by Laura Furman
The Church of the Lord’s Anointed was a new one in town. Nothing flourished here but what her father had called “freak religions.” She could see the building from one of the library windows.
She was at the window before two o’clock, watching a respectably sized group of people go in.
Hats didn’t seem to be required nowadays, on women or men.
How would she tell him? A letter to the office, it would have to be. She could phone there, but then his response would have to be so guarded, so matter-of-fact, that half the wonder of their release would be lost.
She went back to Gatsby, but she was just reading words, not taking in the meaning—she was too restless. She locked the library and walked around town.
People were always saying that this town was like a funeral, but in fact when there was a real funeral it put on its best show of liveliness. She was reminded of that when she saw, from a block away, the funeral-goers coming out of the church doors, stopping to chat and ease themselves out of solemnity. And then, to her surprise, many of them went around the church to a side door, where they reentered.
Of course. She had forgotten. After the ceremony, after the closed coffin had been put in its place in the hearse, everybody except those close enough to follow the dead and see her put into the ground would head for the after-the-service refreshments. These would be waiting in another part of the church, where there was a Sunday-school room and a hospitable kitchen.
She didn’t see any reason that she shouldn’t join them.
But at the last moment she would have walked past.
Too late. A woman called to her in a challenging—or, at least, confidently unfunereal—voice from the door where the other people had gone in.
This woman said to her, close up, “We missed you at the service.”
Corrie had no notion who the woman was. She said that she was sorry not to have attended but she’d had to keep the library open.
“Well, of course,” the woman said, but had already turned to consult with somebody carrying a pie.
“Is there room in the fridge for this?”
“I don’t know, honey, you’ll just have to look and see.”
Corrie had thought from the greeting person’s flowered dress that the women inside would all be wearing something similar. Sunday best if not mourning best. But maybe her ideas of Sunday best were out-of-date. Some of the women here were just wearing slacks, as she herself was.
Another woman brought her a slice of spice cake on a plastic plate.
“You must be hungry,” she said. “Everybody else is.”
A woman who used to be Corrie’s hairdresser said, “I told everybody you would probably drop in. I told them you couldn’t till you’d closed up the library. I said it was too bad you had to miss the service. I said so.”
“It was a lovely service,” another woman said. “You’ll want tea once you’re done with that cake.”
And so on. She couldn’t think of anybody’s name. The United church and the Presbyterian church were just hanging on; the Anglican church had closed ages ago. Was this where everybody had gone?
There was only one other woman at the reception who was getting as much attention as Corrie, and who was dressed as Corrie would have expected a funeral-going woman to be. A lovely lilac-gray dress and a subdued gray summer hat.
The woman was being brought over to meet her. A string of modest genuine pearls around her neck.
“Oh, yes.” She spoke in a soft voice, as pleased as the occasion would allow. “You must be Corrie. The Corrie I’ve heard so much about. Though we never met, I felt I knew you. But you must be wondering who I am.” She said a name that meant nothing to Corrie. Then shook her head and gave a small, regretful laugh.
“Sadie worked for us ever since she came to Kitchener,” she said. “The children adored her. Then the grandchildren. They truly adored her. My goodness. On her day off I was just the most unsatisfactory substitute for Sadie. We all adored her, actually.”
She said this in a way that was bemused, yet delighted. The way women like that could be, showing such charming self-disparagement. She would have spotted Corrie as the only person in the room who could speak her language and not take her words at face value.
Corrie said, “I didn’t know she was sick.”
“She went that fast,” the woman with the teapot said, offering more to the lady with the pearls and being refused.
“It takes them her age faster than it does the real old ones,” the tea lady said. “How long was she in the hospital?” she asked in a slightly menacing way of the pearls.
“I’m trying to think. Ten days?”
“Shorter time than that, what I heard. And shorter still when they got around to letting her people know at home.”
“She kept it all very much to herself.” This from the employer, who spoke quietly but held her ground. “She was absolutely not a person to make a fuss.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Corrie said.
At that moment, a stout, smiling young woman came up and introduced herself as the minister.
“We’re speaking of Sadie?” she asked. She shook her head in wonder. “Sadie was blessed. Sadie was a rare person.”
All agreed. Corrie included.
“I suspect Milady the Minister,” Corrie wrote to Howard, in the long letter she was composing in her head on the way home.
Later in the evening she sat down and started that letter, though she would not be able to send it yet—Howard was spending a couple of weeks at the Muskoka cottage with his family. Everybody slightly disgruntled, as he had described it in advance—his wife without her politics, him without his piano—but unwilling to forgo the ritual.
“Of course, it’s absurd to think that Sadie’s ill-gotten gains would build a church,” she wrote. “But I’d bet she built the steeple. It’s a silly-looking steeple, anyway. I never thought before what a giveaway those upside-down ice-cream-cone steeples are. The loss of faith is right there, isn’t it? They don’t know it, but they’re declaring it.”
