by Susan Conley
“It depends on the body of the aircraft,” Andre said, and I cringed a little for him.
“Some first-class planes to London are a complete nightmare,” Tasmin said when we began walking again. “You pay the same money, no matter whether you get the bed or not.”
“Only the newer aircraft have that bed-seat configuration.” Andre slowed his pace until maybe two body lengths separated him from Tasmin.
Justice paused between two watchtowers and pointed to the mountains up above. There was a series of Chinese characters painted on the rock that he read out loud: “Long Live Chairman Mao.”
“Every spring the mayor of the village repaints the characters,” he said.
“What does that even mean?” Hunter asked.
“It means you are standing in the seat of the local Communist Party,” Justice said.
Toby and Adrian laughed, and Maeve got out a cigarette and lit it, which started a chain reaction of cigarettes. Tree took close-up photos of our faces, which she later sent me and were scary to look at because my face is vacant.
Ulla wandered off, and when we caught up she put her hand out again to block us, so we stood on the wall in silence while she tracked a black bird with her binoculars, then swore in Swedish and let us pass.
Mei asked me if Lukas was a good man, and I remembered the moment in the parking garage where I’d seen my marriage in the reflection in the car window and hadn’t wanted to lose it. I told Mei yes, my husband was a good man.
When he was moved by music, Lukas opened his mouth wide and stuck his tongue partly out and looked like he was about to yell, but he never yelled. He also sometimes put his arm up in the air. That’s my first memory of him: arm in the air.
“Mine,” Mei said, “loved me and then he was not loving me.”
“Marriage is long. It is a work in progress.” I worried I sounded cliché, or that she thought I was advocating for her husband when really I was stating facts. Marriage is long. I didn’t understand this when I married. Or how time speeds up after you have children.
“Leng will go to prison soon and I will, too, if I don’t leave.”
“Why prison if he’s building a show for the military parade?”
“They will tire of him soon, and he will make too much money off his paintings and they will arrest him for tax fraud.”
· 39 ·
Sometimes when I was drinking and not being honest, there wasn’t enough of myself to go around. I did not know how to ration myself for each of the girls. I didn’t, for example, understand how to calm Myla down when I left the house at night. It got so I couldn’t go to the supermarket during the day without her convulsing. It frustrated me, and I had a hard time with it. Elisabeth learned to be quiet when I went out, because Myla made so much noise about it. Elisabeth has learned a lot of things by watching.
My sister Margaret grew up watching. I’ve blocked out much of that time with her, so I can only hope I was kind when I was her sister. Our house was one hundred years old, and the plaster walls cracked from the inside. Margaret got scared of the sounds at night and used to call out, “What page are you on, Elsey?”
We were both big readers. It kept us from being scared. My room was across the hall from her room, and when she asked me what page, I yelled back, “Seventy-two.”
Then I said, “Go to sleep now.”
“See you tomorrow,” she always said.
“See you tomorrow.”
I don’t know why we used those words. “See you tomorrow” seems professional. See you tomorrow. I hope it was enough. I hope my sister knew how much I was trying for both of us. I think she did, because she always went to sleep after that.
· 40 ·
I never fell when I drank. I never banged into a wall. Lukas told me he came home early on the Friday in April because of a small kitchen fire at the nightclub he was playing at. He said I lay on my back like a starfish, and he couldn’t wake me. I was still drunk when Myla crawled in with us in the morning and explained she’d worn her black T-shirt to sleep so the bad guys couldn’t see her in the dark. Fireworks went off behind my eyeballs. Myla told me she had a superstition that at least half her body needed to be covered up by the blankets so the bad guys couldn’t find her, and I said I knew that. I already knew that.
“But could we do that now?” she said. “Could you cover me up better? Because I’m not covered up enough and need more of the sheet.”
Then Elisabeth climbed in and I scooched over so there was more room for her between Lukas and me. “Mama, I was missing you,” she said. “I was missing you, Mama. I was calling for you.”
She had a throaty way of talking I haven’t mentioned, so most of the time she sounded like she was from an early cave tribe just learning to speak. She took my face with both hands and pulled it close and pressed her nose into my mine. I didn’t dare look at Lukas. I could hardly open my eyes, and I was ashamed and embarrassed by what I’d become. But for several weeks I did not stop drinking. That is what I need to acknowledge. After I’d drunk enough to pass out, I’d wake up in the morning and have regret but not exactly for the drinking. My mind was very clouded. A curtain hung there.
* * *
—
On the morning that Ginny left our hotel in Hong Kong, she’d stood next to her bed in the corner of the room she shared with the girls and said, “You’ll know.” She was putting the girls’ clothes in small piles.
“Know what?” I asked. Lukas had taken the girls down to the hotel pool for a last swim, and Ginny was still mad at me for the night before when I’d asked her for a second glass of wine and she’d pretended she hadn’t heard me. So I’d asked Lukas and he’d said no, too, I couldn’t have more wine because of the painkillers.
I’d really wanted the second glass, and I told both of them they had no right to deny me and that I never asked for things, so couldn’t they do me this one favor? But they wouldn’t.
