by Susan Conley
Good, Tony and I say after Jennifer leaves and we make it to the bedroom. We’ve hired Jennifer. We say we’re glad that’s settled. We go to sleep, and Aidan wakes up at midnight with jet lag. Then he and I lie in his single bed from midnight until 6:00 a.m. talking about why he can’t sleep and how he needs to be touching my face in order for sleep to work. Before, I would have been mad at him for keeping me up all night. Resentful, even. I have more patience now. At least breast cancer has made me calmer. There’s no other way to explain it. I lie in bed with Aidan and look back at those years of lost sleep and I can’t tell you how foolish I feel for my anger. I used to yell at Thorne for waking me up. I used to beg him to let me sleep. The light is bright on those years. They look like gold from here. At the time I didn’t see them for anything close to what they were.
On Saturday morning Jennifer calls and says she’s so sorry but maybe she won’t be able to work for us after all. She wishes us luck and Tony and I both admit we’re relieved. Xiao Wang comes back in the afternoon with her friend Mao Ayi and announces that working at our house is really easy. She can do all the work in much less time than the six hours we pay for. She confesses she’s a terrible cleaner. She hates cleaning. I stare at Xiao Wang and think how odd it is that we’ve spent so many days together in this apartment, just the two of us—me working at my desk, her talking on her cell phone and searing pork in the kitchen. I never once thought I knew Xiao Wang. But I sensed we had some kind of implicit understanding. The sort between mothers, or rather, between a woman who pays another woman to take care of her kids and the woman who is paid. It’s an awkward understanding at best.
Four o’clock in the afternoon: jet-lag witching hour again. It’s sleep you can’t fend off. I want Xiao Wang and Mao Ayi to leave so I can lie down. We hire Mao Ayi on the spot. It seems like the best way to get them out of our apartment. She doesn’t show the slightest interest in Aidan and Thorne, who come and go on Rollerblades in and out of the living room, but I pass this off as first-day jitters. If Mao Ayi and Xiao Wang would just leave, I could lie down and sleep on the couch where they’re sitting now. I hand Xiao Wang a wad of hundred-RMB notes to pay her for the work she didn’t do in August while we lived in Maine. I also give her a plastic bag filled with Aidan’s outgrown sneakers and some shorts and pants for her son. I say good-bye to her and wish her luck. She has a difficult life. Her family is exceedingly poor. I realize I’ll never see Xiao Wang again. Both she and Mao Ayi put on their black pumps in the hall and step into the elevator and are gone. It’s seven o’clock at night and Tony falls asleep facedown on the couch. I tuck in the children and make it to our bed, where I sleep until 3:00 a.m., when Aidan comes in and settles next to me. He’s thirsty, he says. His room’s a little scary. He’ll do much better if he lies next to me.
On Sunday morning we go to the suburbs and visit our new Danish friends Anna and Lars, who’ve just returned from summer break in Copenhagen. Their boys, Mads and Gustav, became good friends with Thorne and Aidan at school last spring. Anna is a tall, striking woman—a pharmacist by trade, with snazzy plastic eyeglasses. She is a relief to talk to, so direct sometimes she makes me laugh. On my first date with Anna, we went for a walk in the old hutongs south of Tiananmen and got lost, but she never seemed rattled. We circled the gray maze of stone alleyways, and when we couldn’t find the larger road, we got out the map and stared at the street names. An older man approached us and laughed. Then he explained in Chinese that there was a left turn we kept missing back around the bend.
Anna’s husband, Lars, works for Nokia. He’s a marathon runner who also loves to cook. Today he’s bought local grape tomatoes and is making a salsa with Tony in the kitchen. Anna and I sit in the living room sipping wine. Her mother died of colon cancer several years ago. She says, “I’ve had it with cancer. Completely had it.” Later Tony and I have to drive back to our apartment with the boys for one last ayi interview.
