Audio: Yiyun Li reads.
Had she been born in a different era, Becky thought, and without the education to qualify as a governess, she might have become a wet nurse, offering nourishment in the most mindless form to an infant from a wealthy family. But the idea, explored in detail—what, who, when, where, why, how, those questions Becky had obediently followed in grade school without recognizing the terror of such scrutiny—was disturbing, not even a legitimate secret.
“You know, I hate museums.” The man next to Becky leaned over so that she alone could hear this confession. She nodded. To be a wet nurse one had to be a mother first. What was the point of wishing for that profession, then?
“It makes me angry,” the man said as he and Becky joined the others in clapping. The woman who was taking the podium was the director of this freshly remodelled San Francisco museum. “It makes me angry that I don’t own the art work. I’d hate to share with others. They’d never see what I see.”
He wore a bright-red necktie, which reminded Becky of SpongeBob SquarePants, but nothing about the man himself, who was tall and had to stoop a little to talk to her, resembled SpongeBob. It was terrible of her to seek connections that allowed her to feel closer to her son. Jude was six, and was being seen by two specialists four afternoons a week. He had no interest in making friends because he already had what he wanted: a SpongeBob pillow, and himself.
The man in the red tie said something, and Becky, not catching the words, nodded in confirmation. “So you like museums?” he said with disapproval, and then, forgivingly, “Most people do.”
Becky could see herself transcribing this conversation in her journal later that night. She would note that the man had reminded her of SpongeBob. Soon his face and his voice would fade from her memory; only the red tie and his words would remain. Becky had started to keep a journal when Jude’s condition was diagnosed. There was nothing private in it, just descriptions of strangers: a man brushing his teeth on a bench at a bus stop; a woman in Busy Mart calling a boy strapped in a stroller “a two-headed moron”; a handyman setting up beehives in the yard of the neighbor, who had given Becky a jar of honey when she scratched her car while backing it into the garage.
Becky’s hope was that someday Jude would read her journal and recognize what he would miss if he didn’t pay attention to people. She tried to make those appearing in her journal interesting—interesting enough, but not too much. She did not want Jude to think the world was an exciting party and he was born to be left out, nor did she want him to be disappointed by its predictability and decide to stay in his cocoon.
Not entering Becky’s journal were family members and friends—the journal was not kept as a secret from Max, and even the most innocuous words about her husband or others close to her could be read the wrong way. She did not record anyone she met in the therapists’ waiting rooms, either. The parents there were confronted by their own anxieties in others’ faces, as if peering into mirrors. The children, too, were mirrors for one another, though they, inward-looking, did not seek solace from those caught in the same situation. And then there were people for whom the waiting rooms were only an extension of the world at large: a grandfather who insisted on talking with his wife on speakerphone for half an hour; the Guatemalan nanny who often stopped in the middle of her crossword puzzles and frowned at him, gesturing at his back with a thumb-to-ear, pinkie-to-mouth sign; the au pairs accompanying a skinny boy whose parents had never been seen at the therapists’—a Polish girl, followed by an Austrian who stayed for only a short time before being replaced by another girl from Poland. They’re going to Tahoe for Christmas, the one who had not lasted had told Becky; they said to me, Isn’t it nice you’ll have the whole house to yourself for a week? My mother said, Oh, no, you can’t spend your first Christmas in America all alone, that’s just too sad. Becky had thought about inviting the girl over for Christmas Eve. They hosted a dinner every year, joined by Max’s parents and siblings and their families. But it might have looked as though she were soliciting the girl’s help with Jude, taking advantage of her loneliness. Becky was good at uncovering nonexistent motivations in her actions.
