At lunch, Zichen told her two co workers that she was considering going to a new place for her vacation. Feeling more adventurous this year? Ted said. Since Zichen had begun to work with Henry and Ted, thirteen years earlier, she had taken two weeks off every November to visit China—her hibernation retreat, as Ted called it. England, she said now when he asked, and she wondered which would be more adventurous in her colleagues’ opinion, England or China.
Henry had been sent to Vietnam at eighteen, and had returned to Iowa six months later with ruptured intestines; at nineteen, barely recovered, he had married his high-school sweetheart. Every summer he and Caroline spent three weeks in a lakeside cabin in Wisconsin with their children and grandchildren. The farthest place Ted had travelled to was Chicago. A few years earlier, he had accompanied his daughter there for a high-school volleyball tournament; her team had lost in the final match, and with his daughter now a senior at the state university Ted still held Chicago responsible for the disappointment.
What’s there to see in England in November? Ted asked. Zichen did not answer, because anything she said would fall short of his expectations. In previous years, he had wondered belligerently what there was to see in China, and Henry had been the one to shush Ted. Like Zichen’s other acquaintances in America, they had been led to believe that in China she had a pair of parents, and that, like many, she had wedged some distance between herself and her parents, reducing her filial duty to an annual two-week visit.
What about China? Henry asked, laying out his lunch—a sandwich, a thermos of soup, and a banana—on a paper napkin. His time in the Army must have taught him to keep the contents of his life in good order. Henry was a neat man, his lab coat clean, what remained of his hair combed and parted precisely; he was quiet, but said enough not to seem sullen.
Her parents were taking a tour to Thailand with a group of retired people, Zichen said. Why couldn’t she meet them in Thailand? Ted demanded, and predicted that she would see nothing in England but rain and coldness and people who were too polite to ask her to repeat her name.
There was a reason to visit a place where one’s name was unpronounceable, Zichen thought, just as there was a reason that her parents continued to share a life in their daughter’s mind. A month from now, rather than telling Henry and Ted about England, Zichen knew she would be relating tales of her parents’ trip to Thailand: the crowded marketplace after nightfall, the cabaret show that they disliked but felt obliged to enjoy because it was said to be the highlight of their tour, the hotel bed that was too hard, or perhaps too soft. There were other moments, also imagined, though these she would keep to herself: her father’s insistence on splitting a dish in a restaurant because he was unwilling to pay for two, her mother eying a grain of rice on her father’s sleeve without pointing it out. They would’ve been one of those couples who had married young, and had, over the years, developed their separate ways to live with the mistake, he with his tyranny, she with her wordless contempt.
Henry, Ted, and Zichen worked in an animal-care center, in a two-story brick building next to a research facility that a hundred years ago had been an infirmary for tuberculosis patients. Because they were on the edge of a university town—the facility, a satellite site that housed some projects from the medical school, was in the middle of cornfields—the three of them had over the years become a more or less autonomous unit. Janice, their supervisor, a tall and angular woman who took pride in her extreme fairness and efficiency, came for a routine inspection once a week; Dr. Wilson, the attending veterinarian, a genial and absent-minded man, was about to retire any day now. The only crisis since Zichen had begun to work there—if one did not count the time the water was contaminated and fifty cages of mice contracted hepatitis, or the occasions when breeding went wrong, and the due date passed without a litter, or worse, with a disturbed mother mouse feeding on her own babies—was when a group of animal-rights activists had tried to break into the building on the eve of the new millennium. They had given up when the alarm went off, and instead liberated cages of minks from a farm thirty miles west on the country road. The farmer and his family had recovered less than a third of their loss, the local paper had reported. The rest of the minks, the farmer had told the Gazette, would not survive the Midwest winter and their many predators.
Zichen had been reading the newspaper in the office, pondering the fate of the homeless minks, when Henry, looking over her shoulder, said that he and the farmer had gone to the same high school. She was about to express her sympathy for his old classmate when Henry mentioned that the guy had once pursued Caroline when he was in Vietnam. She was glad that Caroline had not married the mink farmer, Zichen said, and Henry said he was, too, though come to think about it, perhaps Caroline wouldn’t have minded a mink coat. Ted, entering the office with a stack of yellow death slips to file and overhearing the conversation, reminded Henry that a mink farmer’s wife does not wear mink, just as cobblers’ children have no shoes. What does that mean? Zichen asked. When the expression was explained to her, she thought of the way her grandmother used to clip her hair shorter than a boy’s, in summer or winter, but this would not make a good office tale.
