Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “That’s terrible,” Jack agreed.

  My mom walked into the room with a glass pitcher of gazpacho and three bowls. She began putting placemats on the table.

  “The dad kept eighteen pigeons in a cage outside his living-room window,” I was saying. “The mother is having fits of craziness.”

  “What are you two talking about?” My mom asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Then she and Jack and I ate soup, salad, and a baguette with brie. We talked about the weather.

  I left later, desperate to find Da Ge. And then the day was emptied out and gone. That Tuesday night went blank, and then it was Wednesday. Unable to talk to Da Ge, I decided I would talk about him. For real. Julia and I were at her gym. She was in the hot tub, and I was on my way to join her, not realizing that you’re not supposed to boil your unborn baby in 110-degree water. My stomach looked almost no different; it seemed impossible that a peanut-sized person was in there, growing a spine. I had decided not to tell anyone until I was twelve weeks pregnant—in August. I bought a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting at the Columbia Bookstore, and discovered many things I should have been worried about, including eating two thousand kinds of yellow leafy vegetables I had never heard of—five times a day.

  I walked the pink tile plank out to the whirlpool, where Julia was submerged in bubbles, leaning back on a jet with one arm stretched out of the water. I slipped in.

  “I married Da Ge,” I said.

  Julia raised her hands to the surface of the water and looked at them as if she’d never seen them before. I thought I saw something fall behind her face, but she kept whatever it was out of her eyes and words.

  “I thought maybe you had,” she said, her voice staying even and warm. Her hair was slicked back, and the bones in her face were jutting out, wet from the steam and tight from chlorine. I loved her as wholly as I ever had. For protecting me from whatever she actually thought. For not bringing up the fact that I hadn’t told her earlier, for not making it about her. For being so familiar and always agreeing to suffocate under the weight of whatever new weirdness I crushed her with.

  I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. I couldn’t really think of how to bring it up and then there was, you know, the Adam thing.” As soon as it was out, I wished I hadn’t punished her again, but it was also true. She winced.

  “I was waiting for the right moment, I guess,” I said.

  “It’s a citizenship thing? Or you’re in love with him?” she asked me.

  I couldn’t help but wonder—if I answered about Da Ge, would she tell me that she and Adam were in love? I shrugged.

  “Is he in love with you?” she asked hopefully.

  I couldn’t lie. “I’m not sure. I hope so.” Hearing this embarrassed me, and Julia, knowing that, spoke right away.

  “Have you told him about—?” she gestured toward my stomach.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know.”

  She waited.

  “Because what if he has an opinion on whether to keep her?” I asked, “Or worse, what if he doesn’t?”

  “Right,” she said. “Why her? Is it a girl?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s a boy, somehow. And i-t-’s n-o-t-a-b-o-y fits on ten fingers.” I watched my fingers pinwheel in front of us as I spelled. “M-y b-a-b-y i-s n-o-t a b-o-y is fifteen.”

  Used to this sort of tedium, Julia ignored it. “Are you going to tell him?”

  “About the spelling?”

  “No,” she played along. “About the baby.”

  I smiled. “I guess eventually he’ll notice.”

  “And you know for certain that it’s his?”

  Did she think it might be Adam’s? And if so, would she be heartbroken?

  “It’s his,” I said, and then, “Are you a good babysitter?”

  She nodded.

  “If I never see Da Ge again after I tell him, will you be the daddy?”

  “I’ll start right now,” she said. “We should get a doctor appointment for you to make sure everything is going okay.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll name the little muffin Julia.”

  She took my hand tentatively on the walk home and then increased her grip until I thought she might cut my circulation off. I knew, regardless of how many times it had been or whether it was still happening, how sorry she was about Adam. She called her doctor the next day, supplied prenatal vitamins, borrowed What to Expect, and began cooking leaves and weeds and bringing them to my apartment. She fussed over which fish had too much mercury, and bought me organic shampoo so no chemicals could seep into the baby via my hair. I was four and then five and then six weeks pregnant that June. The first time I saw Julia Too’s heartbeat, a bright musical flutter in a sea of green ultra-sound light, Julia One was with me in the room.

  Da Ge came back to my apartment at the end of June, looking like a video game character. He appeared at my door, carrying nothing, not even a helmet or his backpack. He hadn’t called or come by since the fourth. I pulled him into the apartment and hugged him and then held him out so I could look at his face. His skinniness had become a kind of horror. I did not ask where he had been. I didn’t want to scare or crowd him, to “remove a fly from his forehead with a hatchet,” as the Chinese saying goes. Maybe his problem was a manageable one, I pretended, something we could address gradually. As for avoiding the topic of our peanut-sized baby, I justified that with circular logic. Having told him nothing, I couldn’t expect him to confide in me, either. And since he didn’t confide in me, I couldn’t very well tell him I was pregnant.

  “It’s hot,” I said, “let me fix you some iced tea.”

  I cracked ice cubes out of trays and dumped them into a pitcher, poured cold tea over them, and squeezed lemons in. Then we sat on the futon together, drinking and watching light blast into the windows. Time was as slow as heat that summer, the pavement steaming with sun and pollution.