She looked past the SpongeBob man at the nearest painting, a splash of colors that she found both familiar and exhausting. Seeing a painting in a museum and making an effort to understand it was enough of a responsibility. Owning it would be too much. Owning it would be like inheriting a tree, being accountable for its existence even after the person who planted it had vanished. Yet a tree you can cut down with a permit and a reliable crew. A piece of art is like a child: you can’t use your mediocre imagination to change anything about it. On the other hand, you can’t put a price tag on a child; you can’t put him up for auction. Perhaps the SpongeBob man was talking about one’s progeny. You can’t share with others who your child truly is (Jude who talked about semidemisemiquavers and semihemidemisemiquavers at breakfast as though they were floating in his cereal bowl), and you hate to see him through their eyes (Jude who had made himself a sign in kindergarten—“Im Not taLKING because I DON’t WaNT TO!”—and had been mute at school ever since).
The woman finished her speech, and people milled about with a purposefulness that felt amiss to Becky. Max’s boss, the chief of cardiology at the hospital and a longtime friend of the woman on the stage, had purchased two tables. Becky watched Max talk with a colleague, each taking turns laughing at the other’s joke. She raised her champagne flute to look at them through the bubbles, and their perfect social demeanor became less impressive. Perhaps that was how the world appeared to Jude, none of its inhabitants as engaging as a cluster of rising bubbles. But Jude might never find himself at an event like this. He might never drink champagne or taste caviar; he might never hold a woman’s hands in candlelight; he might never backpack through Peru or Scotland. Oh, the places he’ll not go, and the things he’ll miss in life!
But how do you know I’d miss them? asked Jude, who was not mute at home and was especially articulate when he was alone with Becky. She had been talking about soccer club and Little League and the birthday parties to which he was invited, because everyone was invited at that age. If you don’t miss them now, you may someday, she said. But how do you know? he said. These are the things people usually enjoy, she said, and you may feel sad if you miss them. I shan’t, he said. I find little amusement in them. I shan’t: no one around Jude spoke like that, but he kept the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary by his bedside. What amuses you? she asked. Dots and squiggly lines, he said. What? she said. You don’t get it, he said, sighing. You can’t see them.
Another man approached Becky. Even a banal conversation was a relief from a masterpiece staring back in silence, and she was ready to be saved. The man, wearing a plaid hat and a plaid jacket, appeared out of place among the dark suits and festive dresses. He asked Becky if she liked the painter, and she shook her head noncommittally. “What about you?”
“I can’t say I like him. Too febrile for my taste.”
Becky noticed his accent, the kind its owner would not hide, each word hanging on to the lips with a demure graciousness. Years ago, when Becky had been a work-study student in a research lab, she had overheard her manager tell a visiting foreign scholar that people in the Midwest did not have any accent. Mainstream American English, she said, which made Becky feel bland and transparent. Recently, while Becky was waiting for jury duty, a woman had told her that she was originally from Spain and was a linguistics professor but that at a summer party she had gone to with her sister and brother-in-law no one would talk to her: she had walked in with a nephew in her arms and a niece clutching her sleeve. They thought I was the nanny, the woman said. My sister, of course, my gorgeous sister with her handsome husband, she was in no hurry to correct the misunderstanding. The woman and her sister had entered Becky’s journal that night.
“I wonder what would happen if someone splashed more colors onto that painting,” Becky said when the man did not contribute a new question.
“I believe that’s called vandalism, and it’s against the law.”
“I mean, if someone owned it. Would that still be illegal?”
The man looked at Becky. “Please allow me to say—and this is from my study of human motivations—there must be a reason you ask the question.”
“What’s the reason?”
“Might it be that you want to purchase the painting so you can do something to it?”
“It’s not for sale.”
“Things can always be arranged, wouldn’t you agree?”
“But what would I want to do?”
“Might it be that you perceive imperfection in the painting and want to add your own touch? Or even destroy it?”
Jude could have been a suitable conversation partner for this man. Professorial and stilted, the neuropsychologist had said of Jude’s speech. She was the second one they had consulted; the first had been unable to get Jude to speak. I concur, Becky had wanted to reply to the neuropsychologist, using Jude’s phrase. Perhaps there was hope still. This man in front of her, after all, with his odd demeanor that might appear as affectation to unsympathetic eyes, had been invited to the gala.
