Kinder Than Solitude

15

Josef asked only for a cup of black coffee, and even that he did not touch while watching Moran eat her eggs and toast. She knew that her overthinking had fallen short again. The evening before, when she had called Josef from the airport, he had suggested a simple dinner, and she had flatly refused because she had not come to be hosted or taken care of in any way. She asked him what his next day would be like, and he said he had a visit to the hospital in the morning. She would pick him up and drive him to his appointment, she said, deciding for both of them as she had decided all the birthday lunches.

The hospital cafeteria would be too depressing at this hour, Josef had said, and she had agreed to go to a small café nearby for breakfast. But now — too late as always — it occurred to her that he could not eat anything: today he would have another chemo infusion; with all her consideration, how could she have forgotten that for a town this size, one would never need to leave for an appointment two hours ahead of time?

Josef, though, watched her eat as though nothing was out of place. His suit hung loosely; his cheeks, once round and flushed and called affectionately by her his “Buddha” cheeks, were sallow now, creased skin on sharp bones. He moved much more slowly than before, though with dignity. She wondered if his bones and joints troubled him, and whether it was a result of the illness or the chemotherapy — though did it matter? His back was straight when he sat next to her in the car, and he did not let himself slouch after the waitress had brought them their orders. He was one of those people who would meet death with an impeccable manner, shaking hands, thanking death for taking the trouble to come and fetch him, and, having put his affairs in order ahead of time, bidding farewell to his family and friends before journeying onward. “It’s ridiculous to sit here and wait,” she said, disturbed by the thought that his final departure was no longer hypothetical. “Next time we’ll leave for the hospital just in time.”

“This is the only time I go while you’re here,” Josef said. “So don’t worry about next time. By the way, Rachel said to thank you for your help today.”

That, Moran thought, was his cue for her to ask about Rachel, her children, and her siblings and their children. In the past, Moran and Josef had been talkative at his birthday lunches, each picking up a new subject before quietness set in: he would speak of the local orchestra concerts he’d attended, various construction projects in the city, his children and grandchildren; she would speak of new products at work, the colors she’d painted her bedroom, the pots of herbs she was cultivating on her windowsill. What she had failed to do in their marriage she seemed to have managed since, at least once a year: to assign interest to small matters. It takes courage to find solace in trivialities, willfulness not to let trivialities usurp one’s life. Trivialities, though, could wait now, or could be done away with forever. “There,” she said, “will be next time. I’m moving back.”

“Back, Moran, to where?”

Did she detect suspicion or even panic, however fleeting, in his eyes? The house she had known to be theirs — and before that, his and Alena’s — had been remodeled and sold two years earlier. Josef’s move to the condo, she had known at the time, would be only the beginning of a series of moves, each confining his world more. Indeed, back to where? But a more apt question would be, back to when? Over the years she had failed to offer Josef evidence of settlement: a new marriage, a love interest, an affair, anything to end their birthday ritual. It was kind of her to come, he said every year, his happiness and gratitude genuine because she was the one to rearrange her life once a year for him. But Moran wondered if he was only acting for her sake — his life would have been the same otherwise, children and grandchildren providing a solid reality for his memories of Alena, polished into perfection by time. Had Josef not preserved a place for her to alight, Moran would be a hapless bird lost in migration from one year to the next. Indeed, back to when: the moment she had asked for a divorce, or earlier, when she had convinced herself that a man with a loving heart would offer her a place in life, or even earlier, when they had first found affectionate companionship in each other?

“Don’t worry. I won’t install myself in your living room like an uninvited guest. I won’t be in your way when your children come to see you. Oh, no, don’t you worry, Josef,” Moran said, feeling her stomach tighten. She had meant to find the best time to tell him her plan, but five minutes into the breakfast, she was already losing her strategy. She could not bring herself to say that there must be times when he needed a driver, a hand to hold on to when he walked on the icy sidewalk, someone to listen to him reminisce while sleep eluded him, a lover of his good heart.

