Elsey Come Home

by Susan Conley

  I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly. But my heartbeat ticked up. The girls were asleep in their beds, and Lukas was at the hotel gym riding the stationary bike. Some time passed in which neither of us said anything, and her words sat in the room while CNN International showed live footage of a typhoon in the Philippines that had blocked out power in the country.

  I loved my sister, and sometimes she could read my mind, but she could not talk about my drinking. “Don’t pray for me, Ginny,” I said. This was one of only two hard moments we had in Hong Kong. I didn’t want her prayers, or her religion with no birthdays.

  “Why don’t you vote?” I asked her and tried to give it right back to her. It really did bother me that her religion didn’t believe in voting, and I wanted to change the subject badly. She flipped through People magazine with the photo of Prince Harry on the cover, and the pages made a slapping sound. We had a stack of these magazines in the room, and I’d read them all.

  Later, when she got home to California, she sent me an email saying she was going to AA meetings for me. I knew people told themselves stories to feel better, and maybe her story needed to be that she was going to AA meetings for me, but I didn’t write her back for several months.

  · 30 ·

  I want to say something about the drinking. For a long time I had a belief about drinking that was faulty. I believed you were either someone who could drink or someone who could not drink, and I thought I was the former. I didn’t understand there were gradations, and that I was someone who seemed like she could drink but shouldn’t have been drinking.

  When we got home from Hong Kong, Lukas drove me to the secret shops where they sell illegal DVDs of whole seasons of Mad Men, and I lay on the couch in the living room and watched episodes for hours and hours. I don’t know what this says about my longing for escape.

  The man I pay to ask me questions in Beijing recently told me, “That was then and this is now. The past is not happening anymore.”

  I think he means I lived it, but it’s over. My sister Margaret carried down the stairs. The hunting cabin in the woods behind our house. The man also said being closer to the pain can mean becoming free, and he uses words like this. “Free.” They’re embarrassing words that make me half-smile, and then I go home and hold them in my hand like stones I’ve found at the beach and want to keep.

  I need to explain that I didn’t come home from my Hong Kong surgery and just start drinking more. I’d already imagined that it was possible to drink more than I used to. What I’m trying to say is that I saw I might have a problem and then I made the problem worse. I know more about addiction now, but at the time it wasn’t the sugars I wanted, or I didn’t think I wanted them. I wanted the distance that alcohol gave me from my life.

  When Margaret got really sick, we didn’t talk about it the way you might think. Lukas says that it’s almost as if my family is Christian Scientist, which is the kind of religion that doesn’t believe in going to the doctor, and this doesn’t sound so far from Jehovah’s Witnesses, and in any case, it might be true. When my sister was sick, I wanted to be sick with her, too. I wanted the attention she got and to stay home from school like she did, but really I wanted to help her and to make her life my life.

  I wasn’t sad about Margaret in the way you might think. If what’s happening before you—if your sister is getting very thin and also puffy in the face and doughy, and if she lies in bed and lies in bed and goes into a coma in her bed, it isn’t really happening because you can’t allow for that. You can’t be sad. You can’t be anything.

  I see now why the man in Beijing was trying to get me to distinguish between real and not real. Things I could control and things I couldn’t. I once said to him, “I don’t unpack those things. Please don’t make me do that.” In this way I was more like my husband than I thought, and I planned to leave this man I paid to ask me questions and never come back. The man said he could see I was a survivor and he wouldn’t make me unpack all of my suitcases, but he’d like me to rearrange things inside a few of them to get me better prepared for travel.

  · 31 ·

  Sunday and Monday were more yoga and little sleep, and by lunch Tuesday I didn’t want to be around any of the people in Shashan. This is the problem with retreats. There are always people. We’d done a different kind of yoga that morning called yin, where Justice made us hold the poses much longer, and it was difficult to do this and also seemed ridiculous because how could stretching be that hard?

  Afterward, we climbed up the hill for lunch, and on the way Tasmin told me she had a famous French astronomer friend named Serge Honore who chaired the board of American Airlines and was willing to feature a photo of one of my paintings in their in-flight magazine. “All you have to do, Elsey, is come to my garden party and speak to him.”

  “I can’t make it.” Was she kidding?

  “It’s in two weeks, Elsey. You must meet him and convince him to take one of your paintings. It will be fantastic.”

  “But Lukas is away that week,” I lied. “Some music event in Shanghai.” I’d recently seen how I could paint the sky, but I couldn’t go back to my earlier work, and I couldn’t meet with the man named Serge. I wasn’t ready. I was in the process of becoming a different painter, though I didn’t admit this to myself yet.

  Tasmin made her tsk sound and sighed. “Elsey, I don’t think you understand how busy these people are. How unusual it is that Serge is willing to do this for you.”

  “Oh, Tasmin, I’m grateful. Maybe in June when I know Lukas’s schedule better.”

  She shook her head and wouldn’t let me off. “I won’t be here in June. I’m flying to Myanmar. You have to think about your career, Elsey. I’ve told you this before. And Serge. He’s impossible to track down.”