  Tears were percolating under my eyes. “So,” I tried. “What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “you?”

  We were in an ESL skit. I was crying.

  “I’ve been driving out to my dad’s a lot.”

  “You have seen your father?”

  “No,” I said. I was too tired to form words that didn’t crack. “Vacation.”

  “But you go to his house?”

  “I sit outside his house.”

  He nodded, reached over, and saying nothing about it, wiped my cheek.

  “They have a garden,” I said. “She has a garden.”

  “Have you seen Xiao Wang?” Da Ge asked, surprising me.

  “Her husband’s here, visiting.”

  “I know.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t met him yet.”

  “I think she’ll like to introduce you,” he said.

  “Have you? Met him?”

  “No.”

  We sat silently for a moment while I tried to conjure up images of a baby’s face with his scar across its fat cheek.

  “Will you lie down with me?” I asked. He nodded, and we went into my bedroom where I took his clothes off first, slowly, and then my own. I pulled the covers over our heads. Underneath the blankets we were still and quiet, which I disliked. Feared. I climbed on top of him, propped myself up. If only I knew where he lived, I thought, next time he was lost I could go there and find him.

  “Can you take me to your place downtown? I want to see your life,” I said.

  “Right now?” He looked at me searchingly, ran his hands up my sides.

  “Afterwards,” I said.

  That night he took me to a Chinatown restaurant I would never have entered on my own. I wore my cream wedding dress. To my great displeasure, his wax-faced caramel apple of an uncle joined us. Zhen Ming ordered food for the whole table, which I found bizarrely rude, especially since it involved sea slugs, lobster, and beef tripe. It was
a gesture of generous hosting, his way of wining and dining us. I wish I had been able to appreciate that at the time. Zhen Ming and Da Ge spoke in Chinese. Occasionally Da Ge turned to me to mumble a half translation.

  “Zhen Ming is a businessman,” he said. I took this to be an apology for not including me; maybe they were talking about business and Da Ge thought I’d be bored or couldn’t understand. Zhen Ming didn’t even try to mask what I took to be his utter lack of interest in me. I pretended to be engrossed in using my chopsticks to hide a shrimp under some fried noodles. Since growing a shrimp in my stomach, I had lost my appetite for the shiny, veiny things. They looked like little intestinal systems to me, science models of internal parts, ultrasound photos. Being pregnant was like being manic; every sensory experience was exaggerated. I kept myself busy for the duration of the dinner by sniffing the air and staring wide-eyed at food I once might have liked, unable to believe that anyone could eat anything but white bread, plain pasta, and marshmallows.

  When Zhen Ming finally excused himself to go, Da Ge walked him to the front of the restaurant, shaking his hand the whole way. There was something about the way they walked together, shaking hands, that gave me a bad feeling.

  When Da Ge came back to the table alone, I was sullen.

  “For you,” he said, “it’s boring.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s boring.”

  We stared at each other.

  “I think you want to see Chinatown,” he said.

  “If I wanted to see it alone, I would have come alone.”

  “Tonight,” Da Ge said, looking at me, “you are pretty.”

  That was the moment I almost told him. And then the waiter showed up with cubes of cut watermelon, said Zhen Ming, now long gone, had picked up the tab. And the moment was gone. Someone dropped a glass across the restaurant and it smashed.

  “Once I break a bottle over someone’s head,” Da Ge said.

  “You what?”

  “I am angry, so I hit a bottle on someone’s head.”

  “A girl?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked him this. Perhaps I wanted to see where the line was. I found it right away; he was furious.

  He put his hands on the table, hard, as if he were steadying himself. Some thick soup sloshed over the sides of its bowl. My stomach turned. “You think I hurt women?” he asked, through his teeth. “Why? Because American propaganda tell you this?”

  “I just think you have a bad temper,” I said.

  “It wasn’t woman,” he said, “but you already knew that.”

  “Who then?” I asked. I cut a square of watermelon into two with a chopstick.

  “Another student at Beida.”

  “Why?” I cut each of the two watermelon pieces into two more.

  “He says this stupid thing about my mother.”

  “Did he know you?”

  “Yes. We were in a meeting together.”

  “What kind of meeting?” The hot pink smell of watermelon bothered me, so I pushed my plate away.

  “A political meeting,” Da Ge said.

  “What did he say about your mother?”

  “A rude thing.”

  “Did he know your mother?”

  Anger flashed across his face. “What, my mother? How is it possible for this?”

  “If he doesn’t know your mother, why do you give a shit what he says about her?”

  “Nobody say this about my mother.”

  “Tell me what he said.” I was punishing him. For bringing Zhen Ming, for ignoring me, for keeping secrets, for not knowing about the baby, not guessing, not asking. I wanted to provoke him out of himself.

  “He say she is a whore. He say fuck her.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What if someone say these things about your mother?”

  “I wouldn’t break a bottle over anyone’s head.”

  He looked down at the table. “Maybe people have been easy to you in your life.”

  “You’re not easy to me.”

