Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “Very nice one, sweetie. But maybe he likes to live in the grass, and we should put him back.”

  “It’s a girl.”

  “I see. Maybe we should put her back.”

  “I can make a fort for her in the grass.”

  “Good idea!”

  “But I need a shovel.”

  “Do you have a shovel?” I asked Hong Yue.

  “A what?”

  Julia Too asked him in Chinese, and he went to get her a shovel. When he came back, he said, “Maybe you can tell me about Da Ge’s New York life. Because when he left, he was out of his fucking mind. I was glad his old man sent him off. I thought if he went somewhere else, he might get over what had happened. I mean, I thought if he stayed here, he would do wild shit and we would lose him. Of course—well,” he cut himself off, started over. “Were there good things about his time in New York? Happy moments?” He smiled at me warmly. “There must have been, married to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I hope there were. I took him ice skating once. And we went to Central Park, to the zoo. He cooked, showed me movies. He wrote brilliant, funny things about American culture.”

  Hong Yue leaned back, stretched his arms behind his head as if it made sense that it had taken me three years to come find him, as if we had forever to remember Da Ge together while Julia Too dug up the courtyard, burying snails. I was so grateful.

  “I have that painting, the one you mentioned,” I said finally. “I don’t know why I waited to say that—sorry. I guess I was scared you would ask for it back. Anyway, it was in his apartment in New York, and I took it. It’s here, at our place.”

  “No shit!” Hong Yue said, “That painting came back to China! That is crazy, beautiful news.”

  It’s funny he should have used those words. The painting is the craziest, most beautiful thing I own, even now, even though I’ve bought one of Hong Yue’s paintings every year since I met him. I plan to continue that pattern, even if I live to be a hundred and they keep getting more expensive. I’ll be one of those batty New Yorkers whose belongings topple over and kill her, just transplanted so that instead of junk mail and decades’ worth of National Geographics, the clutter that crushes me will be dead letters from the love of my life, and modern Chinese art.

  Da Ge and I took the train from New York to Garden City the night before our citizenship interview and stayed in a shack of a hotel, watching porn, each expressing polite surprise that the other liked it. This is one of several ways porn works, I think. Everyone likes porn. But part of the appeal for guys is the false truism that girls dislike it, which allows for the titillating revelation that we’re dirty enough to watch it, too. Part of the appeal for girls is getting to scandalize guys with that discovery. Fun all around.

  The next morning was less sexy. In a nondescript, government-issue building, we went through security, handed our “invitation” to an exhausted bureaucrat behind a bullet-proof window, and then waited for three hours on round-backed plastic chairs. There were thirty other couples in the room. Eventually, a blonde woman appeared from behind a door, and asked ten of the couples to form a line. Da Ge and I got in place with the nine other couples and followed her like obedient ducklings down a long hallway, up a staircase of ten stairs, to another waiting room. Six of the couples had lawyers with them, and I wondered if we were in trouble. Various “officers” began to appear from the doorway and call people in. I studied each one, hoped the young black guy would do our interview. But we got a middle-aged white woman named Ms. Tritzen.

  Right away she asked me: “Have you been to visit China?”

  I lit up with a smile and pinched Da Ge’s leg. “We’re going this summer,” I lied.

  He nodded. We had agreed that I would say nothing about myself, and he was to say nothing about himself. We would each talk only about the other, and that way we wouldn’t contradict or appear not to know each other. Maybe we’d even seem smitten. I tried to think of shallow, chatty subjects.

  “I’m already used to Chinese food because Da Ge is such a good cook,” I tried.

  “What does he make?” Ms. Tritzen asked me, unsmiling.

  “Tiger food!”

  We both said this at the same time. Da Ge couldn’t resist smiling. Even Ms. Tritzen seemed to soften a bit. “What’s that?”

  “It’s cucumber, cilantro, and peppers mixed with sesame and hot oil,” I told her.

  “And scallion,” Da Ge said. I shot him a look, so he put his hand on my leg.

  “What does Da Ge like?” she asked me.

  I considered possible responses.