Zichen had grown up in her grandmother’s hair salon—a small shack really, at the entrance of an apartment complex, with a wooden plank propped up by two stacks of bricks that served as a bench for the waiting customers, a folding chair in front of a mirror that hung from a low beam, and a makeshift washstand, next to which a kettle of water was kept warm on a coal stove. On the curtain that separated the salon from the bed shared by Zichen and her grandmother, there were prints of bunnies, white on a green-and-yellow background. There was no window in the shack, and a fluorescent light was turned on the moment her grandmother opened up the shop and continued buzzing until the end of the day, giving everything a perpetual bluish-white hue.
That her grandmother could have had an easier life in her old age was made clear to Zichen from her first years: Zichen’s two uncles—her mother’s elder brothers—would have dutifully taken in their mother, and between the two families they would have seen to it that she had a decent retirement. But how could you burden your own sons with a child like that? her grandmother used to ask her customers, as though the time Zichen had spent in the shop learning to sit up and then to walk, and later to assist her grandmother, handing her warm towels or cleaning the ashtrays—two blue-and-white china bowls placed at either end of the bench, the rims chipped, filled with smoldering cigarette ends and streaks of ash—had never softened the shock of the child’s existence. It would have been a different story had she been an orphan, her grandmother would say; it would have been sensible for any uncle to take in an orphan, a statement her audience readily agreed with. Indeed, a woman who had run away with a man against her family’s wish, who had given birth to a baby out of wedlock, and had then been abandoned by the man—that mother would have done her baby more of a favor had she died during childbirth.
It hadn’t taken long for Zichen to piece together her own story from the parts alluded to by her grandmother and uncles and customers and neighbors: that her grandmother had agreed to raise her on the condition that her mother sever all connections with the family; that a couple had once come to the shop to look her over, but then decided not to adopt her; that she owed her life not only to her grandmother, who had to toil at an age when other women could rest, but also to the patrons of the shop, who remained loyal to her grandmother because of the responsibility they felt toward her.
Sitting on a bamboo stool in a corner and listening to her own luck, both good and bad, discussed, Zichen would clandestinely move her feet and make piles of hair according to a system known only to her. Inevitably the game would be interrupted by the strokes of her grandmother’s broom, but even that did not disturb Zichen, as the disassembling of the small hills of hair could also be part of her scheme. Quit grinning like an idiot, her grandmother would sometimes tell Zichen, turning from her clipping, and Zichen would straighten her face, but when her grandmother turned back to her customer she smiled again at the back of a man’s half-shaved head, or at the shoelaces of someone waiting on the bench. Where on earth did the girl get that smile? her grandmother complained to the customers. One would think a child like that should know how to make people forget her for a moment.
Hydrangea House, a sixteenth-century timber-framed house, had served as a family home for generations before it was turned into a B. and B.; Zichen wondered, reading the information provided on its Web site, how such a change had come about. Perhaps the owners would tell her when she asked—if not the whole story, then bits and pieces that would nevertheless delight her.
On the Web site, there were no photographs of the kind that other places, with more business-minded management, displayed: blooming flowers in a garden or soft-colored curtains lifted by unseen wind. Instead, a small sketch of the house, made in ink or perhaps pencil, showed little except a whitewashed front wall and four rectangular windows. It was said to be “never a grand house”; two rooms, the Rose Room and the Lilac Room, were available upstairs.
The modest, almost apologetic way that Hydrangea House advertised itself made it easy for Zichen to choose it. The trip to England, despite Henry’s bafflement and Ted’s disapproval, was becoming a certainty in her mind. Tomorrow she would buy the plane ticket; next week she would call and reserve a room.
Contrary to Henry and Ted’s beliefs, Zichen was neither an experienced nor a willing traveller. The summer she had begun to work at the animal-care center, Ted had invited her, along with Caroline and Henry, to a picnic on the Fourth of July. She had apologized and said that she needed to go to the East Coast to visit her husband, who had finished graduate school earlier that year and moved away for a job.
Before the holiday weekend, she had purchased more food than she could consume, and for four days she had hidden herself in her apartment and worked slowly through a Latin reader of Cicero’s speeches. She had picked up the book from the library not for any grand ideas she might glean from the text; sometimes she forgot a sentence the moment she figured out its meaning. But the effort of making sense out of something that was at first glance indecipherable satisfied her, as did the slowness of the activity: an hour or two would pass as she made her way through one passage on a war; a day that would have otherwise been long was shortened.
