Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  Dr. Meyers was not as easy to convince as I was. She did not believe me when I omitted, euphemized, said my life was fantastic. “You’re distant,” she said. “Are you racing? Doing okay with your meds?”

  “I’m fabulous,” I said. “I think maybe I’m stabilizing.” This was a word I had learned from shrink books. She nodded politely, disbelieving. I told her I was learning Chinese, how satisfying the characters were. I could count strokes endlessly.

  She zeroed in. “Who’s teaching you?”

  I could have said Xiao Wang, but didn’t. “I have a houseguest.”

  “Have I heard of him before?”

  “Not really.”

  “He’s Chinese?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  I ruled out telling her he was a student. “Um, through Xiao Wang,” I said.

  “I hope you’ll tell me more about him at some point. I’d like to know who he is.”

  “I hope you like him,” I told her, “but I have my doubts.”

  “Do you like him?” She smiled kindly.

  I swallowed. “A lot.” I looked away, signaling that I didn’t want to discuss it.

  “Have you told your mom?” Dr. Meyers asked.

  “No. I told Julia.”

  Dr. Meyers was relieved to hear this, because we both knew that my appointments with her were suddenly filled with lies. Of course so were my dates with Julia.

  She took me one night to a Paul Taylor concert, wanting to show off a dancer she’d been vaguely dating. We sat so close the beads of sweat stood out on his body and sprayed in a rainbow as he leapt and bent and twisted across the stage. His muscles looked especially animal, as if he might have been twitching and flicking flies off his haunches and calves. My right foot fell asleep and I stamped the needles out as we clapped for the dancers. “He’s great,” I said.

  Afterwards Julia wanted to get coffee. We sat at a café, but coffee sounded oddly unappetizing. I wanted something white, ordered steamed milk.

  “Steamed milk?” Julia said. She stared at me. “Are you sick?”

  She waited, and I shrugged. “Milk? Are you pregnant?”

  “Ha ha.”

  She paused again, this time to see if I was actually joking. I won the stare-down.

  “Is there a chance that you’re pregnant?” she asked.

  I grinned. “Isn’t there always that chance?”

  “Have you not used anything?”

  “I had to get off the pill, remember?”

  “Of course there are other possibilities.”

  “But they suck,” I said.

  “Are you using nothing?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t mean to judge, but maybe—”

  I cut her off. “Let’s not talk about it right now.”

  She took a sip of coffee. “Okay. How’s Dr. Meyers?”

  I felt tired suddenly, deeply, terribly tired, as if my bone marrow were giving up on me. I couldn’t remember ever having felt this tired before. “Dr. Meyers is fine,” I said.

  “Do you tell her more about the Chinese guy than you tell me?”

  “She asked the same thing about you.”

  “You don’t tell me much of anything anymore, Aysh. Should I be worried?”

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Da Ge,” I admitted. She must have been worried. She had seen him drunk in my hallway, knew he’d been in the hospital and that I was potentially pregnant with his baby. It all sounded worse than it was, I thought. But that’s always how it feels when you’re the one on the inside of some very wrong thing.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Where what?”

  “Where do you guys spend time together?”

  “Mostly at my apartment, but sometimes out in the city.”

  “What about his place?” she asked.

  I felt attacked. “Not yet,” I said. “Maybe it’s not as nice as mine and he’s embarrassed or something.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Is your point that he’s a squatter and needs a place to stay? It’s not true,” I told her. “He has plenty of money, and he doesn’t stay with me every night.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care if he has money, Aysha. I just want him to be nice to you—past that, I don’t care.”

  “What about you, Julia?”

  “What about me?”

  This was the first time I’d asked her anything since Adam. I was half-scared that she’d tell me they were in love, married, pregnant. “How’s your love life?”

  “I’ve been out with that dancer a few times,” she said, “but he’s too vain for me. And I don’t think he’s ever read a book.”

  Unlike Adam, we both thought, and the conversation collapsed.

  When I got home that night, Da Ge was in my living room, his American history textbook open on his lap. I love to come home to someone reading, the lamp, the quiet, the eyes on pages, the way men’s hands look holding books. I was breathless to see him, spinning with the feeling of his waiting for me in my house. My apartment was charged, red and orange like hot blown glass. And sparkling. I cleaned around him like a tornado, bought flowers, hung prints, baked cookies. I checked on him, kissed him, tucked his feet back in, pulled the blankets up over his shoulders. I had never taken care of anyone else before, believed I could revive Da Ge. He slept and slept, and I hardly slept at all.

  Now I walked over. He put the book down, and I sat on his lap, facing him.

  “Where were you?” he asked, monotone.

  “I went to a concert with Julia. Are you okay?”

  “What concert?”

  Was he testing me? “A dance concert. Why?”

  “What about after?”

  “What do you mean? We went for coffee—”

  “I woke up,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I would have left you a note, but I thought you’d still be sleeping when I got back.”

  I thought for a moment. “Did you live alone before you started coming here?” I asked. I put both hands on his shoulders.

  “Yes,” he said. “Zhen Ming rent apartment for me.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Have what?”

  “The apartment.”

  “Yes.” “Does Zhen Ming stay there too?”