  “I know it. I really do. It’s just not the right time.” Who would rescue me from her? And why was she talking about this in the mountains? We were on a retreat. Weren’t we meant to be butterflies?

  We got to the terrace, and Mrs. Liu cooked over the wok in the canteen and Mr. Liu went in and out delivering red peppers and chicken and rice.

  “Let me just be clear.” Tasmin spooned chicken onto her plate. “I don’t believe for one second this country is communist anymore.”

  “It is true, Tasmin.” Mei smiled. “We are fraudulent. We want Louis Vuitton handbags, and we want a strong proletariat, and we want to take over the world.”

  “I intend to make as much money as I can before the next revolution.” Tasmin reached for the salad, and I stared at her and couldn’t believe the words out of her mouth. They embarrassed me, and I felt sort of responsible for them just by knowing her.

  “You should act quickly,” Mei said, “before we kick all foreigners out.”

  “I’m moving as fast as I can.” Tasmin laughed, but it was a forced laugh that pinched the muscles around her mouth. She tipped back in her plastic chair. “For God’s sake, we are far from the city up here.”

  “It’s why we come, Tasmin. To be far away. It’s why I come, anyway.” I don’t know why I said this. It was affected of me, and I bet I was missing the city as much as she was and was trying to talk myself into not missing it. But she was grating, and I wasn’t able to separate from her fully.

  “You look like you’re glowing, Tasmin,” Ulla said and scrunched her eyebrows together, which deepened the quotation marks between her eyes.

  “I’m eating a rare form of tree bark that’s cleared up my skin and given me crazy amounts of energy.”

  I had to look away and bite the insides of my mouth to stop from laughing. Tree lay down on the ratty couch whose legs had been sawed off. Her forehead had a section of wrinkles through the middle that made her look older than she was. Two of the orange cats jumped into her lap, and she petted them and put her ankle up on the arm of the couch and closed her eyes.

  This was th
e meal where I learned that Maeve was a sous-chef in a new French place near the Forbidden City and seemed to be sleeping with the Vietnamese woman sommelier there.

  “Do you two drink wine together in bed?” Toby asked her and put several red peppers in his mouth at once.

  He worked for the American clothing designer Marc Jacobs and wore many different-colored thin yarn bracelets on his wrist and a white shirt that looked torn in places on purpose.

  “Do you always wear three-hundred-dollar shirts that make you look like an idiot?” Maeve smiled, and he kicked her gently under the table.

  Mr. Liu placed a grilled eel on the lazy Susan. Black and charbroiled and horrible. I’d had nightmares about snakes that year, and now here was an eel, first cousin of snake. Thicker in the middle than at the head and tail. If my phone worked, I would have called Lukas and told him I hadn’t had anything to drink, which was something, I suppose by day five, but that I was also ready to crack.

  Justice spooned a three-inch section out of the middle of the eel and left the skin intact on the side the way you scoop out a Chinese eggplant.

  “The biggest risk in a mine,” Hunter told Andre, “is not from a flat, but from gas emitted from the explosion.” Hunter had the slightly puffy face some people would think is handsome, and I could feel money around him. He reached for the eel and cut off a piece and seemed to not know what to do with it on his plate. I couldn’t look away.

  “A flat?” Andre asked him.

  “An explosion. We do roof and pillar mining and you have to support your roof. No one talks about this in the Chinese press. It’s the gas emitted from coal that explodes if it’s not ventilated properly. Carbon monoxide is what kills the miners.” He didn’t smile often, and in some ways appeared to be the most out of place of all of us. I think he was like Andre and Tree and maybe Tasmin, who had all come for a vacation. The others were working through something in Shashan, or maybe all of us were and I couldn’t see it. It was harder to tell than you’d think.

  Hunter turned to Mei. “And you do what?” He shoveled rice into his mouth with his chopsticks, and some of the rice fell back onto the eel.

  “I paint.” Mei waved her hand in the air. “It is nothing, really.”

  “It is something,” Justice said. “Her painting is very good.”

  Andre said he painted, too. “Landscapes of the Caribbean.”

  Mei nodded and smiled.

  Andre said when he wasn’t painting, he was head purser for Air France.

  Mei didn’t know this word, “purser.” “You hold ladies’ handbags on the airplanes?”

  “You’re joking, right?” Andre seemed hurt, but he recovered and asked if she was a model from Shanghai. “Because you are so thin.”

  Hunter asked Mei if she wanted more rice or some of the eel. “Once I learn more Mandarin,” he added, “I’ll understand real China. Until then you’ve got to put up with my English.”

  “Or you could take a Chinese language class.” She reached for the platter of pork.

  “You eat a lot for such a small person.” Hunter smiled.

  Mei shrugged. “Don’t you know that we are always hungry in China?”

  Hunter tried to debone the eel by poking around in the meat with his chopsticks. Then he turned to me and asked what I’d done in Dublin before I moved to China, and I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was the eel. But I couldn’t recall whole parts of my life. It was the first time he’d asked me a direct question, and I was surprised because there comes a point when you meet someone new, and if they haven’t asked you a question about yourself, you know they aren’t ever going to ask you a question. It’s important to get this cleared up early with people, and I thought Hunter was a non-question-asker, so I’d ruled him out.