He asked her if she was an artist. No, she said. A patron of the arts? he said. Not at all, she said, and you? He took a pipe out of his pocket and said he had dallied in a few things here and there but nothing too special. Becky was about to point out that smoking was not allowed when he put the pipe back. “Dr. Watson,” he said, “would disapprove.”
Oh, Becky thought. Perhaps others would have recognized him right away from his outfit. “Is Dr. Watson here, too?” she said, feeling apologetic that he had been forced to drop the most obvious hint.
“He’s tied up at the moment. Another engagement. Not as engaging as this one, I’m afraid.”
“What kind of engagement?”
The man smiled. “As a matter of fact”—he lowered his voice—“they didn’t have a budget for Dr. Watson.”
“They what?”
“A good sidekick is still a sidekick, no?” the man said. He took the pipe out again and toyed with it. “But look around. There are a few other people like me out there.”
Becky could not see anyone else who stood out.
“Naturally, they wouldn’t want something as unimaginative as Vincent,” the man said, caressing his ear. “Or, for that matter, Frida. But give it a try—you may be able to spot de Kooning or Joseph Cornell. Matisse is under the weather, so he may not look himself tonight. Georgia O’Keeffe is here, but I’m afraid her beauty is too malleable to make a lasting impression.”
“Who are you?”
“I believe you know the answer.”
“What I mean is, who are you really? I don’t believe you unless you point out someone. Show me O’Keeffe.”
“I’m not supposed to do that. We leave our clients to form their own conclusion as to whether we do a good job or not.”
“Then why didn’t you follow the rules? And why are you here? You’re not even an artist.”
“Well, I’m their boss,” the man said, and handed her a business card. “Ossie Gulliver. Here’s my agency’s information.”
“OG Talent & Model,” the card said. When Becky looked up, Ossie Gulliver was sidling up to another guest, to reveal his secret and perhaps to find the right person who would become a future client.
Later that night, Becky wrote the man with the red tie into her journal but not the man in the Sherlock Holmes costume. Why? she asked herself, as though she were hiding an affair. She suspected that Ossie Gulliver was a made-up name. Still, a named man would claim more personal space than a man in a red tie. It could become an affair. Becky still had his business card, and with the pretense of hiring him for an event she could make a call. In movies, a romance could start that way, but even the most clichéd affair required a kind of talent she did not possess.
Becky was a good woman, and it required little talent to be good. Before she and Max moved to California, she had worked in a hospital in Sioux City as a float-pool nurse, a well-liked colleague. She was close to her three brothers, who still lived in Correctionville. Becky, the only one who had left, returned twice a year, for a family reunion in the first week of August and at Thanksgiving. She was friendly with her neighbors and the other mothers in the therapists’ waiting rooms, and she stayed in touch with people, some of whom she had known since her time at the Country Kidds preschool. Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver, and the other gold. Becky thought of herself as one of those folktale misers, never letting a person slip out of her life. Jude, spinning in the schoolyard during recess or rocking himself back and forth, was a penniless pauper boy—he couldn’t even inherit her silver and gold.
They couldn’t live for him forever, Becky said sometimes, as though in despair, but the truth was that she felt soothed by the statement; exonerated, really. No parent could do that for a child, Max reminded her. He believed in science, intervention, and his will power as a father. He treated Jude not as the boy facing the social challenges spelled out in the neuropsychologist’s report but as the man who would one day overcome all those hurdles. Max did not ask, as Becky did, what had gone wrong with her pregnancy; nor did he waste his energy, whenever there was a mass shooting, worrying that it would be linked to a young man on the autism spectrum. But how could he be so certain that they had not failed Jude by simply giving him a life? Max was the brave one, and bravery made questioning unnecessary.
Perhaps that was the talent Becky was missing: she wanted a comprehensible life, but she did not comprehend her life. She could not begin an affair because it required imagination. She could not understand Jude because her mind was too commonplace. Who knows better’n I do what normal is? Hazel, Harrison’s mother in “Harrison Bergeron,” asks. Becky had to Google to get the sentence right. She remembered Mr. Hagen, her English teacher, talking at length about that Vonnegut line in high school. Read it ten, twenty years from now, he had told the class. Becky was sketching Lance Elliot’s back when Mr. Hagen said that. Lance was the tallest boy in her junior year, and she imagined that Harrison Bergeron would look like Lance. Becky wished she had been a ballerina.