Josef was quiet, then said that it was comforting to know that, with a bit of food in her, Moran was her old self again.

He meant that impatience and irritation came easily to her when she was with him, part of herself that no one else was allowed to see. To the world, she was not unlike Josef: poised in an old-fashioned way. She liked to imagine that she carried with her something good from him, though at times she suspected she was one of those people who would latch on to what was not in their nature and set about making it their own: once upon a time, it had been Shaoai’s romantic vehemence about injustice and Boyang’s lack of concern for all things troublesome. (How had those two traits mixed in her? she wondered, but it seemed too long ago for her to understand.) There had been Ruyu’s imperviousness, a most alien quality, yet for years Moran had striven for it, as though by aligning herself with Ruyu, she could claim at least a small part of Ruyu’s impunity. But how does one tell where one’s true self stops and makes way for all the borrowed selves? To this day, Moran still sometimes woke from dreams in which she had laughed jovially. Often Boyang was in those dreams, and sometimes Ruyu, too, and the backdrop, however vague, was unmistakably one of her favorite corners of Beijing; in the first moment of wakefulness, the unconstrained happiness, like the lingering aftertaste of the locust blossoms they ate as children, was intensely real, until she remembered that she was no longer a person who had things to laugh about, or people to laugh with. Extreme disappointment seems a lesson one can never master: no matter how many times it had happened, the realization would still hit her like a fierce bout of physical illness, and for a moment she would be dazed, asking herself how it could be that her life had not turned out to be a place for that happiness.

“Did I offend you?” Josef said.

Always quick to admit wrongdoing, always ready to apologize — it was the same for both of them. How could two people like that make a marriage, which required a certain degree of irrationality, work? “I mean it, Josef,” Moran said. “I’m moving back to town.”

“Why?”

“That”—she stared at Josef—“is a stupid question.”

“But what will you do about your job?”

She could say she had arranged a leave to make him feel better, but the truth was she never lied to him. It wasn’t much, she knew: one can withhold many things and build a wall around oneself; one can have a graveyard of dead memories without speaking a word. But at least she was adamant about giving him the kind of love she had not given others: it is rare that one meets a person to whom one chooses never to lie. “I’m giving it up,” she said. “Don’t, please, Josef, don’t try to convince me otherwise. It’s only a job.”

“And what are you going to do here?”

“That can be decided later,” Moran said. “Unless you oppose this move with all your heart.”

Josef sighed. “This is a free country,” he said.

“Would it leave you in a difficult situation with your children? Would they oppose it?”

“You can’t change your life at this moment just for me.”

“Why can’t it be for me, too?” she said, though her voice was low, and she was not sure if he heard her. What he’d called her life was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.

The café was filling up, the warmth of people and their everyday contentment pressing in. It was a Wednesday. This must be the day of the week for the four gray-haired ladies two tables away to meet up and laugh, and for the two young mothers by the window to compare notes on motherhood, their infants sleeping in carriers next to them. A few couples had come in, all of them Josef’s age, and Moran had dreaded recognizing them as his friends, though he had only smiled and nodded at them in the friendly way one smiled and nodded at strangers. Other than two college-aged girls, who were doing some intense work over their coffee, the café seemed to be a place for people who were either at the beginning of their stories or, more befittingly, at the end. Even the college girls, in a way, were only starting out. What one did not find at this place was someone in the middle of a story — but perhaps those people, like Moran herself a week earlier, did not have the luxury of idleness on such a morning. They would be sitting in a cubicle somewhere, secured and entrapped; sometimes they look up at the ceiling, a forgotten memory from their childhood or a glimpse into their old age passing through their minds like the fleeting shadow of a bird flying by, before their thoughts are reined in to the immediate present. No, to be in the middle requires one to be practical: one does not walk away from a stable job; one does not take a sojourn from life. Yet was it her true position to be in the middle — without a future to look forward to, was she, despite her age, already at the end?

