Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “Are you okay?” Bonita asked.

  “Yeah!” I said, loud and unnaturally, “I’m fine. I just, uh, haven’t had coffee.”

  “Oh, no wonder!” she said. “Well, I just stopped by because we are implementing mandatory staff meetings on Wednesday evenings from four to six on business English, TOEFL, and Cambridge exams prep. We have to certify you all and renew our ACCET accreditation. And we want people to sign up and begin preparing now.”

  “No problem.”

  “And about your new student,” she paused, ready to say his name right, “Da Ge.”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “I need you to sign his registration form.” She shuffled some papers around, and I felt relieved. She hadn’t noticed anything off; this was a bureaucratic house call.

  “Here.” She pushed the form toward me, and I took out a pen. Then she lowered her voice for a moment. “So, what’s he like?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Dah. Guh.”

  I shrugged. “He seems nice enough. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” she said. She took the form and slipped it into a manila folder. “How’s his attendance?”

  “Pretty much perfect.” It was out of my mouth before I had time to wonder why I would lie. This wasn’t high school. He couldn’t get in trouble for skipping; we were all adults and he paid to take my classes. But I didn’t want him to attract attention.

  “Oh,” she said, “I just heard he was kind of—I don’t know, trouble.”

  I swallowed. “Hmmm,” I said. My students were filing in, and I was relieved to see him come in and slump into a chair at the back of the room. I glanced at Bonita as if to say, see? He’s here. She nodded and left.

  Then I asked the class to read from their “personal essays,” on which I had given them all A’s—to encourage confidence and participation. I liked for them to read out loud in class; it helped bond us together in the struggle for pronunciation. Ingyum finally raised her hand. She felt sorry for me, I was pretty sure.

  “I write about cooking dinner in American for my husband’s friends,” she said to the class. They smiled, encouraging her. She cleared her throat and looked down at the paper in front of her. I could see my red A at the top, and felt a flush of pride.

  “I am living now in America,” read Ingyum. “Here, it is difficult for me to have big dinners with many people because the grocery store with ingredients is far away and different from what I want. It is not easy. It is difficult. Sometimes I think I will never be able to tell the difference, but then I cook and the difference I can tell.”

  She read on, covering half the food vocabulary, adjectives, and maxims we had learned so far. I clapped when she was finished. There was a knock on the door. Bonita slid in, nodded apologetically, and handed me a cup of coffee.

  “Thank you,” I said, “that’s really sweet.” She smiled and ducked out of the room.

  “Anyone else want to read from an essay?” I asked. I took a sip of coffee.

  No one else took pity on me so we turned to the textbook story about American protagonist Freddy’s extended family at Christmas. I was impressed by how many Americanisms the textbook was able to fit into each of its absurdly simple chapters, although it would have been nice to include some holiday other than the birth of the baby Jesus. I tried to make up for it by asking my students to write about the holidays they celebrated in their countries. After class, Da Ge walked out with me.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. It came out angrier than I’d meant it to, and he looked so flustered that I regretted my tone.

  “Sometimes I have other business,” he said sadly. “I like your class very much.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “So where will you go now?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t have plans. You?”

  “I don’t have plan either. Do you want to go somewhere?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some New York place.”

  I took him to Rockefeller Center. Unimaginative, I guess, but it was December in New York and I had a whole sparkling afternoon with Da Ge in front of me, stretching out luxuriously. It was snowing, and metallic holiday music piped through the city’s speakers. Sugar smoke funneled off carts of roasting chestnuts. The Christmas tree’s blue and silver jewelry was so decadent I was embarrassed for America, even though I love Christmas and used to decorate Julia One’s trees until they practically toppled under the weight of my desperation for holiday cheer. Let’s be honest: Hanukkah is no compensation for not getting to celebrate Christmas. My mom was religious enough that she didn’t allow even a Hanukkah twig in her house, although most of my Jewish friends got to have “Hanukkah Bushes” that looked suspiciously like Christmas trees. My dad, a lapsed Lutheran, didn’t care one way or the other about holidays, so I grew up deprived of the central fun of being American.

