s faces, Ruyu knew that the dinner had been prepared for her with extra effort,
and, later in the evening, when she fetched water from the wooden bucket next to the kitchen for her washstand, she overheard Uncle comforting Aunt, telling her that perhaps the girl was simply tired from her journey, and Aunt replying that she hoped Ruyu’s appetite would return, as it’s certainly not healthy for a person her age to eat only morsels like a chickadee.

Someone walked close to the bedroom, a shadow looming on the curtain. Ruyu closed her eyes when she recognized Shaoai’s profile. Aunt whispered something to which Shaoai did not reply before entering the bedroom. She stopped in the semidarkness and then turned on the light, a bare bulb hanging low from the ceiling. Ruyu closed her eyes tighter and listened to Shaoai fumble around. After a moment, an electric fan turned on, its droning the only sound in the quietness of the night. The breeze instantly lifted the mosquito netting, and with an exaggerated sigh Shaoai tucked the bottom of the netting underneath the mattress. “You have to be at least a little smarter than the mosquitoes,” she said.

Ruyu did not know if she should apologize and then decided not to open her eyes.

“You shouldn’t wrap yourself up in the blanket,” Shaoai said. “It’s hot.”

After a pause, Ruyu replied that she was all right, and Shaoai did not pursue the topic. She turned off the light and changed in the darkness. When she climbed into the bed from her side and readjusted the mosquito netting, Ruyu regretted that she had not prepared herself by turning away so that her back faced the center of the bed. It was too late now, so she tried to hold her body still and breathe quietly. Please, she said, sensing that she was on Shaoai’s mind, please mask me with your love so they can’t feel my existence.

Later, when Shaoai was asleep, Ruyu opened her eyes and looked at the mosquito netting above her, gray and formless, and listened to the fan swirling. She had been off the train for a few hours now, but still her body could feel the motion, as though it had retained—and
continued living—the memory of traveling. There was much to get used to in her new life, a public outhouse at the end of the alleyway Moran had shown her earlier; an outdoor spigot in the middle of the courtyard, where Ruyu had seen Boyang and a few other young men from the quadrangle gather after sunset, topless, splashing cold water onto their upper bodies and taking turns putting their heads under the tap to cool down; a bed shared with a stranger; meals supervised by anxious Aunt. For the first time that day, Ruyu felt homesick for her bed tucked behind an old muslin screen in the foyer of her grandaunts’ one-room apartment.

3

Celia’s message on Ruyu’s voice mail sounded panicked, as though Celia had been caught in a tornado, but Ruyu found little surprise in the emergency. That evening it was Celia’s turn to host ladies’ night. These monthly get-togethers had started as a book club, but, as more books went unfinished and undiscussed, other activities had been introduced—wine tasting, tea tasting, a question-and-answer session with the president of a local real estate agency when the market turned downward, a holiday workshop on homemade soaps and candles. Celia, one of the three founders of the book club, had nicknamed it Buckingham Ladies’ Society, though she used the name only with Ruyu, thinking it might offend people who did not belong to the club, as well as some who did. Not everyone in the book club lived on Buckingham Road. A few of them lived on streets with less prominent names: Kent Road, Bristol Lane, Charing Cross Lane, and Norfolk Way. Properties on those streets were of course more than decent, and children from those houses went to the same school as hers did, but Celia, living on Buckingham, could not help but take pleasure in the subtle difference between her street and the others.

Ruyu wondered if the florist had misinterpreted the color theme Celia had requested, or if the caterer—a new one she was trying out, upon a friend’s recommendation—had failed to meet her expectations.
In either case, Ruyu’s presence was urgently needed—could she please come early, Celia had said in the voice mail, pretty please?—not, of course, to right any wrong but to bear witness to Celia’s personal tornado. Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities. Celia’s martyrdom, in most people’s—less than kind—opinion, amounted to nothing but a dramatic self-centeredness, but Ruyu, one of the very few who took Celia’s sacrifice seriously, understood the source of her suffering: Celia, though lapsed, had been brought up by Catholic parents.

Edwin and the boys were off to dinner and then to a Warriors game, Celia told Ruyu when she arrived at the Moorlands’. A robin had flown into a window that morning, knocking itself out and setting off the alarm, Celia said, and thank goodness the window was not broken and Luis—the gardener—was here to take care of the poor bird. The caterer was seventeen minutes late, so wasn’t it wise of her to have changed the delivery time to half an hour earlier? In the middle of recounting an exchange between the deliveryman and herself, Celia stopped abruptly. “Ruby,” she said. “Ruby.”

“Yes,” Ruyu said. “I’m listening.”

Celia came and sat down with Ruyu in the breakfast nook. The table and the benches were made of wood reclaimed from an old Kensington barn where Celia’s grandmother, she liked to tell her visitors, used to go for riding lessons. “You look distracted,” Celia said, pushing a glass of water toward Ruyu.

The woman Celia thought of as Ruby should have unwavering attention as an audience. Ruyu thanked Celia for the water and said that nothing was really distracting her. To Celia’s circle of friends—many of whom would arrive soon—Ruyu was, depending on what was needed, a woman of many possibilities: a Mandarin tutor, a reliable house- and pet-sitter, a last-minute babysitter, a part-time cashier at a confection boutique, an occasional party helper. But her loyalty,
first and foremost, belonged to Celia, for it was she who had found Ruyu these many opportunities, including the position at La Dolce Vita, a third-generation family business owned by a high school friend of Celia’s.

Celia did not often notice anything beyond her immediate preoccupation, but sometimes, distraught, she was able to perceive other people’s moods. In those moments she adamantly required an explanation, as though her tenacious urge to know someone else’s suffering offered a way out of her own. Ruyu wondered whether she looked disturbed and wished she had touched up her face before entering the house.

“You are not yourself today,” Celia said. “Don’t tell me you had a tough day. The day is already bad enough for me.”

“Here’s what I have done today: I was in the shop in the morning; I stopped at the dry cleaners; I fed Karen’s cats; I took a walk,” Ruyu said. “Now, tell me how hard my day could be.”

Celia sighed and said that of course Ruyu was right. “You don’t know how I envy you.”

Ruyu had been told this often, and once in a while she almost believed Celia to be sincere. “You sounded dreadful in your voice mail,” Ruyu said. “What happened?”