Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

My mother tried to give me a pill, and I told her I was pregnant. There were some policemen in her apartment. Jack was there, in the background. “You’re what?” she said.

  I lifted my shirt up and showed my stomach. She put her hand on the baby.

  “Oh, Aysha!” she cried, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was going to, Mom,” I said. “I was waiting for the right moment.”

  Maybe we were both thinking about that moment and how it wasn’t the right one. Julia was balled up on the floor, with her knees pulled up to her chest. I had two notes we had found, both in Chinese. I didn’t know what they said. Where was Zhen Ming?

  Maybe we should go back to Chinatown, I said. I didn’t remember how we had gotten uptown. My head was on my mom’s shoulder. She combed my static hair with her fingers. The police were peering around. For what? Da Ge? The murder weapon? I thought of Clue. Mr. Tigerfood, on the pipes with the bucket. I didn’t cry. My head was dried up. I thought of the only word left: finished.

  It is Friday, I thought, Friday. It’s August. The police were asking me could they ask me. My mother was shouting at someone. My mother, who never shouted. I couldn’t speak at all. Then it was Saturday, early morning. We were at my apartment.

  My mother and I were in my bed. Life was a photo album: there were only several moments, and in each of them, we found ourselves in specific poses. I looked at us from the outside, as if flipping pages with plastic sheets over them. I suddenly wanted to have a baby. Of course the fact that I was actually having one was a coincidence. Julia was on the couch in the living room. Adam called. My mother took the call. I didn’t want to talk. My mother fed me some kind of breakfast that involved milk. “For your baby,” she said, tipping the cup. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to herself. All of a sudden, I remembered my brother.

  “Benj!” I said, “What time is it?”

  “Your friend? We can visit him in the hospital,” my mother said, her face lighting up because I had spoken. “He’s going to be fine, Aysh. They say he’s going to be okay.”

  I didn’t mean Ben Rosenbaum, but I said nothing. It was too much work. I figured Benj would find his way to my place, realize what a mess I’d created, and leave. I felt for Da Ge’s notes in my pockets, but they were gone. I no longer had the same jeans on. I rummaged through the laundry, but there was nothing in the pockets. My mother is not the type who accidentally washes coins and notes.

  “They’re in your jewelry box, sweetie,” she said, quietly, when I asked.

  Some people from Embassy appeared at my house. I was confused. I wasn’t sure who they were, or why Bonita had brought flowers. My mother organized them into a vase on my glass table in front of the dragons.

  “I didn’t realize,” she said, and then, “you were very discreet.” She was crying.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. I began to wonder where Da Ge was.

  When Xiao Wang showed up, I led her into the bedroom and opened my jewelry box. I took the two notes out and handed them to her. Her eyes moved over the paper.

  “It says, ‘erzi tingzhe mama,’” she said. I looked at her.

  “This means something about the son listens to his mother.”

  I was holding my breath. She looked at the other note, shook her head.

  “Please tell me what it says,” I said.

  “This one say, ‘dou shi gei laoshi de.’” I waited. “It means ‘everything for my teacher,’” she said. We stood looking at each other, blank. Then she hugged me.

  Julia must have explained something to Benj. When I woke up, he was sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my hand. I thought he might believe that I had set him up, knowing my mother would be over at my place, and I wanted to explain to him that it wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t. I was afraid he would leave and not come back. He saw me watching him and said, “I am so sorry about your boyfriend.”

  Who did he mean? I thought something bad had happened, but I wasn’t sure what.

  Finally, I spoke. “What’s wrong with everyone?”

  “Oh, Aysha,” my mom said.

  I looked down at myself. The baby, I thought, and relief surged through me. She was still there. I put Benj’s hand on my stomach. “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  “I know. Congratulations, Aysh.”

  Benj was handsome. I knew he would be. His hair was dark and neatly cut, but still curling up a bit at the sides. He had long eyelashes and sharp face bones. I thought we looked alike, both like our mom, and was glad. I closed my eyes.