  I was chattering incoherently about this to Da Ge as we approached the plaza, pointing out plastic Santas, women in fur coats, store windows, beggars, horse-drawn carriages. The Salvation Army. I couldn’t stop talking. He was either bored to numbness or overwhelmed by vocabulary. I rushed him through the ticket window and into the locker room and stuffed him into a pair of rental skates.

  “It’s my first time to do this, you know,” he said. He looked shy, adorable, hobbling on the rubbery ground. He was such a cardiac arrest of tough and vulnerable; I had never met anyone like him. I was giddy, didn’t even know what I liked so much about him exactly; he was young and sexy and—exotic? Yikes.

  “It’s mostly tourists,” I said. “No one you’ll ever see again.”

  “What about you?”

  I took this to be flirtation. “What about me?”

  “You’ll see me again, so I can’t—how do you say—skate ice.” So he was flirting.

  “I’m not going to judge you on your ice skating,” I said, delighted.

  “What you will judge?”

  “That depends,” I said, batting my eyes.

  He looked bewildered. Maybe he hadn’t been flirting. I turned my powerful hope to a new possibility: that as soon as we got onto the ice, I would twirl and leap and win his love and admiration. Then I would thank my mom for the ice-skating lessons I had hated. We stepped onto the ice, and I immediately flailed about, slipped, and grabbed first onto Da Ge, who was clutching the wall, and then, when he fell beneath me, to the wall itself. He pulled himself up and, in a macho effort to save me, tripped again, this time falling at the feet of some overdressed New Yorkers.

  “Maybe we get off the ice,” he suggested. So we scrambled around the rink once, holding the wall the entire way, made it to the exit, and rushed off. After we put our shoes on, we drank instant cocoa with those plastic marshmallows bobbing in it. He said his favorite holiday was for “sweeping graves.” He wasn’t sure of its name in English.

  “Qingming day,” he kept saying. “Relative Day? Do you have this one?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “When do you care for the tomb of your relative?”

  “Um. We visit my grandparents’ graves on their birthdays,” I said.

  “Like qinggming day.”

  “I guess so. That’s kind of a weird holiday to be your favorite though, no?”

  “I don’t like the—how do you say—light holiday, with no meaning. Qingming day already that will be about my mother. The other holidays I feel not so okay to celebrate anyway. I would rather it be ordinary day so I don’t have to think about that.”

  As if to punctuate his sorrow, Christmas break followed our date. I didn’t see him for two weeks, and it’s mild to say I counted the days, hours, letters. Maybe he didn’t want to be intrusive, because he neither called nor showed up, and I kept a log in my wild mind of the minutes it might be until I found him again, at school, on 115th, in a diner booth, wherever—my handsome dissident ice-skater, falling all over the place.

  I didn’t mentio
n Da Ge once during the holidays in 1989. My mother was ecstatic because I had “finished an entire semester of teaching at Embassy without falling off the edge of the world and because she was in sudden love with a man named Jack Benson, the CEO of a company that made soda-can-shaped vending machines. He invited us for dinner at his house in Westchester one night during Christmas break. At four o’clock. I’ve often wondered why non-Jews like to have dinner at four o’clock. But I didn’t think my mom would like my asking. Jack Benson was a large, round guy with large, round glasses. I wanted to recite Wallace Stevens’s “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” when we met. How do people know what to filter out and what to leave in? Maybe we’re permeable, and insanity is the loss of that membrane; everything floods in and out, uncontrolled.

  Jack’s daughter Emily was twenty-nine and pretty, with straight blonde hair jutting halfway down her back. I wondered if she looked like her mother. There were, of course, no pictures of Emily’s mother in Jack’s house. Just like there were no pictures of my dad anymore in our house. Emily had long legs and big, brown eyes. Describing her in my mind, I thought maybe she was horsey. But she wasn’t, because she had delicate teeth.

