by Susan Conley
“ ‘A time,’ ” Ulla read out loud over Tasmin’s shoulder, “ ‘when people talk about what comes up for them during yoga that day.’ Oh, mother of God.”
No one said anything after that for a few seconds, and Ulla’s scratchy voice hung over the table.
Tasmin said, “Talking Circles make me want to go get a drink.”
I’d already decided to give up drinking that afternoon, but I got that feeling I sometimes get in China that shots of grain alcohol are going to appear soon on bamboo trays, and I couldn’t say whether or not I’d drink one.
Ulla and the woman named Tamar began to speak to each other—unconnected things that spread to the people next to them—and there was a disjointed discussion about yoga mats and how long it had taken Andre and Tree to drive to Shashan in the white minivan Justice had rented in the city. It became difficult to follow. I’m not sure which worried me more, the yoga or the Talking Circle, because I didn’t know if I could do either. I was stupid for having come to the mountains. What would I get out of it? I wanted to drink. So badly I wanted to drink.
“Taxi!” Tasmin stood up. “Can I get a taxi out of here, Justice?” She smiled at him and sat back down. “Does anyone have a cigarette for me?”
Andre handed over his soft pack of Yuxis. He smoked, too?
“There is a God!” Tasmin winked at me.
I didn’t have anyone else in my life who winked at me, and it was the strangest thing. I had to fight the urge to become someone other than myself. Someone who winks back, for example. Or smokes. Maybe I was unfair to Tasmin, but she seemed to have a disregard for where we really were: on a small forgotten mountain in China that appeared to have little electricity. How can I explain? It was an expat trick the way she was able to suspend belief that we were there living in China and to negate the whole country, while also navigating it and making it her own.
Ulla laughed her deep, manly laugh and looked at her watch. “We go now?”
“Soon.” Justice looked at her and up at the sky like he was reading the clouds, but really I think he was waiting for the Chinese woman to finish her meal. She appeared to be a slow eater.
Ulla wasn’t satisfied. You could tell. She didn’t like to not be the one in control. Maybe she would make the yoga serious. I needed it to not be a joke. I thought I’d have to leave Shashan then and go home. It was like a panic attack, and I almost talked myself into it. To leave.
· 10 ·
An American man was last to arrive, and he took the chair on the right of the Chinese woman and said his name was Hunter and that he was in coal mining. I didn’t know anyone else who stated their line of business like this. The Chinese woman told him her name was Mei and that she was from Beijing. Then she snapped a drumstick off one of the chickens and began eating.
We were twelve. I counted ten foreigners and two nationals, if you included Justice, and I moved my chair closer to Tasmin’s, but we still barely fit. I remember sort of following the conversation, but I was worked up, which is what happens if you’ve spent several weeks lying on a couch in a loft-style apartment in downtown Beijing willing yourself to get better and are asked to perform yoga.
For a long time the question for me had been whether to paint or be a mother. But I think there’s no choice. Or that the choice is a myth. Because once the girls arrived they took over my heart, and now I’d left them in the city because I could not seem to parent them. Little grasses grew in the cracks on the patio, and the concrete had chipped away completely in places, which made it harder to move my chair back when we stood and followed Justice to our rooms.
I was relieved to finally be doing something. Tasmin’s room was the only one actually attached to the Lius’ house. Ulla’s was next to Tasmin’s. Then mine and Hunter’s and Mei’s and the others’. Justice told the two boys and girl from England they would have to sleep on the kang inside the Lius’ house, because there were no rooms left. The kang was the platform bed in the Lius’ living room that looked sort of like a wooden throne when I saw it from the front window. This would have thrown me. If Justice had told me I was sleeping in the kang, I think it would have given me permission to go home.
My room had a white laminate door like in cheaper motels in the city, and a picture window, and a double bed with a quilted blue polyester spread. The bathroom was like a cramped phone booth, with shiny one-inch white tiles and an open shower that soaked everything in the room when I turned it on. I placed my bag on the bed and changed into the wide-legged pants I’d bought at the martial-arts school in Sanlitun. Then I went outside and found the group on the far side of the terrace preparing to walk to what Justice called the yoga house. I knew Ulla and Tasmin expected me to walk to the yoga house with them. But if I did this, I understood I’d have to walk everywhere with them in Shashan and I can’t say how much I didn’t want to walk everywhere with them.
I must have known the retreat was my chance to keep my husband, and that if I didn’t change, he would leave me. I hadn’t said this clearly to myself before, but I knew he eventually would. I made sure I was one of the last to leave the terrace, so I ended up behind Mei in the line of walkers. It was like I was in middle school the way I strategized, and this took effort, but nothing like the effort it had taken me to get to Shashan.
Instead of following the path to the parking area, we turned onto a second path past the backs of several brick houses with donkeys tied up in the dirt yards. The path was well worn, but you wouldn’t have known it existed if Justice hadn’t been leading us, and it was like we were almost inside these houses, the path was so close to them.
When I’m nervous, I also have a reflex that’s more like a compulsion, and I see my younger sister Margaret’s face, so then I felt even more cut off from my children. I wasn’t used to being without them, and I tried to balance being a mother with being Margaret’s sister and still not understanding what was called for in this life after she was gone.
