DEAR ROLAND, I’M SORRY THAT you never learned about the birth and the death of your daughter. She was very much your and my daughter: good-looking and difficult.
Time and again Lilia began this letter in her head whenever she reread Roland’s entries of February 1946, but she had never written it down until now. He was sailing from England to Canada, toward his future bride. Lilia was a week overdue with Lucy. She didn’t mind carrying the baby longer. Her mother-in-law and women like her would pay close attention to the calendar when a marriage happened hastily.
What if Lucy had died as an infant? You hear such stories, babies stillborn or having only a brief life. Of course, Lilia might have died giving birth, but she was not the kind of woman who would die in labor. Just like the mares—one look and you’d know which would be the troublesome ones at foaling. You can’t explain that to people who don’t understand. Some creatures are just born with more life in them.
But suppose Lucy had never really lived but for the short period in Lilia’s womb? Would it have been felt by Lilia as a punishment? Or a liberation? The slate between Gilbert and her would have been wiped clean. What would have become of their marriage then?
An untimely death always has mystery in it. And hypothetically untimely death? Lilia might have set out to look for Roland. But equally possibly, she might have forgotten him. Perhaps Lucy lived so Lilia would remember Roland. And Lucy died young so that there was no way for Lilia to forget Roland. There was no way to get even with him, was there? To be forgotten was a defeat. To be doomed to remember someone was a defeat, too. Lilia hated to be defeated.
Lucy broke many hearts. Except Roland’s. He was not heartless, but he would not let his precious heart receive even a scrape. Poor Lucy. No, poor Gilbert. Having his heart broken when someone else should have suffered in his place.
Oh shush! There was no reason to get upset now, except Lilia felt funny this morning. Indigestion, heartburn, palpitation, but not one of them was quite what she was feeling. Perhaps she was simply disturbed by the conversation at breakfast about the writing class. The instructor, a Kurdish-Iranian-American woman, was said to be fiercely funny by some, hard to follow by others, impossibly impertinent by Elaine.
“Too bad you’re not taking the class,” Dolores had said to Lilia at breakfast. Repetition was the only aggressive behavior Dolores had mastered (or retained), a weak weapon, like a toy knife in a toddler’s kitchen set, yet it left a mark on Lilia. No, no blood drawn, but who knew the leathery skin of old age could become sensitive to nuisance?
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” Lilia said.
“I sure am,” Dolores said. “I only wish you were part of it, too.”
Lilia imagined Dolores as a plump, well-dressed, golden roasted turkey looking pitifully at a wild turkey outside the window and saying: Too bad you have to walk in the darkness by yourself. The thought braced Lilia for a few more sympathetic words from Dolores. If Lilia were to trek anywhere down memory lane, she wanted to do it alone.
Dear Roland, I’m sorry that you never learned about the birth and the death of your daughter. She was very much your and my daughter: good-looking and difficult. Lilia reread what she had written, and added: But unlike you and me she didn’t know how to make use of these traits. The words didn’t really say what she wanted to say, but they came close.
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY. ALL BIRTHDAYS ARE accomplishments, but this time someone was turning ninety. The birthday boy, a retired philosophy professor from Stanford, would deliver a lecture on the day. “We don’t have to invite an outside speaker this fall,” Jean said when she made the announcement.
“As though she needs to worry about her budget,” Lilia said, loud enough for Jean to hear. Bayside Garden had a well-endowed performance series. The only unsuccessful presenter during Lilia’s residency had been a mindfulness expert—more than half the audience fell into uncomfortable sleep. The best had been a twelve-year-old boy, who had won second place in an all-state magician contest in Sacramento. Such a handsome young man, his dexterous hands and shy smile just the right combination to enchant his audience. Some asked him to repeat the same tricks. Others demanded he reveal the secrets. The show, scheduled for thirty minutes, had lasted an hour and a half.
“I like birthdays,” Nancy said. “I share mine with Julius Caesar. I remember my father told me who Julius Caesar was on my seventh birthday.”
“I share my birthday with Barbara Bush,” someone said. “But she’s older than me.”
“If you think about it, we never ask ourselves whose death date we’ll be sharing,” Lilia said. “That’s one thing I would die to know.”
The day after her mother died, Lilia had accompanied her father to the funeral home in Vallejo. As they left, she noticed the unusual crowds in the street. Women wept. Men, too, some quietly taking off their glasses and pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes, others baring their wounded faces to the sky. At the next block a black maid threw open a third-floor window of a boardinghouse. He died, she wailed, he died. That night, listening to the news of President Roosevelt’s death, Lilia wished her mother had lived a day longer. All those tears shed and her mother didn’t even have a drop to herself.
“Let’s focus on the birthday party,” Jean said.
“We should throw confetti,” Lilia said. “We should all blow horns and shout surprise.”
“We don’t do anything like that here, for health and safety reasons,” Elaine said. She had moved into Bayside Garden a month after Lilia, and the first time she had introduced herself, she had said emphatically that her strength was to be a leader. If you think I’m not good at listening, it’s because I haven’t met many people whose opinions are worth listening to, Elaine said. Lilia laughed out loud, and laughed again when she realized that the other people only nodded, perhaps out of politeness. But sheep are polite too, following one another to the slaughterhouse, not questioning anything.
“Mark Twain died on his birthday,” Owen, who sat at a nearby table, said aloud.
Frank, that encyclopedia in residence, said Owen was wrong. Mark Twain didn’t die on his birthday, but Halley’s Comet was in the sky on both his birth and death days. “I bet you knew it,” Frank, who never sat far from Lilia, said to her.
Lilia wanted to make a joke about death days, but before she could come up with something clever her heart seemed to skip a beat. It didn’t. It was that sudden emptiness, which was Lucy’s doing. It was worse than having your heart broken. If someone broke your heart, you could still gather the pieces and glue them back, or just leave them scattered around, evidence of what was once your heart. But Lucy’s trick was to make that heart disappear. Like the boy magician. Anything could disappear when he put it in a hat or under a handkerchief. But he gave back whatever he vanished.