  “It’s in his building.”

  “Where?”

  “Chinatown. I told you.”

  “Do you ever hang out with Xiao Wang?”

  He put his hands on my hips. “I don’t have so many friends in New York, actually,” he said. “Mostly, I am alone.”

  His inflection didn’t accuse me. He just sounded like a little kid who’s been excluded at recess.

  “I don’t have so many friends, either,” I said, hoping he would find it comforting. “Just Julia, really.”

  He moved his hands up my sides until they were under my arms, as if he might lift me up or off his lap. “And sometimes you hang out with Xiao Wang, right?”

  “Right.”

  We ended it there, wondering what we had told each other. Da Ge moved his hands back down and put them inside my shirt.

  “Why are your hands cold?” I asked.

  “Please warm them,” he said. I leaned down, put my mouth on his.

  Since Da Ge never left my apartment anymore, that Wednesday Xiao Wang and I saw Pretty Woman in a theater. I told Da Ge I was going out with Julia. Xiao Wang and I were nervous; it felt like a date. We stayed quiet about everything except the movie and Xiao Wang’s bizarre preference for sugar on popcorn. As we walked out, she held my hand. So apparently hugging a Chinese friend was totally unacceptable, but she was cool with being my girlfriend in public.

  “Americans are casual about love and sex,” she said, swinging my hand.

  I laughed. “Aren’t we just holding hands?”

  “What!? I mean that movie!” She let go of my hand.

  “I was just kidding. A
nd I think the point of the movie might be the opposite. Americans can’t even have professional sex without falling in love and getting married.”

  “She’s, how do you say, jinu, prostitute! All she need is money to be happy!”

  “Love, too. And how is that evidence that Americans are casual?”

  “Because who will know if it’s real love with that guy or if she just marry him so she doesn’t have to, you know, sex with other men for money.”

  “The movie means to imply that it’s true love.”

  “I think it’s just like Pretty in Pink. All she need is a man for her life, and America think that will solve all her problem.”

  I smiled, delighted. “That’s a good feminist analysis,” I said.

  “And the man have to have money, too,” she said.

  “Hey, you wanted to watch teenage pop movies. We could have watched American classics—those do exist, too.”

  “Do you ever have romance like this?” she asked me. The street got hot, as if we had veered close to something smoldering and unpleasant.

  “Like what?”

  “With person you don’t know, for the difficult reason of personal life?”

  “Of course not,” I said. I descended into the subway tunnel and rode home to Da Ge, who was asleep on top of my bed, dressed in Columbia sweat pants and a white wife beater I’d gotten him. I shook his shoulder gently, woke him.

  “Hi, teacher,” he said drowsily. Then he spread his arms open so I could climb in.

  The last day of May, two weeks after the Paul Taylor dance concert, I called Julia. “Remember how you asked if I was pregnant?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Time for the test,” I said.

  “My treat!” she said.

  Julia and I had a long-standing arrangement. Whichever one of us thought she was pregnant did not have to suffer the dual indignity of buying and taking the pregnancy test. The nonpregnant witness supplied the test and kept the potential mother-to-be company. This was no exception. Julia arrived twenty-seven minutes later. “You went to Love Drug?” I asked.

  “You know it,” she said.

  “Did the cute Hispanic guy sell you this?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I don’t mind taking the slut rap for you.”

  “The slut wrap,” I said. I peeled the plastic cover from the test and took the cap off the pee-stick. “Not for children or swallowing.”

  “Don’t say children,” Julia said.

  In the bathroom, I peed onto the stick and then set the cap back on the stick and waited for the lines to appear or not appear. I had a moment of dizzy revulsion, mixed with anticipation.

  “So,” Julia called in from the hallway, “did you pee on your hand?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Is the thing blue?”

  I was staring at it. “It’s not that kind,” I said, my voice low. “It’s the double-lines kind.”

  “Oh my God,” Julia opened the door and came in. “What are we going to do?”

  “I can’t speak for you, but I’m going to wash my hands,” I said. I passed her the stick with two enormous parallel pink slashes in its display window. I felt oddly calm.

  Maybe it’s further evidence that I was unstable or impractical, or maybe it means I had learned from Da Ge that having someone to take care of would cure my own woes, but I didn’t consider an abortion.

  “It’s not necessarily right!” she cried out. “Stay put. I’ll go get another one.”

  “Don’t bother,” I told her. “They’re like ninety-nine percent accurate, and I can feel it kicking.”

  She looked at me. “A ninja?” she asked.

  “That’s Japan, you racist bitch. He’s Chinese.” I started laughing, and once I had, coughing, too. It felt unbelievable, that choke-laughing, and as weird as it is, I remember it now as my first experience of a new kind of joy: the shrieking, doubled-over brand that Julia Too introduced to my world.

  “Don’t laugh so hard,” Julia One said, “you’re scaring the baby.”

  June 1990, New York, NY

  Dear Teacher,

  Thank you for letting me to stay so often and so long at your house. I am bad guest and you are kind to me. And for this favor of marrying me. I hope I can repay you this some day.

