1“Such Common Life” is a fifty-seven-page novella that is driven by dialogue, interspersed with narrative passages, between Dr. Edwina Ditmus, an eighty-eight-year-old retired entomologist, and Ida, originally Xiangquan, Dr. Ditmus’s sixty-three-year-old carer and an immigrant from China. The end of Dr. Ditmus’s life is on the horizon, the story plot is minimal, the conversation is reflective but also lively, through the intertwining into the main narrative thread of several embedded stories. Despite the main protagonist’s old age—old age being one of the four revelations which convinced Buddha that everything is illusion or mâyâ (Cheng 328, Armstrong 3)—the perspective is not only retrospective and reflective, but also largely speculative, as Dr. Ditmus has the habit of relentlessly asking questions, until she is satisfied that the matter at hand has been thoroughly examined.
2The construction of the story aims at producing a mirror effect between the two protagonists, who, unlike cheese and chalk—which may look similar, but are very different—look radically different, but deep down have a lot in common. Edwina Ditmus, a highly educated American woman from a wealthy family, single-mindedly pursued a stellar academic career, while Ida/Xiangquan, a Chinese immigrant, wife and mother of two, experienced dire poverty and a repressive political regime in China, in which she became a barefoot doctor, skilled but destitute. After reaping the successes of an immigrant life of hard work in the United States, she now lives a slower though demanding life as an old woman’s carer. Which of these two lives does the story title refer to? And what about the title’s jarring grammar: would one not expect to read “Such a Common Life,” with an indeterminate article before the adjective and noun, to indicate that the story is bound to be about an extraordinarily common life, that of the main character, whose experiences and feelings should be, after all, somehow like anybody else’s, and in the end some wisdom may be drawn from that? With the absence of article, “Life” takes on a different meaning: the title then seems to indicate that life, human life in general that is, is remarkably common, and some experiences and feelings are shared by most, if one looks carefully enough. The story, rather than focusing on a single character to exemplify a point, takes a more philosophical and ontological approach by setting side by side two life stories and putting them in dialogue.
3The narrative is structured into three parts entitled “Protein,” “Hypothesis” and “Contract.” These single-word titles have punch and announce the rigorous rhetorical logic—inherited from her scientific training but transferable to philosophical considerations—that characterises Dr. Ditmus’s speech and that Ida, her interlocutor, emulates. The first title’s simultaneously practical and scientific viewpoint (“Protein”) contrasts with the other two (“Hypothesis,” “Contract”), which are more theoretical and argumentative. This reflects the dialectic dynamic of the novella as a genre (May), which here establishes links between practical considerations of social class and politics, and loftier aspirations to ethics and spirituality, aiming to articulate them together.
4The reflection on life—one’s own life, life in general—that unfolds in the story lends itself to speculation: what if a different path had been taken, at a certain stage? Eleanor Wachtel, in an interview with Yiyun Li, remarks on “the sense of lives unlived” in her fiction, and further comments: “It might be a form of rebellion or resistance, but it’s also a form of self-deprivation it seems.” In response, Li agrees that life unlived is at the core of most of her characters, as a way, often the only possible way, for them to preserve themselves and their integrity (“Yiyun Li” 279-80). This notion of the “unlived life” and of preserving one’s integrity is particularly strong in “Such Common Life,” and is what this article will scrutinize: the sense of the unlived life as a path to explore a kind of otherness, in the sense of an alter ego, another self, possibly a better self, rather than of radical difference. It will successively analyze the role held by playing and making up stories of “imaginary friends” in childhood in the development of the imagination and of one’s life; how each of the two main characters have taken gambles, or not, when making their life choices; and how narrative control is exerted in this novella as a way to also control one’s life.
5Imagination is central to conducting one’s life: it takes imagination to project oneself into the future, to outline the life to come, to formulate ambitions and desires. Imagination is also important in order to develop empathy and understanding. Yiyun Li is particularly aware of this, as she declares in an interview, in response to Vivian Chin’s prompt: “I really believe that one should be able to imagine being someone else” (Li, “Chinese Stories” 318). Imagination is particularly important to children in the development of their personality. In her old age, Dr. Ditmus remembers the part played by imaginary friends, who were her main companions at a certain point in her childhood. The narrative starts off with a very earnest discussion, initiated by Dr. Ditmus, on “imaginary friends” in childhood. She recalls her own three imaginary friends: Cottage Cheese and Tom Thumb-Thumb, “a young couple, quite domesticated” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 105), who both lived with her. Her third friend was “Georgie Porgie, who lived in the woods” (105). Edwina was in love with him, and the love affair lasted for about a year, but she never eloped with him. The other two filled up her imaginary life as an only child.
