Wednesday’s Child
THE DIFFICULTY WITH waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for … Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was canceled.
All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from track 4 to track 10 then to track 7 to track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been canceled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many native English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.
She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would canceled trains only lead to more canceled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”
A novel would not get better if all the characters spent all their time wandering between platforms. What Rosalie needed was not a plot twist or a dramatic scene but reliable information. She found a uniformed railway worker and asked about the canceled trains.
The man, speaking almost perfect English, acknowledged her dilemma with an apology. “There was an incident near Rotterdam this morning,” he said.
“An incident,” Rosalie repeated, though she already knew the nature of such an ambiguous term. “Was it an accident?”
“Ah, yes, the kind of sad accident that happens sometimes. A man walked in front of a train.”
Rosalie noted the verb he used: not “jumped” or “ran” or “leaped,” but “walked,” as though the death had been an act both leisurely and purposeful. Contrary to present circumstances—it was summer; this was the twenty-first century—she imagined a man in a neatly pressed suit and wearing a hat, like Robert Walser in one of those photos from his asylum years. Walser’s hat had been found next to his body in the Swiss snow, on Christmas Day, 1956. But even if the man near Rotterdam had worn a hat, it was unlikely to be resting in peace near him.
The railway worker opened an app on his phone and indicated some red and yellow and green squares to Rosalie, reassuring her that the service would return to normal soon.
* * *
THERE ARE TWO types of mothers: those who have not taught their children to be kind to themselves, and those who have not learned to be kind to their children.
Really? Rosalie thought. Are you sure there are only those two types? Surely some mothers, having done a better job, fall into neither category? Rosalie did not remember writing those lines in her notebook, but they were on the same page as a couple of other notes that she had a vague memory of having written. One of them read, You can’t declutter an untimely death away; the other consisted of two lines from a nursery rhyme: Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go. She must have written those lines on a Wednesday. Marcie had been born on a Wednesday, and had died on a Thursday, fifteen years and eleven months later. For a while after her death, every Thursday had felt like a milestone, and every Thursday Rosalie and Dan had left flowers at the mouth of the railway tunnel where Marcie had laid herself down to die. One week gone, two weeks gone, then three, four, five. It occurred to Rosalie then that the only other time when parents count the days and weeks is when a child is newborn.
After some time, however, the counting stopped. No parent would describe a child as being seventy-nine weeks old or a hundred and three weeks old. The math for the dead must be similar. Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes. And there are very few things in life that are impervious to time’s erosion. Thursday again became just another day in the week.
Rosalie carried three notebooks in her purse, but she no longer knew her original intention for each. They had become three depositories of scribbled words in the same category, “Notes to self.” It was a most lopsided epistolary relationship: whoever that self was, she was an unresponsive and irresponsible correspondent. Had Rosalie decided to address the notes to Marcie, there would have been some room for fantasy; nobody could say with certainty that the dead were not reading our minds or our letters to them. Rosalie, however, had not written to Marcie. She had written to herself, notes that she had not read until that Wednesday in June, while waiting for the disrupted Nederlandse Spoorwegen to resume.
The three notebooks read like a record of a chronic disease—not cancer but some condition so slow-building that it could hardly be distinguished from the natural progression of aging. Rosalie remembered reading a novel in which a character seeks advice from an old woman on how best to poison her husband. The most effective poison, which would go absolutely undetected, she is told, is a pear a day, sweet and juicy. A pear a day? What kind of poison is that? the woman asks. Every husband has a finite number of pears allotted to his life, the old woman says. What’s wrong if he doesn’t die on a specific day? There will be that final pear, which will finish him off one day.
What was the title of the novel? Rosalie tried to recollect it, and then laughed, remembering. This was an exchange she had once sketched out, thinking that she could use it in a novel if the opportunity arose. Are you sure you made it up? her questioning self immediately asked. No, Rosalie could not be sure. The longer one lives, the more porous one’s mind becomes, the less reliable. Perhaps Alice Munro had written a story about pears and poisons? Or, more likely, Iris Murdoch?
And you, my dear—the old woman in Rosalie’s imagination says now to the woman with the mariticidal aspiration—you, too, should take a pear a day; it’s a tonic that’ll do you good, and it’ll keep you living longer than your husband. Let that sweet and slow poison do its job properly, won’t you?
Indeed, why the hurry to get in front of a moving train? Why not let a death be timely, rather than disrupting the schedule of a national rail system? Rosalie considered writing these questions down in her notebook, but they would sound as though she were having an argument with Marcie, or with the stranger who had died that morning. “Never argue” was Rosalie’s motto; especially, never argue with the dead.
* * *
THE LAST BOOK—BOOKS, in fact, three novels in a single volume—that Marcie and Rosalie had discussed was Ágota Kristóf’s “The Notebook Trilogy.” It was not the last book Marcie had read—what that had been Rosalie would never know. The stack on Marcie’s desk, at the time of her death, included a story collection by Kelly Link, the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, a François Mauriac novel, and a book of La Fontaine’s fables. The books, like others before, had been taken from Rosalie’s shelves, with or without her recommendation.