Reading the sentence now, she had an odd feeling that the line should have belonged to her, and that Harrison’s mother had plagiarized her. It was not fair that Jude would never become a child who played goalie for a soccer team or pulled pranks on his friends—but, no, that was the wrong way to think. What was not fair was that Jude had Becky, who was so normal, as his mother. A woman capable of having an affair with Ossie Gulliver would be a better choice, a mother who would rearrange the world for Jude. Becky would be better off being a wet nurse: providing was enough, understanding uncalled for.
Ossie Gulliver, a stranger she refused to put in her journal, stayed on in her memory. People around her were like lights in a house: the more, the merrier; the more, the less space left unlit. Ossie Gulliver was a street lamp, a reminder that one house, however well lit, was the same as any other house, all of them living in the indifferent darkness.
Have you guys considered music lessons? a mother asked, and then recommended a musician who’d been working with her son. Another way to fail, Becky thought, while taking down the information.
Vivien, the musician, had been trained as a pianist and vocalist; she did not have any background working with special-needs children but had discovered her gift while teaching an autistic child—all this she explained to Becky on the phone, and the fact that she would be on tour at times and could not guarantee regular lessons year-round. Becky decided to visit Vivien by herself first. She needed all the evidence to show that they did what they could for Jude. People in the same boat, she noticed, often found more reasons to judge and to denounce.
Vivien lived on a street lined with one-story, boxy houses, battered pickup trucks, older-model cars, and several dogs that barked from behind metal fences. Becky was not familiar with this part of Oakland, and she felt that she should reproach herself for noticing these things. Roads in Correctionville were wider, houses larger, but people in her current neighborhood, a picturesque suburb overlooking the Bay, would find Correctionville strange, too. What’s in Iowa? people in California asked her every so often. What’s on any street, in any town, in America?
An old woman opened the door before Becky rang the bell. She was Vivien’s mother, she whispered, and said that the previous lesson was running a few minutes long. The living room was small, with two armchairs and a sofa around a coffee table. A picture window showed a patch of front yard large enough to accommodate a single agave plant. Another woman was sitting on the sofa, so Becky took an armchair. Vivien’s mother picked up a basket of plums from the coffee table and said they were from her back yard. Becky was going to decline, but the old woman said that they were sweet, and she and Vivien had more than they could eat. The thought of letting the plums rot made Becky feel guilty. She chose a medium-sized one. Vivien’s mother motioned for Becky to take more and fetched an old scarf, making a bundle of the plums.
The other mother, an Asian woman, didn’t seem eager to talk at first, unlike most mothers in waiting rooms. She had a lunch pail of dollar bills next to her. Becky watched her fold the bills into intricate patterns. Money leis, she said when she noticed Becky watching, and explained that she sold them at graduations. Becky had never seen a money lei and did not know if this was a California tradition.
“Are you visiting Vivien for your son?” the woman asked. “How old is he?”
Becky said yes, and that Jude was six.
“Potty-trained?” the woman asked, and when Becky said yes she felt shamed by the questioning.
“Lucky you,” the woman said. “William is seven. He was almost potty-trained last year, but something at school upset him—a kid or a teacher, who knows—and now he’s in diapers again. What do I do? I asked the doctor, and she said perhaps I should let him run bare-bottom in the house so he can feel it when he goes.”
“These things take time,” Becky said, comforting the woman automatically.
Vivien’s mother sat with an erect back in another armchair, her creased face showing little acknowledgment of the conversation. Becky could not tell if she was black or Native American or Latina—perhaps she was all three. There was no photograph in the living room that Becky could use to make out the family’s story. All she knew was that the old woman had raised a musician. Perhaps she would not question herself all the time about failing at motherhood.