She crumpled the letter up and started again, in a more jubilant manner.
“The days of the Blackmail are over. The sound of the cuckoo is heard in the land.”
She had never realized how much it weighed on her, she wrote, but now she could see it. Not the money—as he well knew, she didn’t care about the money, and, anyway, it had become a smaller amount in real terms as the years passed, though Sadie had never seemed to realize that. It was the queasy feeling, the never-quite-safeness of it, the burden on their long love, that had made her unhappy. She’d had that feeling every time she passed a postbox.
She wondered if by any chance he would hear the news before her letter could get it to him. Not possible. He hadn’t reached the stage of checking obituaries yet.
It was in February and again in August of every year that she put the special bills in the envelope and he slipped the envelope into his pocket. Later, he would probably check the bills and type Sadie’s name on the envelope before delivering it to her box.
The question was, had he looked in the box to see if this summer’s money had been picked up? Sadie had been alive when Corrie made the transfer but surely not able to get to the mailbox. Surely not able.
It was shortly before Howard left for the cottage that Corrie had last seen him and that the transfer of the envelope had taken place. She tried to figure out exactly when it was, whether he would have had time to check the box again after delivering the money or whether he would have gone straight to the cottage. Sometimes while at the cottage in the past he’d found time to write Corrie a letter. But not this time.
She goes to bed with the letter to him still unfinished.
And wakes up early, when the sky is brightening, though the sun is not yet up.
There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone.
She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.
There is no news to give
him. No news, because there never was any.
No news about Sadie, because Sadie doesn’t matter and she never did. No post office box, because the money goes straight into an account or maybe just into a wallet. General expenses. Or a modest nest egg. A trip to Spain. Who cares? People with families, summer cottages, children to educate, bills to pay—they don’t have to think about how to spend such an amount of money. It can’t even be called a windfall. No need to explain it.
She gets up and quickly dresses and walks through every room in the house, introducing the walls and the furniture to this new idea. A cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest. She makes coffee and doesn’t drink it. She ends up in her bedroom once more, and finds that the introduction to the current reality has to be done all over again.
But then there is a surprise. She is capable, still, of shaping up another possibility.
If he doesn’t know that Sadie is dead he will just expect things to go on as usual. And how would he know, unless he is told? And who would he be told by, unless by Corrie herself?
She could say a thing that would destroy them, but she does not have to.
What a time it has taken her, to figure this out.
She could say right now, what does it matter? Whatever goes on will go on. Someday, she supposes, there will have to be an end to it. But in the meantime, if what they had—what they have—demands payment, she is the one who can afford to pay.
When she goes down to the kitchen again she goes as if gingerly, making everything fit into a proper place.
She has calmed down mightily. All right.
But in the middle of her toast and jam she thinks, No.
Fly away, why don’t you, right now? Fly away.
What rot.
Yes. Do it.
Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Every year our jurors read the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in a blind manuscript in which each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author. The jurors don’t consult the series editor or one another, and they write their essays without knowledge of the author’s name (though occasionally the name of the author is inserted into the essay later for the sake of clarity). —LF
Mary Gaitskill on “Kindness” by Yiyun Li
This is a terrible story. It is an ordinary story. It is terrible, how ordinary it is. In it, a woman tells a girl named Moyan that her parents adopted her in order to make their artificial marriage appear real and then reads to her with a melodic voice never present in her speaking voice. Moyan learns that her mother is a “mental case” who ran through the streets crying for a married man. Her father offered to marry her mother, and her mother’s parents agreed because otherwise they’d have to send their mental-case daughter to an asylum. The woman reads to Moyan: There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. Moyan joins the army and there meets a painlessly beautiful girl who sings in a voice made beautiful by pain. Her lieutenant is kind to her, which revolts her; her lieutenant makes her cry by forcing her to sing in a tuneless voice in front of everyone. She sings “It Is a Shame to Be a Lonely Person.” She cries. A sow is stretched across a road, suckling. Children cry for candy from the “Auntie Soldiers.” There is a baby in a basket handed up to an old man at the train station. Moyan waves to the stranger who drove her there and goes home. Her mother is dead. Her father says she was the “kindest woman in the world” because she kept her promise. Moyan cannot visit the grave of the woman who read to her because the woman’s estranged children won’t let her know where it is. She gets a wedding invitation from the lieutenant. She reads her mother’s romantic novels. They give her hope that it will all be well in the end. She is invited to the lieutenant’s funeral. She doesn’t go. Because she lives her life in the same neighborhood she has many acquaintances and so does not feel alone in her aging.