“Are you going to look for a job here?” Josef asked.

“Only if it’s flexible enough,” Moran said. “Though maybe not for a while.”

“Then how are you going to spend your time?”

“I’m coming back to be near you. Unless—” she paused, a sudden fear hitting her. “Unless you have a lady friend now. I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

“I would’ve told you,” he said. They had circled the topic in the past, but had always managed, at the end of each meeting, to inform each other of their love lives, or of the lack of love in their lives. He had gone out with a woman for a while, but by the time Moran came for his next birthday, the relationship had fizzled. There had been other interests, though nothing fruitful had come of them, disappointments for him perhaps, but she had felt relieved each time, and guilty about her relief.

“Then what prevents you from saying yes to my proposal?”

“Wouldn’t you say no, too, if you were in my shoes?”

“No.”

“But you would, Moran,” Josef said gently. “You know you would.”

“There’s this old tale in China. An ironsmith boasted that he had built the sharpest spearhead — one that could pierce all armor; then he boasted that he had built the sturdiest armor that no spearhead would be able to pierce.”

“So he was asked to test his own products on each other?” Josef said.

“Very good thinking, my dear Josef,” Moran said. “But the lesson is, I think, that each and every one of us has flaws in our reasoning, and we should not take advantage of that in another person. What I would do if I were in your shoes doesn’t matter. What matters is what I would decide in my own shoes.”

“Of course it would be … wonderful to see you more.”

“Then why don’t we settle on this?”

“But I won’t be here forever.”

Of course it was like Josef to remind her of a fact that she never forgot. “Shouldn’t that be more of a reason for me to come back?” she said, and abruptly asked the waitress walking past to bring them the check.

“We still have some time,” Josef said.

“Can’t you see that I don’t want to be a fool and cry in here?” she snapped, and leaned her face into her hands, warning herself not to fail her first test. He did not need a weepy woman; facing death, he was more defenseless than she was.

The waitress came with their check. Moran did not change her posture and let Josef take care of it. When he asked if she was ready to go, she took a deep breath and looked up. The effort to ensure that her eyes stayed dry had exhausted her, but she was glad that the dam inside her had not broken. “Now, don’t look so worried,” she said. “I’m not here to bring a scandal to your name.”

“Man in seventies bullies visiting ex-wife into tears in public,” Josef said. “No, no, we don’t want to see that in the paper.”

“But that ex-wife is not visiting anymore,” Moran said. “The big news is, she’s moving back to haunt him.”

Josef made a gesture of being caught in a spotlight, his hands raised halfway in an effort to shelter his face, which was flushed by the sudden movement. Momentarily they were back in a better time, when he had made her smile with a few unexpected improvisations. Were these moments, she wondered, enough to be called happiness this late into their story?

Later, when she dropped Josef off at his place, he asked if she would like to go up and sit for a while. She hesitated, and then said she would let him rest. She wanted to make a few appointments to look at some rentals before everyone headed out of town for Thanksgiving.

“Moran, enough fooling around. Let’s drop the subject.”

“Why?” she asked. In his voice she’d detected the weariness that belonged to people who were too tired to feel responsible for how they spoke.

“You and I both know that you should not leave your job.”

She wondered if the visit to the hospital had made him change his mind. He had introduced her to the nurse as a friend, and the nurse had asked about Rachel and her family before they left. Could it be that there was a settled rhythm to his life that he did not want her return to disturb? Or that his time, already limited, had little extra to spare for her?

“Will it be too much for you? Will I be taking you away from your family and friends?” she asked, tightening her grip around the steering wheel, even though she had parked the car, perfectly centered between the two lines, just as he had taught her.

“You know that’s not the reason.”

“Then what is?”

“You still have half a life to live.”

“Why can’t moving back here be part of that half?” she said. His face looked ashen, much sicker than it had earlier; he must be exhausted from spending the morning with her. What if she, despite good intentions, was only toxic for him?

