Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “Sit down, honey,” she said. I did not. “How about we turn the movie off and I give you guys manicures, then?” she suggested.

  I went to the closet for my manicure kit, a present from her.

  Then I heard the buzzer. I tried to think of an excuse to run outside for a minute and come back alone, but there was no way I’d be able to trick my mom or Julia. So I stood frozen in the hallway.

  “Aysha!” My mom called. “Someone’s at the door! What are you doing in there?”

  “I’m looking for a nail file!”

  “I have one with me. Just bring a color, darling.”

  I was holding the whole plastic kit, full of files. The buzzer rang again.

  “Now who can that be?” my mother said.

  I was surprised that she sounded like such an old person. “Who says, ‘Now who can that be,’ Mom?” I asked her.

  “Apparently I do!”

  “Keep practicing saying I do,” I told her, as the buzzer rang a third time.

  “Why aren’t you getting the door, Aysh?”

  “I am,” I said. “I am.” My mother walked into the hallway to see what was stopping me, and then stood there watching. I didn’t listen for Da Ge’s voice over the intercom, just pressed the open-door button. I planned to let him come up, assess the situation for himself, and then leave.

  That’s not how it worked out.

  When I opened the door for him, my mother was still standing behind me in the hallway. I wondered which of us saw Da Ge first, since I had turned to look at her behind me. I think I saw him register in her face before I saw him myself.

  “Da Ge!” she said to him. Her pronunciation was gorgeous.

  He had rain in his hair and eyelashes. All of a sudden, he swooned against the door frame, moved in toward me two steps, and slumped down against the hallway wall. He was so drunk that he hadn’t even said hello back to my mother.

  Julia craned her neck into the hallway to see. “Who is it?” she asked.

  My mother said, “He’s one of the kids from the hospital.”

  I spun around to look at her. She looked back at me, innocently.

  “He’s my student,” I said. My voice came from far away. I didn’t look at my mother, just bent and tried to help Da Ge up. My mother closed her home manicure shop. She and Julia and I half-carried and half-dragged Da Ge into the living room. He glanced around at us, blearily.

  “Who’s Aysha?” he asked. The words ran together like rain. I remembered the storm and looked up at the window, streaming.

  “He means where am I,” I told Julia and my mom. Even I was surprised at how pathetic it sounded.

  “Of course he does,” my mother said. Julia was staring at him. I wondered if she’d met him, too, how I’d convince her he wasn’t the Chinese student I’d mentioned sleeping with. She quietly slipped out, returned to her apartment.

  My mother poured a glass of water and set it on the windowsill. Then she busied herself putting clean sheets on the futon for Da Ge. The shock began to crystallize.

  “How did you know his name? How did you know how to pronounce his name?” I asked, trying to keep my voice on a calm blue line. I had heard my mother say hospital. Had I heard her say hospital? I wasn’t ready to understand what that meant.

  “Hang on, sweetie. Let’s tuck Da Ge in, and then we’ll chat in your room.”

  She pulled the covers up over him lovingly, and then we sat on my bed.

  “He was in the hospital when you were,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “Did he not tell you we had met?” she asked me.

  Anger burned my mind blank, whited out the panic. “He mentioned it,” I lied.

  Now we were quiet. My mother, knowing this couldn’t be true, was at a loss. She and I were not in the habit of calling each other out on little lies. In this respect, we were quite Chinese. Americans love to confront and pin each other to the wall. Chinese people don’t do this so much; they move sideways in conversations and negotiations, leaving you room to escape even your own fabrications, exaggerations, and euphemisms.

  “Is he really in your class?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Is he okay? Does he behave normally toward you?”

  “How do you mean normally?”

  “I mean, what kind of relationship do you guys have?”

  Even though it wasn’t my mother I was angry at, I couldn’t help taking it out on her. “What kind of relationship do you guys have?”