The man in Beijing who I pay to ask me questions once told me that I didn’t know how to name my emotions, and when he and I came to the subject of my sister’s death this man asked me, “What do you feel?”
I’d tried to smile at him, because there was this pain, and the man imitated my fake smile, and I hated him for that. Really hated him and almost left him over it, but later I saw he was right and I didn’t have words for how I felt, and I needed to do more than smile.
The man asked me to write a history of certain parts of my life in order to try to differentiate the present from the past, and it calls on me to be honest in a way I’m not used to and hasn’t been without difficulty. I’m a painter. I know I’ve said that. It’s been my experience to translate life through image and little blasts of unexpected color, and I’m not used to getting to say everything I want to say in one place like this, so I’m unsure what to leave out.
When I first met with the man who I pay to ask me questions, I told him I felt guilty for leaving my girls and driving to Shashan for the week. The man said, “Guilt. Get over it. You don’t have time for that luxury now.”
· 11 ·
The houses in Shashan were single-story and wedged into a crease between the two steep mountain faces, and they were old houses. Ancient-looking. With sweet, scalloped stone roofs and the faint odor of rotting pineapple. I may have already said it felt like another century there. The path was steep and rocky and maybe two feet wide. Some of the houses had open wooden pens in the backyards and pigs called sows inside the pens, and some houses had animal sheds attached with corrugated roofs and dogs on metal chains. I couldn’t believe the size of the dogs, and I thought that when I got home I’d tell my girls how glad I was the dogs hadn’t eaten me.
Myla is my oldest. I’ve mentioned that. I knew she’d want to know I was safe and coming home soon. She kept track of me, and she wouldn’t care about the dogs really. Elisabeth would wonder if the do
gs were speaking in dog. She was interested in things like animal language and mystery and was also tied to me but in less obvious ways than Myla.
Several old women came out of their houses to stare at us. They were silent and wraithlike in the gray wool blazers the Chinese grandmothers wear, with pure white hair and creased faces. I felt like a Russian cosmonaut because of my height and my green yoga mat, but I regularly felt like a Russian cosmonaut in China. The path got steeper the lower we went, and there were larger rocks that almost blocked the way, so in certain places it was easier to try to step from rock to rock. Mei wore black sandals with a two-inch wedge heel, and I worried about her shoes and if she would fall on the rocks, and then she did.
“Thank you,” she said after I helped her stand. She’d taken off the wig and pulled her long hair back with two purple butterfly barrettes. I hadn’t known her hair during dinner was not her real hair, and I liked her real hair better than the wig hair.
“I have never done the yoga before,” she said. “I am a very nervous person about the dogs.”
The dogs were barking up a storm. “The dogs are tied up,” I said. I was surprised she was scared and I wasn’t and that she was willing to admit it. I thought it would be the other way around. I took her elbow while she sidestepped down, but it was difficult in the sandals, and she almost fell again.
“I will leave in the morning and go back to Leng and throw things at him,” she said. “I am sorry I am swearing.” She was not swearing. “I am embarrassed that you have seen me like this.”
She had a way of declaring what was right in front of her, and I could never tell if this was a product of the translation from Mandarin to English, because some of the other Chinese people I knew had this candor, too, and I was drawn to it and it was nothing like what I grew up with.
“At Leng?” I said. “You’re mad at Leng?”
I knew a Leng who painted enormous schools of black fish, and when I saw these paintings in Dashanzi where Leng showed, or at exhibits in the national museums, I wanted to buy one. They were ironic and sly and featured many Chinese people swimming in the same direction. Or maybe the fish were meant to be Westerners. It seemed very hard to make political paintings in China like this and also achieve public and critical success. The story went that he’d been shot at Tiananmen Square and had gone into hiding but was later rehabilitated and married to an equally respected artist named Mei, reclusive and rarely seen.
We got to an easier part of the path, and I let go of Mei’s arm and we walked almost side by side where the path allowed, and I asked her why she was in Shashan. I’d realized who she was but couldn’t fully take her in yet. That she was on the mountain with me. Her most famous paintings were of women in small villages where nothing was quite finished: the women, and the rivers the women sat next to, and the explosions of yellow wildflowers. The sense was of approximation. Of not being willing to fully pin things down and the relief of that. Mei put little poems in the upper corners of the canvas that were commentaries on the early deaths of her parents from poverty and what she called political duress.
I’d seen photos of Mei before, but she looked nothing like the photos, and it took me some time in Shashan to understand this difference and that it was the effect of the wigs she wore.
“No one ever asks me questions,” she said. “Thank you.” She seemed truly grateful. “I came here because my cousin Justice is helping me leave my husband.”
We descended for ten minutes or so until it flattened out in a small dirt clearing in front of the yoga house, which was smaller than most of the other houses and set farther back from the edge of the mountain, with two donkeys in the yard who slept standing up. The whole village appeared cut into the mountainside, with many houses seeming to balance on the edge, and it worked like a tiny city and was purposeful in that way. You could stand outside the yoga house and look up and hold almost all the other houses in the village in your mind at once.