  “Spaghetti.”

  “Do you two have any photos?”

  I took the album out of my bag. We had cobbled it together, pasting in ticket stubs from plays, movies, and concerts I’d been to with Adam or Julia, menus from cafes where I ate with my mother, and blank postcards with pictures of China on them. Our scanty zoo and picnic photos were scattered throughout. The “Thank you to Aysha” note with Da Ge’s characters at the bottom was featured on the last page.

  Ms. Tritzen asked, “What does that note say in Chinese?”

  “It’s the characters for Da Ge’s name.”

  “What were you thanking her for?” She turned to him bodily, punctuating the fact that she didn’t want me to interrupt. I was nervous that he might fuck this up.

  He collected words.

  “She took me out,” he said. “I think it’s polite to thank her for this.”

  I stared at him, thinking I adored him, unsure whether it was an act or not.

  “Where did he leave the note?” she asked me. Before I could answer, she said, “Write it down,” and passed me a sheet of paper. Who divides and conquers married couples? I hated her.

  I wrote “sofa,” on my note, worried he wouldn’t know the word “futon.”

  He wrote “futon” on his.

  Ms. Tritzen pushed her chair back slightly. “Da Ge,” she said, “I’m going to ask you to leave the room for a few minutes.” He got up. I tried to catch his eye as he left, hoping to impart something, although I didn’t know what. I wondered if Ms. Tritzen would be less formal now that he was gone. She wasn’t.

  “Draw a map of your bedroom,” she instructed me.

  “A what?”

  A diagram of where things are placed in your bedroom.”

  “What things?”

  She glared at me and slid a piece of paper across the desk. On it, I drew a two-dimensional bed with stick figures spooning across on it. I wanted to ask “Do you like it?” but thought better of it. I thought we needed her not to fail us on this test.

  “Is there any furniture in your bedroom?” she asked me.

  I drew in the dressing table and saw it, wooden in the corner with its mirror backed up to the wall. I drew a jewelry box on top. A tube of lipstick.

  “You need to mark obvious things,” said Ms. Tritzen, annoyed. “Please put an X where the closet and door are.”

  When I had finished my art project, she asked me to let Da Ge back in the room and to wait out in the hall. I stood up dizzily and walked to the door. I knocked before opening it, thinking he might have his ear pressed to the outside. But there was no response, so I pushed it open and peered out into the fluorescent hallway. Da Ge was leaning forward on a plastic chair, and I thought of him the first night he’d been in my house, sitting on the edge of the futon backlit by streetlight. He jolted when he saw me, as if he associated me with Ms. Tritzen now that she and I had been alone in that room.

  “You can go back in,” I said.

  “But for you?”

  I smiled. “I have to wait out here now.”

  “What will she do?”

  “Hello?” Ms. Tritzen called out from the room. I thought of recesses and hall passes. Did she think we were making out? Cheating? Da Ge dragged back in, and Ms. Tritzen told him to close the door.

  The hall seemed to me to be liquid, blurring in and out. I felt nauseated by the lights and the
bumpy walls, had a dizzy sense that a cement truck had turned sideways and poured them vertically.

  Ms. Tritzen’s door opened, and Da Ge gestured to me to come back in. We both sat. I looked at the desk and saw Da Ge’s drawing of my room.

  “When did you know you loved Aysha?” Ms. Tritzen asked him.

  How dare she.

  “In the beginning,” said Da Ge.

  She wasn’t buying this.

  “The beginning of what?”

  “She buy a Chinese dictionary,” he said. “And I see her with her mother.”

  “What does this mean?” she asked me. In spite of my feeling that she was racist to exclude him by asking me what he meant, I was aware that it was something I might have done, too.

  “I bought a Chinese dictionary after we met so that I could look up his name.” These words felt hard and sharp. I wondered what he would think. I looked over, but his expression hadn’t changed.

  “And that’s when you fell in love with her?” Ms. Tritzen asked him. I wondered if she was married and going by Ms. Tritzen anyway.

  “When I see her with her mother,” he said, “I can tell about her love.”