Rosalie had read the Kristóf trilogy during a cultural-exchange trip to Moscow. The narrative labyrinth of the novels had baffled her. Corridors built of metaphorical mirrors, real and fake doubles, reflections of reflections—all those devices that might fascinate or frustrate a reader, though Rosalie had felt neither fascination nor frustration. What she had wanted was to talk with someone about the novels, and so she had asked Marcie to read them.
“I can’t believe you asked me to read these books,” Marcie said when she had finished.
“Are they confusing?” Rosalie asked. “I was confused, too.”
“Confusing? No. But they’re rather, what do you call it, graphic.”
“They’re not pornography.”
“They’re worse than pornography.” Marcie, who by middle school had become a better cook and baker than Rosalie, was carving out balls of cantaloupe with an ice-cream scoop. “I think they may have permanently destroyed my appetite.”
There was plenty of violence in the trilogy: rapes, mutilations, executions. Before Marcie’s remark, it had not occurred to Rosalie that the books might not be age-appropriate. In eighth grade, Marcie had quoted C. S. Lewis in her application to a highly selective prep school—“I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years”—and then gone on to catalog all the thinking she had done. Might not this come across as a bit … arrogant? Rosalie had asked, and Marcie had replied that if any of the adults dared to judge her so, it was they who were arrogant. They, Marcie had said, instead of you, thus, to Rosalie’s relief, excluding her from the indictment. If those adults judged her, it meant that they had not done their share of thinking when they were young; older now, they felt they had a right to treat children like miniature poodles. “Miniature poodles, I’m telling you!” Marcie had said with a vehement shudder. “Not even standard poodles!”
Rosalie watched Marcie arrange balls of cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon in a glass bowl, then squeeze half a lime over them before sprinkling some salt flakes on top. The bowl of melon was Marcie’s afternoon snack. Rosalie had no idea where Marcie had acquired such a demanding standard for everyday living; she herself would have eaten a slice of melon over the sink.
“I think your appetite is going to be all right,” Rosalie said.
Marcie pointed a two-pronged fork at Rosalie. “Sometimes things are all right, until they turn all wrong.”
“Where did that fork come from?” Rosalie said. The fork, slender, with a pinkish metallic hue, was unfamiliar.
“I bought it. The color is called rose gold. I liked how ‘rose gold’ sounded.”
That conversation had taken place the week before Marcie started at the prep school she had applied to with her youthful confidence. Three weeks later, during second period, she walked off the campus to a nearby railway. For some time afterward, Rosalie had replayed their conversation over the tricolored melon balls. She wondered if she had missed something that Marcie had been trying to tell her. Would rereading “The Notebook Trilogy” help her? It occurred to her that at least Marcie had known, just shy of sixteen, that the world had the potential to be as violent and bleak as something written by Ágota Kristóf. The world was not as bland and harmless as it was in those novels with long-haired girls on the covers, which had been devoured by Marcie’s classmates in middle school. “OMG, I CANNOT STAND THEM. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID,” Marcie had said a few times, with such passion that Rosalie could see every word in capital letters. But a girl who read those novels might not so resolutely give up all hope. There were more books with long-haired girls on the covers than had been written by Kristóf.
* * *
“SOMEDAY YOU SHOULD reflect on the mistakes you made. I’m not saying now, of course. Now may be too soon,” Rosalie’s mother had said on the phone a few months after Marcie’s death.
“What do you mean?” Rosalie asked. Like many people, she asked that question only when she knew perfectly well what the other person meant. It was more about earning a moment for herself, like a tennis player flexing her legs, bouncing, readying herself to return a serve.
“Any time a child chooses that way out, you have to wonder what the parents did,” Rosalie’s mother, who refused to use the words “died” or “suicide” but was okay with “passed away” or “took her own life,” elaborated.
It was cruel, what her mother had said to Rosalie, but it was far from the cruelest thing she had ever said. Besides, Rosalie knew that her mother was only expressing what other people tried not to, some less successfully than others. The week after Marcie’s death, the mother of one of her middle-school friends texted Rosalie, conveying her condolences and ending the exchange with “I’ve read that there are ways to cure adolescent depression. Didn’t you guys know?”
Parenting was a trial. The lucky ones were still making a case for themselves, with cautious or blind optimism. Rosalie and Dan had received their verdict.
* * *
ROSALIE HAD DECIDED to take a trip by herself just as the Delta variant of COVID started to gain notoriety. She often traveled alone for work, but in the past, holiday trips had belonged to the family. Dan had not questioned her decision. He was going to tear down the sunroom, which had been in a dilapidated state for some years, and his plan was to build a new sunroom during his vacation time—well, as much of it as he could; he could spend subsequent weekends on the final touches. To toil in the North Carolina heat—just thinking about it made Rosalie feel exhausted, but since Marcie’s death, Rosalie and Dan had learned that a shared pain was simply that, a permanent presence of a permanent absence in both their lives. There was no shared cure, not even a shared alleviation. There was no point in comparing the risk of traveling during a still rampant pandemic to the risk of his injuring his back with heavy lifting under the hot sun.
