Elsey Come Home

by Susan Conley

  Osana got out of the pool and put on a long batik robe and sat in the chair nearer to me. I asked where she was from.

  “My husband got me to live in Wales for fifteen years, and I grew quite wet. Three years ago I got him to come back to Zambia.”

  I asked her how much longer she had in Yunnan.

  “Not long. Next we will go to Christchurch, New Zealand. We belong to a spiritual organization that is having its annual meeting there.” She had a lilting British accent and an overarticulated way of speaking that seemed almost like a collusion. That’s how I will describe it. Like she thought I understood her, when I didn’t.

  I asked her the name of the spiritual organization. I don’t know why, except I was curious and able to act as if I had some idea what she was talking about, when I had no idea. She was a glamorous woman. Maybe I was trying to impress her.

  “Subud,” she said.

  Again I acted like I sort of knew what she was talking about and nodded. “Subud?”

  “We will all meet in Christchurch on July Fourth and have come to Lijiang to be indulgent.” Here is where she paused and looked me in the eyes. “Besides. You never know when this life as we know it is going to end.”

  Our conversation had taken a turn, but I wasn’t sure where exactly. I smiled and got the girls out of the water and wrapped them in the blue-and-white striped towels and put them on a couch under one of the white canopies with Lukas. Then I went back to our room and pulled my laptop out of its quilted case and read that two or three times a week people in Subud talk directly to God. To receive him, the website said, Subud believers clear out the furniture in their houses and there is yelling and dancing and singing. I sat against the teak headboard with the wooden ceiling fan whirring above my head, and I couldn’t understand the part about the moving of furniture and the couches and tables and chairs being picked up and taken away. It reminded me in some way of the Bible club my friends and I started before my sister got sick.

  We met at the picnic table behind our house and my mother got Ritz crackers, and we all followed along in the Book of Genesis with a woman named Tonya York who was the evangelical minister’s wife and told us the rapture would come soon and only people who hadn’t sinned would be saved. “Have you sinned?” Tonya looked me in the eyes, and I was sure I’d sinned. I hadn’t heard of the rapture. Why had no one told me? Because it seemed big and like something someone should have let me know about.

  I found my mother in the kitchen after my friends left and said I wanted to be saved from the flood. My mother was a social worker who ran a high school out of our house for teen mothers getting GEDs after their babies had been born. I already knew she wasn’t going to let me stay in the Bible club. She lit a cigarette by the electric range, took a long drag, and put it down in the clay ashtray I’d made her at YMCA camp. She didn’t speak to me until my father got home. Then she waited for him to light his cigarette, and told me to go up to my room.

  On my way upstairs I asked her to let me stay in the club. I said it really matters to me and all my friends are in it and I’m afraid of the rapture, and my mother said I was silly to believe in those things.

  · 34 ·

  I remember that I closed my computer in the hotel room and stood up from the bed, and the bottom of the computer had made the skin on my legs very hot. I was warm all over my body and unsettled about what I’d read. I put on my one-piece and went back to the pool where the boy named Marcus was teaching the girls a card game called Pounce that involved individual decks of cards for each player. I knew the game would be hard for Myla and easy for Elisabeth and that this was how their brains were wired, and I wanted to tell Myla not to play the game because it would end badly for her, but I was already trying not to be so controlling.

  I dove into the water and swam to the shallow end, and my skin was a little tingly when I surfaced. I think a part of me wanted to join Subud, though I can’t say for sure. I’ve had other times in my life when I wanted to belong to something, and I was in a way going through a time like that again in China. I sat on the stairs in the shallow end where the water came up to my waist and stared at Osana. Maybe it was a dangerous cult, but I didn’t see how it could be, because Osana seemed gentle. My husband sat on one of the white couches with Elisabeth in his lap, and the towel I’d wrapped around her head had come loose, and her hair had dried into a weird sculpture on her head that I wanted to paint. I still wanted to paint then, though this was getting close to the time when I lost the painting.

  Lukas wore his long surfer shorts and a rumpled linen shirt, and his beard had two days of stubble. I desired him but in a more distant way I was still getting used to since we’d married. That morning the girls had run ahead to the outdoor breakfast by the beach, and my husband turned to me on the dirt path and ran his finger down the middle of my back, and just his doing that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

  He showed Elisabeth how to fan her cards properly and hold the cards closer to her chest so Myla and Marcus couldn’t see them. He whispered advice in Elisabeth’s ear, and Myla pouted, so he put Elisabeth down on the rattan mat and sat next to Myla on the couch and reordered her cards and scraped them against his beard back and forth. Myla reached for her cards, but Lukas wouldn’t give them back. He was too involved in the game now, and this happened frequently that we lost Lukas like this. It was endearing to a point—his curiosity. But he was also competitive and wanted Myla to win the card game, or, more accurately, Lukas wanted to win the card game.

  What did my husband long for? This was before I learned not to live the way he lives, on adrenaline. But it was after the initial rush of marriage and children, and I was questioning Lukas though I couldn’t see it yet. I wanted to take both of the girls in my arms and keep them from the need to belong.

