Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “Would you consider getting back on lithium?” she asked gently. I hadn’t told her that I’d stopped taking it. I was surprised she had figured it out.

  “It’s okay, Aysha,” she said, reading my thought. “I’m not judging.”

  “Are you ready?” I asked Dr. Meyers.

  “Aysha,” she said, “look at me. Nothing you tell me can shock me. I will not be surprised, and I will not judge you. It will help you make it through whatever you’re suffering if we iron it out.”

  I loved the expression “iron it out.”

  “I married one of my students, and I’m three months pregnant with his baby,” I told her. When I said it, an image of a baby flashed through my mind, and I imagined I could feel our baby eating sesame candy.

  “I see,” Dr. Meyers said.

  “I didn’t tell him.”

  “You mean you haven’t told the baby’s father that he is the father?” she asked.

  I said I hadn’t told him anything, and when she asked what I meant by anything, I told her that I was in love with him.

  “Or about the baby,” she said, softly.

  “Yes,” I confessed, “or about the baby.”

  “Do you want to tell him?” she asked.

  I felt stupid. “Actually,” I said, “I was planning to tell him tonight.”

  She nodded, encouraging.

  “He had his citizenship test and we have a dinner date, but I can’t find him.”

  “Is citizenship why you two got married?” she asked me. She was careful with the words. I pictured how they lined up in her mouth first, auditioning for their parts in this sentence. They were well cast, too. Compassionate, nudging words.

  “I don’t know,” I told her, honestly. “I think maybe it was the reason he wanted to marry me at first, but it’s complicated. I mean, he knew me in the hospital, but I didn’t realize it, and then he came to my house drunk and my mom was over and she knew him so I asked him and he said he’d been in a motorcycle accident—” I ran out of breath.

  “Slow down,” she said. “We can sort this out for a while together.”

  I wondered why shrink and laundry vocabulary overlapped so often. We will iron and sort, I thought. I imagined folding sheets with Da Ge again. This time, it would be the four of us: Da Ge, Dr. Meyers, Xiao Wang, and me. One on each corner of the futon, tucking a contour sheet underneath. At our sleepover, the roof would blow off my apartment building and the four of us would lie on our backs, looking up at the open sky.

  “What are you thinking?” Dr. Meyers asked.

  I did not hate her for this.

  “I am thinking of folding sheets with you and Da Ge, and the roof blowing off my apartment and all of us sleeping in the living room.”

  “We’re going to figure this out.” Dr. Meyers promised. She smiled at me with such warmth and patience that I wondered for the first time who her children were.

  “Your kids are lucky,” I told her.

  “Thank you,” she said. I blinked. Instead of offering me a tissue, she lowered her eyes a bit, so that I would see where she was looking on the desk. I picked the tissue box up myself and put it on my lap.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said.

  “He’ll come back,” she said.

  “What should I do?”

  “You should wait.”

  But he didn’t come back.

  I read “Cloud in Trousers” to Julia, who was watching TV from her bed. “You think malaria makes me delirious?” I read. “It happened. / In Odessa it happened. / ‘I’ll come at four,’ Maria promised. / Eight. / Nine. / Ten.”

  “This is not a good time to read Russian poets,” Julia said.

  “I always think of this when I’m waiting for something. Eight, nine, ten. He was watching the clock, you realize, waiting for her.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But put that down and come watch mindless TV with me.”

  “I can’t get back on lithium. The baby will have ten heads.”

  “I know,” she said. “But you’ll make it the next six months okay. Come watch.”

  She had turned to a talk show, the topic of which was “Married men who dress like women and sleep with other men.” A hostess with breasts so enormous she looked like an inflatable parade float was interviewing a guest who had slept with his wife’s gay brother. Julia changed the channels around and came back to the talk show. The man was going to confront his wife with this information on national TV and ask her to forgive him. Hope flooded me. I crossed my fingers that the baby got some, reached over Julia’s bedside table, and called California information for my brother’s number.

  In the last five years, I had spoken with Benj only a couple of times. Once, when I was seventeen and still living at home, Benj came to New York and stayed with a girlfriend. He and I met for coffee that time, and he seemed to love me still. We did not talk about our father. Benj was grown-up, with a button-down shirt and clean fingernails.

  I saw him a few times when I was at Columbia. And I know he came once when I was hospitalized, because Julia One told me. He wanted both to come to the hospital, and, if possible, to avoid my mom. So he and Julia coordinated. I do not remember that visit at all, but Julia told me later that he was “dignified.” At her studio, I dialed the digits an operator had given me, and it seemed like magic when Benj picked up somewhere sunny on the other end.

  “Hi, Benj?” I asked.

  “Is this Aysha?”

  “Yeah. Hi.”

  “Hi. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “You, too. What’s up, Aysh?”

  “Could you come home, please?”

  He paused. “To New York?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, I know it’s—”

  “Is Mom okay?”

  I was surprised to hear him ask this.

  “She’s fine, Benj. I just really want to see you.”

  “Oh. Okay. Um. Of course. Let me figure out a ticket.”

