A girl writing the alphabet on cement using a watering pot. The worn-through knee of a pair of jeans stitched up with pink, sequined thread. The ritual clipping of coupons, carefully cut with scissors that squeak at the joint. These are a few of the images that resonate from this week’s story, “Winter of Departures,” by Kundiman fellow Susanna Kwan. Published in Joyland, the story is dense with these sorts of small, precise details that reveal depths, describing a world where poverty and generosity, tragedy and forgiveness, live side by side.
The story is given to us through our narrator’s memories of one winter when she was seven years old, the coldest San Francisco winter in decades, when she lived in an apartment building with her mother and four other residents. Kwan takes her time with its telling, allowing the bits of memory room to breathe, space to build upon and inform each other. Like this:
Wilson, the forty-something-year-old Chinese man who lived opposite us, would step out for a smoke every hour or so. I’d follow him down the stairs, admiring his neat ballerina bun and perfect posture, to watch him from inside as he blew smoke rings on the stoop. He wore jeans torn at both knees, one of the holes patched with pink sequined thread, its seam puckered, the scales forming a sparkling wad, which I imagined would do damage to his skin if he fell. The other hole hung open like a lazy mouth with frayed threads for lips. I thought he looked lonely and told my mother so.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “You were too young to remember, but a very nice man named Leo used to live with him. He got sick and died a few years ago.”
Later, when Wilson is getting thinner and thinner, when his skin breaks out in a rash, Kwan doesn’t have to connect the dots for us.
We’re gradually introduced to the building’s other tenants: Mr. O’Rourke, a retired band director who plays the bugle at military funerals, often filling the building with the brassy notes; and Avis, a friendly woman with ever-changing wigs, who gives the narrator gifts of plastic jewelry (“dangling chili pepper earrings, pearls with seams that scratched my skin”). Cedric, Avis’s boyfriend, a bouncer, visits often.
Together, this small group of tenants feels like a family to the seven-year-old girl, or the closest thing to a family she knows. She doesn’t know her father, as we learn in a simple, heart-wrenching line, the only time it’s mentioned: “I wondered, as I wondered of all men his age, if [Wilson] might be my father.” But this apartment building with its thin walls, with the sound of the bugle ringing from Mr. O’Rourke’s rooms, and Avis and Cedric’s laughter filtering from upstairs, and Wilson on the stoop every hour with a cigarette like clockwork, feels full.
Even when things start to fall apart, when the homeless are freezing in the streets, when the building is rocked with unexpected violence and tragedy, moments of grace still come through. It’s far from what one would call a feel-good story, but there’s some measure of comfort to be found in the fact that, to paraphrase one of Kwan’s lines, even when people have run out of everything, they still have something to give. “Winter of Departures” is harsh and beautiful, cruel and kind, and it’s that kindness that makes all the difference:
In the cement yard, weeds shot up through the cracks and wilted, too tall to stand. Poppies sprouted from the fence corners like static bonfires. Cats covered in cuts and sores, their ribs visible beneath the fur, slunk through the lawn, which was ravaged from winter and littered with mascara tubes and beer bottles and bullet casings. At night we heard the cats yowl as they scavenged in the dumpster. When they came to the back door, my mother would put out a shallow bowl of milk. She said their bones were stretching like mine, that their cries were from growing pains.
