by Susan Conley
We stood up from our mats in the yoga house when the Talking Circle was over, and I hoped Shashan would be done soon. I hoped I’d be fixed and back home with Lukas and the girls, but it was still only Friday.
· 17 ·
About a month before I left for Shashan, Lukas had found me in the basement of Tower Three on my way to get more Belgian beer at the convenience store there. It was surprising to me that they imported beer all the way from Belgium, but the Chinese import many crazy things, like free-range chickens from Ireland and saffron from Egypt and silk nylons from England. Lukas was meant to be putting on yet another private concert for a young Chinese banker, but it had ended early.
“Els,” he said when he saw me, and he seemed so worried. “What’s wrong? Where are the girls?”
I was not as responsive as I might have been because I’d been drinking, and I was very focused on it—the need for more beer. The bottles were a sophisticated dark brown with a lovely red, Belgian label, and I knew the girls wouldn’t wake up. They never woke up.
“The girls,” I said, “are asleep. I wanted to get eggs for breakfast.” I may have been slurring my words, and I knew that he knew I was lying.
“What if Myla wakes up and you’re not there?” He tried to compose his face, but I’d seen the flash of anger after the worry, which then changed into fear. He was now a little afraid of me and of what I might do next, and this was new in our marriage—the idea that neither of us understood what I was capable of.
“Elisabeth will take care of Myla,” I said, which wasn’t true, and certainly wasn’t fair—to make the younger one be in charge of the older.
“Don’t you think that’s a lot to ask of a seven-year-old?” Lukas’s face was very serious.
I moved by him as if to open the store’s glass door with the leather strand of tiny silver bells on it. I thought he would continue home without me. I needed to get the beer. I hadn’t considered how I would hide it when I returned, but I wanted it, and this is as embarrassing to me now as anything is from this time, and there’s a lot.
Lukas swung his black backpack up onto his back and took my hand firmly in his. “Let’s just hope no one has woken up.”
I didn’t have time to argue, and he didn’t say anything else after that and didn’t confront me. I knew I would go back the next night when he was out and get the beer. I’d created these small games in my mind. When I would drink. When I would not. When I would get more beer. They were all tests that I guess, in the end, I failed repeatedly, but I kept making up more tests. I would not drink on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But then I would feel very tired on Tuesday, so I’d make an exception because a drink would, for example, help me when I needed to clean up the kitchen after the girls had gone to sleep.
· 18 ·
On the way out of the yoga house I asked Mei if we could do the Talking Circle drunk the next time. I don’t know why I said this. I was joking but not joking, because I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep my promise to myself not to drink. You might think this would have been clear. I had two small girls. I would stop drinking. I know this is what Lukas thought. But drinking doesn’t work like that, and my need for it was stronger than I realized.
“I cannot perform that task sober again,” I said while we stood outside the yoga house in the moonlight. We hardly saw the moon in Beijing because of the smog and the lit-up skyscrapers and the neon signs. “It’s not possible to do it sober. So please don’t make me.” I pretended to be cavalier and as if I was in control of the drinking and not the drinking in control of me.
Mei looked at me. “It will be difficult,” she said, “to do the hand standing if you are being drunk.” Her English was good but not flawless. “Maybe it is possible,” she said and smiled, “that your friend Tasmin can teach you.” I was surprised by her sarcasm and how quickly she’d understood Tasmin, and I loved Mei for saying what she’d said.
Then Ulla announced that she and Tasmin and Tamar were walking up to the Lius’ house to go to bed. She asked me to leave with them, but I chose to go to the Great Wall instead, and hoped my choice made a small statement about how I wasn’t who she thought I was.
The rest of the group followed Justice for twenty minutes to a section of the wall on the ridge to the right of the Lius’ house if you looked up from the road, and the sky was navy blue. We don’t get that kind of wide sky in Maine. We get stars and the dark navy but not the expansiveness you get in China. A small pile of rocks sat underneath a falling-down part of the wall, and we climbed up here and sat down. Tree brought out a bottle of red wine from her backpack and passed it, and I didn’t drink when the bottle came to me. Because of this I honestly thought I’d fixed my drinking problem, which was a sign of my unmooring and maybe also a sign that I hadn’t gotten a handle on my thyroid, which I’d found like an enlarged butterfly while fastening beads around my neck before Myla’s school Christmas concert.
Justice asked Tree how long she’d been in India, and Tree leaned her head against the side of the wall. “I walked in the northern region near Nepal all winter. It became harder and harder to get away from people, so I walked farther into the mountains until I was as far from others as I could be.”
I couldn’t imagine being without people entirely, because even though I don’t like crowds, to be without people would be to be without the girls and Lukas, which would be the most terrible thing. Mei lit a Yuxi and passed it to me, and I shook my head and gave it back. We all stood along the edge of the wall where the rocks had mostly fallen away, and I looked up at the sky—paler now that the stars were out. I need to say something about how it felt on the wall, because I sensed animals—Chinese wolves and bear—and for a few minutes I was scared but knew I was in the right place. The mountains were outlined in ink as far as I could see into the darkness, and I felt alone, and this was not a bad thing. I almost never experienced being alone because of the girls and Lukas, and I hadn’t realized how much territory they took up in my brain. I wasn’t sure who I was without them or how this had happened without my noticing it.