  Out of family habit or love, Benj spared me the embarrassment of further questions. I had never asked him for anything at all before, not even information on our parents. I wondered if now that the dam was broken and I’d begun begging favors, there would be no stopping me. I waited for him to respond. There was a shuffling on the phone, like newspapers.

  “Would Friday work?” he asked me. “I have to work tomorrow, but I could come Friday night on a red-eye maybe and then—”

  “That would be perfect, Benj—I can’t tell you how glad I’d be to see you,” I told him. “What should I cook?”

  “Do you cook?”

  “For you I can,” I said.

  Relieved that I had this happy news to hold on to, I repeated the conversation to Julia, word for word. She asked what we’d do while he was here.

  “I’m going to tell him about Da Ge,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “That we’re married and I’m having a baby. I think if he’s here, he’ll see that it’s all okay, that I’m okay—and he can meet Da Ge, I guess. And maybe see my mom.”

  “I’d like to meet Da Ge too,” she said. It was characteristically generous of her not to count the drunken encounter in my hallway or whatever glimpses she’d caught of him in the hospital as “meeting him,” not even to mention those. I thought of my fight with him and wondered where he was right now, what he was doing. I hoped as hard as I could that he was okay, closed my eyes, and failed to conjure up his face.

  My mother came into my bedroom last night while I was on the phone with Shannon, gossiping about my trip to the embassy with Teacher Hao’s daughter. She got her visa. “Honestly,” I was telling Shannon, “I don’t know anyone—it was just luck.”

  “Did you cosign her financial papers?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not always enough. She’s a brilliant student, and a huge patriot. She’s definitely coming back.”

  “We’ll see,” Shannon said.

  “Since
when are you so cynical?” I asked. “And besides, life in the States isn’t better than life here anymore. Why would she want to stay?”

  “She’ll marry an American,” Shannon said. My mom was tapping her foot.

  “I gotta run,” I said. “My mom. I’ll see you Friday night for majhong?”

  “Bring Yang Tao,” she said, “and your mom. And Julia Too can sleep over.”

  I blew her a kiss through the phone, and hung up. My mom pounced on the bed like she’d been stalking me for hours.

  “Who was that?”

  “Shannon. She says hi.”

  “Oh! Tell her I say hi.”

  “I’ve already hung up the phone, Mom.”

  “I really like him,” my mother said, ignoring me.

  I squinted at her. “Yeah?”

  “He reminds me a little of Da Ge.”

  This made me quiet.

  “I don’t mean in you know, that sense. I just mean he’s kind.”

  “I don’t know if Da Ge was kind, exactly,” I said, surprised she would even bring him up. We almost never mention him.

  “Do you ever talk about him with Julia Too?”

  “Yang Tao? We had a scalding conversation about him last night during dinner.”

  “I meant Da Ge, but what do you mean, scalding?”

  “She doesn’t like him as much as I do.” I smiled.

  “Does she get a vote?”

  “She gets the most votes. If she doesn’t come to like him, I’ll leave him.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the right—”

  “I know. But this is her house, and she and I have been on our own together a long time. If she’s unhappy it’s not worth it to me.”

  “What about you? What about you being happy?”

  “Right,” I said. “There is that, I guess.” I shrugged. “But my happiness depends less on Yang Tao than it does on Julia Too.”

  “Did you tell her that?”

  “In so many words.”

  “Maybe that’s all she needed to know. Maybe she’ll like him now.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you ever talk to her about Da Ge?”

  I felt exhausted by my mother. “I try to.”

  “Do you and Old Chen talk about him?”

  “Never.”

  Now there was a long, awkward pause.

  “I tried to talk to you about your father sometimes, darling.”

  “I know you did. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Is there anything you want to ask me now?” She looked at me fretfully.

  “No,” I said. I did not add that it was late, or that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Instead, I turned mild. It was what my mother would have done.

  “I appreciate all your help with Julia Too this summer,” I said.

  She sighed with relief. “I want to help give you time to yourself. I think it’s wonderful that you’re writing a story for her. I can’t wait to read the story myself.”

  “I hope you like it,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t.

  “I will,” she promised. “I wish I’d written something for you.”

  I looked at her. “There’s still time.”

  My mother and Old Chen showered each other with bizarre presents this morning at dumplings, as is the custom and their habit. My mom brought the old man Cuban cigars, which he loved even though he doesn’t smoke, a Gucci tie, and a Mont Blanc pen set. He had outdone himself with his present for her, a sculpture of a plump ballerina in a rough, textured dress. Spinning, with her arms out and palms up. It reminded me of the giant stone statue in Red Moon’s courtyard. My mother shrieked with delight when she saw it, and then spent such a long time kvelling and asking questions that Old Chen was finally too embarrassed to continue and had to wave his hands in the air to shush her.

  “It’s nothing! It’s nothing!” he said, “just a little gift from China for you to have in New York. Maybe your dance students will like to see this Chinese art.”

  “Well,” my mother said, “they’ll have to come to my house to see it, because this is going right in the center of my living room. It’s the most incredible thing I own.”

  “Um, can we eat, please?” Julia Too asked.

  “It’s like a Chinese Degas in 3-D,” my mother said. “I mean, the delicacy of her body under that rough dress—it’s a statement about human frailty, don’t you think?”