6The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott studied the role of playing for children, and in particular the importance of “transitional phenomena,” that is the intermediate area of human experience, between inner reality and the outside world (2-3). Edwina’s imaginary friends act as such transitional objects, around the time she started kindergarten, at the age of five or six, just before she launched into socialization in the real world of school. Winnicott further stresses the importance of playing and creativity in the process of identity construction: “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (72-73). Edwina’s interactions with her imaginary friends therefore deserve all the seriousness she gives them in her conversation with Ida as an old woman.
7Two aspects of playing are particularly relevant to this discussion of how one controls one’s life. Winnicott points out that “creative impulses, motor and sensory . . . are the stuff of playing” (86), and also that “[t]o control what is outside one has to do things, not simply to think or to wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing” (55). Motor and sensory impulses drive Edwina’s life until she starts school; then one can presume that most of her attention and energy are taken up by learning rather than playing, even though playing, as embodied in her imagination by Cottage Cheese and Tom Thumb-Thumb, remains part of her life for a while. Second, if playing is doing and doing is controlling the external world, then the time Edwina spends playing is about her figuring out how to control the world around her. It is clear that she fairly quickly gives up on Georgie Porgie, the embodiment of the bad boy of potential wild passion, and turns to a more intellectual kind of activity. And this early play can be seen as one of the factors in her life that kept her away from married and family life, something that her father seems to regret for her.
8Edwina Ditmus’s father was good at imagining his own life. After his wife died, when Edwina was fourteen, he sent her to a boarding school so that he, “a forty-two-year-old widower and a successful partner at a Detroit law firm, could work on the next chapter in his personal life” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 124). Two years later a half-sister was born to Edwina, who basically spent her life at boarding school, without family, “made invulnerable by her mother’s death and her permanent exile from the family house” (126). The notion of imagining one’s own life, “writing the next chapter,” is one that Edwina instinctively replicates, but not so successfully. As a teenager babysitting the Silases’ daughter, she imagines stories about the Silases that open up her own future, based on the script of her father’s story: “in some of Edwina’s fantasies . . . , one or the other of the couple did not return . . . , leaving the other spouse miraculously intact and ready for a new life” (135). For “Edwina, desired by both, had loved both” (136). When the Silases, who each have secret loves with girls, including Edwina, move away suddenly, after her first year at school, her fantasies come to an end. Even though Edwina was looking for a substitute family with the Silases, imagining one of them dead, or even making a family of three (four with their daughter), they did not offer a stable model in which she could fit and project herself: “the Silases had failed Edwina, by asking her to keep her life as two separate halves, and she had, too” (140). This pattern is identified as dissociation by Winnicott, who distinguishes dreaming, which connects with life, from daydreaming, that is fantasy:
With unexpected clarity, dreaming and living have been seen to be of the same order, daydreaming being of another order. Dreams fit into object-relating in the real world, and living in the real world fits into the dream-world in ways that are quite familiar, especially to psychoanalysts. By contrast, however, fantasying remains an isolated phenomenon, absorbing energy but not contributing-in either to dreaming or to living. (36)
Fantasying is disturbing, as it does not feed into real life but is disconnected from it, and generates a form of dissociation. Once the Silases are gone, Edwina abandons her fantasies of recreating a family with them, in whichever configuration, and puts all her energy into academic life. She thus gives up on family life until her memories of her relationship with the Silases unexpectedly creep back on her in old age.