China was in my blood then, the way Tree had earlier said it was in her blood, even though when she’d said it she’d seemed a little ridiculous. What I mean is that China felt important on that wall, like the most important place in the world. I never smoked pot after the children, but I had the feeling of being outside my body on the Great Wall, and I loved this feeling when I was stoned in high school. It was close to the feeling I got when my painting went well.
“You have cancer of the arm, Elsey?” Mei asked me.
I was surprised again that she was so direct, and I appreciated it. I thought to tell her about the zinging pain in my elbow and how it scared me, because what was it? But I didn’t want to burden her with it. I hardly knew her, even though I felt like I knew her. “No,” I said. “No arm cancer.”
She took a last drag of her cigarette and rubbed it on the sole of her sandal. “It was the truth wrapped in a lie.”
“Yes, that’s it. But I feel bad about it.”
“We do not need to know your secrets here. Keep them safe in China.”
I saw that she didn’t operate out of guilt, and I was envious of this, too. I couldn’t keep track of the different people in my life that I was in the act of letting down. She asked me if I liked the Great Wall, and I said yes, very much.
I rarely talked to any of the Chinese like this. I mean, Ulla had Chinese colleagues who came to her larger dinner parties, and I chatted with them, but it seemed formal and not like talking to Mei. Her fame also aroused my curiosity, so there was a little bit of that, too. I can’t lie. She told me she was trying to understand foreigners like me who projected things onto the Wall and made the wall into something bigger than it was until it wasn’t a wall anymore but a distorted symbol of China. “You must forgive me for criticizing you.”
I didn’t feel she was
criticizing me. “I’m not offended,” I said, and vowed to give the Wall more thought when the pain in my arm had subsided.
“I had a husband once,” Tree said and took another sip from the bottle, and I could see some of her teeth in the dark. Her hair had curled a lot more in the mist and rose around her face like a little hive. “He fell out of love with me when I had no money and worked in a fruit processing plant in Auckland. He let me have the couch, and he took the bed. He didn’t worry about me. He never worried about me.”
Andre said he was glad he was single now. “It’s too difficult to work for the airline and have the love life.” He exhaled loudly and reached for the bottle and took a big sip and passed the bottle to Maeve, who drank and passed it to Toby. Toby pushed his glasses higher on his nose and drank and passed the bottle to Adrian, who drank and handed it to Justice, who to my relief put the bottle by his feet.
I thought how Lukas slept without any clothes on and ran naked down the hall in the morning to make the coffee. I knew Lukas would never stop running down the hall naked in the morning, and that there were things to fight in a marriage and things to let go of. I thought also of how Lukas was the Chinese bear in winter that I wrapped my arms around in bed to keep warm. And how he worried for me during the surgery and brought my favorite steamed buns with red-bean paste to the hospital as a surprise.
· 19 ·
During my first month in Beijing, we’d wake up in the dark and reach for each other and I felt almost crazed with it, and it went on like this for quite some time. He came home one night wearing a black flight suit with a zipper down the front. We’d probably been married three weeks, and it was two in the morning, and I walked into the kitchen to get water. He was at the sink filling a glass, a little unreachable after his time in the club. This was the old apartment with the view of the back of the Workers Stadium and the formica kitchen and the pink plastic rice cooker. I’d been painting and drinking scotch, and I wanted to remove the flight suit and press into him and absorb him, and I did this.
My paintings were still my children, and the metaphor is obvious but I need to say it because I cared for the pieces like they were a part of me. The paintings were no longer about whether the women were beautiful anymore, which was important in the context of my career. I very much wanted a career. These paintings looked like mistakes—lemon yellows and lawn greens and marines. The women’s stories were underneath and that was enough, and the work sold at higher and higher prices.
It sold to expats in China because of my art dealer, a Finnish woman named Bree who wore ropes of gold and was married to second-in-command at Apple in China. She had a deep network and was able to get my paintings to the Europeans. This was my more important market. I’d had shows by then in London and Prague and Paris. After Saatchi began representing me, buyers paid $25,000 and waited on me to finish commissions. All this happened over many years and feels to me almost like a dream, because painting was my life then.
I gave birth to Myla four years after I moved to Beijing and Elisabeth eleven months later. I don’t know how to explain this, except that everything in my life changed after I had children. I didn’t understand how to parent. No one really knows how to parent until they have kids, but I’ve often worried that I parent scared, because this was how I took care of my sisters in our house in the woods. I thought I could save them if bad men came for us while our parents were gone. I didn’t know there were ways to protect the people you loved and not be fearful. Or that we don’t control very much of anything that happens anyway.
The girls were one and two and then three and four. I learned to cook the things my children would eat. I still tried to paint. I felt guilty when I painted and wasn’t with the girls, but I was unsettled when I was with the girls and didn’t paint. I kept a secret log of my hours painting and my hours with the girls, and I spent parts of the day adding up the hours in my head so they would be equal. It was my sickness in a way. Not to be in the painting when I was painting, and not to be with the girls when I was with the girls.
