Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  Our bureaucrat was a plump and pale man who reminded me of Mr. Batwan, the director at Embassy. His name was Michael Schmello. Schmello? I stared at his name tag in disbelief. He had tired rings around the bottoms of his eyes. Maybe he was thinking fifty percent of us would get divorced anyway, why should he waste his time. I wondered whether he was the same person who had to oversee couples signing their divorce licenses.

  Da Ge handed me a pen. I watched it spill ink into the curves of my cursive name, got the same warm rush I’ve gotten since second grade when I learned to write curling, linked letters. They always look so smooth and sure of themselves, dark against the blank spaces on paper. I felt better as soon as I saw my name on the page. Da Ge took his Chinese passport out of a leather folder. Michael Schmello was waiting, so I put my arm around Da Ge’s shoulders. I hoped we looked natural, although my heart sounded to me like a car alarm. Could Mr. Schmello hear it? Maybe he’d think I had prewedding jitters.

  He disappeared with Da Ge’s passport and returned several minutes later, said our certificate of marriage registration should arrive within four weeks, and if it did not, we should contact the office again. Da Ge took out a roll of money and handed Mr. Schmello two twenties. Then he turned to leave.

  “The processing fee is thirty dollars, sir,” Mr. Schmello told Da Ge. He knocked on the window and pushed Da Ge’s change through.

  “No matter,” said Da Ge, and turned. “You can keep that.”

  It was a minor miscalibration, but Mr. Schmello took offense.

  “Excuse me, sir!” Schmello said, much louder than necessary. “The office of the city clerk does not accept bribes!”

  I don’t know what Da Ge would have been bribing him to do: marry us faster? Marry us in a threesome with his fat, pasty self? We had to wait twenty-four hours for our ceremony no matter what, weeks for our license. I had to complete an I-130, Da Ge an I-485 for his “conditional” green card. We would still have to fill out a thousand foreign national spouse forms and applications, interview and prove our love, jump through so many flaming bureaucratic hoops it would be Olympic. Did Mr. Schmello think we believed he could save us from all that for ten bucks?

  Da Ge, who didn’t understand Mr. Schmello’s reaction, waved the extra ten-dollar bill and receipt into the window hole and then left both there, half in and half out, before turning and walking toward the door. I took the money and tried to make meaningful eye contact with Mr. Schmello. “Customs are different everywhere,” I said. “My fiancé meant no harm.”

  Da Ge had turned around. The veins on his neck were standing out. “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  “I am completing our transaction,” I said. It was the weirdest thing I had ever said. Da Ge walked briskly back to the counter and pounded on the window.

  “You will not talk to her anymore!” he shouted. The regular noise of the office flared out. “You accuse me of what?” Anger made Da Ge’s English choppy, and he was furious that I had talked about him with Mr. Schmello in a way that excluded him. I put my hand on Da Ge’s back and led him out of City Hall. His uncle Zhen Ming, who had stood watching the commotion like an absolute statue, called something in Chinese. I never found out what it was. Congratulations?

  We didn’t speak on the walk back to the train, and then he went wherever it was he went, and I rode home, lonely, almost married. Back in my quiet apartment, as if I were looking for a comic sequel to my day with Da Ge, I called Xiao Wang and invited her over to watch Dirty Dancing with me. I told her it was my favorite movie ever, even though it made fun of Jewish people.

  “Chinese people love that Jewish person,” she said.

  “What Jewish person?” I asked.

  “Jewish and Chinese are similar.”

  “How’s that? You also have expensive summer camps where middle-aged women with nose jobs take advantage of hot-bodied workers?”

  “Hot bottle?”

  “Hot body. Means sexy.”

  “Nose what?”

  “Nose job.”

  “What is it?”

  “Surgery to make your nose smaller.”

  “I think for American it’s a good idea. Many people here have too big, how do you say—enormous—nose. Tall, too, up on the face like a mountain.”

  I laughed.

  “Especially Jew,” she said.

  “Um, it’s okay to say that to me, but you should probably avoid it in public.”

  “No, I don’t mean you. You don’t need it, this job. But your nose also not small.”

  “Right. So why are Jews and Chinese alike?”

  “I don’t mean that we have this kind of, how do you say, place for play. Jews and Chinese both care most for family and education.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “It’s true,” she said. “And Chinese and Jews are also good at making money.”

  When Jennifer Grey got a nose job two years later, I showed Xiao Wang an article in a celebrity magazine. It featured before and after shots. Xiao Wang shook her head.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “But I thought you liked nose jobs on Jewish girls.”

  “Not for this one,” she said. “Now she is some other, boring person with plain face and nothing about her.” She grinned, in a rare lighthearted moment. “I think she won’t make so much money anymore. Now that she isn’t Jewish.”

  She wasn’t wrong, exactly.