Her interest in a dead language had been one of the things her husband had held against her when he asked for the divorce, which to Zichen had come neither as a surprise nor as a disappointment. There was a practical order of things for an immigrant couple like them, he had once explained to her. They would start a family when they had finally made it, he’d said comfortingly when the baby that Zichen so desired, who must have sensed itself unwanted by its father, miscarried. He’d had plans for her to go to graduate school to become a statistician, or an accountant, or a nurse, part of that order of things that would help them make it in the new country; he was finishing a Ph.D. in mathematics, and had a goal of working on Wall Street. Zichen, never arguing, for arguing was not in her nature, nevertheless dismissed his blueprint for her career with unconcealed resistance. There was no use in her copying Latin vocabulary onto flashcards, he had yelled at her—only once, as yelling was not in his nature, either—when she had outraged him by missing the G.R.E. test he had registered her to take, wasting more than a hundred dollars, half a month’s rent.
The marriage had ended shortly before he moved away, but Zichen had used him to excuse herself from two years of social life. The cheek of it. When she lied to Henry and Ted, she could hear her grandmother’s words, those she would say after Zichen had read her report card aloud in the shop. Unable to concentrate, the teachers commented every year; a lack of interest in both studying and participating in school activities. Her grades were meagre, barely good enough for her to proceed to the next level. What will you do with your life if you don’t catch up with your schoolwork? her grandmother’s customers ceaselessly asked her; not knowing the answer, she would smile as though she did not understand the question, and it was her smile more than her grades that had marked her as beyond teachable.
Zichen had given Henry and Ted a skeletal account of her divorce the third year into her work, as it had not felt right to continue to lie about a marriage that no longer existed. But an ex-husband was easy to be done with and never mentioned again, while a pair of parents, even if they lived on another continent, needed careful maintenance: an annual trip; phone calls that brought news from China; presents to take home—Wisconsin ginseng for her father, anti-aging cream for her mother.
She could easily take the usual trip back to China this year, a routine unbroken, thus causing little concern or suspense, but the truth was the shack that had housed her grandmother’s shop had been demolished, her grandmother reduced to an urn of ashes. Her grandmother had lived in the shop until a month before her death, at ninety-three, and Zichen knew that for as long as her grandmother had lived there the shop door was opened every morning, the fluorescent light kept on till closing time, as it was during her annual visits. The news of the death had reached Zichen after the funeral; she had not been invited to it, as she knew her mother had not been. Together they, rather than an early widowhood, were blamed for her grandmother’s harsh life; together they had been the old woman’s disappointments, a daughter who had brought humiliation to the family, a granddaughter who had rashly married a man she had met twice and had then been unable to stay married for longer than three years.
The B. and B. was in a village called Neville Hill, some distance from Brighton, but to simplify the matter Zichen told Ted and Henry that Brighton was her final destination. They were eating lunch together, savoring one of the last warm autumn days before a cold front set in. She described the places she wanted to see: the promenade, the beach, the English Channel.
“Now, explain two things to me,” Ted said, and for a moment Zichen thought Henry looked relieved that someone was going to confront her as he would never do. “First, why do you want to go to the beach in the winter?”
November was not winter yet, Zichen argued, and Ted merely nodded at her with a triumphant smile as though he had cornered a runaway rat that Zichen wasn’t able to catch. It was rare that a mouse or a rat slipped through her grip, and when it did happen—a few times over the years—Ted would talk about it for days afterward with a childlike glee. When you touch an animal, it can tell right away if you are nervous or if you are the master, Henry had explained to Zichen when he trained her. Ted, during the first weeks, had liked to seek her out and tell her gruesome tales; his favorite one concerned a homemade rat guillotine that he and Henry had once built for a neurologist’s study. But to her co-workers’ surprise Zichen had never been jittery. She had applied for the opening because she had no other profitable skills, but in retrospect she wondered if she had found the right job out of blind luck. From the beginning, she had clipped a mouse’s ear or prepped a rat for a skin graft as deftly as if she had always worked with animals. Even the bigger mammals had not distressed her: the monkeys that clamored in the cages and made faces at her when she came in with feed or a hose, the forlorn-looking dogs that rarely barked. After her training, Henry had told her that he and Ted would split the care of bigger mammals because they thought her too small, for instance, to dispose of a thirty-pound carcass by herself. The Rodent Queen—on her thirtieth birthday, they had left a toy crown on her desk, the words scrawled on with permanent marker.