“You know it means the world to me that you came,” Josef said. “It’s too flattering by half that you’re talking of moving back. But we ought not to indulge ourselves.”

“You may need someone,” Moran said, though she knew that the role of caretaker could easily be filled by another person: Rachel, for instance, or his other children; down the line, it would probably be a hired nurse, or else he would be moved from the condo to a facility. Many stories of his generation would end that way, and he would argue that there was no point in being different.

“You’re being stubborn,” Josef said.

She exited the car and opened the passenger door. “Come,” she said, bending down and reaching for his hand. “I’ll walk you up after all.”

Moran had not been in Josef’s condo before, but a place, like the person who inhabits it, can become close to one at the first encounter. Of course there were the things from the old house: the framed pictures of the children and Alena; the oil painting of a lone, whitewashed farmhouse dwarfed by the rolling green hills behind it, which used to hang in the family room; the sofa and the coffee table, both of which, Moran had once calculated, must be about her age, if not older. But more than these objects, it was the unclutteredness that reminded her of her own house. One could easily trace a life lived in solitude. The footprints, though invisible, were not hard for her to see: the steps to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, all taken out of necessity.

Moran asked Josef if he would like to lie down, and he said it would be better that he sit on the sofa. On the coffee table, five pills of three different colors lined up on a coaster, next to a glass of water. She asked if he needed to take the medicine now, and he said yes, and thanked her when she handed the water and the pills to him.

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.

“He tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others.” Reading it for the first time in English had been a bit of a shock. The words had lost their meaning; the line she’d underlined in her Chinese translation was, in English, an ordinary sentiment; or else something had caught her attention at seventeen but had lost its impact. Still, she had brought the book to show the words to Josef, though she wondered, after Winnie-the-Pooh, if it was pointless to do so. To start a life with a new language is like being returned to childhood — no one is really interested in your thoughts; all the world wants is for you to be contentedly occupied or else safely tucked away. Perhaps Josef was no different.

He seemed not to notice Moran’s change of mood. He asked her if she had plans for the Christmas break; she said no, and he said that if she liked, he would bring her to his friends’ house — a couple — as they always had the best gatherings on Christmas Eve, everyone singing Christmas carols at the end of the evening. Would his children come to the party, too? Moran asked, and Josef said that Thanksgiving was their family holiday. John and Mimi were planning to spend the week in Hawaii. Michael and Sharon were taking the children to see Sharon’s parents in Memphis. George and Rachel? Moran asked, and Josef said that they might or might not come. “I don’t want them to feel that they have to spend the holidays at home for my sake.”

Each member of the family, Moran thought, had a position in the world, and everything they did — working, raising children, partying, vacationing — added more assurance to that secured place. Even Josef, who hadn’t yet recovered from the most difficult year of his life, could rely on the consistency of his days — staff meetings at the library, choir practice, dinners with friends, and a meeting with Moran on Sunday afternoons. At Thanksgiving dinner, Moran had been impressed by the certainty of everyone in his family; no matter what the topics had been — college basketball, Bill Clinton’s second term, the different ways to cook a turkey, Rachel’s internship applications — the family members all seemed to have opinions, none of them shy to state his or her own. At times the back-and-forth had become a verbal game among the siblings or between a couple, and the ease with which they had carried on had given Moran an unreal sense that they lived in a TV show. But it must be her misimpression: what’s wrong with a family gathering around a table full of food and conversing in a lively way? In a parallel world, if things had happened differently, Moran herself could have belonged to such a scene: she would have remained friends with Boyang, and they would have bantered as easily — she dared not imagine them as a couple, but they would remain affectionate as siblings. In a parallel world Shaoai would have made a brilliant career for herself, as government permission was no longer required for working; Ruyu — what would have happened to her? — perhaps she would have moved out of their lives as abruptly as she had come in, but Boyang and Moran might not have felt the loss acutely: even someone like Ruyu could be replaced or forgotten, if one made the effort.