Tony greets a small-boned woman wearing a long black dress at the door. She tells us her name is Mao Ayi and takes off her black pumps, then gives me a firm handshake. We walk toward the living room, and Tony quickly explains to me in English that during the Cultural Revolution, families named their children after Chairman Mao to show patriotism. There are now hundreds of thousands of women named Mao in China. It turns out her full name is even more patriotic than the first Mao Ayi’s. Tony says the exact translation of this Mao Ayi’s name is Mrs. Glorious Army Horse. She wears blue eye shadow and has a quick smile and wants to see the vacuum cleaner and the mop. I take her to the back closet and she nods approvingly at the equipment. I feel I’ve passed a crucial test.
Mao Ayi #2 lives twenty-five minutes away by bike and knows the small vegetable markets in the hutong behind our house. She meets Aidan when he comes in from skateboarding and follows him into his room to ask him how old he is in Chinese. Mao Ayi #2 does not speak English. But she listens to me when I try to use my Chinese and gently helps me with my verbs. Tony and I hire her because it’s getting late again, and I can’t keep my eyes open. I walk Mao Ayi #2 to the door and she calls out good-bye to Aidan. “Zaijian, Aidey,” she says. How does she know we call him that? She’s the ayi for us. Good, Tony and I say after we climb into bed. It’s settled. We’re falling asleep, but Tony promises to call Mao Ayi #1 in the morning.
It is now quarter of eight at night. Both boys are asleep. I gave Aidan a pep talk about sleeping when I tucked him in. I told him his brain was ready to make it through the night. That his body now knows he’s on Chinese time. He nodded at me. “But what if I need you?” Aidan asked me before he fell asleep. “What if I call out for you?”
“I will always come,” I tell him. “I will always come for you. Meiyou wenti: no problem.”
Science Experiment
The first week back in Beijing the skin on my chest turns a dark sunset red and begins to peel. Dr. Godin said this would happen: that it would get redder and tighter after the radiation was finished. Most peeling takes place under my left armpit at the site of the lymph-node scar. Aidan first catches a glimpse while I stand in my underwear and search a drawer for a T-shirt. Today is the first day of school in Beijing all over again. How did Aidan become a kindergartner?
I’m not ready to be here yet—not braced for the dislocation. The boys are unsure too. School in China starts up earlier than in the States, and we pulled the plug on summer in Maine too soon for anyone’s liking. There had been a time—a window of two weeks—when I deliberated whether or not to do chemotherapy, and I thought we might stay in Maine and not return to China. I imagined us moving back into our house and envisioned the wooden beds and bookshelves—the scaffolding of our lives there.
During this window, Tony and I drove down to Boston to talk to the doctors again about recurrence rates. We were still deducing how much benefit chemo might give me. “I know where you are,” Tony said afterward, when we pulled out of the parking garage. “You’re unpacking plates and cereal bowls in Maine. You’ve moved back into the house and said good-bye to China.”
It was a hard moment in our marriage. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to close the door on Beijing completely, but if chemo was in store, then the idea of my own bed—of our own home—was not something I could turn away from easily. I didn’t know how to answer Tony because what he said was true: I had been calculating how many days we’d need to unload the moving truck.
Then he said, “I get it, you know. I completely get it. Of course you’d want to be home. But I’m up all night trying to figure out how we’re going to keep our family together. I have to be in China to do my job. We need that job. And I can’t live apart from you.”
Part of me knew we weren’t done with our time in Beijing—that we’d left too abruptly. But home has its own tidal pull, and staying in Maine was hard to resist. In the end we chose not to do chemotherapy—we couldn’t find a doctor who said the benefits outweighed the risks.
“Yuck!” Aidan yells at me now in my bedroom. “
What’s that under your arm? What’s that skin doing?” He screams for Thorne to come take a look. This is not the first time I’ve felt like a science experiment for my children. I’m the different one. I’m the female specimen—the one who has to explain where her pee comes from. “Thorne!” Aidan screams again for his brother. “You’ve got to come look! You’ve got to see this!”