  When he asked me about Dublin, everything about my life before China was blocked. I knew I lived with the man named Tommy and that I painted and left Tommy. But this all seemed vague and unconnected to who I really was. It might have been another part of the reason why I agreed to go to Shashan—the vagueness of my history and my willingness to bury the things I felt.

  · 32 ·

  After yoga Tuesday night, Justice asked us to sit on the rug and press our back against the back of someone else and close our eyes until our breathing pattern matched our partner’s breathing pattern. Hunter sat down with Mei, and I thought Tree would choose Justice because she always got to him first, but Andre asked Tree before she could ask anyone else. Tasmin was with Toby, and Ulla sat with Adrian. Maeve lay down on the rug and closed her eyes and said she was passing on this one, so I was left with Justice. He and I walked to the back corner of the house, farthest away from the door, and he pointed to the rug and smiled again, and we sat down and maneuvered our bodies until our backs were pressed against each other.

  “Take deep breaths,” he said to everyone in the room. “Watch the breaths and the feelings attached to the breaths come and go in and out of your bodies. Notice also the weight of your body on the ground. The weight of your arms and legs. You’ll be more attentive. More alert.”

  I wasn’t sure. But I’ll try to describe what it felt like to breathe with Justice: very, very intimate. It was like lying down in a bed with a stranger. His back felt solid, but also gave a little, and I liked leaning into it. We were meant to close our eyes, and I tried to breathe when Justice breathed, but it was hard at first because he took so many fewer breaths than me. I had to slow down, and it was beyond sex but also extremely sexual, and I was never sure he was feeling these things, too. I think not. I think he sat with people often like this, and that he was just open in his body.

  He never indicated he was aware of me during the breathing, except he corrected his breathing each time we got out of synch. When it was almost over, he told the room we should open our eyes and slowly come back. I didn’t want to come back. Right before he stood up, he pressed my hands with his hands, and I felt the connection with him I’d been waiting for since I got there. I thought he understood me, and I was grateful.

  Then he announced that the day of silence had begun. “You are to try to be quiet,” he said, “until the end of yoga tomorrow evening. Many things will come up, and you should write them down.”

  He bowed his head and put his hands together in prayer in front of his chest. “I wish you well.”

  · 33 ·

  The next morning we ate fermented vegetables and hard-boiled eggs without speaking. Then down to the yoga past the barking dogs and grandmothers feeding the pigs. At first the novelty of it was something. How were the others handling the silence? Could they bear it?

  At lunch the kang sleepers wrote little notes to one another on pieces of paper from a notebook Maeve kept in her backpack, and they passed the notes and became hilarious while they ate the rice noodle soup, and I envied them.

  Mei chain-smoked on the couch and seemed to have no interest in lunch or being part of the silent people. After I was done with my soup, she motioned me over and raised her eyes and looked out over the mountains with a smirk, and I started giggling and couldn’t stop for a minute and was sort of out of control. Not because Mei had really done anything funny, but because of my anxiety over being inside my own head.

  After lunch we walked about a mile across the middle of the mountain and passed the terraced fields cordoned off with tidy stone walls. We came to an oblong lake, which was also a reservoir, and Justice said we should spread out along the shore and in the field and continue our silence. As if silence was a verb and we were in the act of doing something other than not speaking, which maybe we were. I’m not sure.

  There were granite rocks and mosses and tall grasses, and I sat down on a large boulder. Justice stood to my right, maybe a foot from the lake. “Some of you,” he said, “will get stuck in the silence today. Please imagine a time of great fear for yourself. Then a time of great safety. Go between
these two: fear and safety, until you feel the difference and realize you can always be safe.”

  He also said we were meant to think of our ancestral powers. What did that mean?

  “Change,” he added, “is always possible. Everything you want is right inside you.”

  This last part was appealing, but then I really had no idea again what he was talking about. Some people fell asleep at the lake after that. I sat up for probably an hour looking at the water, but I wasn’t good company with myself. I struggled and worried about my arm and if the pain would become a serious condition I could give a name to.

  I finally lay down on the rock, and this came to me: a trip we’d taken a year earlier with the girls to a music festival in Yunnan Province that Lukas was playing in.

  We stayed at a Buddhist hotel on the edge of Lijiang, and the hotel had moss-covered Buddha sculptures and stone paths. Lukas was convinced spiritual belief in China had been supplanted by toaster ovens and luxury cars, but the hotel did feel like a spiritual place, and my memory of it is clearer than almost everything else that happened to us in China. On the second day the girls played a game with a boy named Marcus from Zambia—jumping into the pool and catching a tennis ball before it hit the water. Lukas was good at throwing the ball, and he did this while Marcus’s mother, a very tall woman named Osana, swam. I sat in one of the canvas chaises next to the pool and read the last five pages of a novel by Colm Tóibín about a high-ranking Irish judge named Eamon who becomes a widower and says he doesn’t believe in one thing anymore. Just ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. When I finished, I shut the book and closed my eyes and imagined how it would feel not to believe in anything. The feeling scared me and I opened my eyes and searched for the girls in the water.