  I woke up again and again. The next time it happened, it was night and I was alone in my room, crying. I wondered how a body cries before it wakes up. I saw my body sometimes then, as if it belonged to someone else, the quick dip of my hips, bones still visible even as my belly rounded out with Julia Too. I checked in with myself occasionally, running my hands down my sides, or over my stomach, wondering if I could bring Da Ge back by touching what he had touched. By living places where he’d lived. China. I thought of China. But I couldn’t even make it into the living room, couldn’t find it. I couldn’t remember my name. I was asleep again.

  I was awake, trapped between tight white sheets. My mother must have tucked me in like that; I prefer to let a foot stick out. She was sitting on the bed now, talking to Benj. They were on either side of me. I wanted to shout. To jump on the bed, to be manic again. Anything other than this, this slogging through air so thick it was chewable. I thought of the Goo Goose in Dr. Seuss. If sir, you sir, choose to chew sir, with the goo goose, chew sir, do sir! I was breathing, filling my lungs with gum. I wanted to ask my mom and Benj how it was after so much time, if they forgave each other. But I couldn’t put consonants together what with my mouth stuck shut.

  I heard Julia’s voice. I was in the living room, propped up on some pillows and sipping from a glass. Milk? Da Ge was hanging from his basement pipes, his lovely neck twisted, the collar of his shirt ripped open. There was blood on his throat. Rope burn.

  “She tried to tie his shoes,” Julia was saying. “And take him down. She wanted to take him down.” She must have disliked talking about this, and I felt grateful to her for the sacrifice. I wondered whether Adam was relieved that we were not friends anymore, now that something was wrong all around me. Where was Adam?

  “A few months ago, I guess,” Julia was saying. She meant Da Ge and me, when we had gotten married. I twisted my wedding ring. I was thinking about how once I’d been swimming naked at night. I couldn’t remember where or with whom. Maybe Adam, upstate somewhere. Or was it high school? That night had been blue black and smooth. Maybe something like being dead. Maybe being dead was okay, like swimming naked in dark water. Cool and full. The police had come back and were asking why Julia didn’t know some date. She said she hadn’t been there.

  “Didn’t she tell you right away?” someone asked Julia.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “She likes to wait for special moments—it’s a kind of habit for her.”

  “Did she ever mention Da Ge’s family?”

  “Not really,” Julia said. I could hear her voice flattening. You’re doing a good job, Julia, I thought, keep it up.

  “What about a man named Zhen?”

  “No.”

  “What about Ming?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did she ever mention a man named Ben Rosenbaum?”

  “Maybe. The name rings a bell.”

  “Were they involved?”

  “No.”

  “Would you definitely know?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t know that her and the Chinese kid got married.”

  “I did know that.”

  “Do you think the kid killed himself because of what he did to the other guy?” one of them asked, more to the other than to Julia, I think.

  But Julia started crying. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so. I mean, I think he was just depressed. I d
on’t think the two things were—I don’t know, connected.”

  “So,” one of them said gently, “after she took the body down, what happened?”

  “What do you mean ‘what happened?’” Julia snapped.

  “I mean,” he said, “what transpired then?”

  “Well,” Julia said, “let’s see. She collapsed under the weight of the body and I tried to pull it off her but it was really heavy and I couldn’t move them and I called 911. Is that what you meant? Is that what you meant by ‘transpired’?”

  My mother and Benj looked at each other, and he walked the cops out.

  Xiao Wang and I met that week at Grand Sichuan, where she ordered noodles so hot they numbed my mouth. We bent over our bowls, unable to look at each other.

  “I’m really sorry,” I finally said.

  “Yes, I’m sorry too. I—” She was flushed, her eyes red and swollen.

  “You can say anything you want, Xiao Wang. I know this is a nightmare.”

  “It’s not polite question,” she said.

  “I don’t care.” I thought of Da Ge’s “It’s not polite talk.”

  “Do you love Da Ge?”

  I folded my mouth into an expression I didn’t recognize from the inside of it.

  “Yes,” I said, “I love him.”

