It’s been many years since I’ve slept in a place alone. As I lay there, I thought of Charlie, her first night as a spouse. For now, there’s only a single, narrow bed, the one Charlie slept on, and the sofa in the living room. I don’t know what they’ll do, if they’ll get a double bed, or if he’ll want to simply sleep apart—I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I instead tried to concentrate on the image of the two of them standing at the open door of their apartment, waving at me as I walked down the stairs. I had at one point looked up and had seen him put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder, just lightly, so lightly that she might not even have felt it. I had talked to her beforehand; I had told her what to expect—or, rather, what not to expect. But would this be enough of an explanation for her? Would she still hope her husband might come to love her in a different way? Would she hope to be touched? Would she blame herself when she was not? Had I made the wrong decision for her? I had spared her pain, but had I also denied her ecstasy?
But—I have to remind myself—at least she will have someone. I don’t only mean someone to look after her, to stand in front of her against the world, to explain things that to her are indecipherable. I mean that she is now part of a unit, the way she and I were once a unit, the way that Nathaniel and David and I were. This is not a society made for the single and unattached—not that the old society was, either, as much as we all pretended otherwise.
When I was Charlie’s age, I scoffed at marriage, thinking it an oppressive construction; I didn’t believe in a relationship legislated by the state. I had always thought that I didn’t view an unpaired life as a lesser one.
And then, one day, I realized that it was. This was during the third quarantine of ’50, and in retrospect, I can see that that was one of the happiest times of my life. Yes, it was anxious, and dangerous, and, yes, everyone was frightened. But it was the last time we were all together, as a family. Outside was the virus, and the containment centers, and people dying; inside was Nathaniel and David and I. For forty days, and then eighty days, and then a hundred and twenty days, we never left the apartment. In those months, David became softer, and we were able to become close again. He was eleven, and I can look back now and understand that he was trying to make a choice about the person he would become: Would he choose to be someone who once more tried to have the kind of life his parents led, the kind of life we expected he would lead? Or would he choose to become someone else, finding another template for who and how he could be? Who would he be? The boy of the year before, the one who threatened his classmates with a syringe—or a boy who might one day use a syringe in a different way, in the way a syringe is meant to be used, in a laboratory or hospital? In later years, I would think: If only we had had a few more weeks with him close to our side, away from the world; if only we could have convinced him that safety was valuable, and that we could be the ones to provide it to him. But we hadn’t had a few more weeks, and we hadn’t been able to convince him.
It was in the middle of the second forty days that I got an email from a long-ago friend from medical school, a woman named Rosemary who had moved to California for her postdoc when I had returned to Hawai‘i. Rosemary was brilliant and funny and had been single for as long as I had known her. We began a correspondence, our messages part workaday matters and part sweeping updates from the past twenty years. Two members of her staff had gotten sick, she wrote; her parents and closest friend had died. I told her about my life, about Nathaniel and David, about how we were together in our small apartment. I realized, I wrote her, that it had been almost eighty days since I had seen another person, and although that realization had been astonishing, what had been more so is that I had yearned for no one. David and Nathaniel were the only people I wanted to see.
She responded the next day. Wasn’t there anyone I really missed, she asked; wasn’t there anyone I couldn’t wait to see when the strictures had been lifted? No, I wrote back, there wasn’t. I meant it.
She never wrote again. Two years later, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that she’d died the year before, during one of the illness’s rebounds.
I have thought about her often since then. I came to understand that she was lonely. And although I cannot have been the only person she attempted to find who was as lonely as she was—we had spoken so infrequently that she must have tried a dozen others before she reached out to me—I wished that I had lied to her: I wished I had told her that I did miss my friends, that my family wasn’t enough. I wished I had thought to find her before she was driven to find me. I wished I hadn’t, subsequent to her death, been so grateful that I hadn’t had to live her life, that I had my husband and my son, that I would never be that alone. Thank goodness, I had thought, thank goodness that isn’t me. That pretty fiction we told ourselves when we were younger, that our friends were our family, as good as our spouses and children, was revealed in that first pandemic to be a lie: The people you loved the most were in fact the people you had chosen to live with—friends were an indulgence, a luxury, and if discarding them meant you might better protect your family, then you discarded them quickly. In the end, you chose, and you never chose your friends, not if you had a partner or a child. You moved on, and you forgot them, and your life was no poorer for it. As Charlie got older, I’m ashamed to say I thought of Rosemary more still. I would spare her that fate, I told myself—I would make sure she wasn’t pitied as I had come to pity Rosemary.
And now I have. I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. I cannot promise that my granddaughter won’t be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone. I have made certain her life will have a witness.
Before we left for the courthouse yesterday, I had looked at her birth certificate, which we had to bring as proof of her identity. This was the new birth certificate, the one issued to me by the interior minister in ’66, the one that disavowed her father—it had protected her for a while, and then no longer.
When Charlie’s parentage had been erased, so too had her name: Charlie Keonaonamaile Bingham-Griffith, a beautiful name, bestowed with love and diminished by the state to Charlie Griffith. It was a reduction of who she was, because in this world, the world I had helped make, there was no intentional excess of beauty. The beauty that remained was incidental, accidental, the things that nothing could vanquish: the color of the sky before it rained, the first green leaves on the acacia tree on Fifth Avenue before they were picked.
It had been Nathaniel’s mother’s name: Keonaonamaile, the fragrant maile. I gave some to you once—a vine whose leaves smelled of pepper and lemons. We wore leis of them for our wedding—the day before, we had hiked into the mountains, David between us, the air around us wet, and had cut a rope of it that was growing between two koa trees. It was a lei you wore for weddings, but also for graduations and anniversaries: a special-occasion plant, back when there were so many plants that some were considered special and some were not, and you could just take them from the tree, and then the next day you would throw them away.