I liked to be alone when I painted. There was no other way to do it. Painting was an evisceration of any lies I told myself. When Myla was five, I told her she was stupid for not taking a nap, and this may be the hardest thing to write. I wanted her to nap very badly so I could paint. I was still consumed by the paintings, and I threw a blanket at Myla that landed partly on her head in her bed, and she began to cry. For weeks afterward she said, “Am I still stupid, Mama? Am I stupid today?”
· 20 ·
Sometimes the painting went well in my studio in an old war factory in Dashanzi thirty minutes from our apartment. Sometimes the days with the girls were quiet and uneventful, and I was the luckiest person to know my children. But these days were rare, and the painting was like a compulsion. It was the only thing I’d done well, and I couldn’t look at my life or ask myself if I needed to be doing the things I was doing anymore.
When Myla started school near the new shopping mall in Sanlitun, I went to my first parents’ association meeting there, led by a child psychologist mother from Singapore who asked us each to say one thing we thought we were good at as parents.
I didn’t believe there was one. It seemed like a trance had taken hold of expat mothers I knew in Beijing: Cloth diapers shipped from England. Organic pears from France. Online math programs for our three-year-olds. I didn’t judge them for this as much as try to keep up, and I couldn’t keep up and experienced a quiet sense of unrest no one could see. Not my husband. It was invisible and was everything to me, this unrest. The time in my life when I painted was ending. I could feel it ending. It had begun to seem luxurious—hours alone painting, and this was my downfall, when I made it something that created a debt against my girls.
At the parents’ meeting, I was still trying to hold on to ideas I could paint—things about what it meant to live in a woman’s body, and how the body got manipulated by the representation of it. I held these ideas in a small corner of my mind and tried to bring them out when I was alone in my studio, until it got to the point where this no longer worked and the ideas seemed foreign and honestly sort of odd, and I stopped going to the studio and stopped painting.
When my turn to talk at the meeting came, I said, “What about affection?” It was my only thought—that I often hugged my girls. “Does that count?”
A Chinese woman next to me in a lime green Hermès scarf nodded. There were other immaculately dressed mothers there from South Korea and India and Bahrain and Russia, but the Chinese woman spoke first. “I had not previously considered affection as a parenting trait.”
I felt embarrassed. But the woman smiled at me and wrote down what I’d said on her iPhone—I could see it on her List of Things to Do as a Parent. Hug the Children More.
· 21 ·
“If you fucking push me, I’ll find you in your sleep,” Maeve said to Toby and Adrian. They’d grabbed her by the shoulders and for a moment seemed about to send her over the side. Then they let her go, and we all stood on the wall looking down at the ground. It seemed far to jump, so I turned and used the wall like a ladder, and Mei came next, and I held her elbow and her shoulder. Tree tried going face-forward, inching her way, but she slipped and landed badly on the rocks. I remember it was hard to see, because low clouds had blocked the moon. Justice jumped down after her and made Tree straighten out her leg. She needed help walking, and Justice carried her on his back. She rested her head on his neck and closed her eyes and looked like a sleepy child, and I had to pee quite badly so I followed them because I wasn’t sure how to get to the Lius’ on my own.
Their house sat underneath the first big curve of the mountain, but for a while I had no idea of distance or where the house was in relation, and I studied my feet in the dark so I didn’t fall. Mei and Andre and Hunter were somewhere behind me, and the three kang sleepers behind them. The sensation of being on the mountain in the da
rk without my girls was the same reckless feeling I’d had earlier on the wall. I will say that I thought I was in control when I drank at home alone, but I see now that I was also reckless. This sounds confusing. The drinking was the one thing I thought I controlled. How many drinks. One or two or three. I didn’t see the consequences. I didn’t know, for example, how my drinking hurt other people. I didn’t understand that when I drank, my husband could still see me and that my oblivion didn’t work both ways.
I hurried to keep up with Justice. What was I doing with strangers instead of home with the girls? I won’t say being in Shashan was a punishment, though there was some of that. Mostly it was disorienting to be alone on the mountain at night, and I wanted to call Lukas and tell him about it, but I remembered he might not want to hear from me and that I was walking in the dark back to the Lius’ house because I was weak and couldn’t stop drinking. I worked hard then to remember Lukas loved me and my girls loved me and that I wasn’t being punished. I was being helped.
I stayed caught between being weak and being helped, and in this way Shashan called on me to clarify something about myself. Did I love myself or hate myself? Until I met Lukas I didn’t know there were people who liked themselves even with the damage they carried. People for whom life was maybe simpler and who had never considered hating themselves. He was one of them. He liked to ask me questions, and in this way he was different from men I’ve known. How are you feeling? Do you have a fever? Can I make you tea? Can I tell the nurse with the bad attitude to get the fuck out of your hospital room? Can I make rice? I didn’t often answer him, and I see now that he was trying to let me know he saw me for who I was. But he was also trying to fix things, and it has taken me time to understand that my quiet didn’t mean I had deficiencies he needed to compensate for.