Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  I was hurt by this and worked not to be defensive. Don’t hurt him, my mind reminded me. He’s not entirely wrong. I looked up, tried to meet his eyes.

  “I do listen to you. I like to listen to you.”

  “But not only,” he said.

  I was quiet, spelling. I d-o-n’-t l-i-s-t-e-n w-e-l-l. Fifteen letters and true.

  “Aysha?” He was looking down at the floor. “It’s okay I stay here tonight?”

  I took this to be the most overt pass that had ever happened and felt reckless and thrilled. “Sure,” I said, trying for nonchalance. I shrugged. “If you like.”

  “I can sleep here,” he said, and patted the sofa next to him. So maybe it wasn’t a pass. When his hand came down on the sofa, I watched it, wanted to see the blood move through his veins. I wanted to pick his hand up off the couch and put it under my shirt. He looked disturbingly calm. He was difficult to follow, unlike most guys I knew. When Adam lied, which it turned out he did frequently, it was so obvious that his pants burst into flames. When Da Ge spoke, I had to inspect him for signals of dishonesty, and then I couldn’t read them. He was like a book with whiplash plot twists. Choose your own adventure, written in a hybrid of English and Chinese.

  “I have sheets and extra pillows,” I said, backing into the hallway to get bedding.

  “No,” he called. “Please, no trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble at all, really,” I told him. I sounded like an English teacher. I opened the door to the closet and managed to collect a set of flannel sheets from behind the air conditioner. Back in the living room, Da Ge had stood up. He was looking at black and white photos on the wall above my table. I began making the futon into a bed.

  “It’s you?” he asked, pointing to a faded photo of my brother Benj and me in full-length sleepers with feet; I am on Benj’s lap, my head thrown back, laughing. He has one arm around my waist and is tickling me with the other. Sam the doll, now Julia Too’s, is lying on my lap, her plastic eyes blinked shut. Benj is six, I am three, and Sam is new—we look as if we’ve been stacked like blocks in order of descending size.

  I nodded at Da Ge, swallowed the rise in my throat. I stopped fanning the top sheet over the futon, let it fall into a wrinkled mess. Da Ge was watching me carefully.

  “Do this question make you feel unhappy?” he asked.

  “It’s just a long time ago,” I said.

  “You are fat and white,” he said, smiling.

  I stared at him. The CD began skipping, and I went to fix it.

  “Pang pang bai bai de,” he said in Chinese. “It’s good things for a baby.”

  I liked it when he spoke Chinese to me. I had written down “pai the ma pi of America,” in case I ever found myself in a conversation with a Chinese person and needed to talk about horse-ass patting. Of course, I had no idea at the time how well it would serve me. As with fat fat white white, which I’ve used to describe every baby I’ve met for a decade.

  “Who is this?” Da Ge asked, pointing at Benj. In the photo, Benj’s hair is standing on end in a halo of static. Maybe our mother had just pulled a sweatshirt over his head. I felt my heart move up closer to throat. I sat on the messy sheets, put my hands in my lap. They looked like they were someone else’s.

  “That’s my brother, Benj,” I answered, and the grief in my voice was so revealing that I called upon my English teacher voice to hide me for a moment. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

  Now Da Ge’s eyes clouded over. He looked mean, and I remembered how he’d seemed the first time he’d come to class. But when he said, “No, it’s just me,” his voice was so dark blue that it reminded me who he was now. Or who I thought he was.

  Maybe he wanted to hide, too, because he said, “China has a rule of this. You can only have one kid. For population.” Of course this rule hadn’t been in effect when he was born, but this was before I knew that.

  Then he stood up straighter all of a sudden, and looked oddly formal.

  “Aysha,” he said. “I need to have certain history of my life, and for this I must become American.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe I like to marry with you, so I can be American. I know it’s a rude favor. I am sorry for this. Maybe you cannot agree to it. Or maybe I can pay you some money?”

  I stood up, reeling and dazed, felt myself catapulted into a soap opera. I sat back down. It was as if as soon as I didn’t know what to do with my words, I also lost track of what to do with my body. I gathered some of the sheet in my hand and squeezed it. “We hardly know each other,” I heard my voice say. I looked around the room as if a teleprompter might appear and guide me.