  He picked at two grains of rice with his chopsticks and refused to meet my eyes.

  “You’re not easy, either,” he said.

  “So maybe we’re good for each other.”

  I reached across the table to touch his hand, and he set his chopsticks down, laced his fingers in mine. Electricity moved up through my arm to my neck. I flew the circle of my mind, looking for the right question to land on, the thing I could ask that would provide a real reveal. I wanted to peel Da Ge’s skin and see underneath. I wanted to be inside him. I wanted to be him.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  He glanced nervously around the restaurant and eventually looked at me and sighed. I remember feeling like he was looking down from the top of the restaurant, thinking I understood nothing. He was right.

  “Sometime, I feel so bad I cannot leave the bed,” he said.

  “I know,” I told him.

  “For many weeks.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe I will be like it forever.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “Forever is—”

  “Nobody can know this things about anybody else.” His voice picked up. “Let’s go to my apartment and watch movie and sleep.”

  He reached for my hand and led me out, past the fish tanks displayed against the restaurant’s windows. Lobsters flicked the glass with their eyestalks, walking in a forward and backward trap. They were about to be boiled to firecracker effect, electrified red. Eating lobsters was so specific, two-handing them while their meat-packed shells clacked against white plates. What would it be like to be dead, staring out of a hot shell at a plastic bib and cartoon of your living self?

  Da Ge and I walked along Mott Street. There were open-air stalls crammed together, selling replicas of purses, electronic toys, and watches. I wanted to ask Da Ge if it felt anything like China, but was afraid he’d be offended. Maybe if he were in China, I thought, he could be repairing damage he felt he’d done, rather than suffering from afar. In a window we passed, glazed ducks hung by their necks, and Da Ge noticed me flinch.

  “Next time we have Beijing duck, okay? It’s not like these Cantonese barbecue ducks. You have to order it the day before.” He paused and looked over, as if remembering again that I was there.

  “You are thin,” he said, “sad girl.”

  But I was pregnant, fattening up to insulate his baby. I should have told him how much I hoped the baby would look like him.

  “I’m happy to be with you, not sad,” I said.

  “It’s here, this video store I like.” He opened the door, and a bell rang. The owner waved to him and said something in Chinese. Da Ge walked over and leaned on the counter, forgetting or failing to introduce me. I studied the bindings of Chinese movies, the characters crawling up the spines like hieroglyphics.

  Da Ge came over, holding up a tape. “I want for you to see this new movie, Ju Dou. It’s a thing you don’t know, Chinese peasants.”

  “It’s good?” I asked.

  “The peasant?”

  “No, the movie.”

  “The end is stupid,” he said, “but that’s true.”

  “What’s true? The stupid end?”

  “No,” he said, “every end is stupid.” He walked with the movie over to the counter. The manager asked him something and he answered while looking down.

  “What did he ask?” I asked.

  “He asked why I want to show you this movie of backwards, peasant China.”

  “Why do you?”

  “I think you would like this movie. It’s not his business.”

  Da Ge lived a block from the store, less than a mile from Xiao Wang’s Nai Nai. His apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up studio, and I trailed behind him, sniffing the air, which smelled of garlic and oil. Everywhere the clatter of pots, chairs, sizzling, laughter, foreign conversation. The windows in the stairwells were all open. It was hot.

  “This building is mostly family from South China,
you know, Guangzhou,” Da Ge told me. “They speak Cantonese and eat everything with four leg except the table.”

  When we reached the door marked 5-I, he touched the brass number and letter. “Five is like ‘wu’ in Chinese,” he said. “Sometimes this means none of something. So this means ‘None of I.’”

  “None of I?”

  “The first time I call you, I am nervous,” he said, opening the door.

  “Why?” I asked, thinking he’d tell me he’d had a crush.

  “Because your phone number,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s one-four-one-four at the end,” he told me.

  “And?” I have always liked the symmetry of those last four digits. I traced a finger up the back of his neck.

  “It’s bad news,” he said. “This one and four, for Chinese, it mean bad things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Number one means to want,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “But four mean death.”

  When he opened the door, cool air rushed into the hallway. He gestured for me to walk in first, then followed me. On the wall was an oil painting done in angry yellows, oranges, and reds. It was of four boxes, filled with a fish bone, a black bird, a distorted portrait of Marx, and a calendar. The calendar was made of more boxes, and in each of those was a small head with its eyes X’ed out.

  Da Ge was watching me fall into the calendar boxes. “It’s by my old friend Hong Yue,” he said. “Red Moon. That’s his artist name, not his real name.”

  “Are they supposed to be dead?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The people in the calendar.”

  “I don’t know,” Da Ge said.

  “I like the painting.”

  Da Ge looked skeptical. He had taken his shoes off and set them carefully on a wicker rack that had several other pairs resting on it. He put plaid slippers on.

  “Would you like me to take these off?” I asked.

  “It’s okay.” I added my sandals to the collection, and he handed me some white cotton hotel slippers. “Come,” he said. I followed him into an open room off the entrance. “This is it,” he said, “It small to yours.”