  I look forward with an addict’s love to the mundane routine of my Sunday morning lessons with Teacher Hao: the tea jar he brings, the metal sound of its cap coming off for sips, the clean lines of Tang poems, his repetitive, unsuccessful explanations of why I’m syllabically and tonally off, the sunlight shifting outside my living-room windows, first imperceptibly and then so completely until the room and the pages of our poems appear to be on fire. We end at noon. This week we worked on a poem about drinking alone, one I love but that Teacher Hao insists I can’t possibly understand, what with my American nature. It’s a Li Bai poem, and Teacher Hao says it has a masculine bent. I’ve been ribbing him that Li Bai was in touch with his feminine side, in love with flowers and moonlight.

  “Those are not feminine things,” Teacher Hao said.

  “Really? The natural world isn’t, by most definitions, feminine?”

  “Tang poets are men,” he said.

  “But that’s because women weren’t encouraged to write, and their writings weren’t published, right? Like in the West.”

  “Let’s look at this part again,” he said, ignoring me. He read in a lilting Beijing accent: “I lift my glass, invite / the bright moon, who casts back a shadow / Making us three. / But the moon can’t drink / and my shadow studies me carefully.”

  He stopped there. “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  Aware he might dislike it, I said, “I wish the moon could make us three.”

  “That’s very American,” he said, meaning that if you make a poem about your daughter and her lost father, you’re focusing on yourself, thinking from the inside out.

  “This is a poem about universality. About the condition of man, and the contradictions that provide balance in both the natural world and poetry: loneliness and companionship, dark and light, reality and shadow,” Teacher Hao said.

  “Mom, let’s go!” Julia Too called from the hallway. I pushed my chair back.

  “Coming,” I said.

  “Where will you go today?” Teacher Hao asked, closing his books.

  “Rock climbing,” I said.

  He shook his head in disbelief, maybe at the risks we took, or maybe at the frivolous lives of Westerners here. In either case, I agreed.

  “She loves it,” I said, shrugging guiltily. “And it’s good exercise.”

  I thought of his look as Julia Too and I biked past by the U.S. Embassy. The line, always long, seemed especially infinite, twisting out the back of the silk market and around the block. After 9/11, they moved the line away from the embassy itself, and create
d a series of ropes to control the crowd. There are also now three different layers of security, even if you just stop by to add pages to your passport. Americans have always been able to enter the U.S. Embassy without waiting in line, which both makes sense and feels miserably unfair and awkward in front of the hundreds of students and grandparents lined up for visas—most of whom will be denied. As we approached the park, I saw laborers scaling buildings, hammering and scrubbing, even as urbanites and tourists climbed the shiny rock wall in the park. No wonder Teacher Hao arched his eyebrows.

  Anne and Phoebe were already there, putting on climbing shoes. I was surprised Anne wanted to climb. She and I said hello, and then, with that conversation over, looked around, as if hoping another subject would walk up to us and present itself.

  Julia Too leapt onto the wall. She’s a talented spider, and the young guys who run the place love her because she’s fearless both about scaling the wall and pushing off in her soft purple climbing slippers. Anne and I stood together watching our girls climb, fall, and swing out over the park, a sight that always leaves me breathless with fear. I was coaching myself about not being overprotective, not shouting hold on, not holding my breath and passing out while I watched my daughter move through life without crippling neuroses. Let her go, I was thinking. Anne sighed.

  “Maybe this is too personal a question,” she said. “Feel free to tell me if you don’t want to answer it.”

  Delight shot through me. “No, no,” I said. “Go ahead.” I watched her.

  “Do you ever get lonely here? I mean, living alone in Beijing?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Everyone does. This is a weird place, especially to be—” I paused, deciding whether to ramp up the stakes and then doing it, “a single mom.”

  She winced. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I keep thinking I’m not really a single mom.” She blinked a few times so fast it looked like she had a tic. “I mean, I know it’s silly, but I can’t help but keep thinking it’s just a matter of time before he comes back.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I used to think Da Ge, Julia’s dad, would appear somehow. Reappear.”

  “Do you ever think it now?” Anne asked.

  I shook my head no.

  When Yang Tao showed up, he agreeably put on slippers and a harness right away, even though he had never been before and clearly thought climbing was a horrifying idea. And although he’s somewhat spindly and might have been light, he was a dreadful rock climber. From the instant he clambered onto the wall, he clutched it like a dying person and tried to pull himself up with his arms. The key is to put the weight and burden on your legs—no one has the upper-body strength to last long pulling himself up a ninety-degree incline. But Yang Tao didn’t trust his skinny legs. Watching him flail about increased my affection for him, but it had the opposite effect on Julia Too. She likes cool kids more than I do.

  “God, he’s like a total spaz, Mom,” she said.

  “It’s his first time rock climbing,” I reminded her. “It’s brave of him to try.”

  “Because he’s old and frail, you mean?”

  Anne, hearing this, smiled at me over Julia Too’s head, and I felt a surge of something I can only describe as the opposite of loneliness. Julia Too stepped onto a small rock jutting out and began propelling herself back up.

  “Don’t fall, sweetie,” I called. I hate watching her swing off the wall. What faith can I really put in a pair of elastic underpants?