  “Wow,” she said, beaming. “It’s really great to meet you.” I was afraid she would say, “I’ve heard so much about you,” but she somehow knew better. Jack’s son was outside pushing a snowblower, but then he came in to meet us. “Mighty brisk out there!” he said, bringing a shock of cold in with him. He had red streaks across his cheeks and was cute in a Frosty-the-Snowman way, as if had stepped from a children’s book or song.

  Jack Sr. had ordered food from a Jewish deli. I found it funny that we were going to eat pastrami and dill pickles with Jack and his blond angel children. Had my mom told them about me? Maybe she had told Jack late at night. We sat to eat, my mother hovering over me, stacking food onto my plate, her arms moving like the branches of some thin, flexible tree. Her sweater had little fur cuffs at the wrists.

  “So, Aysha, how’s teaching going?” Jack asked. She had definitely told him.

  “It’s great, actually,” I said. I was overwhelmed for a moment with the desire to tell the four of them everything: about Russ, Chase, Xiao Wang, Ingyum, and Da Ge. About their skits, Da Ge on ice skates, his desire for democracy, the way Xiao Wang had stopped apologizing before she spoke in my class. That I was in love with a dissident.

  “My students are smart and interesting.” I picked one. “One is married to a distinguished Korean political scientist. He’s at Columbia for the year, and she can hardly speak English but tries valiantly to host dinner parties for him.”

  Jack and my mother smiled at each other. Maybe she had only told him good things, worried that if he knew the truth, he would leave her. Maybe she’d spring it on him years from now, when it was too late for him to go.

  Jack Jr. said, “I led a computer-training seminar once and was such a terrible teacher that the students knew less when they left than they had when they arrived.”

  I laughed politely. He waited for something, and I thought maybe it was a self-deprecating response from me, but I couldn’t manage one. The Embassy School made me a real person; my students had to learn from me or I would spin out of focus and be a useless being. I couldn’t joke about it, even if Jack Jr. would never like me.

  “Aysha is a natural-born teacher,” my mother said. I worked not to roll my eyes.

  “My mother got me the job,” I reported, “through a friend of hers.”

  “Emily is working in publishing,” my mother said, out of the blue. Then everyone looked at me, waited for a response.

  “Great,” I said.

  “Call me when you write your first novel,” she said, smiling.

  I liked her. I detected a light hum of sarcasm behind the things she said. She was acknowledging both the awkwardness of my situation and the dual reality: that I am someone who might write a novel and someone who recognizes that everyone thinks she might write a novel. I smiled back.

  “So, Nicholas has taken up photography lately,” she was saying to Jack. She turned to me, “Nicholas is my husband.” I saw her in a new light and wondered why she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She saw me looking at her hand. “I get serious rashes from rings,” she said. I felt stupid and caught.

  “Me, too,” I said. “That’s why I’m not married.”

  My mom looked up from her food, worried that this wouldn’t go over well, but Jack Jr. was laughing big choking laughs, with his mouth open. I saw pieces of bread and some of his fillings, but was grateful for the laugh. Emily laughed too. And my mom, seeing that it was possible for things to go well, glowed with relief and happiness. It was already hard to say why, but Da Ge was the best secret I’d ever kept.

  Before I reveal the details of the secret I’ve always liked less, I should say I know the shocking truth: lunacy is boring. Hollywood loves the nut trope, features the split-personality girl writing violent and fascinating lines on an ancient typewriter, skinny cigarettes and white-walled asylums as glamorous as she is. The bipolar father amuses his family by jumping naked on a trampoline. But anyone who’s actually seen or experienced a breakdown up close (and recovered) knows that actual insanity is a slow, narcissistic slog of redundant monologues. I’ll try to avoid those here.

  It’s best put like this: things went dark quick. The spring before I met Da Ge, I was halfway through the second semester of my senior year in college. I had stopped seeing Dr. Holderstein, rejected the drugs he suggested, and begun painting my dorm room with teeny, evenly spaced, silver acrylic bubbles. Then I failed some midterms, and within weeks of that, I was staying awake for four, five, sometimes six nights straight, outrageously happy. I had powers that no one else had or could possibly understand. I waited until it was totally irresistible and then broke the news to Adam.