9Contrary to Dr. Ditmus, imaginary friends are not something Ida remembers having had as a child; with five siblings, she was busy enough in real life and had more immediate practical concerns to deal with, as illustrated in her response to Dr. Ditmus’s story of her three imaginary friends. Ida worries about what Georgie Porgie would eat in the woods, and where he would get his protein from—protein as an important part of the diet. For Ida’s imagination as a child was fed by stories in which, during a famine, “the youngest children of families were exchanged, to be cooked and eaten by strangers” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 107). Ida is now a grandmother, and her daughter tells her on the phone that when she read Charlotte’s Web to her twins, a story “about a pig who escapes being slaughtered with the help of a spider” (108), the children were sobbing at the end of the story. Here again, Ida’s response to their reaction is informed by her experience as a child: “That, she thought, was civilization: tears shed for a fictional spider and a fictional pig, rather than for a child who nearly got slaughtered like a pig” (108). Lack of protein marked her childhood—“She had been eleven when the three-year famine began” (107)—and her concern for protein carries on in adulthood. In their early days as immigrants to the United States, she and her husband used to go fishing at the weekend, not for recreation, but to supply “a vital source of protein for their family” (123), as was the case with many of those who fished alongside with them. There were also others, who fished for pleasure, and told Ida about the concept of “catch and release” (123): keep only the better fish. This phrase becomes a symbol of what immigrant life is about: “They had raised their children so that concept of catch and release, like fresh oysters and organic berries, could find its way into their lives, so that their grandchildren could weep for fictional animals, and had enough space if they wanted imaginary friends to live with them” (124). Imagination and empathy are luxuries that the better off can afford. The “Protein” of the title of the first part foregrounds this difference in social class, which largely determines the type of imagination of an individual.
10Although she claims that she and her siblings had no imaginary friends at first, Ida then remembers that a friend of hers “gave her hands names,” Big Sea and Little Thistle, “and let them play with each other” (115), in a way that “in retrospect, had felt erotic, too indecent for a child’s mind” at the age of ten or eleven (116). Telling that story in the name of a friend enables her to put the embarrassment of that memory, in reality her own, at a distance. Yet Winnicott points out that “[i]n psychoanalytic writings and discussions, the subject of playing has been too closely linked with masturbation and the various sensuous experiences”; to him, “playing needs to be studied as a subject on its own, supplementary to the concept of the sublimation of instinct” (52-53). Perhaps the same goes here, and Ida’s hands were her own way of exploring sensuousness, in a world that didn’t encourage it. Both Ida and Dr. Ditmus are modest women, a fact that is illustrated by their unsettlement, reported separately, at the thought of looking at inflamed tonsils, be it their own or someone else’s.
11The world Ida grew up in was one in which dreams were not encouraged. She remembers Mo, a monster in Chinese myth who lives on people’s dreams and eats them so they do not remember their dreams; Mo was forbidden in school during the revolution as something prerevolutionary and therefore counterrevolutionary (Li, Wednesday’s Child 142), but it comes back to Ida’s mind when she is planning to ask for leave from Dr. Ditmus’s to visit her friend Yanzi who needs her. Evoking Mo gives her the unexpected strength to claim her right to make her dream of visiting her friend come true. Ida is aware that stories are meant to frighten, to caution, to move, to give courage; she values them hugely and reflects on them, from her own perspective. She does not know some of the writers and stories Dr. Ditmus alludes to—Hans Christian Andersen’s story “Ida,” or Oscar Wilde, or King Midas—and she is also aware of not having grown up in English, which she reflects on ironically: “According to the picture books, she had missed many things in her childhood—waving at passing trains, egg-and-spoon races on picnic days, rolling an iron hoop to school and back, dancing around a maypole. It had occurred to her that her granddaughters, whose lives were filled with dancing and singing and gymnastics classes, might miss the same activities, too” (129). Culture is determined by place, class, and generation, and not sharing a common cultural language here reveals cultural and educational difference, rather than a difference in the kind of sensibility that literature enables. Still, Ida is able to straddle these differences and have conversations with Dr. Ditmus; this is part of her work as a carer. And even though the central value of her life is work, her approach to it, based on a teaching from her youth, makes her ruthlessly optimistic: “any job you end up doing, love it with a summerlike passion” (112). Her passion for work makes the work, and her life, lighter, if not play.
12Dr. Ditmus made life choices that led her to give up on marriage and family. To the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “we learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like” (xi), a state he calls the “unlived life.” I will focus on three points in his examination of the unlived life, two of which are phrased in negative terms—on frustration, on satisfaction, on not getting it—to analyze how Dr. Ditmus manages her unlived life. Then, in counterpoint, I will examine how Ida approaches her life, as a game, a gambling, a chance for a positive outcome.
13As mentioned earlier, Edwina Ditmus devoted herself to academic life from early on, in response to emotional frustration, which Phillips calls “the cumulative trauma of desire” (23). To Phillips, “[t]hought is what makes frustration bearable, and frustration makes thought possible. Thinking modifies frustration, rather than evading it, by being a means by which we can go from feeling frustrated to figuring out what to do about it and doing it” (24). Dr. Ditmus brilliantly harnessed her frustration to lead her to success. The clarity of her life as an entomologist, her ability to identify a discernible logic, as illustrated in her conversations with Ida, in which she thoroughly questions a given situation, her discipline of reading scientific articles daily, are a source of pride, or used to be, before her body started to deteriorate faster after she had a fall. Now “[s]he missed being not this old” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 117).