One specialty of the Netherlands, for a visitor, is its picturesqueness. “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” Alice asks, sensibly, before going down the rabbit hole. She might as well have asked, What is the use of a life without pictures or conversations? For a week, Rosalie took photographs of canals and windmills, of wheels of cheese and parades of blue-and-white figurines in shopwindows, of museum gardens and market stalls. Amsterdam, Delft, Utrecht, Haarlem—all were picture-perfect, just as she knew Brussels and Ghent and Bruges would be, on the next leg of her trip. Marcie would have jeered at Rosalie’s behavior as a tourist; she would have quizzed Rosalie on the Benelux countries in order to demonstrate to Rosalie her ignorance of the region she so avidly photographed; Marcie would have said, What’s the use of this skimming on life’s surface as though that would do the trick?
How do you know it won’t work? Rosalie would have replied; is this not the same as your baking those cookies with the perfect jam decoration? She then realized that, once again, she was back at the same argument, the one that Marcie had already and definitively won. What’s the use of an argument without the promise of further arguments?
Rosalie sent the best of her travel pictures to Dan. In return, he sent photographic documentation of his progress: piles of rotten wood, pristine planks first stacked and then nailed into the right places, new windows with cardboard wrapped around the corners, paint-sample strips and cans, empty beer bottles in the garage, arranged in groups of ten, like bowling pins. Skimming was preferable to dredging a bottomless pain. Every parent who has lost a child will one day die of that chronic affliction. Why not let the sweet pears do their work?
The train to Brussels arrived. All waiting has an end point, Rosalie thought, and instantly her other self said, All waiting? Surely some waiting will always remain that: waiting.
Like what? Rosalie felt obliged to ask.
Like waiting to be contacted by an ET, waiting to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, waiting to believe in an afterlife.
Oh, you unbending soul. Life is held together by imprecise words and inexact thoughts. What’s the point of picking at every single statement persistently until the seam comes undone?
Rosalie used not to have so many quibbles with herself. Had she developed this tiresome habit because of Marcie’s death? Marcie would have said right away, Don’t you dare blame anything on me. That Rosalie had never, while Marcie was alive, given her an opportunity to speak that line—was that a comfort for either of them? Rosalie wished she had spoken a variation of the line to her own mother, though it was too late. Her mother had died two months earlier. Were there an afterlife, she would have conveyed a message to Rosalie by now, pointing out that her death and her afterlife, both being disagreeable, were Rosalie’s fault, just as her life before death had been full of disappointments caused by having to be a mother to Rosalie, for whom she had abandoned her training in architecture. She had never stopped believing that she had been destined for fame and accolades, all sacrificed for Rosalie.
Would her mother have asked Marcie to give a daughter’s account of Rosalie’s failure in motherhood?
* * *
DESPITE THE EARLIER canceled trains, the carriage Rosalie settled down in was not crowded. She counted a family of three, a young couple, and a few passengers traveling alone. A woman, tightly double-masked, looked back and forth several times, checking on each of the other passengers as though assessing the potential threat they posed, before putting herself into a seat across the aisle from Rosalie, her hands supporting her lower back. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight weeks pregnant? Maybe even forty, Rosalie estimated, looking at the imprint of the woman’s navel, protruding unabashedly against her thin white maternity blouse.
Rosalie remembered learning, in a college psychology course, about how pregnant women were likely to think that, statistically, more women were getting pregnant than in the past, but that it was only a trick of their attention. Were it not for the pandemic, would Rosalie have noticed on this trip more young people about the age that Marcie would have been? After her death, a grief counselor had explained to Rosalie and Dan that all sorts of everyday things might devastate them without warning: a hairpin, a ballpoint pen, a girl Marcie’s age walking down the street, with the same hairstyle or in a similar dress. None of these, however, had happened to Rosalie. The whole wide world was where Marcie was not; Rosalie did not need any reminder of that fact.
Marcie would have turned nineteen on her next birthday. Immediately after her death, Rosalie had written in a notebook that her daughter would now remain fifteen forever, and she—Rosalie—would never know what Marcie would have been at sixteen, or seventeen, or twenty-six, or forty-two. What surprised Rosalie—and so few things surprised a parent after the death of a child that this realization had struck her with a blunt force; she would have called it an epiphany had she been religious, or the kind of writer who believed in epiphanies—was that, contrary to her assumption, Marcie had not stayed fifteen. Her friends had continued progressing, going through high school, and they were now about to leave for college. Marcie, too, had aged in Rosalie’s mind. Not in a physically visible manner—Rosalie would never allow herself to imagine a girl who looked any different from the one she had dropped off at the school gate on the final, fatal morning. “I want you to remember the living Marcie,” the funeral director had said gently on the phone, explaining his decision not to allow Rosalie and Dan to view Marcie’s body before the cremation. “I don’t want you to always dwell on her last moments. That’s not what her life was about.”
Copyright © 2023 by Yiyun Li
