Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “You’re on the outside, Mom,” I told her.

  I could hardly hear her voice, “The outside of what, Aysh?”

  “Of me,” I said. I noticed how powerful my own words were, spearing out of me. “See how my words are sharp? I own the language. I’m like a language ballerina, spinning on a linguistic dime. See? The weather!” I stood on the bed, bouncing my mother as if we were on a seesaw. I pranced to the window. “Look!” I said to her.

  “At what, Aysha?”

  “It’s perfect outside,” I said, meaningfully. She was quiet.

  “It’s a sign!” I told her.

  “Of what, baby?”

  “Of this contract I have—not with God, really, I mean it’s not a religious thing. But it’s a contract I have—where, if I guess things in advance, then I’ll be right.”

  “About what?” she asked me. I was annoyed. How could I expect someone as unendowed as my mother to understand this epiphany? Adam had vanished.

  “When you see my performance you’ll understand!” I told my mother. Tony, who came to be my favorite nurse at St. Luke’s, walked in. She wore a white skirt, white shirt, white shoes, held in her right hand a glass of water and in her left a pill. It was the “worse” medicine Dr. Holderstein had been trying to save me from, Haldol. It made me dull, made my hair fall out, and cured psychosis and delusions of grandeur. On occasion, I tried to cheek and spit it out, but there was no tricking Tony so when she said here, honey, I opened my mouth, put the pill on my tongue, and swallowed. Now they make those drugs dissolve in your mouth. My mother thanked Tony and watched me take the meds before turning away toward the window, but I could see parts of her face fighting one another for control. She never lets herself cry.

  In the first years that followed it, my breakdown seemed blended up. Time was thick, ground with geography and relationships into a granular paste. Sometimes I could identify in it grains of what my life had been, but I couldn’t hold on to anything.

  Now that memory is itself only a memory. It’s counterintuitive, but the more years between it and me, the clearer my breakdown looks. So that now, even though I’m as far away as I’ve ever been from that time, it’s easy to see the shape of it. It was just a season and a half: spring and part of the summer of 1989. My mother was a fixture in the corner, on the bed, on the phone, carrying food trays, organizing lilies on the windowsill. She brought lasagnas, baked brownies and wrapped them individually, even showed up one day with framed pictures from my high-school bedroom and hung them on the walls.

  In my memory, she is all-powerful, rewiring the hospital with less fluorescent, more hopeful lights, painting, renovating, running the staff, and controlling the weather. In fact, she combed my hair every morning, brought fresh flannel pajamas, jeans, and panties printed with hearts and cherries. She fed everyone, including the other patients, and never showed up without something bright and good-smelling. The nurses kept a cot for her in my closet against the rules. Tony used to change the sheets, so there was always clean linen clinging to my mother’s propped-up cot. Once my mom made a cake with Tony’s name embossed in frosting.

  Adam and Julia were there too, usually together. Prior to that, they hadn’t really gotten along, and since I believed there was a deep connection between all people, I was glad Julia and Adam could enjoy it, too, even if only in their mundane way. Julia brought Pixie Stix and Twizzlers, which I hid under the pillow and gave away to other patients.

  “You like these, right?” she asked once, holding a half-sweet Charms lollipop.

  “What does it mean?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean, what does it mean?”

  “The half-sweet, half-sour thing. Is there something to that?”

  “It means I love you,” she said, but she never brought another one. Instead, she brought magazines and a battery-operated Scrabble game I should have loved but never played. Each time she came after she’d bought the game, she carried new batteries.

  “The world is bigger than this game or its screen!” I told her. “I can’t focus on something that small.” I stood on the bed to illustrate my point.

  Sometimes Adam came there at night, after visiting hours, and climbed in the bed with me, held on to me until I fell asleep. The drugs made me too dull for sex, and I wondered whether he was taking care of me or whether he was just terrified himself, and seeking comfort.