14The satisfaction Dr. Ditmus derives from her stellar career chimes in with Phillips’s point that “One of the ways ‘we,’ in this ‘historical period’ . . . have given ground relative to our desire is to have taken refuge from it or repressed it into ‘the passion for knowledge.’ As if to say, it is not knowledge we really want; or, rather, knowledge is what we start ‘really’ wanting when we evade (that is, repress) our desire; knowledge is a sublimation” (148). As a fourteen-year-old, “Edwina belonged to knowledge and to herself” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 125), not to other individuals, the way most other people around her did, as she saw it. Knowledge is a sublimation of her frustrated desire to be part of a family, and belonging to knowledge is her way of preserving her integrity, to echo Yiyun Li’s words (Li, “Yiyun Li” 280), and of not living in a fantasy. This kind of satisfaction requires determination and a refusal to consider for too long the unlived life. On the eve of her life, taking stock of the fact that she did not experience married life or having children and grandchildren, Edwina Ditmus grapples for a suitable metaphor to express her feeling: “Dr. Ditmus was determined not to feel nostalgic for what she had not lived through. The events in that life were negatives that never got developed. No, they were film never used, fogged by time, long past the expiration date” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 110). It takes some adjustment, and some good metaphors, to come to terms with the unlived life.
15Regarding the unlived life, some not knowing, or not wanting to know, can be suitable. Phillips considers, “on not getting it”: “Can we learn how not to know, as well as how to know, and what could be the benefit that might accrue from this? Or, in which area of our lives does not knowing, not getting it, give us more life rather than more deadness?” (80). There are several instances of Dr. Ditmus not knowing that are revealing of her relation to the body and the sensuous life, for example the field of knowledge of Chinese traditional medicine. When Ida presses down at a few acupoints on her legs, producing instant relief to her stomach, Dr. Ditmus, who “had thought of [Chinese traditional medicine] as no better than quackery,” is pleasantly surprised, and marvels: “The things one learns even after a lifelong career in science” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 105). Although when Ida blames herself for not teaching her friend Yanzi the acupoints well enough for her to avoid getting pregnant, Dr. Ditmus calls it a magic practice that is nonsense, Ida argues that Dr. Ditmus does not understand, and that “[n]ot everything can be explained by science” (151). There are things that Dr. Ditmus prefers not to know or think about—her relationship with the Silases who could not offer her a family, her relationship with her father who suggested on his death bed that she should have children, at the age of fifty-six—but that come back to her to remind her, on the eve of her life, of the life she did not live. The memory of her father comes back to her when Ida tells her the story of her friend’s daughter who is about to give birth at the age of fifty-one. The memory of the Silases comes back for no identifiable reason, seemingly out of the blue, although Ida is convinced there is always a reason. So Dr. Ditmus has successfully practiced not knowing and not getting it until now when certain memories come back to her, hinting at the unlived life.
16Ida had a different life from Dr. Ditmus, but one that was also a life of work and of using her brain. While Dr. Ditmus reads scientific articles to keep her mind sharp, Ida recites poetry to herself every night, “the perfect lubricant for that machine in her head” (114); it is also something that imperceptibly feeds her imagination and sensibility. Equipped with her ability to work and her good brain, Ida repeatedly tested her luck in life, in a kind of gamble, in the sense of a game or (figuratively) a situation of chance in which one takes a risk on the outcome of an event (SOED). She once bought an ice-cream maker, unopened, at a garage sale for two dollars which she sent to her twin grandchildren; it turned out the machine contained an envelope with a hundred-dollar bill inside it. Ida sees her buying of the present as an investment and imagines the grandmother who originally bought it being disappointed not to get a thank you note for it, as the gift remained unopened. This lucky event makes her philosophical, remarking to herself that “Giving presents was like loving people: a gamble, though this would not prevent Ida from doing either” (114). Ida is married and has had a family life, and high-achieving children; in that regard her life has been utterly successful in her gambling. Altogether, Dr. Ditmus reflects, the difference between Dr. Ditmus’s attitude and Ida’s is this: “That was the difference between science and life. In science, one only chose to pursue the hypotheses that they found to be valid; In life, . . . not so much” (141). Dr. Ditmus has lived her life with a scientist’s mind, followed scientific hypotheses, while Ida has been guided by her unbeatable optimism and her trust in life.