She told me she came from a village where it had been her job to watch the family goat. “I followed the goat up into the hills each day. I am what you say, self-taught.” Then she laughed. “I have never been to America and would like to be going there. You should take me.” She looked to see what my face was doing. I didn’t take her seriously. Many people in China told me they wanted to come to America and didn’t mean it. But I was excited that she talked directly to me.
The yoga house had a wooden door with a metal latch, and everyone else had gone inside. Mei touched the barrettes in her hair with each hand and said the reason she was leaving her husband was because he was sleeping with the country’s judo champion. I nodded like I understood what she was telling me, but my mind wasn’t clear, and I put my hand on her shoulder and pressed it. I didn’t say anything else, because it was quiet inside the house and people could hear us. Then I opened the door.
· 12 ·
“Make yourselves into strong pieces of wood,” Justice said, and Tasmin groaned. She was in the front row with Ulla and Tree and Andre. I was in the back with the others. The house was really one large room with three wooden beams across the ceiling, and a dirt floor covered with red Persians. Justice must have lit incense before we got there because the room had a strong smell. He said in order to do plank we needed to prop ourselves up on our hands and the balls of our feet and clench our bottoms and pull our stomachs in, until everything was in a straight line. I looked only at him and tried to forget the people around me, and his voice was kinder than I’d remembered.
I was trying to be inside my body and not in my head, and it was hard and I was self-conscious. I thought of a Halloween party in Maine that my parents had when I was ten, and a friend of theirs came to our porch without clothes on. I’d opened our front door and told Craig McGrath that he was naked, and he said naked was his costume, and I said I wouldn’t wear a costume like that if I were him. He was famous in our town for sailing in the America’s Cup, and it seemed on our front porch like he was very comfortable in his body, but I see now that Craig McGrath was drunk.
Not long after this party, many people in our town got divorced, and it became like an epidemic along the river. Women left their husbands, and sometimes left their children. Some of these women hadn’t gone to college or didn’t finish college because they’d gotten married halfway through and moved to Maine. Maybe it dawned on them what it meant to be vaguely employable and required to live with a man they hardly knew for the rest of their lives. There was also much more snow in Maine than there is now, which made it harder to get through the winters. You had to do something significant if you were from away, like put out a very large forest fire or build a YMCA, before the locals would accept you.
Hallowell was halfway up the state, with double-wide trailers and wooden Capes and saltboxes, and the town was poor and forgotten and also beautiful like Shashan and full of trees. My father was an only child and the first person in his family to go to college, and he left briefly to do this up in Calais, where he met my mother. They came back to Hallowell and bought a square carriage house on loan six miles from the river, where back-to-the-landers lived, and solar house designers and potters and alcoholic tennis instructors, and fourth-generation fishermen.
My parents went to parties at night, and I watched my two younger sisters while our parents were gone and felt responsible for them and kept things from them so they wouldn’t be scared. Scraping sounds I heard on the porch. Rustling at the windows. My youngest sister, Ginny, was a baby and slept in a crib, but my middle sister, Margaret, was two years younger than me and she stayed up. She was dedicated like that and didn’t want to be left out. I acted as if everything was okay, but in truth I was very worried for us at night in the woods.
The new people in town from away had parties, and the locals had parties, and my parents were invited to them all because my father was a local who’d come back home and become a bank manager and a woodcar
ver and an avid gardener. Margaret stood in her flannel nightie and screamed and banged her hand against the back door when our parents left for these parties. It was a thick door made of barn wood, and we had to lock it so she wouldn’t run into the driveway and follow them. Her dark hair flipped up at the ends when she got sweaty like this, and it was the saddest scream. So I pretended I wasn’t sad and that I didn’t want our parents to stay with us. I thought if I was quiet and pretended what was happening wasn’t happening, I’d save people this way, and I let Margaret and Ginny help make butterscotch pudding and we ate it out of the saucepan. Margaret made farting sounds with her hand under her armpit and did amazing impressions of our parents when they became very mad at us, and once I fully wet my pants laughing. Margaret.
I was thirteen, and my parents called it a central nervous system cancer, which I didn’t understand except it sounded large and central. Ginny understood nothing. I now know that Margaret had the kind that started in the brain and traveled the spinal column and stopped somewhere there. I don’t remember junior high, except she lay in bed a great deal, and I smoked pot I got from a tenth-grader on the bus named Steve Grodin who kept it in his backpack. I was on the cross-country team, and I’d smoke in my room down the hall from the room where my sister was resting and go for a run along the river, up past the cemetery and Steve Grodin’s house. The pot made me serene. It did not make me sad.
When Steve Grodin asked me to meet him at his father’s hunting cabin on the cliffs in the woods behind our houses, I said yes because I wanted to appear fearless, and this is what you did if you were floating and waiting to be saved. I was thirteen. He took off his pants in the slant-roofed loft that you got to by ladder. They were jeans. I have no memory of climbing the ladder. He lay down on top of me, and I don’t recall talking. Or the taking off of my pants. I remember my shock, and I don’t know how I got him off me, or if I walked home or ran through the April snow.