  · 35 ·

  On Thursday morning Justice stood on the terrace and said he had an announcement to make. “It’s a surprise, really.” He pulled his hair back into a ponytail and let it fall on his shoulders. “I’ve been waiting on word from my monk.”

  I was almost euphoric that morning. The end of the week seemed near, and I liked so much that Justice had a monk he’d been waiting on word from, and I liked being in Shashan now that we were able to talk again and the day of silence thank God was over. I thought I understood something about Justice and what he wanted from us and what he was able to give us, but now I think it was more about what I wanted to see.

  “It takes a day to send message by foot and a day to hear back, and I’ve just heard we have permission to walk to my monk’s temple on the mountaintop two villages over. We will leave in an hour.”

  No one at the table seemed openly opposed to walking to the temple. We seemed willing, as if we’d known all along when we signed up for the week in Shashan that we’d be asked to walk to Justice’s monk’s temple. It took us probably more like forty-five minutes to get ready instead of the full hour. Mei told me she was worried about the walk, and she did look very worried.

  She said she didn’t think she had the stamina to make it. “I don’t have a water bottle.” She frowned.

  “I have two,” I said. Both were full of water. “You don’t need to worry. We aren’t going far. It’s going to be okay.”

  “I do not have an appropriate coat or jacket, if that is what you call it. My sweater will not keep me warm.”

  “You don’t have to worry about staying warm. It’s very hot this week.”

  “But we are going to the mountains.” She had a question on her face. “Will it not be cold in the mountains? I have never done this hiking before. I have never been in the mountains.”

  I wanted to tell her we were already in the mountains. That Shashan was the mountains. But I understood what she meant. “It won’t get any colder where we’re going than it already is here. I promise.”

  She nodded her head and looked down at th
e ground, and we followed the goat paths up around the first full curve of the mountain until we reached the sloped fields where the Great Wall looked like it ran all the way to Mongolia. We had to walk in a line. Justice at the front. When we got to the pile of rocks where Tree had fallen the first night, Justice climbed up on the wall. It was probably about eleven o’clock in the morning, and the sky had turned soft white. The hot wind made me thirsty, and I handed Mei one of my water bottles, and she took a long drink and handed it back.

  “It was good that you told them the other day that you don’t have arm cancer. It’s important to tell the truth.”

  I looked at her closely for maybe a minute or maybe it was only half a minute, but she didn’t look away. I was trying to figure out what was real in her and what wasn’t, but I could only detect real and that she understood the risk for me in the Talking Circle. It was important to me to have tried to tell the truth. It had something to do with not drinking.

  · 36 ·

  “We will walk for two hours,” Justice said when we were all assembled on the wall. Big blocks of stone had broken off the sides and lay in the middle of the walkway, and I tripped on one. It would have been hard to fall completely off the wall, but it could have been done. Lukas didn’t know where I was now that I’d left Shashan. What if something happened to the girls? I’m not saying that he was going to definitively leave me if I kept drinking, but I decided to try and stop drinking that day on the Great Wall.

  The land around us wasn’t untouched, and there were postage-stamp villages smaller than Shashan and cornfields where old farmers worked with donkeys. Earlier that year I’d met a British man at an art opening whose goal was to walk the length of the wall, which is really many segments of wall, and write a book about it. This man took people on trips where they slept on the wall in tents, and I’d wanted to go on one of these trips for a long time but was afraid to leave my girls.

  The air smelled of stone and dirt and cedar like the woods above the state beach in Maine with the picnic tables and charcoal grates, which was a place we passed on our way to the ocean, and I was sick for home suddenly and then for Margaret. I wanted her to be alive with me very badly, even just for the afternoon, and I hadn’t felt that kind of real physical longing for her in years.

  Ulla paused to scan for birds and held her arm up in the air for us to wait. I wasn’t used to being around people for this long, and I worried I’d say things I’d regret—things people say when they’re not allowing themselves to be in the situation they’re in and are trying to will the situation away.

  I thought of a trip Lukas and the girls and I took two weeks after my surgery when he’d become interested in a jasmine tea from Hangzhou. Before we got to the tea fields, we walked past apothecary shops in the center of town with picture windows and glass jars with dead snakes inside. Lukas pulled the girls and me into one of the shops to learn what tinctures the snakes were used for. I went along with it, but my heart was pounding, and I wanted to get far away from the herbalist who pulled a snake out with metal tongs so we could get a better look.

  We walked in the tea fields for several hours after this and lost Lukas to the landowners and talk of soil acidity and irrigation, and there were many species of poisonous snakes in that region. I let the girls run on the paths where the older women knelt in straw hats picking tea leaves, but I didn’t get over the snakes or the feeling that I was seeing China through Lukas’s eyes. Living his life. I wasn’t painting, so I was sort of floating away. To paint with the recklessness it required was impossible, and I had no inventory left to sell. My dealer, Bree, was patient and the galleries were polite, but their interest had waned. That night, after Lukas and I got the girls asleep in the hotel, I went into our bathroom with paper and scotch and a small case of oil paints.