  “I have to tell you that I take your class so I can meet you,” he confessed. “Sometimes even before that, I follow you. I feel I like to know you, to marry with you.”

  I stood again and began pacing. I considered walking straight out the door and into Julia’s apartment, telling her everything, saving myself. Because the “I follow you” was even less what I had been expecting than the proposal, and it scared me.

  “I think what you need is not to be a stalker,” I said.

  Some light in his face went out. “I don’t know this word,” he said dejectedly.

  What offended me most, I know now, was the offer of money. Right off, I relished, in the way only a cracked person could have, the idea that Da Ge wanted to marry me. I would be the protagonist of a bodice ripper, the wife of a Chinese dissident, his savior. We would be madly in love. If he hadn’t offered me cash or called it a favor, I could have coolly omitted the awkward fact that we had met three months before. Because I found Da Ge, in all his wanna-bethugged-out bookish splendor, fascinating. I had started to dress more sexily, to consider before teaching whether I had lipstick on. I took time in the mornings to slick my bangs with various gels. I dreamed of going to China with him, trading my broken life for a new, improved, international one. Or at least seeing The First Emperor together at the IMAX. Marrying him would mean the effort I had put into seducing him had paid off; it would be less sordid than simply having sex with my student, which I thought I couldn’t resist in any case, should it come up. I would be like one of those teachers who seduces her student and gets pilloried by American society even though men bed their female students like unapologetic rabbits and no one seems to mind.

  I went to get the red, plastic Chinese dictionary. When I came back, holding it, Da Ge’s eyes widened. “Why you have this?”

  “So I can understand you.”

  “I can go now,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  “No, no. Stay.”

  I sat down, thumbed through the dictionary.

  “What is the word you use?” Da Ge asked me. There was no entry for “stalker,” and I couldn’t think of a synonym. I found stalk and walked over to the table. I stood behind him and showed him the entry, pressing my fingernail into the soft page just beneath the word. His hair smelled like peppermint shampoo.

  He looked at the entry under stalk. “This is like grass?”

  “No, wrong word,” I said, annoyed even though the whole stupid thing was my fault. “That’s a different kind of stalk. I can’t find the right one in there. Forget it. A stalker is someone who watches someone else.”

  “A bad word,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s okay for me to go,” he said.

  “Stay.”

  The phone rang. “I’ll let the machine get it,” I said, hoping it wasn’t Adam.

  “Where are you?” said Julia’s voice. “Call me as soon as you get this.” I wondered how I would both not call her until the next day and not tell her anything. I wondered why I didn’t want to tell her anything about this.

  “Do you want to sleep?” Da Ge asked. He said nothing else about getting married. I didn’t know what he meant by sleep.

  “Uh, sure.”

  “If I stay, it’s okay I shower?” Da Ge asked.

  “Yes, of course.�
� I handed him a towel and a washcloth, and put a quilt my mother had made out of my baby clothes over the futon. Whenever she made her bed at home, I liked to jump on it immediately and lie there, flat, seeing how little damage I could do to the fresh blankets. Da Ge stood quietly, watching me. I hoped he would leap onto the bed and ruin it. But he hadn’t moved at all. I considered offering to help him shower, but wasn’t sure I could get the nuance right.

  “Good night,” he said, and started toward me.

  “Good night.”

  He crossed by me, giving me the sense of an edge—of something straight and horizontal, a wall, maybe or a window. Da Ge had a sharp, glassy flavor about him, more a metal color than a smell. I heard him close the bathroom door, turn water on. I went into my bedroom and read the first page of The Remains of the Day over and over until I heard Da Ge back in the hallway. Then I turned off my light, cracked the door, and peered out. He had wrapped the towel around his waist. Now he sat on the futon, his shoulders wide and thin. He looked like a wasp ready to lift off. The skin over his stomach was stretched taut, the muscles underneath it square and even. Then he folded so that his elbows rested on his thighs and he held his face in his hands.