Suddenly, piano music came from speakers, which Becky only then noticed. They were set in the corners of the living room. “Vivien lets the parents listen to the last five minutes,” the old woman explained, her eyes more lively now. After the opening bars, a boy’s voice came in, loud and perfectly in tune, its articulation to be envied by any mother in the speech therapist’s office: I have often walked down the street before. But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.
“He has a heavenly voice, no?” the old woman said. William’s mother went on folding the dollar bills, her expression flat, as though she alone were deaf to her son’s singing.
“William sings so beautifully,” the old woman said. “This is my favorite time of the week.”
And, oh, the towering feeling just to know somehow you are near. The overpowering feeling that any second you may suddenly appear. People stop and stare. They don’t bother me. For there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be.
Had Becky been a sentimental woman she would have wept. But love songs were written to sugarcoat life’s plainness, to exaggerate the pain of living with or without love, and they were meant to be sung only by ordinary people. For Jude and William and children like them, love songs were another measure of their apartness from the world. How could William understand the dignity of his voice when his mother discussed his bodily functions freely with strangers? A month earlier, Jude and his classmates had been asked to write about their fears. Becky wished that Jude had put down spiders or darkness or Teletubbies, like his classmates, but he had spelled out his fear neatly: “I still suffer from monophobia.” Monophobia—Becky had to look up the word—an abnormal fear of being alone. It was not fair that her son did not live with only some minor fears. Still, always, forever. That a person who expressed no interest in people could live with such a yearning for them; that a paramount fear of being alone could drive him away from the world. Becky could have empathized if this fear came from traumas, the kinds that she read about in magazines and saw on movie screens. But Jude had been born to a pair of dedicated parents. Neither Becky nor Max had any hidden history of unspeakable suffering; neither harbored darkness in their soul or inflicted pain on others.
William, finishing one song, moved on to the next: Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older . . . when did they?
Becky felt furious—at Vivien, who used William’s voice to make something beautiful, when this beauty was of no use to the boy; at Vivien’s mother, for wiping away her tears because she, who must have suffered plenty, had the luxury of being moved by this unnatural beauty; and at herself, too, for being there, a witness to a crime, an accomplice, really. They had all made this moment into a memory for themselves without William’s permission; they gave meaning to something he would not attach meaning to. Of course, children like William and Jude were the loneliest people in the world. They had no one to rely on but the cocoon woven out of a wish to be unobtrusive, yet it was their parents’ job to rob them of that cocoon. Parents like Becky and Max visited therapists, discussed treatments, formed support groups, but they did this only because they could not understand. They, with their limited imaginations, wanted to change their children. Vandalism, Ossie Gulliver had said in front of the Jackson Pollock painting. Parents like them committed vandalism out of love and despair.
When William walked out of the studio, his moon-shaped face expressionless, his mother put a newly made lei around his neck. Ta-da, she said, ready for college.
Becky was in a ruminative mood when she exited Vivien’s house. She was about to get into her car when a man, who seemed to have come from nowhere, grabbed her purse. “Hey,” she said, still half lost in her mood. “Hey!” she shouted, and the man started to run.
Becky ran after him, a stupid thing to do. She had been one of the top cross-country runners at her high school. She used to chant under her breath when she ran, No halftimes, no time-outs; no halftimes, no time-outs. The man turned the corner, his dark pants too loose for him to run efficiently. She did, too, looking up at the street names to make sure she remembered the way—Garden, Grande Vista, Highland. In no time she would overtake him, and she could sense the exhilaration she used to feel, making the final sprint toward the finish line. Becky had a mind that was neither too large nor too small for her body; how could she have given birth to a child fated to endure disproportions all his life?
The man stopped suddenly at the next corner. “Ma’am, stop chasing me,” he said, panting a little. “I have a gun.”
“Oh,” Becky said. He was her height, with a round face that seemed to wear a perpetual smile—the kind of man who would crack an easy joke with anyone waiting in line at Trader Joe’s. His courteousness reminded Becky of the nurse sent by A.I.G. to take her blood samples—both Max and Becky had purchased life insurance within six months of Jude’s birth. The nurse had told Becky that he was a single father, and he left his baby girl at his neighbor’s when he was working. Don’t you worry about the needle, Ma’am, he had said, and Becky had thanked him, not revealing that she had been a nurse.