  Then I got out one morning that June and left the hospital with my mom, Adam, Julia, a new shrink named Dr. Meyers, and a list of pills and strict instructions. My mother talked endlessly about stabilizing, normalizing, and “getting better,” an idea she measured in milligram reductions of this or that drug. She rented the apartment on 115th, in case moving back in with her might make me feel like I had failed at life. She set up the Embassy interview with the director, Pete Batwan, an acquaintance of hers. I wanted to appear normal, so I kept the conversation on books. When he asked the surreal, “What do you see yourself doing in five years?” I said, “Reading,” and he gave me the job. I was so unqualified that I had to wonder if he and my mother had ever had been lovers.

  As soon as my mom went back to her life a little, I was first overwhelmed with relief by her loosened grip, and then grief-stricken. I wondered how my father could have left without missing her. Because when my mother leaves a room, lightbulbs and heaters flash, pop, go black and cold.

  “I’m like a fat old lady,” I told Adam one night, “sitting in this dark room without my mom.”

  “You’re certainly not fat,” he said. Even he could hear that this had come out wrong, so he backpedaled, “It’s going to be okay. You’re already so much better.”

  I flinched. The room looked numb and creamy. “I’m lobotomized,” I said. “I can’t even remember where or who I am, and I’m about to start a job I’m totally unqualified for. What if I never even finish school myself? How is that better? Better than what?”

  Adam swallowed. When he looked up, his eyes were red around the edges.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Are you crying?”

  “No.” He looked down. I had seen Adam cry before. Each time, his eyes turned red around the edges five minutes before he actually cried. I always said oh my God, are you crying, and he always said no. There was comfort for both of us in this pattern.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  Adam had a literary interest in my breakdown. He thought he was being empathetic, but when he wanted to discuss the minutiae with me—what I had felt and thought while I was “having my breakdown”—I found it voyeuristic and annoying. Did I remember the person I’d been then? Who was I now? He was lonely, looking for a me he knew. Who could blame him? But I couldn’t answer his questions and chose instead to talk about whatever bizarre tangent was most attractive to me. During this particular conversation, it was a list of “ph” words, clicking like Scrabble cubes in my mind: pheasant, phenomenon, phylum, phoenix.

  “Do you want to hear the ‘ph’ words I’m thinking of?” I asked.

  “Why can’t we have a conversation, Aysha? Please?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry. Please don’t cry.”

  “Sometimes I feel like the biggest asshole ever,” he said, and pushed his floppy hair out of his eyes. His glasses seemed to me to be sliding down his nose, but he made no move to fix them. Something like fear moved into my back and arms.

  “The fact is, you’re much younger than I am,” and the feeling was up to my neck. “I don’t know if I had it to do over again, whether I’d be able to change anything, but I think we need to rethink this,” he said.

  I spelled it out on my fingers. H-e-’s l-e-a-v-i-n-g. The “me” did not fit. But he was leaving. He was leaving me. I thought. Phenol. Pharaoh. Farah Fawcett. I thought of those plastic makeup heads, wanted to comb the straw hair on one I’d had as a kid.

  “Had it to do over,” I repeated. “Are we breaking up?”

  “You know I love you, right?”

  “It depends,” I said.


  “On what?” he asked.

  “Are you leaving for a new freshman?”

  “We didn’t date until you were almost a sophomore.”

  “Adam, have a shred of perspective, okay?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not leaving you for anyone else.”

  “But you will eventually date another one of your writing students.”

  As I spoke, his Columbia apartment zoomed into focus in my mind, tall bed in a blue room. Flannel sheets hung over the mattress edges, and Adam’s foot stuck out of the right corner. He had sturdy feet. His room was visible from the street outside, on the corner of 121st and Amsterdam. His was a mini-window I had headed for hundreds of nights in a row, sundress breezing my knees in summers, scarves against my collarbone in winters. The same homeless guy sat outside the building the whole time Adam and I were together. The guy sang “Pop My Neck” whenever anyone walked by. I gave him three dollars each time I went to Adam’s. I wondered whether the new girl at Adam’s would know the words to “Pop My Neck.” The rims around his eyes were red. My God, I said again, you are crying. He left. It was 8:06 P.M., warm, breezy summerish. I opened the windows and floated through the new apartment alone. Unopened boxes lined my walls. Dust had collected next to them. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was alone. No-w I-’m a-l-o-n-e. I ripped a piece of tape off the top of one of the boxes, looked lovingly at the spines of my books inside. I began to take them out, place them on shelves. I wasn’t despondent, I have to admit. In fact, now that there was no one left, I was thinking I could get off my meds and soar back up to the heights of mania.