Thorne races into the bedroom half-dressed in a white and red Chinese soccer uniform. He’s carrying the soccer ball in one hand. “Disgusting!” he yells when he sees me. “That is gross!”
“It’s just peeling,” I say, trying to act casual while I pull my T-shirt on over my head. “Just peeling skin.” I go into the bathroom to wash my face and try not to let my hands shake. They are children. They don’t know what they’re saying. They follow me and stand close to my waist while I reach for the face towel. It always amazes me how alarmed the boys are by my body since the cancer. Because what is mine is theirs in the world of young boys and my body is in some ways sanctified to them. So how could I let such a thing transpire, and on whose watch? What would they do if I tried to explain the concept of silicone to them? What they want is a return to normal. Not skin falling off in pieces like small leaves.
What we’re striving for here is a return to the way things were before—a mommy who’s at the bus stop every day. Thorne stares at me in the bathroom mirror. “Mom,” he says quietly now. “Mom, you’ve got to put sunscreen on there.” He points at my armpit through my T-shirt—the place where the peeling is the worst. “You just have to.”
I look at him and wonder when he became a teenager. “Okay,” I say calmly, as if I’ve never thought of this. As if sunscreen will solve the entire problem. “Good idea. Sunscreen. I’ll do it.”
Then Aidan says, “Boys are lucky because they can’t get breast cancer.” Who knew this was on his mind? I nod at him and decide not to quibble with facts. “Mommy,” Aidan continues, “did you know that there are one hundred women in the world who get breast cancer who can’t fix it?”
“Sort of,” I say, hoping to steer this conversation toward a soft landing.
“Yup,” Aidan assures me. “One hundred. And that may sound like a lot but it’s not really when you think of how many hundreds of people there are in the world.”
Then even Tony comes running into the bathroom. What’s with him? He’s just back from the police station. There’s a scary new sign outside the apartment complex that says in English, “All Foreigners must register with police upon arrival. Or the Judicial Organ will affix the responsibility for the criminal acts.” Tony rushed our passports over to the station this morning, then realized he needed a different permit to prove the authenticity of our lease, so he came home, then rushed back again.
We’re now standing by the shower door, staring at my covered chest, and we’re late for the bus. “Can I see the peeling?” Tony asks. Things are getting out of hand. All summer I’ve tried to keep the whole burned skin situation low-key. We need to get on with the business of going to school. I give Tony a look. More like a plea than a look. He smiles at me—he’s realized his slip, and shoos the boys to their rooms for socks and pants.
That’s when I hear Aidan ask Tony what his sister, Polly, died from. “She got cancer. Right, Dad?” Aidan says.
How have we come to this sad place on the first day of kindergarten? I almost don’t recognize us for the kinds of things we talk about now. “Yes, but it wasn’t breast cancer,” Tony answers brightly. “Polly didn’t die of breast cancer, Aidan.” And here’s the thing about children and cancer—my children, anyway. They muse on it, then they make their own connections. They don’t shy away from the scary stuff.
“She didn’t die of breast cancer?” Aidan confirms.
“Nope. She didn’t. Not at all.”
I go back into the bathroom and the tears come. I think I’m crying for the darker things about cancer that Aidan doesn’t understand. I’m swimming in the cancer lake again. Aidan and Thorne are standing on the grassy bank with Tony, peering out over the waves to see if they can spot my head. Today it feels like a long way back to my family.
I peek around the doorway. Aidan leans against the wall in the hallway outside our bedroom wearing his first pair of big-boy jeans. He says, “You can’t die of breast cancer. Did you know that, Daddy? You can’t.” I watch Tony pause, and I’m amazed at the way my husband is able to meet the boys’ questions and redirect them. Because how much can you talk about breast cancer at 7:45 on a Monday morning with young boys?
“Aidan,” Tony says and picks him up in his arms. “We should go and find some sunscreen in the hall for this face of yours. It’s going to be a scorcher on the playground today.”