The man did not look menacing, yet she had to believe him. “O.K., O.K. But can you give me one thing? There’s a notebook in that purse. Can you throw it to me? I promise that’s the only thing I want back.”
He put the Moleskine on the curb next to him and backed away. “Don’t you move until I tell you to,” he said.
Jude would never read the journal. The people in it, having caught Becky’s attention once, often made her think how curious other people were. It was silly to risk her life for the journal, anyone would say. No one would know that she was risking her life for this belief: Who knows better’n I do what normal is?
The thief was out of sight. Becky thought of calling Max and asking him to cancel the credit cards, and realized that the man had got away with her phone, too. That evening they would find out that he charged more than two thousand dollars, buying gift cards and a can of soda in a nearby drugstore. You were lucky he didn’t hurt you, Max said. You were lucky he didn’t take the car. But let’s not go to this Vivien person for music lessons. It’s not a safe neighborhood. There are other things we can do to help Jude.
But, whatever they did, they could never free Jude from his fear of being alone. This Max did not understand. There were other things that he did not understand. Would it even occur to him to question them? Max could have married June Landry, another float-pool nurse, who would be tending to their dinner now. Becky could have married Brandon Rogers, who had taken over the nursery in Correctionville from his father—both Becky’s and Brandon’s parents had thought that they would make a good couple. But Becky had not hesitated to say yes when Max proposed. They had dated long enough to think of themselves as being in love. She could be contentedly married to any reasonable man: that had been a comforting thought during their engagement. He could be happily married to any capable woman: that was a comforting thought in their marriage. For these comforts, Jude must have been given to her as a punishment. No, no, Becky told herself, shuddering violently. That wasn’t true. Things that could not be scientifically explained could not be prevented, either.
Becky noticed the shaking of her hands as she drove away. Her purse was gone, along with Ossie Gulliver’s card. An affair with Ossie Gulliver, like being a wet nurse, was only a fantasy of infidelity. Becky did not have the talent to betray anyone.
The next street she turned onto, an overpass above the freeway, was blocked by traffic. Many people had got out of their vehicles. Becky did, too. There must have been an accident. She wanted to be among a crowd, to be a gawker, to be occupied by others’ misfortunes. Perhaps what made most people different from Jude was their cowardice. They, too, suffered from a monophobia so unbearable that they needed to witness a street accident with strangers.
The freeway—all four eastbound lanes—was closed. On the next overpass, a similar crowd had gathered: a man was standing outside the railing, on the edge. Fire engines, ambulances, and police cars blinked below. A giant ladder had been set up, and two police officers were climbing it. People on both overpasses raised their cell phones. Good thing they caught him before he jumped, someone said. What if he jumped now? someone else asked. He can’t, another person said. The cops cuffed him to the railing.
A moment of crisis, a moment of near-catastrophe. But when the man was subdued and moved into the ambulance the excitement quickly fizzled out. People dispersed. It was then that Becky noticed the man who had robbed her. He was whistling while taking pictures of the empty freeway, and when their eyes met he grinned and she could see the gap between his front teeth.
Becky returned to her car. It occurred to her that she could flag down a policeman, but she was exhausted, and saw little point in prolonging the day. The thief had made material gain, she had lost replaceable items, but what they had each gained or lost was nothing compared with a man’s near-death. People would tell him that he had many reasons to live; they would not accept it if he said that he had many reasons for wanting to die. Anything that could go wrong—a marriage, a child, a medical treatment, a painting, an affair, a tree—started with hope. The only option was to blunder on through hoping. For that reason, Becky would keep telling Jude that it was good to make eye contact, to engage in conversation, to talk about his feelings, to make connections with the world. For that reason, too, she would refuse to accept Jude’s argument if—when—one day he told her that none of these things would alleviate his monophobia, and that he did not have the talent to be anyone other than himself. ♦
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