  I should have gone in there, apologized for the awkwardness, said I would marry him or asked for a week to consider. I should have climbed into bed with him. We both had a lot of face at stake, which seems stupid now, but doesn’t protecting your face always seem idiotic with hindsight? I, for one, keep doing it, even knowing. Back then, I wasn’t even considering what motivated me. I guess I didn’t want to risk his turning me down for sex, even though he had just proposed marriage. It’s ludicrous, but I couldn’t be brave. And I figured we had all the time we needed. I crept backwards into my room, took a sleeping pill from my nightstand, and swallowed it without water.

  I woke the next day with an icy start. Da Ge was gone and the futon was made. There was a note on it: Thank you to Aysha. At the bottom were two Chinese characters, and underneath them, Da and Ge. I put it in my jewelry box and called Julia.

  “I was sleeping when you called last night,” I lied.

  “Was someone there?” she asked.

  I thought for a minute and then said yes, Adam had been here.

  “No,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He called me last night to see if I wanted to have a drink. He said he wanted to talk about you. He was worried. That’s why I called. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “Really?” I asked. “The truth is, he slept here the night before.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He said so.” We both waited.

  “Come over,” she said. “I’ll make you coffee.”

  I put on sweatpants and went to her apartment. She answered the door in tights.

  “Why this?” I asked.

  “I have an audition,” she said.

  “Julia!” I said. “That’s great! Is that what you called to tell me last night?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “There’s something else, too.”

  I sat down on a stool. I had sat in this precise position thousands of times. I wondered if this was the thousand and eighteenth or the thousand and thirtieth. Julia turned to the stove, poured boiling water into a French press. The smell of coffee filled the room. Suddenly, I hated her.

  She was silent, but her shoulders were moving in a gesture I recognized instantly.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “It’s complicated,” she started, “what I have to tell you.”

  I decided not to help. Time dragged across the kitchen, carrying a stick with its possessions tied to the end. It was a crayon-drawn mouse, moving out. Tom and Jerry.

  “I saw Adam last night,” Julia said.

  “Right. You said he called. So?”

  “I slept with him.”

  In spite of myself, I felt a laugh rising up into my mouth. “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Aysha, I’m so sorry. I can’t—I didn’t mean—It was just—it was a mistake.”

  She threw some monosyllabic words around—drunk, we, fucked, up—I heard the consonants catching in her throat like metal hooks. Mistake words have a lot of k’s in them. They’d fucked? Yuck. I tipped the stool forward and walked out, took the stairs back down to my place. I swallowed, thought I might digest my heart since it had been in my mouth. Julia and Adam? Something about it reminded me of the way most people feel about their parents having sex. It was dirty, disconcerting, off. And they were my only friends. It was wretched that they had betrayed me together. Who would be on my side about it? I could hear Julia calling down the stairs after me. I closed the door behind me and stood in my hallway, thinking.

  “I’m sorry,” said Da Ge, and I realized that he had appeared from the living room and that I was crying. “I bring breakfast,” he said, holding a paper bag. “Some bagel.”

  I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned in his note that he was coming back. And how he’d gotten back in. I wiped my eyes.

  “Why?” he asked me.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I went running. The wind. You know. Thank you. For the bagels, I mean. Uh, let me take a quick shower. Maybe you can toast them? I’ll make coffee when I get out. Oh, wait, you don’t drink coffee, do you? I’ll make tea. Just wait here a second, don’t go.” I heard my mania, mostly suppressed for the last six months, surface in my voice like a friend who’d been abroad. Welcome back, I thought.

  In the bathroom, I reached into the shower and turned the water on, stripped my sweatpants off, and climbed in. Within five seconds, Julia was knocking on the front door. I climbed out of the shower and grabbed a hand towel to hold over myself as I collided with Da Ge in the hallway. I put a finger over my mouth, and shook my head toward the door.

  “Don’t open,” I mouthed.