  “Come on, Aysha. He was at St. Luke’s when you were there. He was recovering from some kind of trauma,” she said evenly. “When I met him, he told me he had just been through the democracy protests in China. Apparently he was upset. All I know for sure is that he was in the psychiatric ward. He had a lot of bruises, and some stitches in his face. I only asked him once what happened, and he said he’d fallen.”

  “But—?”

  “But nothing. I thought he had probably tried to hurt himself.”

  My mother has never used the words “commit suicide” or “kill himself” in my presence. I think my single episode terrified her so much that she imagines if she planted either of those phrases in my mind, even now, they might inspire me to take action. But the truth is, I’ve never felt particularly suicidal. I was astonished to hear that Da Ge had.

  “You didn’t ask him why falling landed him in a mental hospital?”

  “I didn’t want to challenge him, honey. We didn’t know each other that well, of course, and I wasn’t interrogating him. Plus, you know, his English wasn’t perfect, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to communicate sensitive stuff like that.” She stopped herself. “How close are you two?”

  “We hardly know each other,” I said, and as I heard the words, I realized they were true. A visceral dread seized me, one that started in my bones and rose out until my hair prickled with it. I wanted to unzip my skin and run from my life. But I caught my breath and started lying. “He sometimes stops by to pick up homework assignments.”

  My mother was tickling my back in a lullaby gesture. “Late at night?” she asked.

  I moved my back away, and she put her sad hand in her lap. “Obviously this was an exception to the normal visiting-hours rule,” I told her.

  “Don’t snap at me. Do you have social relationships with any other students?”

  “Of course. They need extra help all the time. You’ve met Xiao Wang.”

  In all the years I’ve taught, Xiao Wang and Da Ge are the only students I ever developed social relationships with (if you can call them that.). Mania allows for such connections. Later, when I was sane, I knew more people, but in less intense ways.

  That night Da Ge slept on the futon, and my mother stayed over and slept in my bed with me. When we woke, he was gone. The futon was folded up. My mom took me to the Museum of Natural History, where we sat under the blue whale. She put both of her arms around me. On the way out, she bought freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream from the gift shop, and I ate it on the walk back to her place like an astronaut, ready to lie my way through the next few months, marry him anyway, take a trip to the moon.

  The flu Old Chen was worried about has twisted Beijing into a horrible tornado of public relations scandals, apologies, travel warnings, and rushes on hospitals. There’s been a mass exodus of diplomats and expatriates. Events are being canceled daily and there’s no one on the streets. I’ve never seen anything like it. Half of Global Beijing is absent; parents are too freaked out to send their kids to school. Maybe I’m reckless, but when I look at the numbers of people infected, it doesn’t seem as threatening as hepatitis. But I guess if you can catch whatever it is by being in the same country as someone who has it, then it makes sense for the UN to issue a travel advisory.

  Shannon and Zhang Sun agree with each other for once. They think the flu is a conspiracy to bring China down. We had a picnic on Saturday in an empty Ritan Park.

  “Where are the people? Everyone believes this? It’s just b
ullshit propaganda!” Shannon kept saying. “Twenty people have flu and the world boycotts Beijing? Are people insane? More people die of diarrhea every day than have died of this ever.”

  “Not rich people,” Zhang Sun pointed out. “Hey!” he shouted, standing up. He hopped off the blanket and raced toward the entrance of the park, where his mother was buying her twenty-cent entrance ticket from a woman in a surgical mask and hairnet. Zhang Sun took his mom’s arm and led her over to us.

  “Xu Nai Nai is here, stand up,” he told Sophie, and I felt a twinge of envy. Sophie got up from the blanket where she and Julia Too were stretched out looking at last year’s GB yearbook and whispering secrets. Their surgical masks were up on their heads like headbands, a cute look. Zhang Sun’s mom ran over and swatted Sophie on the butt.

  “Xu Nai Nai!” Sophie said. She kissed the old woman, leaving a big lip-gloss print on Xu Nai Nai’s face. The old woman began immediately to frisk Sophie in what I recognized as a pathological long-underwear check.

  “So few clothes!” she said in Chinese. “You don’t fear cold?”

