Em's Awful Good Fortune

by Marcie Maxfield

  The walk to the hospital is lined with sick people, from the parking lot straight on through to the lobby. Jake whisks us into the elevator and up to the calm bubble of the VIP suite, for expats only, where we are greeted by the marketing director, who is from Seattle. He’s an American version of Jake, who was born in Taiwan and educated in the States. They both have essentially the same job: to make us feel comfortable about moving to China.

  I’m not particularly interested in this hospital tour, because I am never coming back here, or entering any hospital in China, for that matter. I’m sure of that. But Marketing Guy is more buff than Jake, so I grill him about exercise and air quality.

  “I run every morning,” he says. “Along the Huangpu River.”

  This guy looks like he works out—lean and healthy, so toned he could be a spokesperson for sneakers. Just do it. Only, to be on the safe side, don’t do it if the air quality index (AQI) is over one hundred.

  “So, it’s safe to practice yoga?”

  “Sure,” he says. “The air is usually okay before six a.m. and after ten p.m.”

  Now I’m the one nodding my head in understanding. Like the boys. We’re bobbleheads, eyes glazed over as we ignore the obvious risks of moving here: Gee ignores the environment to pursue his career; I ignore my own needs to make the marriage work.

  I hear the numbers but fail to translate these time parameters into real life, that they mean I would have to practice yoga before I wake up in the morning, or after I’m home for the evening, in my jammies, getting ready for bed. All I hear is that it’s doable; that’s my takeaway. His one solid piece of health care advice: The magic number is AQI 100. That’s the line between okay and risky. Between sane and crazy.

  “Plus, there’s an app for that,” Marketing Guy tells me.

  Right away, the pieces start to fall into place. He makes it sound totally manageable, like you can beat the whole smog thing if you just follow a few rules, treat pollution like an inconvenience attached to rush-hour traffic and factory schedules. And if you’re smart, you can avoid it altogether by practicing yoga early in the morning or late at night. Make good decisions, like I tell my kids.

  I buy into it hook, line, and sinker and immediately relax, breathe deep like a yogi, thinking, This could work. I’m good when someone gives me a how-to plan, like no carbs after 4:00 p.m., or always wear sunscreen, or never let your husband move overseas without you. That sort of thing.

  I figure, how bad can it be? It’s not like living in Daejeon was such a picnic.

  “Your spirit was dying,” the therapist said when I came home from South Korea and told her how one day, my left arm went limp out of nowhere. Couldn’t fasten my own bra. Dr. B. Queensly said it was a panic attack, as well as a physical manifestation of my subconscious loss. My spirit was dying. Like Tinker Bell. I just needed someone to clap for me.

  Don’t get me wrong, Gee always brags about my teaching English to kids when we live overseas. He’s so impressed that his wife doesn’t just eat and shop with the tagalong crowd. But really, c’mon, I used to make more money than he did. I was the rainmaker.

  “So, why did you agree to move?” B. Queensly asked me one day during our session. Saying, “If my husband asked me to close my practice and move overseas for his job, I’d be like, ‘No way!’” Then she dug her heels into the carpet as if she were stepping on the brakes, her arms outstretched, wrists flexed, palms pushing away from her. It was a full-body oh, hell no.

  What strikes me as strange about the whole thing, looking back, is that I didn’t even freak out when my left arm stopped working. I was just super glad to be right-handed. As it happens, I am incredibly adaptable, although I’m not sure whether that’s a strength or a weakness. And I’m not sure whether my husband has my best interests at heart or whether he’s exploiting my adaptability to his own advantage.

  The next day, before the driver drops me off at the airport, Jake takes us to the Fake Market in the basement of the science center; this is where designer goods that fall off the back of the truck end up. Cartier LOVE bracelets and Burberry scarves. I peel away from the boys, choosing to window-shop on my own. I’m standing in a purse stall, eyeing a wall of bags, when a salesperson comes up to me and asks if I like Prada; she’s got more colors. Maybe I like Chanel; she’s got Chanel bags, too, in the back.