17Ida’s husband has gone back to China, where she plans to join him once she decides to stop working in the United States. He sends her emails from the websites he reads, including this one: “‘Change your perception of life: treat it as a game” (110). Ida, for whom work is a core value, takes the message literally, ponders and eventually dismisses the notion of treating life as a game as an impossible one. However, it can be argued that her approach to life is like a gamble, the word “gamble” being derived from “game”; a gamble being a game that involves a risk. On a short walk close to the house, Dr. Ditmus and Ida meet Luke Robson-Stancer, a young cellist who is raising money to attend a music camp. He is brimming with confidence and optimism about his future career, which irritates Dr. Ditmus, as he reminds her of her professional life and the “men for whom science served as a stage for their egos, as music did for Luke” (121). Ida, on the other hand, is willing to give some money to Luke, thinking of it as an investment of sorts: “what if one day her granddaughters could boast about having the autograph of the cellist who had become the next Yo-Yo Ma? . . . Ida imagined the girls telling people the story . . . what if . . . she was in the mood for a game just for the day? A gamble for a lifelong nongambler—there was no law against that, was there?” (122). Ida has all her life put her trust in work, and achieved a lot. Now she is ready for some gambling, considering the worth of the gamble with the hypothetical formula “what if…?” The story of the young musician is a parable for gambling, for having trust and confidence in the future, in fellow human beings, in life. A parable, as a rhetorical form, being itself a gamble, a story that stands as a template for other possible stories.
18Ida uses another hypothetical formula at the end of the story, as she is thinking about Dr. Ditmus and her own life: “Had she [Ida] been born into a different kind of life, she could have been that woman [Dr. Ditmus], so free, so confident, so elegant” (158). This reflection is made not with regret for the unlived life, but with trust in her own achievements, in her own life. And above all, Ida is the one who controls the narrative and its ending.
19To Henry James, writing in the preface to “The Lesson of the Master” about the genre of the novella (which he refers to as nouvelle), its “main merit and sign is the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity—to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control” (231). Although James does not elaborate on what he means by this science of control, it is worth examining the notion of control in relation to Li’s novella, as there are strong links between controlling aspects of one’s life and narrative control.
20Controlling time—time in life and narrative time—is an important aspect of the narrative. A novella may be seen as a long short story, and this extra length, when dealing with the looming death of an old woman, creates space for a slowness in physical movement and general dynamic, as well as in the narrative, which here unfolds at its own deliberate speed, punctuated by the dialogues between Dr. Ditmus and Ida, at slowed down tempi, reinforced by subjective retroversion in which parts of a life pass through the character’s mind (Bal 94). This slowness sets the right rhythm for considering time and one’s relation to it. The plot provides the perfect anecdote and metaphor to reflect on time: the timer that controls the automatic sprinkler in Dr. Ditmus’s house is broken and needs fixing. Ida suggests that the system be updated to a digital control system, but when she considers, alternatively, the possibility of using the sprinkler manually three times a week, Dr. Ditmus does not see the point of having the system converted to a digital one. Ida, who is familiar with both traditional Chinese society and with modern “civilization”—a term she uses recurrently when reflecting on American society—is open-minded about doing things either way, digitally or manually; the old, slower way or the modern, more efficient way. And to Dr. Ditmus, “[a]n outdated clock that failed to keep time was an appealing concept at this stage of her life” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 133). The failing timer that can no longer keep up with regular activity ticks in time with Dr. Ditmus’s own slower pace in her life, something she appreciates. This contrasts with her youth, and the train story she used to read to the daughter of the Silases, who asked her to stop the clock so the train in the story would not depart; back then young Edwina taught her that time could not be stopped (135). But now she is in control of time, at least her own, and can slow it down.
21Being in control of the body is something that Ida can do through her skills as a doctor in traditional Chinese medicine. She worked in rural Huaiyin for sixteen years, where she was known as “the Doctor,” and saved many lives. One day she chose not to treat properly a wounded revolutionary (not being a revolutionary herself), thinking of the number of lives she would spare by effectively not maintaining him in a position to kill others. In her present life, Ida can bring relief to Dr. Ditmus’s elderly body. It is ironic that Edwina Ditmus is referred through most of the story by her academic title as Dr. Ditmus, while Ida does not have one but is effectively a medical doctor. She does not have the sort of scientific knowledge and recognition that Dr. Ditmus has, but she nonetheless has reliable instincts, efficient knowledge of acupoints, as well as a healthy exercise routine, grasping “any opportunity to keep her body mobile” and doing “deep stretches” regularly (112, 143).