  “I fear heat,” Sophie responded, and collapsed again onto the blanket. Julia Too craned her thin neck around and smiled at Xu Nai Nai, gave a little wave.

  “Have a seat,” Shannon said, “I brought tea eggs and sausage for you.”

  “You eat first,” said Xu Nai Nai, “you eat first.”

  “We’ve eaten,” Shannon said.

  “Why aren’t you wearing masks?” Xu Nai Nai asked. She reached into her bag and pulled out an unopened box of surgical masks. “Here,” she said, “extras!”

  “Eat some lunch first,” said Zhang Sun, handing her a paper plate with a tea egg and red-plastic-wrapped sausage. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing a mask, mom?” Zhang Sun asked.

  “I’m too old for such bullshit,” she said. “I’d probably choke to death on the mask. I’d rather get the flu.”

  Shannon laughed with her mouth open at this. “But you should wear one, Shannon,” Xu Nai Nai said in Chinese. “You don’t want to pass anything to Sophie!”

  Xu Nai Nai is hardly the only old woman to be worried. I’ve promised my mother that things will have calmed down by summer when she’s supposed to visit. But right now it’s hard to say. Julia Too wears a surgical mask all day; I’ve forgotten what her mouth looks like. And since no one goes out anymore, she works full-time on a project she has yet to show me.

  I know vaguely what it is. Old Chen’s envelope was filled with frayed pictures, dozens of a fat baby in buttless pants, crawling, sitting on his mama’s lap, and lying immobilized by enormous padded winter costumes. Then there were four shots of a scrappy kid in the streets of a hutong, and two of the same boy in underpants on the Beidaihe shore. There were two of him climbing Fragrant Hills, three sleeping, and two riding a bike. There was only one teenage photo, in which he sits alone on a bed, surly, out of focus. And that was it. Not a single adult photo.

  Julia Too bought fourteen pieces of handmade paper, maroon and textured, and some photo corners. Then she retreated to her room for three weeks of evenings. She’s illustrating a book, that much I know. I haven’t asked her anything but how it’s going. She nods seriously, says fine. I figure she’ll show me when she’s ready, but some nights, when I see her bent over in her room, cutting out pieces of paper or drawing on those pages, I think my heart might claw its way out of my chest.

  The Monday after he stopped by drunk and ran into my mother, I cornered Da Ge before class, not caring what my other students thought.

  “You told my mother that you fell?” I asked him. “You were in the lunatic ward because you fell? You knew my mother from the hospital? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “We can meet after school to have some chat, okay, Aysha?”

  Xiao Wang was staring at us, unblinking, as if she had always known it would come to this. I took an eight-second breath and walked to the front of the room to read Langston Hughes’s “I, Too, Sing America.” Its perfect fifteen-letter title fit on my fingers. No one noticed I was counting them over and over in my mind. Or that every sentence I uttered fit in multiples of five. My right hand moved like a running spider on the side of my leg. I was spelling everything. I was in control. Then Ingyum was standing, describing how to knit a scarf for “hobby show and tell.” It felt interminable, even though I normally loved this sort of lesson. Xiao Wang had done a stir-fry demonstration, holding an imaginary wok and saying, “then you put the meat in, then you take the meat out,” and I thought I would teach her the hokey-pokey when she next came over to watch movies. Chase and Russ had done baseball, complete with bat and ball, although I asked them just to “mime” hitting the ball. They were brilliant, throwing around baseball words like pitch, strike, and slide, and ending with a rousing description of home runs. Everyone cheered. I wanted to be happy, to focus on the words and celebrate, correct, and clap, but I felt like a fly, buzzing above the room, my dozens of insect eyes all looking in different directions. When Ingyum finished, I dismissed the class, dying to clear them out and hear whatever lies Da Ge was going to use to comfort me.

  On a payphone close to Embassy, I called Dr. Meyers to cancel my appointment with her—for the first time. I said I had a fever. Could she hear the traffic whipping by?