  “You want see?”

  It’s overwhelming. I don’t even know if I prefer Prada to Chanel; realistically, it’s never been a choice I’ve had to make. I tell her politely that I’m just looking, but she doesn’t leave. Instead, she hovers off to the side, commenting on everything I touch. “This one very good.” “That one come in red too.” It makes me so uncomfortable that I stop touching anything.

  “Bu yao!” the woman next to me says, and the saleslady walks away.

  “Are you new here or visiting?” she asks me in English. I can’t quite place the accent—most likely Australian.

  “I’m not sure,” I reply.

  “Well, just in case you stay, this is a good phrase to know: bu yao. It means ‘don’t want.’ But you can’t just say it nicely; you have to say it like you mean it, use your big-girl voice. You have to throw it down like it’s in all caps. BU YAO.”

  The boys look at me like I’ve failed Shopping when I return empty-handed. Apparently this is part of the tour, the look-see wrap-up activity: The tagalong wife leaves Shanghai with a designer purse, like a gift bag at the end of a kid’s birthday party. Their disappointment pressures me to buy something—and fast, because I’ve got a plane to catch. Jake knows a guy with a secret door in the back of his stall, where I spot a Dolce & Gabbana leather bag, black-and-white checks with pink floral appliqués, something utterly couture and totally impractical. Something I don’t particularly need or want but wouldn’t mind having. A consolation prize for being a good sport.

  “Is it real leather?” I ask.

  “This real leather,” the guy says, and to prove his point, he does this trick with a lighter where he puts the flame to the bottom of the bag and we all gather in close to watch it not burn.

  “See,” he says, “plastic burn. This no burn. This real leather, not plastic.”

  We haggle a little, just because it seems expected, and then we buy it. My first fake designer bag.

  The drive to the airport is butt ugly, like I said, but so is the drive from the Valley to LAX. Tacky billboards, endless mini-malls, urban sprawl—you just tune it out when you live in Los Angeles. I remind myself of this fact while trying to keep an open mind about moving to China, sitting quietly in the back seat of the van, my forehead pressed to the glass. State of mind: mild excitement laced with dread. I thought this trip would never come, thought it would remain somewhere out there on the horizon, a dangling relocation. The strap on my new purse starts to crack and peel even before I board the plane. Not a good sign.

  THIS IS HOW IT STARTED

  Gee walked in the door and announced, “We’re going to Osaka.” Just like that, like it was nothing, like he was saying, Hey, babe, I’m home, let’s grab some sushi. Only the sushi bar was halfway around the world.

  I was standing in the living room, baby on my hip, pasta on the stove, thinking I must have misunderstood him. But no, that’s what he said. Walked in the door with this shit-eating grin plastered across his face and told me that he went out to lunch with his college buddy, had a few beers, and took a gig in Japan.

  “You do know you’re married,” I said, shifting Ruby from one hip to the other.

  “It’ll be an adventure, Em.”

  Then he grabbed the baby and pretend-threw her in the air, chanting, “Konichiwa, Osaka, we’re going to Japan!”

  “What do you mean, we?” I asked.

  I had finally landed a decent job in LA, not the epicenter of the business but on the fringe, more like music-industry adjacent, working for a headbanger magazine, local newsprint, turned your fingers black just flipping the pages, but still … in the biz.

&nbs
p; “What about my job, Gee?”

  “You’ll get another job. You’re fucking good at what you do, Em; you always land on your feet.”

  It’s Gee who always lands on his feet. There’s always another auto show or expo or Vegas attraction to be wired for sound. The record business is like musical chairs: There are never enough jobs, and every time there’s a reshuffle or restructure, the music stops, everyone hustles to land a desk, and someone always ends up without a backstage pass. Next thing you know, boom, you’re in sales at a factory that presses CDs for record labels.

  “Japan, baby! It’ll be so cool. C’mon, Em, you love sushi.” As if loving spicy tuna rolls meant wanting to live in the birthplace of sushi. He was practically jumping out of his skin with anticipation.