22Being in control of fate is a quasi-impossible task. When she was young, Ida became interested in acupuncture and meditation, but the technique to avoid pregnancy she taught her friend Yanzi, a mix of breathing and pressuring acupoints, failed. To Dr. Ditmus, “[t]hat can only be nonsense” (151), but to Ida, the reason is elsewhere, possibly in her lack of experience and ensuing failure at explaining to her friend what to do, and she has been feeling guilty about her friend’s pregnancy ever since. Yanzi decided to falsify her daughter’s age to conceal from her second husband the fact that she had become a mother at thirteen, and now her daughter is about to give birth at the age of fifty-one, when her husband and the doctors believe she is forty-one. Ida wants to be present when Yanzi’s daughter gives birth, for good luck, and to dispel the secret that she shares with Yanzi, so she asks Dr. Ditmus for leave. Dr. Ditmus is irritated when Ida starts telling her that story: “Until this moment she had thought that Ida belonged to the same species of woman as herself: one with a history, but a history under control, which would not develop into dilemmas and complications” (147). Life events happen, but to Dr. Ditmus they should be kept in check, and not become a source of unsettlement. One should not act out of superstition, in the hope not to tempt a fate linked to old secrets. However, the story of Yanzi’s daughter giving birth late in her life brings back to Dr. Ditmus’s mind the memory of her father on his death bed suggesting to her that she should have a child, even though she was already fifty-six. Remembering her father wishing her some kind of happiness back then, she feels an unusual sort of tenderness and becomes more sympathetic to Ida’s position. Dr. Ditmus has spent her life controlling her feelings, but as Ida is asking for leave, she becomes aware of how being present, sharing a secret, keeping an open heart, can be ways to manage emotions, despite the fact that they are not rational actions that will have predictable consequences, as scientific reasoning has it.
23What about being in control of death? Or birth? When Dr. Ditmus reflects on her approaching death, she maintains her customary rigor to avoid letting thoughts of the unlived life darken her outlook: “One’s way of living determines one’s way of dying. If she was proud of her life lived with discipline, purpose, and principle, there was no reason to allow doubt and regret to creep in” (110). When Ida asks for leave, she thinks of the possibility that Dr. Ditmus might die while she is away, so she casts a spell on that anticipation (Bal 82-83) in the imperative mode: “don’t die when I’m out there in California” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 158). Ida feels better after speaking out her fear, trusting that language will be performative and keep death at bay, while also establishing a contract “that she would be there when the old woman was leaving for the next world” (158). By voicing her fear, Ida controls the ending of the story, and the end of Dr. Ditmus’s life, whom she wants to accompany. She is in control of the narrative sequence of their story together, in the same way that Dr. Ditmus was in control of her life, “built as DNA and protein” (108). Both DNA and protein form an essential part of living organisms and are linked in specific sequences, folded into complex structures, which can be identified (SOED). Ida has that same desire for control: by forbidding Dr. Ditmus to die while she is away, she anticipates the ending of her charge’s life, and commits herself to being present for its natural termination (Gerlach 8); such is the contract that is established at the end of the story, as announced in the title of the third part. By controlling the ending of the story, and the closure of Dr. Ditmus’s life, Ida exerts narrative agency and encloses Dr. Ditmus’s experience, going against the open-ended story that was favored by Modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century (Lohafer 109). Once again, Ida opts for an old-fashioned approach to time, and to life, one that is under control, and that suits her charge.
24The unlived life in “Such Common Life” is kept in check: it must not be a subject of regret or sadness. Dr. Ditmus achieves this through strong will, and with the help of Ida, who understands that Dr. Ditmus is doing the difficult work of taking stock of her life and promises herself that she will be there when Dr. Ditmus passes away. Because the anxiety of dying on her own is latent in the narrative: the absence of a spouse or progeny is felt in a way it was not in the past. As death approaches, the old feeling that “nothing was beyond endurable” (Li, Wednesday’s Child 110) wavers but is pushed back, by sticking to strict logic on the part of Dr. Ditmus, but also agreeing to enter Ida’s world, and through a mix of gambling and narrative control on Ida’s part. By shifting the lines of science and life, the two women make the prospect of death more easily acceptable.