  Julia Too twisted around to face me. “When you fall, it’s like flying,” she called. “Falling is the fun part.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So fall, I guess.” I blew her a kiss. Let go, I thought again, let go. An image of her first shoes flashed into my mind. How I bent to buckle them and she stood, waiting to run into the first school she ever attended, a festive place on the Upper West Side called Basic Trust. Julia Too cried less at “good-bye” than the other toddlers, and I used to wonder if this was because she expected less than they did, that her heartbreak was set in motion before she was born. Even on days when she felt mixed about seeing me go, her way of putting her mittens in her cubby and pulling out her mat for morning meeting seemed to me especially stoic. Julia Too blew me kisses through the windows of classrooms for years, butterflied her way through swimming, dance, and pottery lessons, made and kept friends from every corner, including Beijing. I thought the impossible circus of moving and being the international new kid might shatter her, but she’s apparently made of some trauma-proof material; I’m the glass one.

  Yang Tao rappelled off the wall, hanging in space for what must have been a terrifying moment—before returning to the ground. He was unable to disguise his relief.

  “You hated it!” I said.

  “Hate is a big word.”

  I smiled. “Remember when you said I could ask you anything?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Who was it that Shannon meant when she said you weren’t married because you’d had your heart broken?”

  “You’re still on that question? A girl from Hubei,” he said.

  “Hubei! Where is she now?”

  “She married my college roommate.”

  I tried to see his facial expression, but he was shading his eyes from the sun, and I couldn’t make much out.

  “Were you crushed?”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  “Right. Was your heart really broken, though?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “Unclear,” he said, in Chinese.

  “Are you ready to belay me?” I asked.

  He nodded, and I roped myself to him and climbed until I reached the bell at the top of the wall. Ringing it, I had the thought that rock climbing is like sex. The exertion narrows your mind to a single focus: where the limbs go next. Don’t fall. Or do.

  Our processed marriage license arrived, and I passed it to Da Ge in class. Now all we had to do was go to city hall for a “ceremony,” and we’d get the real certificate. A marriage certificate! I wondered if I would hang it on my wall next to the fat fat white white baby picture of me and Benj. I hoped so. Maybe Da Ge would ask to move in with me. He said nothing after class but called me late that night.

  “I like to see you,” he said.

  “Come over,” I said. “Now that we’re almost married, maybe you’ll kiss me.”

  “Do you want?”

  “Yes.”

  I went downstairs, propped the lobby open with a Bedford grammar handbook, and left my apartment door unlocked. When he arrived, I was lying in the dark, undressed, the covers up to my neck. He closed the door, bolted it, and pulled the chain across. I heard two controlled thumps as he set his shoes in the hallway: one shoe, two shoes. His socks brushed the wood floor toward my room, the door creaked open, and a little hallway light washed over the bed.

  He walked to the shelf and set something down. The textbook. Then he appeared at the side of my bed. I thought he’d ask was I asleep, and that I wouldn’t respond, even though I had just brushed my teeth and had a pounding cardio pulse. But he said nothing, simply lifted his shirt over his head and then undid his belt buckle. He took his jeans off and folded them. Then he stood in his boxers in front of me, touching the bed. I turned onto my side and propped myself up. His stomach tensed when I reached out to touch him, wrapped my hands around his straight hips. He put his hands on my face, and I closed my eyes. It was too dark to see when he slid into the bed and pressed himself against me until our bodies were touching entirely. I could feel his thighs against mine, and remembered wondering what it would feel like to touch him, taste him. This was what. He felt like beach glass, tasted minty and urgent. The city was dissolving out my window, lurching forward without me. I could feel the muscles in Da Ge’s back, the pulse in his neck where I pressed my open mouth. A car outside came to a grinding, screeching halt, and I listened for the smash of metal, but it never came. Da Ge’s arms were under my waist, lifting
and arching me toward him. He smelled like shampoo and newsprint. He had brought the city inside my apartment with him; the skin on his face was still cool from the night. When his hips were moving against mine, and his breathing jagged and rough, he put his mouth over my ear. His voice was like heat, his words so clear I can still hear their edges. “I want you unbelievable bad,” he said.

  When Da Ge and I slept together that first time, it was March of 1990, and I had two friends: Julia One and Xiao Wang. Telling Xiao Wang was not a possibility. I had no idea how she’d react, and I didn’t want to risk our friendship. But I wanted to tell someone, and it couldn’t be Dr. Meyers or my mother since I was on such a lie roll with both of them. So I had to forgive Julia. There was no one else to keep me company about how weird or not-weird it was, or to help decide if he was a stalker or the love of my life. Julia might not approve, but she was my best option.

  I decided to start a conversation as if she and I had just left off the day before by some accident, and not to acknowledge the Adam debacle at all. Maybe we could just pretend so hard that it hadn’t happened that it wouldn’t have. But I would leave out the part about marrying Da Ge, I decided. I could handle the salacious sex with a student, the no-condom aberration, the general slut narrative, but the marriage part felt like too much.

  Weirdly, I put on lipstick before going to Julia’s apartment. When she opened the door and saw me, her eyes watered. But she stood there, maybe scared. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “Um. Could I have some coffee?”

  “Of course,” she said, turning. “Come in.” We sat in her kitchen, on the stools, the red and white floor twirling up at us.

  “So,” I said. “I slept with one of my students.”