  “Take care of yourself,” she said, the way Bonita had. The way Adam always did.

  Da Ge was waiting outside the phone booth, his backpack slung over one shoulder, the muscles in his jaw moving. Maybe he was grinding his teeth. His eyes had sunk further into his head since I’d met him. I closed my eyes and told myself that when I opened them, if the first number on the phone I saw was even, everything would be okay. I didn’t even know what that meant. When I opened my eyes, I saw all the numbers at once. He hadn’t brought an extra helmet, but I rode on the back of his moped anyway, half-hoping we’d crash and never have to have the conversation. But we survived and arrived at Tom’s Diner. Safe in our booth, I sat with my stomach grinding.

  “I had a accident,” said Da Ge, eating fries with a fork. “I meet your mother in the hospital when you are there. I’m sorry I don’t tell you. I don’t want you to think I am—”

  “What, insane?”

  He raised an eyebrow, then tucked a paper napkin around his burger before picking it up and biting so tidily it reminded me of my mother.

  “What kind of accident was it?” My words came out thick with dread, a dark mess of mixed paint. Da Ge spun a forkful of the spaghetti he had also ordered. I had never seen anyone order both a burger and spaghetti. He put the noodles in his mouth.

  “Oh my motorbike,” he lied, chewing.

  “Oh,” I said. “You crashed it?”

  He finished chewing, swallowed. “Your mother is very worried for you then.”

  “She told you that?”

  “I can tell.”

  “But what about you? Tell me about the accident.”

  “I fell the bike.”

  “You were thrown, you mean?” I couldn’t stop supplying him with excuses.

  “Right.”

  He looked so young and skinny, eating his two entrees. I wondered if he had envied me in the hospital. For the first time, I thought how grateful I should have been for my mother’s care. “Who took care of you at St. Luke’s?” I asked.

  “The doctor.”

  “No one else? Did anyone visit you?”

  “I take care of myself around that time. Maybe my father’s brother, Zhen Ming.”

  “What about your father? He didn’t come?”

  “No. He doesn’t know this.”

  “You didn’t tell him about the accident.”

  “This will be too much trouble for him.”

  “Maybe he would have come.” I said.

  He said nothing, shook his head no.

  “All right, maybe not. But why were you on the floor for mental patients?”

  “I suffer mind thing,” he said.

&nbs
p; I heard the echo of Xiao Wang’s words in his. Had she known about this all along? Or somehow guessed it?

  “You mean, the accident was because of the mind thing? Or the mind thing was because of the accident?”

  He was wrapping more noodles around his fork. I wanted to throw his plate at the wall, hear the porcelain shatter, spray the place with pasta sauce.

  “The other thing you said,” he said calmly.

  “What?”

  “Because the accident, my mind become weak.”

  I wanted to believe him so badly that I offered up the word. “Shock,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “You were in shock because of the accident?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “But did you plan the accident?”

  “What does this mean, plan?”

  “Did you want to crash the bike? Did you want to hurt yourself?”

  “Who says I crash the motorbike? I just have an accident and fall. That’s all.”

  We looked at each other, and the right side of his mouth edged up into a smile. I smiled back, agreed to let it go. Da Ge gulped some Coke, reached into his backpack.

  “Maybe you can help me,” he said, pushing a fat folder across the table.

  I opened it, found American citizenship application forms full of bizarre vocabulary. I recognized some from our marriage registration process: Petition For Alien Relative, Registering Permanent Residence, Supplement A to Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence, USCIS Form G-325A—Biographic Information U.S. Citizen, Affidavit of Support Contract Between Sponsor and Household Member. He pointed to a practice booklet for a test about U.S. history. “You will help me with some study? It’s okay for you?”

  “Of course,” I told him. “And I’ll fill out all the forms for you.”

  “Thank you, Aysha,” he said. Hearing my name in his voice gave me the feeling of falling. Like in a dream. I jolted, caught myself, studied the tabletop: metallic patterns winding inside Formica.

  “Can I ask you something, please?”