  Da Ge didn’t call after our ice-skating date. I waited until the last day of vacation and then called Xiao Wang, asked if she’d come shopping. I was hoping she would tell me something important about Da Ge, although I wasn’t sure what it might be. We met at 8th Street and 5th Avenue, where every store sold identical, badly made, and overpriced shoes.

  “How’s Nai Nai?” I asked, pushing open the door of my favorite place.

  “Now maybe it’s too cold for her, but she have a new bird—I don’t know how to say. Maybe you don’t have English word for this bird,” Xiao Wang said.

  “We probably do. Most languages have names for everything. What’s it like?”

  “It can talk! Maybe you can teach English to this bird!” Xiao Wang laughed, covering her mouth. “In Chinese,” she added, “We call this bird ba ga.”

  “I bet it’s a mynah bird,” I said.

  “Mine bird?”

  “M-y-n-a-h,” I said, feeling the delicious fit on the five fingers of my right hand.

  Xiao Wang handed me a plaid, rubber boot. “I think maybe this is okay for you?” I felt obligated to try it on and was relieved to find that the store didn’t have my size.

  “Maybe they have your size, though,” I suggested.

  “It’s okay for me,” she said, and I didn’t know whether this meant that she, too, disliked the boots but thought I would like them, or that she already had boots, or that she wasn’t interested in general, or that she couldn’t afford new boots. I felt awkward in any case. I took a pair of red platform shoes off the display shelf and asked a salesperson for them in a 7. A stunned look appeared in Xiao Wang’s eyes. Maybe they were hideous.

  “Do you think these are ugly?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s quite ugly,” she said.

  I laughed. Then I bought some black boots fast to put the trip out of its pain, and we walked all the way to City Bakery in the cold, small-talking. Once there, we sat with a tray of pretzels and hot chocolate between us. Into the silence, Xiao Wang asked, “Sometimes you are friend with Da Ge from class?” It was as if it was clear that this was the reason we were there, and she had been the one to admit it.

  “He asks for some extra help sometimes,” I said. I picked some salt off a pretzel.

  “I think he is trouble person,” she said, sipping her cocoa.

  So they knew each other well, I thought. “A difficult person himself, you mean? Or trouble for others?” I asked.

  “I think he will be hard friend for you to understand.”

  “Why?”

  “Da Ge is very Chinese.”

  “What do you mean?” I finished picking salt off and took a soft bite of pretzel.

  “I think he have a lot of anger for China being so—closed for long time.”

  “Repressed,” I said.

  Xiao Wang took a dictionary out of her purse. “Can you show this word to me?” At the time, I thought it was funny that she had a dictionary with her all the time; now I don’t know anyone who doesn’t carry one. I pointed to the characters for “repressed.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “China repressed Da Ge. He feel he need to be free. But China is also—how do you say—also maybe inside of Da Ge. He is also repress himself too. Maybe he’s not so zhishuai, straight to the point, like Americans.”

  “Straight to the point?” Da Ge said that too,” I said. “I know my experience is limited, but I think you two might be the most straight-to-the-point people I’ve ever met.”

  “Oh,” said Xiao Wang, looking surprised. “I think Chinese people are quiet what they think. Maybe Americans talk more because they don’t feel repress.”

  “I don’t know about that. Americans have our own angers and repressions. And we create our stories, too—it’s not like being direct and being honest are necessarily the same thing. And Da Ge interrupts a lot, don’t you think?” I stopped for a moment, deciding to ask and then asking, “Are you two close?” I gulped some chocolate.