“Now, winter or not winter,” Ted said. “Why do you want to go to England all by yourself?”
People travelled alone all the time, Zichen said, and there was nothing wrong with that.
“But what are you going to do in a place where you don’t know anyone?”
“How do you know I don’t know anyone there?” Zichen said, but the moment the words came out she regretted them. Over the years she had become accustomed to who she was in other people’s eyes: she knew she would be considered a loser by her Chinese acquaintances in America, a divorced woman toiling her life away in an animal-care facility, someone who had failed to make it; in her landlord’s and neighbors’ eyes she was the quiet, good-mannered foreigner who paid her rent on time, who every Halloween put out a couple of pumpkins, uncarved but with drawn-on eyes and mouths, and who had no visitors on weekends or holidays, so there was no conflict regarding the guest parking; for her grandmother and her aging customers, who spent their days in the shack for conversation and companionship more than for the care of their thinning hair or balding heads, she was—despite being a baby who should have remained unborn, a child with little merit and an unnerving manner, and a young woman who had no respect for marriage or her own future—a proof, in the end, of the ultimate mercy of life. She had been able to build a life out of her failures, to wire dollars to her grandmother, to return every year like a loyal homing pigeon and sit with the old customers, still with that unnerving smile on her face although they no longer cared; simply sitting with them and listening to them had absolved Zichen of all possible sins.
But it was who she was in the eyes of Henry and Ted that she cherished the most: sure-handed and efficient at her job, quiet yet at times chatty, uncomplicated. That she had memorized passages from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” that she had read its Latin translation before reading the English text, she did not share with them, because that would make her an eccentric in their eyes. The things that gave her pleasure—the pile of wood shavings meant for the animals’ bedding, which she assembled into small hills; the time she spent imagining her ex-husband in a pale-blue suburban house in New Jersey, his two sons growing up and looking more like him each year, his new wife unaging; the marriage she had given her father, whom she had never known, and her mother, whom she had met only once, in a small one-bedroom apartment in an older neighborhood in Beijing—these she did not share with Henry and Ted, because they would have made her a person with a history, in this or that time, this or that place.
“So, you are meeting someone in England?” Ted said.
“No,” Zichen said. “Why should I?”
The unusual confrontational tone in her reply made Ted flinch, as though he had trespassed. He shrugged and, with a theatrical gesture, threw a half-eaten sandwich to a squirrel. Years earlier, Molly, Ted’s wife, had asked Zichen if she wanted to meet someone she knew who was available; Henry’s wife, Caroline, had mentioned once or twice her Chinese dentist, divorced, according to his office manager. When Zichen had not followed up on either lead, the women had not pressed her. Henry and Ted had never asked about her personal life. The ease into which the three of them had settled left her life outside work irrelevant, and she liked to imagine that for them it was as natural for her to cease to exist the moment she left work as it was natural that she could handle the animals with confidence and calm. The only time they had experienced discomfort was when Henry first trained her to breed the mice—he had asked Ted to be present when he showed her how to detect vaginal plugs, the evidence of successful copulation. Beet red, Henry had grabbed a few females to display their private parts to Zichen, then explained that sometimes the plugs did not guarantee pregnancy. Ted, rearranging the charts on the cages with a look of concentration, had remained uncharacteristically quiet on a subject that he might otherwise have joked about with Henry.
Had Ted been offended by her abruptness, Zichen wondered, but she could not find the words to soften the tension as he continued to whistle to the squirrel, which was ignoring his generosity. She had unwisely opened a door and then clumsily slammed it shut, but perhaps some harm had already been done.
“You’ll do just fine,” Henry said when it was apparent that Ted would not fill the rest of the lunch break with one of his favorite topics, the upcoming basketball game or a wrestling match. “When you think about it, I’ve seen my share of pictures of China but never any of England.”
Zichen took pictures when she travelled to China, of things she imagined Henry might like to see, or of strange sights that would offer Ted an opportunity to criticize. Yes, she agreed. England would be a good change. She then dusted off the crumbs from the picnic table so that they would not find ants crawling over their space the next day. Before she had joined them, Henry and Ted used to eat in the office, the door open to the hallway with its constant odor of bleach and rodent pellets and damp bedding and dead animals; they did not seem to be bothered by this, but when Henry noticed that Zichen often sat on the steps in front of the building to eat her lunch, he had requested a picnic table as an improvement for their work environment.