Then I dry my face and walk toward Thorne, who’s standing by the front door. I take his shoulders in my hands and squeeze them and say, “I love this boy. How did I get so lucky to have this boy?” and he laughs and swings the door open to the hall. “Let’s go, guys,” I call out to the three of them then. “Let’s go to school.”
After they leave, I walk to a café called Jamaica Blue that’s opened next door to the French grocery store—right between the high-end antiques dealer and a new dry-cleaning shop. Elizabeth calls me on my cell phone and tells me she’s been thinking of me all month. I thank her for the e-mails she sent to Maine. She says she can’t believe I came back to Beijing. I remember again how much I admire her bluntness. She’s not afraid of asking me how I feel. “I can’t believe you came back,” she repeats. “I would have never come back.”
It’s taken me all week to get over the name of this new café: Jamaica Blue. But today I go in and ask for a slice of quiche. Then I sit at one of the shiny black tables with my writing notebook and watch the concrete shops. The New Age singer from Ireland named Enya plays on the sound system. While we were gone this summer a whole section of shops across the street was torn down to widen the road. I can’t think this is a good omen for the hutong. I take a bite of quiche and watch a Chinese man do tai chi in the middle of the sidewalk. He pauses and checks his cell phone. A younger man sits on a concrete piling out front with a baby in his arms. He sat in that same spot holding the baby when I went into the market yesterday. The man wears flip-flops and navy trousers and an old black blazer. He’s gentle and knows the way the baby likes to be held: hugging the man’s thin shoulder with its bare feet in the man’s open hand.
My plan is to open my notebook any minute and begin writing, but I can’t concentrate. Anxiety has followed me to China. I stare out the window, and the decisions I made about treatment are up for grabs: to chemo or not to chemo? To radiate or not to radiate? To go vegan or veggie or to stay carni? To suppress hormones or let them run wild? And here’s another thing, and maybe this is the most important one—there’s no one in Beijing except Tony to really talk to about my cancer. None of those new friendships is strong enough. Or maybe I’m selling the women short. Maybe it’s me who’s not strong enough to reach out to them.
A woman I met at the playground trampoline yesterday comes into Jamaica Blue—a Chinese investment banker who just moved here from Hong Kong with her husband and five-year-old son. She’s got a black bag on her shoulder and the big white letters spell C-h-a-n-e-l. She asks me, “What does a person do for fun in Beijing? Is there a Disneyland here?” I’m tempted to tell her I’ve taken to spending long stretches of time watching the people in the concrete shops.
It’s time to go pick the boys up from school with Lao Wu in the van; I promised I would on the first day back. When I get there, Thorne and Aidan are playing soccer with their friends on the field. One mother I know from a cooking class asks me, Are you okay? I’ve decided that when people ask me this and tilt their head, what they’re really saying is Did you beat the cancer? Or have you gone over to the realm of the dying?
I can do it this way. I don’t blame anyone for not mouthing the word out loud. No one on this soccer field knows me well. I nod my head. I say, Yeah, thanks, I’m okay.
They all go back to watching the game, and I stand there wondering why it feels like a train has just run over me. When I get home, Mao Ayi has left a bowl full of tomato and egg noodle soup on the stove. It’s delicious. I watch the boys eat dinner but my mind has gone away. Tony comes home, and I tell the boys, “Mommy’s not feeling well tonight.” I go lie down in my bed and spend the next three hours wondering what caused my cancer.
It’s a dark hole I slip into more and more. And hey—I’m done with the treatment. I should be doing cartwheels. So why am I not floating on air? I think about the Camel Lights I smoked in high school. Did they cause my cancer? It’s dangerous territory. And what about fruit? What about the apples and bananas I should have eaten more of? And then there are the cruciferous vegetables. What about red bell peppers?
On Saturday morning I decide the answer is to pack up the minivan and head to the Great Wall. We need to get out of the city and hike on top of something bigger than us—a wall that took millions of people thousands of years to build, one that stretches across China four thousand miles. When we arrive in Mutianyu it’s still morning, and we rent an old house for the night from an American man and his Chinese wife.