  “You have what?” he asked, looking at the silver bubbles.

  “I know it sounds weird,” I said, “wings.”

  “Wings,” he repeated. He shook his head.

  “It’s not obvious from the outside,” I said, “but I could fly if I wanted to. I mean, so far I haven’t wanted to and that’s okay—it’s okay not to want to, but if I did want to, I could. I can go anywhere!” I said. “I can do anything I want to! I know everyone’s mom tells her that when she’s young, but for me, it’s actually the case—I can—”

  He stared at me. I gathered he didn’t have the surge I did, and couldn’t really understand. I was writing twenty-page papers when I had been assigned to write ten. I had started a novel about a teenaged dwarf who gets involved in a sex scandal and written 280 pages. I was busy all night every night; I was emaciated and in love with my hunger.

  “It feels fantastic to be hungry,” I explained to Adam. “I’m like a polished poem, revised down to the most essential version of myself! I mean, when you’re like me, your body doesn’t need as much food as other people’s. My mind feeds me.”

  “That’s terrifying,” he said, pushing sandwiches at me.

  But I trampled him on a race through days, powered by a force that can only be described as chemical. My mind filled the whole page in a chorus of horrible non sequiturs. There was no punctuation anywhere. My body was deprived and exhausted, but I thought I was a superhero. There were white lights everywhere, the city orbited me.

  I was baking but not eating complicated cookies that involved coconut, running eight miles a day, reading the dwarf novel out loud to Adam, and handwriting letters to long-lost high school friends when I went blank. Maybe the cumulative exhaustion caught up, because everything stopped; my world blacked out.

  My roommates didn’t know how to rescue me. Julia had known me since our Bank Street primary school days, so for her the changes were gradual enough to seem subtle. She never believed I was sick the way Adam did. He was the one who called University Health Services, after respectfully warning me first.

  “I’m calling someone, Aysha. I think you need some help, and as long as you’re enrolled i
n school here, the university is responsible for you,” he said.

  I was furious. “I’m responsible for myself,” I said.

  “It’s okay to need some help. Why deny yourself even that?”

  I remember thinking—even? What else did Adam believe I was denying myself? He, in the final moments of a Ph.D., was older and wiser; I was a patronized, babyish undergrad. So he called the school. And they called my mom.

  I woke up and spring was gone. It was sometime in June, and I was in a tall white room at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt. I thought I could hear the ocean, but it was an echo of medical equipment. Adam was a sad shadow in the corner. My mother perched on the edge of my bed, so small and hurt she looked like she might snap in half.

  “Where are we?” I asked her.

  “You’re in the hospital, sweetie,” she said.

  I never forgot that she said “you’re” instead of “we’re.”

  “In a city?” I asked.

  “Of course, darling. We’re at Fifty-Ninth and Tenth. In New York. Home.”

  Her voice had a fragile edge—lace doily, paper-cut snowflake.

  “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” I asked. Adam was looking at the floor. People often look at the floor when they can’t find answers in their minds.

  “Yes,” my mother finally said, “I’m here to take care of you.” She looked over at Adam. “We’re here to take care of you,” she added, politely. She was not originally in favor of my dating my poetry instructor. But when Adam called health services on my behalf, my mother came to appreciate him. In both cases, she was sensible, actually. He was a wreck of a boyfriend, and yet it was right of him to intervene when he did.

  The hospital lights were especially bright, spectacular over the bed. I looked down at my red-and-white-striped flannel pajamas.

  “Who put these on me?” I asked my mom.

  “I did,” she said. “I brought them.”

  It all made sense. She had seen my room, read the novel, picked up my pajamas.

  “What did you think of it? Did you like that she was under four feet tall? Did you see my silver collage? Did Adam tell you about the wings? Is that what this is about?” My mother stared. I knew right then that she knew nothing about me.