But there was only this one world, in which Moran had no position to claim as hers. This was not because she was a new immigrant; some of the other Chinese students she ran into on campus seemed as confident about America as they were about China. To have a position — any position — requires one to have opinions: Moran had none of them. What she did have were observations and questions — those that she asked Josef, to which he would provide answers, and those that she kept to herself, each unanswerable one pushing her further away from the world: sometimes she felt as though she was living from a long way off. Why couldn’t anyone detect the hollow echo of her voice when she spoke?

There was no reason not to accept Josef’s invitation to the Christmas gathering; perhaps she could play the role of a happy audience. When they left the café that day and reached Josef’s car — a Ford Taurus, as he had pointed out to her when he had learned her birthday, which made her a Taurus, too — Moran kicked the mudguards of both wheels on the right side. Chunks of frozen slush dropped to the ground with dull thuds, which strangely cheered her up. She had noticed other people doing that, and sometimes when she saw a car with too much accumulation behind the mudguards, she had an urge to give them a kick.

Josef looked at her oddly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it a bad thing to do?”

Of course it was not, he said, though he looked distracted. She wondered if the action was unladylike in his eyes, but he did not know her: he would never envision her riding a bicycle down an empty stretch of road in Beijing with both hands off the handlebars, or pedaling alongside Boyang, whistling a John Denver song in duet: Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong—years later, when a colleague of Moran’s whistled the song in the hallway, Moran would quietly weep into her hands, because a heart is always short one piece of its armor.

Josef drove quietly, and sensing his moodiness, Moran wrapped her scarf more tightly. He turned the heater up a notch, and then, without Moran’s prompting, he said that Alena used to do that, too. She could not stand even the smallest gathering of mud or slush, and it used to baffle him that she could feel so strongly about something trivial.

“Did you ask her why she did it?”

“Yes, but she didn’t know, either. She said she couldn’t help it.”

Moran had seen pictures of Alena at Josef’s house, looking down at one of her children, or, in a photo from their wedding, laughing away with a childhood friend. Had she kicked the mudguards for the simple satisfaction of getting rid of something unsightly, or had there been something within her that could only be expressed by a violent yet harmless action? Thinking about another woman’s past when the woman was no more had made Moran ashamed. That secret had belonged to Josef and, before that, to Alena.

A phone rang somewhere in the condo. Josef shifted on the sofa but did not wake up at once. Moran found the phone on the kitchen counter. She wondered if it was Rachel, and after a moment of hesitation, she took the call.

Rachel sounded flustered. “Oh, good, you’re still there with Dad,” she said.

“He’s taking a nap.”

“Will you be able to stay with him for a while? I promised I would come over, but the school just called. I think Willie is coming down with some sort of stomach bug.”

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Moran said. “Go ahead and take care of everything. I’ll be here.”

When she turned around, she saw that Josef had woken up. Was everything all right, he asked, and she repeated Rachel’s words. He nodded and said that Rachel had been stretched thin since his diagnosis.

If Moran tried again to talk about her plan to move back, it would be taking advantage of his guilt, though what if she talked to Rachel instead? Would her approval change his mind? But the thought of stepping from her hiding place behind Josef and speaking to Rachel made Moran uneasy. During her marriage to Josef, she had gotten along all right with his three sons, who had been living farther away; Rachel, who had stayed, had never liked Moran. Of course there were reasons for Rachel’s animosity: the protective instincts of a daughter toward her widowed father; her loyalty to Alena; Moran’s age — she was only three years older than Rachel; and Moran’s foreignness. Josef had only hinted at these things, though Moran had not needed him to spell them out; he had said that by and by Rachel would come around, and all they needed was a little patience.

To accept these reasons was to agree that everything could be explained by a few generalized statements: a stepmother is evil, a foreigner is not to be trusted, a dubious woman taken in by a good man will repay his kindness like the viper in Aesop’s fable, roses are red, violets are blue. But Moran found it hard to fit herself, or anyone for that matter, into a space secured by such unwavering convictions.