  I sat on the toilet seat and tried to get at something about the tea fields and wanted to turn them into women in green, bell-shaped dresses. I took sips of scotch, and when Lukas woke up to go to the bathroom, it was a little bit like a circus. At the time he was just very, very angry, and I had a sick feeling but couldn’t pinpoint why. Everything was chaotic in the room, and I was loud. Talking all the time. I said things about how I couldn’t paint and that I was scared and wasn’t a painter and wasn’t a mother. Lukas asked me what on earth I was talking about. It seemed like what I said truly surprised him, but I’d been asking myself these questions since the girls were born, and he hadn’t seen.

  I was a good mother, he said. A tired one who’d had thyroid surgery and it had been a mistake to bring me to Hangzhou, and could I please be quiet or I’d wake the girls.

  Then I did wake them. It was completely dark outside. Probably three a.m. I didn’t know that I swore at Lukas in front of the girls or that I sat on the bamboo floor at the foot of their bed while they cried and said they would all leave me soon, and that I was nothing. Lukas has only recently told me these details. All I remembered was the shame in the morning. We gathered our things to go to the airport, and he said I was still recovering from the surgery. We didn’t talk about the confusion I’d put them through in the night, but I’m sure he felt it and the girls did, too.

  · 37 ·

  On the wall Mei told me she hadn’t slept with any boys in her village, but when Leng hid in the room over the family’s pig’s stall she knew she’d sleep with him. “I was sixteen.” She laughed.

  “Ha. I knew nothing about sex. Imagine. I had the embarrassment after I did it. Yes. But I was also proud I had done it because I loved him. He had not been a student leader, but he had lived in the square for the seven weeks of occupation.”

  Her hair was up in one of Tasmin’s white Nike baseball hats, and she walked slowly, so that everyone passed us until we were at the back of the line. She told me there were arguments about whether to leave the square or not and that Leng had gotten shot near the Avenue of Peace after he’d left. “His friends drove him three days and three nights. When the police came on the fourth day, they arrested my father for helping the boy, but they could not find the boy.” She stopped to catch her breath.

  “I do not know what this really means, hiking.” She laughed, and whenever she did this she seemed much more open. “Hiking?”

  “How did the police find Leng? You can’t skip that part.”

  “Oh, I forget each time that you are being interested. He worked in a coal mine in Yima County. Another miner turned him in to get the reward.”

  Leng went to prison for two years, and after he was released he wasn’t supposed to travel in China for a year but he went looking for Mei. “For me. He came looking for me, and my future was being made now because he is a very forceful person. Very determined is what you would say in American. Our apartment in Guangzhou was small. Elsey, it was a small room. We worked in the computer-chip company. I was twenty-five and twenty-six and twenty-seven and twenty-eight.”

  “Computer chips? That’s funny to think of. You there.”

  “Funny? It was not funny. It was our lives. It was a chance for us. This factory. We knew it. We worked very hard, Elsey.”

  I wanted to say I’d thought it was funny as in unusual, not funny ha-ha. And I told her I hadn’t meant to be insulting, but she didn’t turn to look at me or acknowledge what I said.

  Her photography exhibit was called “New Chinese Women,” and it received good international reviews and one in the New York Times that compared her to the American artist Cindy Sherman and said Mei was at the forefront of a reexamination of women’s art in China. The photographs carry great emotional charge: Chinese woman as prostitute, Chinese woman in collarless jacket for the Long March, Chinese woman in gray wool blazer. Mei was obsessive about details and color and light. In one photograph she wears a long, dark wig and a red qipao and lies on a velvet settee, head against the pillow. An older white man begins the act of unbuttoning her. You see the man only in profile. There are dozen
s of them. Maybe the woman’s body as barometer of China’s progress.

  “I thought I would have babies but it never happened,” she said. “I think it was what a religious person would call a blessing.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Do not be sorry. You Americans are always sorry for something. It is what happened. I did not have the babies and later I did not want the babies because I had nothing to stop me then from my painting. You see? I had no excuses.”

  I stared at the back of her head. Stared and stared. Did she know I had excuses? How could she have not seen that?

  * * *

  —

  We stopped at a watchtower, and the whole group got out water bottles and slugged. The land around that part of the wall looked like tinder, and Justice said twenty more minutes until the temple. We started walking again. Mei said after the computer chips, she’d worked at a factory that made underwear for a place in America no one had heard of called the Gap, and Leng cooked pork in their apartment on the electric burner. “Now Leng is famous, no?” She said this last part like a statement-question. “He has friends with officials but also with activists.”

  The year before, a large museum in New York had asked him to curate a Chinese retrospective, and he hadn’t chosen any women artists. Not even Mei. “My husband does not like the female artists. He says he cannot detect any methodology in our work. Can you imagine that, Elsey? Can you imagine being married to this man?”

  She stopped and turned and looked at me. “I will make a new life. Maybe I will kill him first for falling for the girl.”

  · 38 ·

  The sky looked like rippled skin on the ocean before a storm, and the group paused for more water. We caught up, and Tasmin asked Andre why only certain first-class Virgin Air cabins had fully reclining seats that turned into beds.