Kindness seems to me a story of terrible loneliness made bearable because the woman suffering it is exquisitely sensitive to the most subtle acts of kindness, which are acceptable to her only when they come from strangers. It seems a story of a starving soul who every now and then senses a feast in the occasional scrap, which keeps her barely alive. It seems a story in which love hides in tiny places, in the memory of sunlight on the floor of a long-dead person’s apartment, in the voice of someone reading to you about imaginary people, or in the heart of someone you have never really cared much about.
But that is interpretation, and interpretation of any kind seems nearly disrespectful to this work, this narrator. Moyan’s voice is void of superfluous emotion; she says what happened, and while she might speculate in a small way about why or what someone felt, her speculation is unfailingly modest; it is perhaps this modesty that gives her story its quiet, desolate beauty. There is no transcendence here, no heroism, no self-deprecating humor; that is to say, there are no contemporary literary conventions. In this story there is human feeling, which turns and changes as life turns and changes, and for Moyan—as for most people—that must be enough. Her inability to take more than the bare minimum of what life offers to her becomes, in this story, a kind of dignity that lives and dies alone, unrecognized. I felt touched and grateful to read of it.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Last year she was a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library, where she was researching a novel.
Daniyal Mueenuddin on “Kindness” by Yiyun Li
Kindness. Even the title is deceptive, warm and uncomplicated as the story certainly is not. Yiyun Li plays a subtle game with her readers, concealing hard conflict in the shadows of what appears to be the quietest, the mildest of stories. The narrator Moyan, in her cat-footed voice, begins by telling us that her life has been without notable event, subdued and blameless. She has traveled very little, has neither family nor friends, never married, teaches math but doesn’t particularly care for the job, has no hobbies. And yet, from this plain material, Li has created a story as dramatic and complex and penetrating as anything I’ve read in a good long time.
The story is idiosyncratic in other ways. Is it a short story at all, or is it that contentious thing, a novella, which operates under a different code? Certainly it is longer than any of the other pieces in this collection and strains the limit of what will likely be read in one sitting—my definition of a short story. Given extra space, Li has not merely added detail, she has also freed herself from the characteristic arrow trajectory of a short story. Pilots describe helicopters, which are aerodynamically unstable, as a collection of parts flying in tight formation; the same can be said of Kindness, which has several different points of narrative weight, the emphasis distributed.
What holds the story together, in fact, is not the cumulative development of the narrative, but rather, the voice. The story circles around the elements of Moyan’s life, reinforcing and deepening our knowledge of her, by making us privy to her thoughts and reflections, dropping in and out of the stories within the story. The narrator’s subtlety, which is a form of good manners, of hygiene, draws us increasingly into sympathy with her; Moyan is a knowing narrator—we take her at her word. Here she is, speaking of her single romantic adventure, which marked her entire life yet barely rose to the level of a relationship, with only a single moment of near avowal, in the shade of a wisteria:
There had not been a boyfriend and perhaps there never would be one—the man who had not wiped away my tears under the wisteria trellis had later done so, repeatedly, when my memories were revised into dreams, and he who had chosen not to claim the love had left no space for others to claim it: In high school there had been a boy or t
wo, like there is a boy or two for most girls during those years, but I had returned their letters in new envelopes, never adding a line, thinking that would be enough to end what should not have been started.
There is neither self-pity in this nor a plea for our pity, and even this resignation, which can so often be merely a cover for timidity, leaves the impression of being sincere, deliberate.
Moyan’s quiet intelligence, her resignation, and her stoicism serve as a foil for the drama of the story. Her beautiful, intellectual mother is bedridden, unbalanced years ago by her unrequited love for a married man; her uneducated father drifts through life, deeply in love with this woman who agreed to marry and live with him, but only on the most limited terms; Moyan discovers by accident that she is adopted; she falls in love with a pauper, a derelict, who later becomes a great flautist; her mother commits suicide. This is a heavy load for a story to carry, is almost baroque, and yet the reader accepts it without demur, because the tone and the matter of the story so blend with and so balance each other.
There is another quieter drama running through the story, a backbone on which the rest of the narrative is hung. The story jumps back and forth in time, but if it were straightened out and laid flat, we would see that a series of characters approach Moyan, wanting intimacy from her, and that each in turn is rejected in favor of the isolation—or the independence—that she feels is her inevitable portion. Professor Shan, Lieutenant Wei, Nini’s father, even the Jeep driver who takes her to the train station after she is informed of her mother’s death, all seek to overcome her resistance to their touch, the touch of their minds more than their hands. Moyan allows the approach—without that there would be no story—but fleetingly, while drawing away. We acquiesce in this, find it sufficient that these relationships are unresolved, that these characters loom up to Moyan—and then back away, the moment passing unconsummated. Moyan’s distinct sensibility binds the story together, her unexpected lonely affirmative power.