Josephina, the proprietress of Hydrangea House, had been easy to talk with on the phone. If she had felt curious as to why a woman from America with an unpronounceable Chinese name would want to spend two weeks in Neville Hill she had not shown it. Zichen wondered, after the phone call, whether the thought would be shared with Josephina’s husband; she wondered if they would decide that such a question did not matter in a bed-and-breakfast business.
When she got to Neville Hill, Zichen would explain to the owners that she had come in memory of an elderly woman who had befriended her when she first moved to America. Margaret was the woman’s name. She had spent her childhood in Neville Hill before marrying an American pastor, John Hubor, and had lived in the States for fifty-three years. Would the couple at Hydrangea House try to locate a girl in the village’s past, one who had left, taken away by a marriage after the war? Perhaps they had heard of a girl named Margaret, or perhaps they would apologize for having no such recollection. The truth was, the name Neville Hill had never been mentioned in any of Zichen’s conversations with Margaret, yet it was Neville Hill that Zichen had decided to go to, her research fitting the village to an old woman’s descriptions: the school trips to Seaford taken on foot; the car rides to Brighton for special family occasions.
It was in the spring of 1994 when Zichen had met Margaret and John, in a supermarket; the autumn of 1995 when Margaret had been buried in a hillside cemetery. In the aisle between shelves of sugar, flour, and cooking utensils, Margaret had mistaken Zichen for a Chinese student she knew, who had recently graduated and moved to California; John had invited Zichen to become their friend, as the woman before her must have been invited, whose name Margaret had used for Zichen for as long as she had visited their house.
She would describe Margaret to the couple at Hydrangea House, and tell them how Margaret had tutored her in English when she first arrived in America because she had wanted Zichen, a young woman who had left her country for marriage, to have a friendship.
Growing up, Zichen had never had a close friend. A bastard was what some of the children at school had called her, the word learned from older siblings. Once, when Zichen was ten, and tired of being teased by her schoolmates, she had pointed to a neighbor who was passing by on the street and said that he was her real father. The man, overhearing Zichen’s claim, had paled but said nothing—he had recently divorced, and his twin daughters had moved away with their mother.
The cheek of it; her grandmother would have been shocked by her shamelessness. The man Zichen had appointed as her father, a week later, asked her if she would like to see a butterfly exhibit that he perhaps imagined his own daughters would enjoy. Across the street from the park was the Friendship Hotel, and after the exhibit the man took her to the hotel entrance. It was one of only two hotels where foreigners were allowed to stay in Beijing, he explained; once, when he and his daughters were there, an American had given each of the girls a chocolate. It was ridiculous to stand in front of a hotel for the prospect of a chocolate; still, Zichen smiled at the two armed guards, and, later, at a pair of foreigners walking out of the hotel. The couple, both with pale skin and straw-colored hair, must have assumed that the man and Zichen were father and daughter, for they signalled and made it understood that they would take a picture of them. It was the first Polaroid Zichen had seen. The man had offered it to her, but she had refused to take it, the unspoken agreement being that their lives would go on as though the outing had never happened.
As a teen-ager she was one of the girls no one wanted to be close to; she was too strange and unpredictable to be a confidante, too inconspicuous to be a subject of any confidences. At that age, friendship had to offer drama or ease; she had been unable to provide either, and later, as a young woman, had been unable to provide either to attract a boy.
Yet it was ease she had offered in Margaret’s brightly lit sunroom, giving the old woman the impression that she was tutoring Zichen, although the language they were studying was not English but Latin. Margaret’s mind by then had been tangled, and Zichen, working by herself through “Wheelock’s Latin,” nonetheless allowed the old woman the luxury of repetitions: farmer, farmer, of the farmer, to the farmer, by the farmer, O farmer. Repeated, too, were the memories of Margaret’s childhood village, which she must have known by then she would not be able to visit again: the trail that led to a secret pond, the couple in the red-roofed farmhouse giving birth to a baby who had six fingers on one hand. Every spring saw a batch of new chicks in the yard; in the summer the fluffy clouds sometimes stayed motionless for hours; any month could be called a rainy season, and the rain seemed to keep their house perpetually damp and chilly.
It was kind of Zichen to come and sit with Margaret, John had said the first time he drove her home at the end of the afternoon, apologizing for Margaret’s confusions. She had come from a seaman’s family, he had told Zichen on another ride home, as if that explained the fact that Margaret had picked up fourteen languages, when all of them, other than Latin and French and English, had been learned during her decades of marriage in America. Toward the summer of her last year, Margaret had shown signs of the approaching end, her words sometimes ungraspable even for John. Out of the blue one day she had produced a copy of “Winnie Ille Pu,” the first edition of the Latin translation, for Zichen as a present; the translator, like Margaret and Zichen, was a man who had left home and settled in a foreign land, but that fact Zichen discovered only later.