  “No, thanks,” I said, taking the baby back. “I’m good where I am.”

  Plus, I’d been to Japan. Before we got married, before I moved to Los Angeles to marry Gee, I chaperoned a Valentine’s Day promotion to see the Romantics in Tokyo. Detroit homeboys. Red leather suits and one big hit: “What I Like About You.” Right at that moment, I was wondering what I liked about him, my husband, and coming up empty. He had just made a life-changing decision over beer without even consulting me. Wasn’t this something couples were supposed to discuss, chew on, mull over, dissect inside and out, sit at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and make lists of pros and cons about, before coming to a decision? And by “decision,” I mean no effing way.

  “You need to call Jared and tell him no,” I insisted.

  “Did you just stamp your foot?” Gee asked, laughing.

  Yep. Stamped my foot like a wild pony.

  This is why women are so often compared to horses—headstrong; bucking and neighing; necks straining left and right, backward and forward, in a violent shake, trying to break free of bridal constraint.

  “Em.” His tone was casually resolved. “It’s only eleven months.”

  And that’s when he dropped the real bomb and admitted that he had already quit his job. That’s right, he went out to lunch, high on hops, signed on to a gig in Japan, stumbled into his office, overserved and happy-man, and quit his job, all without even talking to me. And now he wanted me to quit my job and tag along.

  “It’s like you think I’m some sort of concubine.”

  “Wrong country, Em. In Japan, you’d be a geisha.”

  “Well, I am not a geisha. And I’m not moving to Japan, either.”

  It finally felt like I was settled in Los Angeles. Married, with a baby and a job at a music magazine, everything—the perfectly happy pieces of my life—coming together. I was thinking he might be the most selfish asshole on the planet, but I swear I didn’t say that, although the look on my face may have been transmitting poison darts.

  “Goddamn, there’s no pleasing you,” he said. “You complain when there’s not enough money, and you complain even more when I get work. I tell you I get a gig in Japan, and you’re pissed. I’m just following the money; seems like that’s all that matters to you these days, ever since the baby. Money. And, fuck, it’s never enough. As soon as you got pregnant, we had to move out of Koreatown—wasn’t good enough for you. You couldn’t see yourself with a baby stroller on Vermont and Kenmore, so, okay, we moved to Los Feliz. Hipster heaven and overpriced French pastry shops. You could see yourself there, my princess bride. That made you happy for, like, a millisecond, but as soon as the baby came, wham, when are we gonna buy a place of our own, you wanna know. What happened to the rocker chick I married, the one with the fine ass and easy smile? That’s what I want to know. The girl who’d go down on me in the front seat of my car while I was pulling into the garage, because she couldn’t wait to get into the house. Where’d that girl go?”

  I wanted to say that girl worked all day, picked up the baby from daycare, and was now making dinner. But I’m not sure it would have supported my case; he would just have said it was all the more reason for me to quit my job and follow him, again, like I did when I moved to Los Angeles to get married. He was perched on the couch my mother bought me from Englanders in Detroit, back when I got my first radio gig: assistant director, advertising and promotion. The couch was covered in black parachute material, delicate and modern—perfect when it was just me, but now, with him and the baby, the two of them drinking and crawling all over it, it was starting to fray. It was completely threadbare in some spots, but we couldn’t afford a new sofa.

  “Are they at least paying you a lot of money?” I asked. And when he said yes, I said, “Good,” staring past him to the hole in the couch.

  “We’ll get a new couch, Em,” he promised, giving Ruby and me a hug.

  I felt a twinge of guilt, mixed with awkwardly misplaced new-mother understanding, as if he were my son, not my husband. He seemed so jazzed about going to Japan that I didn’t want to rob him of the experience. The excitement in his voice, his energy pumping—I recognized this feeling. Only this time it was his.

  “It’s a great opportunity,” he said.

  “For you, maybe.”

  “For us, Em. We’re a team.”

  Here’s the thing: I never played team sports. I grew up swimming in the Great Lakes, canoed the Manistee River, biked, hiked, took ballet and jazz, but I never joined a team.