  Her face betrayed nothing. She bit into her pretzel, chewed, swallowed, and dabbed her lips. “We live near to each other,” she said. “You know, I meet him in your class, but he and I are different. I do not feel the same anger of Da Ge about China. And I am—how do you say—balance in the mind.”

  “Do you think he’s imbalanced?”

  “He has some problem of the mind, maybe.”

  I wasn’t sure where to go from there. She was warning me, but the words “problem of the mind,” made my own problematic mind seize up.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I don’t know how you say that. Maybe it will be difficult for Chinese and American to understand each other.”

  I intentionally misunderstood this. “But we can try, right? You and I can be friends?”

  “Of course. For our friendship it’s very nice. Anyway, how are your meetings with Da Ge?” She smiled and her face relaxed.

  “They’re okay. I find him—interesting. I like his company, I guess.”

  She nodded. I wondered what she either knew or thought she knew. “Maybe you are lonely sometime,” she said. “I am too, when I feel scary that my grandmother would die. But then I say, okay, you can always back to China.” She paused. “I am happy I have already married. Even though Jin have to stay home in China, I do not feel I am alone.”

  “You must have gotten married quite young.”

  “I marry to Jin when I am twenty-one, in agreement of our parents. Now I am twenty-five.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. “An arranged marriage?”

  “Not so official, you know. He is son of my father’s friend, and they think it will be suitable for us to marry.”

  “Was that okay for you?”

  “It’s okay for me,” she said. “He is very lovely boy. He will visit this summer, because I like to have a baby now. So maybe we will try that.”

  “A baby? Already?”

  “Twenty-five years are not so young,” she laughed. “If I am thirty in China without baby, I should be dead like of old age.”

  I couldn’t imagine even meeting a baby, let alone having one.

  I laughed. “Thirty’s not too old to have a baby.”

  “I don’t mean too old to have one,” she corrected. “I mean to not have one.”

  “Does your husband want a baby?”

  “Of course! All Chinese man will want
that.” I noticed how neatly Xiao Wang’s bangs were cut, straight across her forehead. Her eyes, lively with mischief, seemed to contradict her hair.

  “Do you think your husband is the person you would have married if your parents hadn’t known him?” I asked.

  “But my parents do know him. They like him very much.”

  “No, but I mean—what if there was someone you would have loved more—I mean, if you had picked for yourself?”

  “Oh. You mean is that—how do you say—romantic love. But maybe romantic love isn’t the only important things.”

  “But were you upset that someone else chose your husband for you?”

  “It’s not simple. My family make this choice together, because that will affect everybody. It is too selfish if I marry someone my family do not approve, or unsuitable to our family. I am one person. I do not think my own idea is the only one.”

  I wanted to ask Xiao Wang what would happen if she fell in love with someone in the United States, but thought it might be too abrasive. Plus, I was worried that she was in love with Da Ge, and I didn’t want to be responsible for knowing it.

  That evening I told my post-hospital shrink, Dr. Meyers, that I had a new friend who was changing some of the ways I thought about the world and myself. I liked Dr. Meyers because she wasn’t Dr. Holderstein and didn’t annoy me. I tried to tell her the truth. But I did not mention Da Ge.

  Outside Dr. Meyers’s windows, fists of snow were pounding down. By nighttime, there were thirteen inches, and I put a parka over my moon pajamas, slipped on red rain boots, and walked across Riverside, shivering into the park. Then I sat on a bench facing the street, watched headlights streak by in a blur of bright beads. Two kids stomped across the snow to a nearby playground, craning back to see their footprints under the streetlights. When one of them tipped her head back and opened her mouth, I wondered if she thought each flake she ate could never exist again. That she was gobbling up the sky. If so, she was wrong. Even snowflakes repeat. Maybe they vary on an atomic level, but it’s a myth that no two look the same, just like the wrongheaded truism everyone loves about the Great Wall being visible from outer space. You can’t actually see it at all.