  “I loved him, too.” She put extra emphasis on the past-tense “d,” something she usually missed. I wondered whether this was because she was making a grammatical point or because he was dead. Was it possible to love him now?

  “I’m glad,” I said. “I’m glad we both loved him.” Neither of us was crying. It was too late for that.

  “Da Ge met my mother in the hospital,” I said.

  “Yes, he said it to me.”

  Of course he had told her. “Did you know he wanted to marry an American?”

  Her eyes flickered over me. “Actually, he wants to marry with you, I think,” she said. Her voice had no inflection. “He also want to be American, but he choose you for his private reason of love, too. You should not feel only sorrow for this.”

  “Did you two talk about it? Did he tell you that?”

  “We don’t have to talk that,” she said. “For you, Da Ge is like going abroad. For me, he is coming home, familiar, like so many Chinese guys I have known.”

  I rested my chin on my hands and remembered him for less than a second, the way it’s possible sometimes to understand forever. As a little kid, late at night, I used to get death so clearly that the getting made me gasp with fear. And then it was gone, my grasp slipped, and I could live again with the fact that I would someday die and be gone forever. Death was back to abstract, the way it has to be.

  “When you said you want to have dinner to ask me some things, I do not think it is this,” Xiao Wang was saying. “I think it must be what kind of friendship Da Ge and I have. Or what he say in class.” His name sounded so good in her accent that I wanted to wrap her up and keep her close by forever, suffering with me. I hated myself, hated him.

  “You don’t have to tell me either of those things,” I said.

  Xiao Wang exhaled. “In your class, Da Ge is always furious to me. He think I am ruin his chance to be American.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I make him feel Chinese. Because I am asking why he want to be American. He say, he is not Chinese. So I ask is your father Chinese? And he say, ‘Fuck my father.’ So I say, in Chinese, ‘You don’t love your own father? This is wrong,’ I say, ‘You should be proud to be Chinese,’ and he say to me, ‘Fuck China and fuck you.’” She took a sip of tea. The leaves had been steeping for so long that the tea was black. She chewed a leaf. “Do you want to know the other time?” she asked me. “The time it’s so bad word it’s not in the dictionary?”

  “No,” I said, “forget it.”

  “I have something for you,” she said. She handed me a wrapped gift. I took the pieces of tape off as if I were operating on a patient, unfolded the wrapping paper, and pulled out an unopened VHS tape of The Sound of Music.

  “It’s my favorite American movie,” Xiao Wang said, her face lighting up with hope, “but we never watch it together. Did you see it before?”

  “No,” I lied. “let’s watch it tonight.”

  She brought vanilla Haagen-Dazs, and we watched The Sound of Music from beginning to end, twice. It took like six hours. When the movie ended the first time, she turned to me and said, “Maybe we watch it again,” and I rewound the tape without speaking and pushed play again. I was grateful for Xiao Wang, for Julie Andrews, for the nuns. Neither of us mentioned the possibility of sleep. We sat up until it was light outside. Then she left to check on Nai Nai, and I began a habit that would organize the two weeks between Da Ge’s death and Embassy starting up again. I rode the subway for entire days, listening to names, watching the map, groping for a correspondence between what was written and what I heard. This is a Wakefield bound 2 express train; the next stop is Intervale Avenue. Intervale, Stimpson, Freeman. Sometimes I tuned out and came to dozens of stops later: Burke Ave, Gun Hill. Nereid. Wakefield. Then I’d turn around and ride backwards from the tip of the Bronx to Wall Street, watching people move and stop and move and stop. Their urgency was my movie, a documentary about some species I’d once belonged to. Sometimes people talked to me, mostly I just rode quietly, comforted by the infinite places I’d never have to stop. It made no difference where I was, what neighborhoods I skimmed over, rode under, passed through. I never wondered what was happening in any of them. I didn’t even have to be me those days, could just blow by, watching worlds melt in the instant I passed. Stand clear of the closing doors.