  “A year is a long time to be apart,” I said quietly, already missing him.

  “It’s only eleven months, Em.”

  In eleven months, Ruby would be a walking, talking little person. There was no only eleven months. It was eleven effing months!

  Usually, when one of us got a new job or promotion, I’d throw a bed picnic for two: finger foods, cheese and crackers, olives and nuts. And champagne. But this time, I didn’t feel like celebrating. A week later, he was gone, leaving me alone with the baby and a full-time job. It wasn’t like being divorced, because I didn’t date. It wasn’t like being married, because I slept by myself. It was some sexless, in-between marital status, where I had all the responsibilities of a family and none of the benefits of being single.

  My boss at the magazine loved to tell the story of why he hired me. How when he called me for a phone interview, he could hear the baby cry in the background, and then the crying stopped. That’s because I put Ruby in the playpen and locked myself in the bathroom to drown out the noise. After I told him that, all he heard was that being a mother would not get in the way of this woman’s career. And it wouldn’t. Nor would my marriage. That was how I sealed the deal, how I snagged the job—my ability to compartmentalize.

  Everyone had an opinion about my decision not to go to Japan with my husband. Andra, who had followed me to California, like a tagalong, thought I was nuts.

  “They offered you a per diem just to go with Gee? They were going to pay you not to work, and you said no? Maid service and breakfast buffet every day? Ruby could grow up like Eloise at the Plaza!”

  My mom called to tell me that her manicurist told her to warn me about Japanese girls. That’s a mouthful, I know. She must have been bragging about her son-in-law with the big overseas job.

  “Lady,” the manicurist told my mom, “you tell your daughter Japanese girls are like catnip for American men. Those girls got one thing on their mind, and it isn’t what you think—it’s a plane ticket out. Asian girls see an American man alone, they don’t care if he got a wife and baby back home—their black eyes light up green card. They know how to get what they want. You know what I’m saying? You like the pink or the coral today, lady? Modern marriage? Bah! No such thing. You tell your daughter: Sheila says she best be keeping an eye on her man.”

  “Oh, Mom!” I laughed when she told me what Sheila had said. “That’s so retro. It isn’t like that anymore.”

  “Emma, your husband is a man, isn’t he?”

  No, I thought, he’s a boy. He had a ponytail. Dyed blue.

  Gee’s mom wasn’t worried about our marriage; she was too full up on the fabulousness of Gee’s international assignment. Always blowing sugar up
my ass, saying stuff like, “You must have a terribly important job, dear, not to go with your husband to Japan.” There was this unspoken undercurrent that a good wife would have accompanied her husband to Osaka. But I was not a good wife; I was an awfully good wife.

  Milly was a master at inserting her truth between the lines. Full disclosure: Milly and I did not get along. It went deep and way back. Something about my being fun to have at a party but not the kind of girl one marries. Maybe it was the black miniskirt and ripped stockings I was wearing the first time we met. In my mother-in-law’s worldview, this whole single-mom hell I was living through while Gee was in Japan was all my own doing, my choice, as if my career was nothing but paper towel, disposable, though I should point out that my income was not so disposable in those days.

  At work they teased me that Gee didn’t exist, joking that I’d made up a baby daddy. On Valentine’s Day when flowers were delivered to my office, I waved the tiny envelope, saying, “See! Flowers from the hubby!” As if a bouquet of flowers was indisputable proof that my husband existed. After I read the card, I quickly hid it in my purse. The flowers weren’t even from Gee; they were from Milly, covering for Gee, like she had somehow known her son would be too busy to remember to send his wife flowers on Valentine’s Day.

  One morning I was in the kitchen, warming a bottle for Ruby, when Gee’s mom called. Wet hair, half-dressed, wishing I had not picked up the phone and let in Gee’s family drama.

  “Grandpère is in hospital,” she said. That’s how she talked, dropping articles and peppering her speech with French like she was posh. And she always used Gee’s full name. “Can you please have Gregory call me,” Milly asked, “if it’s not too much trouble, dear?”