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.”


Copyright © 2023 by Yiyun Li