  A knot formed in my throat.

  “My mother and I are close,” I told Ms. Tritzen.

  “Have you met his mother?” she asked me.

  “His mother is dead,” I said, with none of the it’s-going-to-be-okay-when-you-apologize-inflection she expected.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, as coldly as possible “So are we.”

  And that was the end of the meeting.

  We traveled back to New York together shyly, not knowing if we’d passed, each unsure how much the other had actually meant. We were, of course, faking it, meaning to convince only Ms. Tritzen that we were in love. But it was tricky to keep that straight, at least for me. Da Ge said he had business in Chinatown, that we’d see each other later in the week. Bereft of him, I rode home and called Xiao Wang.

  “I haven’t rented anything,” I told her, “but I have The Graduate. Could you please come watch it with me?”

  “I will love to come,” she said. “I never saw that movie.”

  I said nothing about Da Ge, just ordered Chinese food from Hunan Balcony and put the movie on. As soon as Dustin Hoffman got into bed with Anne Bancroft, Xiao Wang asked, “Why does this young guy love to be in bed with so old lady?

  “She’s a sexy woman though, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “It’s not common situation. Usually, old women never get this kind of romance, and just live the practical part of life, caring for children and husband.

  “What about the husbands?”

  “It’s easy for them to have younger love.”

  “Don’t you think that’s outrageous?”

  “Out races?”

  “Outrageous—something that’s like, grossly unfair or offensive.”

  “Maybe sometimes you’re not practical person.”

  There was no denying that.

  Ben Rosenbaum was standing at my classroom door when I arrived to teach the final week of class at Embassy in 1990.

  “I hope your weekend was productive and fun,” he said.

  I thought about how “How was your weekend?” would have opened up the conversation and given me a chance to speak, and how he never took those routes.

  “I saw an impeccable performance of Hamlet,” he said. I nodded and walked to the front of the room, set down my books, and begin to write the Golden Rule on the board.

  Ben surveyed it. “My philosophy is not to teach religion or the trappings of its language as part of an ESL course,” he said.

  “Religion or the trappings of its language?” I asked.

  Unsure whether this was critical of him, Ben spent a rare moment reflecting. I headed back to the far end of the chalk-board and began listing phrasal verbs and their idioms: bring the subject up, bring the house down, bring home the bacon, bring about change, bring out a new album, bring up your baby, bring it on. I was wearing my wedding ring, watching it as my hand made chalk words. Ben walked back toward the door, and I turned to see Da Ge lingering there, the veins in his neck standing out again like the Incredible Hulk’s. When Ben went by, Da Ge said something so quietly under his breath that I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t tell whether Ben had. I thought I didn’t care.

  “Good morning, guys,” I said to the class, twisting the ring on my finger.

  “And girl,” said Xiao Wang. I was happy she had stopped apologizing before she spoke, that we were friends, had a history, even if it mainly involved fictional characters.

  “Yes,” I said, “good morning guys and girls. But it’s okay to call everyone ‘guys,’ too. It’s better for gender equality that way.”

  “What is this?” she asked. Da Ge mumbled a word to her in Chinese. She lifted her chin, did not look at him. “What is this thing you say?” she asked me again.

  “Gender equality. Justice for women—equal rights.”

  She nodded vigorously. “In China, we say, ‘Women hold up half the sky.’”

  Da Ge was watching her. I wondered, in a moment of fleeting panic, whether he’d told her we were married. If he had, I wished I had told her first.

  Xiao Wang glanced at Da Ge, who looked away. “This guy,” she said to me, “the other teacher who come to class—”

  “Who, Ben?” I asked. I immediately regretted saying his name, as if knowing it at all were an admission of some mutual interest between us.

  She nodded. I wondered where she was going with this. Xiao Wang kept Da Ge in her peripheral vision. “I think he loves you,” she said, meaning Ben. Her voice was as crisp and unapologetic as I had ever heard it.