  I am sorry for being so bad guest. I can’t help because my mind is dark. When I begin to think there is no good place to go in my mind. I think of my grandfather is dead, of those books he have to bury, of how I am disappoint to him now too. My mother and father and China, even my grandfather. If I consider to go back home I know I cannot do that. But also I can’t stay in America without being hypocrite and coward.

  I can think only how powerless I am. How I did nothing in the moment when it was important to do something. The more I think the worse I feel in my mind and the crazier in my body and finally I am so angry it make me want to kill someone. I have nothing now. Even nothing to give you to say thank you. I hope you will forgive me.

  Da Ge

  CHAPTER TEN

  Junes

  SCHOOL IS OVER, AND THE CITY IS ON FIRE. WHEN THE TEMPERature passes forty degrees Celsius in Beijing, the city is legally allowed to close shop, so the government keeps the thermometers perpetually at thirty-nine degrees. It feels like fifty, and yet the flu’s been contained so the streets are alive again. Stores, trying to recoup losses, have strung banners up—“Show you love our Beijing”—and held marathon sales.

  The touristy neighborhood of Wangfujing is like an elevator, so stuffed with people you can’t walk in either direction. Everyone is still wearing masks, but no one can resist a sale, so we’re all back out on the streets, including Julia Too and Phoebe and Sophie and Lili. They all have new, socialist realist T-shirts that flaunt model workers “stamping out sickness” with square fists. Buses with antiflu slogans zoom by and we all feel united in a fight against this outside evil. According to Beijing’s new billboards, the people will be victorious. The city feels blissfully awake again: its fountains populated by chubby people in underpants and jelly sandals. The ubiquitous Walls Popsicle carts have reoccupied street corners and old people are back in the parks, birdsitting, exercising, fanning themselves and chatting. Only the restaurants and dead businesses look tattered.

  Julia Too and I went to Tiananmen Square today. We go every June 4, and it’s usually the same scene: most of the other people there appear to be undercover cops with shiny shoes. I wonder why Da Ge always wore those black beetle shoes himself.

  Julia Too wrote a history report this year about the Martyrs’ Monument and lectured me proudly as we stood in front of it today, reminding me of Old Chen.

  “It was built in 1952 to commemorate dead revolutionaries,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard.” I smiled. I know the monument down to its tiniest detail.

  “Mao’s calligraphy,” she said, pointing. “The People’s Heroes Live On Forever.”

  “Right. I like that inscription,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “It’s open to interpretation. We get to decide who the heroes are.”

  “Did you know they used seventeen thousand pieces of marble and granite? That’s a lot.”

  We stood for a moment. When she asked me what my favorite “picture” was, I said the simplest one, the May 4 movement panel. In it, a young Chinese man demands “national sovereignty as a defense against foreign powers” in front of a crowd at Tiananmen. He has square cheekbones, and a rock jaw set in absolute defiance.

  “Why that one?” she asked.

  “I like that hero,” I told her, “he looks strong and brave to me.”

  “Does it remind you of my dad?”

  I ran a hand through her bangs. “It reminds me of you.”

  Twelve Junes ago the news was full of Tiananmen’s first anniversary. Thousands of teachers and students gathered at Beijing University to mourn. They sang “The Internationale” and smashed bottles.

  Da Ge left my Upp
er West Side apartment before I was awake on June 4, 1990. I tried madly to find him, left dozens of messages on his machine, alternately worried and cheery. It was a summer Tuesday, and I had nowhere to be, nothing to do. I asked Julia if I could borrow her car, and drove to New Jersey alone to sit outside of my father’s house. I parked in their cul-de-sac and sat fretting about Da Ge, dying for my dad. I hoped to see two seconds of him, even if only walking by a window, but they were gone on vacation. The house was shady and silent. I stayed for two hours anyway, studying the garden she must have planted: blooming marigolds, roses, a bed of half-dead impatiens. I wondered who came to water her summer flowers when she was away. I saw her on a plane, probably resting her head in the crook of my father’s neck. She had a magnificent magnolia tree next to the front door and giant bamboo stalks along the sides of the house.

  When the sun began to set, I drove back over the bridge to my mom’s. She was out with Jack, so I let myself in and read news on the blue couch until they came home.

  “Hi baby,” My mom said. “You hungry?” She disappeared into the kitchen before I could respond. I could hear her fixing dinner. Jack sat in an armchair across from me.

  “What’cha reading?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Just news,” I said.

  “Marion Barry’s drug trial started today,” he said, his voice extra-animated.

  I nodded, but could barely mask my lack of interest. Jack must have sensed it, because he turned to the Tonys, probably thinking I was artsy. I felt for him.

  “I was reading about China, actually,” I said.

  “Oh. What about it?” he asked politely.

  “It’s the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising.”

  “Oh right, of course,” he said.

  “Some guy tried to unfurl a banner, and was dragged away,” I reported. “But he kept shouting ‘Rise up!’”

  Jack looked me over, trying to guess what I could possibly want in response.

  I saved him. “I think it’s brave of him,” I said.

  “I guess so,” Jack said. He looked sad.

  “They interviewed some parents whose kid got shot in the back while he was biking to work four miles from Tiananmen last summer.”