  I was worried about how Old Chen might take this, but he smiled. “That’s something common to us all. This piece is called I don’t know don’t know do you know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Old Chen. “That’s why I like it.”

  His maid came out with a tray of dumplings, and Julia Too began eating as if we’d been starving her for years. My mother held her chopsticks all the way at the top and lifted a dumpling off the plate as if it were a rare gem she was holding up to the light. She took a tiny nibble and none of the filling dribbled out. I watched, mesmerized.

  “What do you mean that’s why you like it—because you don’t know what it means?” Julia Too was asking Old Chen in Chinese.

  Old Chen answered her in English, rare for him. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,” he said, “but because it has a song.”

  “Or some ancient Chinese wisdom it wants to tell me,” said Julia Too.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Augusts

  A PHONE CALL WOKE ME ON THE FRIDAY MORNING MY brother was scheduled to come to see me in New York. It was August 10, 1990. Bolts of light jutted through my windows, and I jolted awake at the sound of Bonita Verna’s hello. She was the administrator from Embassy, on the phone. But school didn’t start for three more weeks. Her voice made no sense. Before the words were even out of her mouth, my blood had become something other than blood. It was soda, bubbling through my veins.

  “There’s been an accident,” she said, apologetically. “I’m calling the staff.”

  I was instantly so cold I thought the baby might be born a Popsicle. I heard my voice as if it were on a tape. “What happened?”

  “It’s Ben Rosenbaum. He was assaulted last night outside his apartment. Um. He’s at Mount Sinai.” My lungs clamped shut. “Aysha,” said Bonita, “you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m here. I’m here.” I took some breaths. “Will he be okay?” As soon as I had asked, I already didn’t want to hear.

  She said, “They don’t really know yet.” She paused. “Something about his jaw, maybe, or his mouth. It’s wired shut? And something about his eyes, maybe. We’re all sending a gift together. Should I sign your name?”

  Twenty minutes later, I sat facing Julia on my couch and repeating compulsively, “He spoke such complicated English!” She had come over, and we were waiting. “What are we waiting for? What are we waiting for?” I kept asking.

  “Try to breathe deeply,” she said. I felt for her. I stood up. I sat down. I stood again.

  “Should I call your mom?” she asked. I didn’t think so. How could I explain everything I hadn’t explained? I didn’t think my mother could manage the avalanche of all of it at once. I know, I thought, we would go to Da Ge’s apartment in Chinatown. That would be a way to show him I was worried, to take initiative.

  “That sounds fine,” Julia said when I asked her to come. She was scared.

  We took the subway to Canal Street in a blur. I wasn’t sure where Da Ge’s apartment had been. We wound through tight streets, purses, fish and fake name-brand watches everywhere. I was frantic to see Da Ge, even to show him off to Julia. We passed a brick wall painted with the words “dim sum.” They seemed nonsensical, the way words get when contorted by repetition. It wasn’t until we accidentally saw the video store where he had rented Ju Dou that I recognized his apartment building and pointed at it.

  “It’s right over there,” I told Julia. She looked skeptical.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. She could not imagine that I knew anyone who liv
ed in Chinatown, or that any of the apartments we were walking toward was familiar to me.

  We trekked through the rush of garlic and oil up five flights of stairs, and knocked on 5-I. There was no answer. We waited in the hallway, looking at each other anxiously. The more we knocked, the more agitated I began to feel. A cool, sinking feeling rose through my bones. There was a sickening energy in the building.

  “Maybe he’s out. Or doing laundry or something,” Julia said.

  “Should we go downstairs?” I asked.

  She said sure, relieved to have even a pointless Plan B. But down the stairs in the basement there were no washing machines. I guess Da Ge must have taken his laundry to a laundromat. As we moved from the dingy trash room into a corridor, I saw a shadow against the concrete wall. I stood looking at the shadow. “What’s that?” I asked Julia.

  “What?” she said. And then she was screaming for me not to move, not to look, but it was too late. I had already stepped into the hallway and seen him. He was completely still, but had the after-look of hanging, a look I had never seen but recognized instantly, knew in some animal way that involved no words. He hung from a cord strung up over an exposed pipe. His neck was sideways. I couldn’t manage that part somehow, couldn’t take it in. I kept looking at his neck. Why was it sideways like that? Crooked, broken, wrong, the wrong angle, color, shape. There were his clothes: his collar, a button-down shirt I’d never seen, his chest and stomach still underneath. I knew the cargo pants, his thighs, knees, calves. His feet. I looked again, he was whole. But his neck. Why was it sideways like that? He could be rescued, I thought. My eyes fell back to his feet, saw the shiny shoes once maybe or a thousand times, flashing and motionless after what must have been the force of the swinging, and back up his ankles, waist, chest, shoulders, face, his cheek, the scar, everything, suspended, dead. He was dead. The word itself took shape in my mind. He faced down, was looking at the floor. I couldn’t see his eyes, didn’t know if they were open or closed. Underneath him was the metal bucket he had kicked savagely onto its side. I could hear it clattering, feel the cord scraping against the pipes and the delicate skin on his neck. His shoes were untied.