  Shannon, Xiao Wang, Anne, and I took the girls camping on the Great Wall Friday night. My mother stayed home; she hates nature. Yang Tao offered to drive us out there, leave, and then drive back the next day to pick us up. When I protested that it was way too much mafan for him to go to, that we’d just rent a minivan, he insisted.

  “I’d like the time with you and Julia Too in the car,” he said. He hadn’t been over in a while, hadn’t pressed it. I said he could take us there, but we’d go back with Anne.

  So Yang Tao picked us up and we drove three hours to the “wild wall,” a lesser-known access site, listening to a painful CD Julia Too had burned of Beyoncé, Ludacris, Avril Lavigne, and Nelly. Yang Tao asked polite questions about the MTV music awards, and she lectured him Old Chen–style, happily. When we arrived at the wall, he unloaded sleeping bags, then kissed Julia Too once on each cheek before kissing me. She smiled, kissed his cheeks back, and ran to greet Phoebe and Lili.

  “Thank you for schlepping us out here,” I said, looking up at Yang Tao.

  “It was nice for me,” he said. “I’m glad she’s giving me another chance.”

  He got into the car, rolled the window down. “Have a good night on the wall.”

  “Will I see you tomorrow when we get back?” I asked.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Terribly,” I said.

  He smiled, turned the key in the ignition.

  “Mom!” Julia Too called. “Look at this!”

  I walked over to where Julia Too, Lili, and Phoebe were crouched over a dead snake.

  “That’s odd,” Anne was saying. “It’s a water snake.” She flipped it over with her hand, shocking me with her un-squeamishness. “A tiger-striped neck groove snake.”

  “A what?!” I asked.

  “A tiger-striped neck groove snake. They’re common in Beijing,” she said.

  “You’re a freak,” I told her. “How do you know esoteric snake names?”

  She smiled, pleased. “It’s not esoteric. We had one in our garden once.”

  Weeds as tall as the girls rose up, and we swashbuckled our ways through them. Unlike at Simatai or Mutianyu, the tourist sites on the wall, there was no cable car, no slide, and nobody following us up the wall. I somewhat missed the chatter of the old women who climbed the wall with us when we went to Simatai, hoping to sell w
ater or postcards at the top. We stopped in a fortress for lunch, ate mozzarella and basil sandwiches from the Kerry Center deli, and looked at the dozens of miles of sky visible in every direction. It was so hot that the air felt thick and supportive, as if we could collapse and still be held up by humidity. There was the slow drone of insects so utterly absent in the city, and after I finished my lunch, I leaned back against a stone wall and listened. Julia Too and the girls were talking about seventh grade, who had moved, whether Kevin and Phoebe would continue to be in love, whether they’d be allowed to go to the Glay concert in October, since we moms had waffled and agreed to let them go unchaperoned to the Beijing jazz festival the last week of August. Xiao Wang was sitting next to me, fanning herself.

  “I am reading this book called Kitchen,” she said, “a Japanese book.”

  “In Chinese?”

  “Yes. They have it in English. Maybe you can read it so we can discuss.”

  “Okay. Is it good?”

  “I think it’s good, yes. The story has some nice feeling, but it’s a little bit soft, maybe inexperienced.”

  “Inexperienced?”

  “Young, I mean. The author was young when she wrote it.”

  “How old?”

  “Maybe in her middle thirties.”

  “Our age, you mean.”

  “Yeah. Maybe there are experiences you must have before you can be maturity or perspective. Especially to write a story or book about life experiences like love or death.”

  “I agree.” I smiled, accepted with salt her warning that I should wait to write.

  We hiked the rest of the afternoon until it began to get dark. Then Anne flaunted her Girl Scout résumé by making a voluptuous illegal fire. We sat around it, ate our second batch of Kerry Center sandwiches and roasted marshmallows before unrolling sleeping bags and staring up at a billion stars invisible in the city. When everyone else was asleep, Julia Too rolled her little burritoed self over to me. “See those stars?” she whispered.

  I woke myself up enough to say, “Of course. They’re beautiful.”

  “You can see the same ones from New York and China,” she said, so quietly I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”