“You look pensive,” Josef said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Rachel,” Moran said honestly.

“She’s not what you remember from before.”

The last time Moran had seen Rachel, she had been engaged to Matt; the prospect of a happy life had made Rachel more resentful of Moran’s pending divorce from Josef. Certainly she was the only one who knew this was how things would turn out, Rachel had said then; her dad and her brothers had all let themselves be deceived. There had never been any scene between Rachel and Moran, but all the same, Rachel’s words had made Moran wonder if indeed she had used Josef, mistaking him for the starting point of a new story, abandoning him when that script had failed — one’s life could have only one beginning, and that happened at birth. When people talk about starting over, it’s only wishful thinking: what came before, what happened yesterday, did not come or happen in vain.

“How’s Rachel these days?” Moran asked. Earlier on the phone, she could hear in Rachel’s voice the weariness of middle age setting in. “And her family?”

It made Josef happy to talk about his children and grandchildren. Apart from George, his children had all settled down in the Midwest: Michael worked in hospital management in Omaha, and Sharon, after the two boys had started school, had gone back to graduate school and become a middle school teacher; John, who had trained as a child psychologist and had become the headmaster of a private school in Chicago, had three children with Mimi, and together he and Mimi had overcome some rocky patches in their marriage; Rachel and Matt had their own optometry business, where Matt worked as the optometrist while Rachel ran the business. Even George, who had moved away to Portland, Oregon, to be the co-owner of a food truck and who had stayed single, seemed to make Josef proud, if only because he found George’s life a little mysterious.

“So you see, everyone is in good shape. I’m lucky that way,” Josef said.

There was a solidness to Josef’s children that Moran felt attached to from afar, the way a traveler feels drawn to a fireplace seen from outside a window and between half-pulled curtains. Every time Moran walked past a party, she could not help but take a look: people in twos and threes chatting or smiling or sipping from near-empty glasses. Moran did not want to be there, but she held on to the belief that they were happier than she herself was. Of course there were dramas known only to themselves, but she believed that if they were troubled or distressed, they had sound reasons to feel that pain: when Rachel had broken up with her college boyfriend, it had been a volatile period filled with tears and then parties that had made Josef worry, but it was at one of those parties that she had met Matt, and all of a sudden things had been better; the six-month separation between John and Mimi, after Mimi could not continue her career as a vocalist when she had moved with John for his job, had for a while been disheartening, but she had since found enough to do with the church choir and an after-school program that she now felt fulfilled—no doubt Mimi’s word, as Josef had explained to Moran at one of his birthday lunches.

“You certainly should take some credit,” Moran said now. “Are you hungry? Do you want some food? Or a cup of tea?”

Josef looked at her as though he had not heard her questions. “Except — what do we do with you, Moran?”

“What’s there for you to worry about?” she said, and regretted right away that her voice sounded stern.

“You’re slow to move on, you know?” Josef said gently.

Moran wondered if he was speaking of her inability to move on from their divorce — or could it be that he was speaking of his own death? To ask a person if she could survive one’s death indicates a kind of arrogance, or else a love so deep that no one but a dying man would admit it.

“Moving on? That’s an American thing I don’t believe in,” she said. If one starts without a position, it’s meaningless to think about the next point in time and geography. The last Thanksgiving that Moran had been Josef’s wife — in 2001, not long after 9/11—the subject at the table had been moving on. Moving on — to where, or to what? she had thought to herself. She had seen the phrase often in the newspapers around that time and had found it more than baffling, though only Moran seemed to have doubts about what it meant for the country, for its people, to move on.

So much confidence, and where could one find evidence to prove that their optimism was justified? Even Alena’s senseless accident had not cast a single shadow of fatalism in her family’s hearts. When Josef had married Moran, his friends, despite their doubts, must have been comforted by the fact that he had moved on; after their divorce, moving on would have been part of what people had said to Josef — or had not even needed to — to make her stop mattering to him.