  Now that I know Xiao Wang as well as I do, I’m certain that punishing Da Ge wasn’t her only reason for saying this, although that must have been part of it. She also said it because she thought it was true and that I would be flattered. She had to sacrifice a certain measure of personal restraint to blurt out what she thought was a compliment.

  “You think so?” I asked, pitching my voice up to sound hopeful.

  She pumped her head up and down.

  “Yes, he loves you. And he’s—how do you say, shuai, handsome!”

  Maybe that handsome flipped the switch, because the veins bulged back out in Da Ge’s neck, and he spoke Chinese to her, something curt, short, mean. Before she could react, I turned to him. “Da Ge,” I said, “Can you speak English, please?”

  “Xiao Wang can translate,” he said. Her face was burning.

  “Xiao Wang?” I asked, “Are you okay?”

  “It’s too bad word,” she said. “I do not know that in English.”

  Da Ge stood, turned on the heel of his shiny shoe, and walked out.

  “What an asshole,” Chase said. Everyone waited.

  “Good usage,” I said.

  When school ended the last week of May, I wrote, “There is nothing so useless as a general maxim,” on the chalkboard, without joy. We had a good-bye party, everyone except Da Ge, everyone proud of the dishes we’d brought, everyone speaking in English about how much we would miss each other. Then I never saw Russ or Chase again. I ran into Ingyum once grocery shopping at University Food Market on 115th, and another time on Broadway, and I built an entire life around Da Ge and Xiao Wang. As a sane person who contains her former crazy self, I can see both how bizarre that is and how, if I had a do-over, I might do it again. So there it is.

  Summer came down that May in New York just as it has in Beijing this year, a hot towel over the city. The streets reeked of spoiled fruit. Buses blasted by, scorching everyone with exhaust. When Embassy classes ended, Da Ge and I languished in my apartment, taking baths and eating Popsicles. He was urgently unhappy. I did not ask about his last fight with Xiao Wang or where he went when he wasn’t with me. I kept the shades drawn, let him sleep for hours a day, and read in the dim light from a textbook he had discovered called David and Helen Go to
China. The American protagonists travel to Beijing to study and experience culture shock. They can’t adjust to spicy Chinese food. They go running and are exhausted by the vast city. Finally, they meet Chinese friends in the dormitory, only to bestow upon them inappropriate gifts like green hats and clocks, which suggest cuckoldry and imminent death.

  While Da Ge slept, I studied the vocabulary in David and Helen Go to China with a ferocity matched only by that of my Embassy students. When he was awake, Da Ge helped me, wrinkling his brow if I worked sloppily or added extra parts to a character.

  “Don’t be American barbarian,” he teased. His mood would improve in those moments, and I’d feel hopeful as he closed his hand over mine on the pen, or rewrote the lines of each character with a patience I never saw him demonstrate in any other situation. When it was light, he slept and slept. I woke him sometimes to ask if he wanted a meal, others to seduce him. He always said yes, but was somewhere else at my table, someone else in bed. I liked even the stranger version of him, quiet, agitated, with his eyes perpetually open. He watched me like a mirror, as if searching for a secret about himself. I hoped he’d find it, thought if I just waited, fed him, met his eyes, he’d be back.

  I tried to learn Chinese so he’d feel at home. I wrote ni hao seven hundred times. I wrote ni and wo, you and I. Wo men. We, us. I wrote Da and Ge, filled pages with his name.

  When I missed my period in late May, I did not tell anyone.

  I was as giddy with this new secret as I had been with his proposal. I stopped taking my meds right away and waited to see what would happen in June. I stepped up the counting. “I-’m p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t” fits perfectly on ten fingers. I always spelled it that way, with “I’m” as a conjunction rather than “I am,” since that doesn’t fit. Maybe because I wanted to be pregnant. There are ways to spell whatever truth you want. Just add a “very” or a “really,” to even out the number of letters. I sometimes let myself believe Da Ge wanted a baby, too, since he never once asked whether we were avoiding one. Maybe he assumed I was on the pill. Or had a cultural aversion to condoms. At the time I spelled it out the way I wanted it: h-e w-a-n-t-s a b-a-b-y, t-o-o. It fit.