  He nodded and backed away. I turned into the bathroom, wondering, in spite of my misery, whether he had taken a look at me in my small towel. I turned the shower up full blast and sat down in the tub, figuring I’d count the streams of water as they came out of the nozzle. I was at 83 when Da Ge opened the door. He pulled the curtain back and I shrieked.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “don’t feel nervous.”

  Then he turned the water off and bent down. He was holding a towel. He reached into the tub and picked me up, wrapped me in the towel like a child. Then he carried me to my bedroom and set me on the bed. He covered me up and then he lay down, too, on the outside of the quilt and put his arms around my mummified body. We didn’t speak, and after a while, I fell asleep. By the time I woke up, he was gone.

  Much later, I would ask Da Ge why he had come to get me in the bathtub that day, and he would teach me a Chinese grammatical construction I now know better than I ever knew him: ni shangxin sile. “You were heartbroken to death.”

  Julia Too spent New Year’s of 2002 in New York with my mother. She’ll turn twelve in February. and she and my mother propagandized me for months about this trip, finally convincing me that that means she’s old enough to fly alone. In honor of her first solo flight, I taught her “Avanglavish,” a secret language my aunt taught me and Julia One in third grade. We practiced until we were so fluent we could have hours of conversation about other people in front of them. It was a scrumptious tool. Avanglavish is a simple formula, really: just add an “av” before every sounded syllable of English. Julia becomes “Javulav iava,” Lili becomes “Lavilavi,” elbow “Avelbavow.”

  I told Julia Too that she and Lili (whom she decided to teach) have to be nice with the language, that they’re not to use it to exclude other girls. I don’t know how that will work out, really, or what the point is of having a secret language if you can’t use it to keep secrets, but I thought I should remind her of the rule about being nice to other girls anyway. We were packing. I was barely stifling my panic at the impending week away from her, a prospect that sent a vacuum of blood away from my heart.

  “Havair bravush,” she said, putting her hai
r brush in the suitcase. Then she asked, “What about Chinese Avanglavish? Chavinglaivsh? Navi havao is ni hao!” She ran to call Lili, and I thought I’d like to tell Yang Tao about Chavinglavish. He’d appreciate it.

  When Julia Too came back, I asked her why she’d chosen Lili, and she knitted her brow. “I don’t know about Phoebe yet,” she said.

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Mom?” She fiddled with the ear of a ratty teddy bear. “Was my dad a criminal?”

  “No,” I said. “What gave you that idea?”

  “Phoebe said everyone in Beijing knows that.”

  “I see. It’s not true.” I said it without pausing, and she nodded, ready to believe me.

  “I’m sorry Phoebe is making up stories that hurt you,” I said, trying to hide my horror. “You should try as hard as you can not to worry what other people think.”

  “But Phoebe isn’t other people. She’s Phoebe,” Julia Too said. “And she was just telling me so I would know what everyone was saying.”

  I could hear that this was something Phoebe had said. “What about Sophie?”

  “Sophie’s opinion is important, too.”

  “What is Sophie’s opinion?”

  “She always agrees with everything Phoebe says.”

  “I see. What about Lili?”

  “She doesn’t even go to our school.”

  “But is she on your side?”

  “Yes.” That night, I sat up watching Julia Too sleep in a bed crowded with a stuffed lion, two monkey puppets with Velcro arms wrapped around each other’s necks, and a doll named Sam. I remembered Julia Too’s baby life, how many mornings my mother showed up, packed Julia Too and the diapers, wet wipes, sippy cups, Cheerios, balls, sunscreen, hats, and countless other necessities, and went to the park so I could read, bathe, or sleep. So I could get sane and finish Columbia. So I could eat, teach, manage. Even after she married Jack, my mom was always everywhere all the time. And I don’t know whether it was in his nature or my mom tutored him, but Jack is loving and generous too, signs cards Grandpa Jack. So how big a favor is it to put Julia Too on a plane to see them? My mother would pick her up at JFK. Julia Too would be fine. I kept reminding myself. There are so many ways in which I do not want Julia Too to be like me. I’d like her to feel safe. Whenever she cried as a baby, I snatched her up immediately. What was in store for her seemed already so terrible; how could I let her weep over lesser tragedies?