No, she had not heard of “Winnie-the-Pooh,” she had told John in the car that day. She had not had any children’s books when she was growing up. It must have been the gentle sadness in John’s eyes that had made her tell him other things, of being called a bastard when young, of having miscarried a baby, of not loving her husband. John, a careful driver, had removed a hand from the steering wheel and held hers for the rest of the drive. Had that been a moment of deception? Zichen wondered sometimes; had she betrayed Margaret’s friendship?—not because Margaret had ever learned of the moment from Zichen or from John but because Zichen had relived it now and again, long after Margaret had been buried and John had moved away to Sioux City, to be close to his children and eventually, as he had explained to Zichen after Margaret’s funeral, to be placed in a nursing home.
Once a year in December, Henry took Ted and Zichen out for a drink in a nearby village called Tiffin, since none of them liked the places in the university town, where the music was too loud, and the college students made heartless noises. The bar was on a country road and was never full. The men there were older; some of them, the more talkative ones, had once played in a paintball league with Henry; others remained reticent. The bartender, a former wrestler who had been a state champion in high school, liked to tease Ted; every year, he asked him what color underwear he had on that day, for Ted, being Ted, had once bragged that he bought only two kinds: black-and-gold for the university’s colors, and red-and-white for his high school, which was also his wife’s and his daughter’s alma mater. The men at the bar had always been courteous toward Zichen, but as the years went by they had grown more relaxed, raising their glasses to her when she arrived, calling her the Rodent Queen.
A mail-order bride she was, she had told the bartender one year, when she had drunk more than she should have. It was not true, for there had not been any business transaction in her marriage: she and her ex-husband had agreed to marry after meeting twice in a teahouse near her grandmother’s shop, he choosing her because she had grown up in a harsh environment, which would make her a good companion in America, she choosing him because of America.
It had made her feel happy for a moment, voicing the words “mail-order bride” and watching the bartender take in the information with an acknowledgment that felt neither aloof nor unnecessarily concerned. It would make her happy, too, she knew, when she told the story in Hydrangea House about Margaret and reading “Winnie-the-Pooh” in Latin, about how she herself, inexperienced with the language, had let the poor bear’s head thump and thump again on the stairs.
“Your father and I did what we could for you,” Zichen’s mother had said, the only time they had met, perhaps the only time, too, since giving birth to Zichen that she had put herself and Zichen’s father in the same sentence. Zichen did not know why her mother had agreed to see her before her departure for America, but she had recognized, at the first sight of her mother, the sternness and the stubbornness she had grown used to in her grandmother’s face. One’s parents could do only so much, her mother had explained, and a child was responsible for her own life. Her mother had not told her anything about her father, saying only that they had long since lost contact; she had not said anything about her new family, either, even though Zichen had known there was one, with a husband and two children. That Zichen’s grandmother had kept her in order to spite her rebellious and humiliated daughter Zichen had always known; that her mother had given birth to her in order to spite her father had become evident when they met.
Every year, on the drive back from the out-of-town bar, Zichen sat in the back of the car and quietly wept. Henry drove cautiously, both hands gripping the steering wheel, as he always did after a drink, while Ted, in the passenger seat, talked with expert knowledge about a coming basketball game. She blamed the alcohol for her tears—that, and the cold moon in the winter sky.
One year when Ted had asked to be dropped off first, to attend a wrestling match, she had told Henry that she had grown up without knowing her parents’ love for each other. Through the windshield she watched the frozen rain rushing toward them, and when the sound of the windshield wipers seemed too loud she said that her parents had stayed in the marriage because of her; and they had learned to tolerate each other for her sake. It was as close to the truth as she could get—she wished she could tell Henry about the man in front of the Friendship Hotel, or John’s hand holding hers, but those stories would make her a different person in Henry’s eyes—and afterward he patted her on the back as he walked her to her door, saying it was all right, because that was all he could say.
In Hydrangea House, perhaps she would tell the owners about her grandmother and her mother, the two women in her life whose blind passions had sustained them through the blows of fate, but even as she imagined that she knew she wouldn’t. There was no way to leave herself out of their battle stories, and she knew that in all stories she must be left out—the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people’s lives. ♦