“You’ll know when to stop drinking,” Ginny said and went into the closet to get one of the girls’ roller bags. “It will be when you can’t bear the thought of waking up and doing it all over again.”
My phase of concentrated drinking hadn’t really started yet, so I didn’t understand what my sister was talking about, and after she left I lay down on her bed and closed my eyes.
· 41 ·
Lukas and I were hardly separated the first month we came back from Hong Kong. He was careful about work and took nights off and cooked things involving soy and ginger and fish that were so good. Myla wasn’t as worried about me leaving to go anywhere because I didn’t really ever leave the apartment. She was calmer, and it was as if those other times when she’d thrown herself at me never occurred.
But I had the nightmares and wasn’t sleeping. I saw the future as a series of steps in which the girls would be in the act of leaving me, and then who would I be in China? The pain started up in my arm, and I lay on the couch and watched the girls zip their backpacks for the school bus, and my arm zinged and my thoughts were too persistent and close.
When I began drinking the Belgian beer from the convenience store in the basement of Tower Three, it was as if I’d had an affair. That’s how Lukas later said my drinking made him feel—like I’d slept with another man when he found me drunk, and that he had a hard time looking at me on the mornings after the girls got out of our bed and I got up and didn’t know where to start.
“I thought you’d get better and we would have our life back,” he said when we’d gotten home from the tea fields. The glass shower muffled his words, but I knew what he was saying.
“We’ll have our life back,” I said and partly believed this. “But it won’t go like you thought it would go.”
I had to tell him this. I also wanted to tell him that my drinking had very little to do with him, but I knew he wouldn’t believe me. I w
ouldn’t have believed me, either, if I’d said that.
· 42 ·
I’ve had enormous faith in him. He collects things that the Communist Army used during the Long March, so we have the soldiers’ enameled tin cups and teapots with stars and sickles. He says he believes in accountings like this. The things. He won’t go back to Denmark, even though his mother is in a convalescent home attached to a church, and I think it’s hard to leave her alone for so long, but he’s unmoved by me on the topic.
Sometimes, rarely, I’ve seen this other side of him, though never fully with the girls. It’s an impatience that comes maybe from leaving his country.
He receives many gifts at the clubs and festivals where he plays, and he tries to give them away. Brand-name watches and silk ties and electronic devices. Receiving these things is formal and ritualized in China, and when you receive a gift it’s meant to indebt you to the person who gave you the gift forever. I’ve watched my husband closely, and I don’t think Lukas is indebted to anyone, and I don’t think he’s been changed by the gifts he receives.
I see the entitlement around us and am not immune. When Myla was five and Elisabeth was four, we asked them to begin riding the bus to school. Or we didn’t ask them as much as tell them, but for it to work they had to agree. It was a big white coach bus with the word SUPER stretched across the right side and three large steps covered in black rubber you had to climb to get inside. For months the girls were old enough to ride the bus but wouldn’t ride the bus. Myla was too scared to do it and often asked me during those months if she should be stressed about riding the bus. She was five years old, and it pained me to hear her use this word, stressed, because what did she have to be stressed about?
I’ve learned from her teachers and from the man who I pay to ask me questions that many children have worries and that Myla and Elisabeth are no different. They’re trying to understand their place in the world. Once Myla rode the bus, Elisabeth rode it, too, because she’ll do anything if Myla does it. But during this time when no one rode the bus, I used to drive the car at noon to get Elisabeth at her preschool attached to the elementary school inside the metal gate. It was complicated to get her out at noon, because no one else got out then. Everyone else in school went full-day. Getting out at noon involved finding the principal, who had to sign a slip that we had to give to one of the uniformed guards. But first I had to find Elisabeth’s teacher to get the slip. Mrs. Carter was from England and very fair, and she let Elisabeth make the paintings of pink flowers with Lena that we still have on our walls.
One day I couldn’t find the principal or get the form signed, so Elisabeth and I couldn’t leave the grounds and it became frustrating. When I finally found Mrs. Carter I said, “Why is it so hard to get the form signed for half-day release?”
She smiled at me and looked very tired. “But, Elsey, we do not have a half-day release here. All the children go full-day.”
After that Elisabeth went to preschool the full day. I didn’t have to be the person who created her own half-day program for her child. And it wasn’t long until both my girls rode the bus. The bus driver spoke no English, but he waved at me whenever I waved at him, and I did this every morning to signal to him that my girls were getting on his bus and they were connected to someone. They were connected to me. I know if I hadn’t become someone who sent her children to full-day preschool, I couldn’t have kept my marriage. Don’t ask me what the two things have in common, but there’s something there.
· 43 ·
After my sister died, my father retired from the bank and began building windmills in the field behind our house. Three of them. Life-sized and painted red. Then he had an affair with a thirty-year-old girls’ basketball coach named Tammy Plover, who was also a teller at Augusta Savings. My mother learned of the affair after my uncle Whit, a man who spent most of his life teaching high school English in rural Vietnam, found my father behind Tammy’s trailer on Carriage Road with a shotgun in his right hand. Uncle Whit told my mother that my father planned to shoot himself with this shotgun.
Uncle Whit died almost twenty years ago, and the funeral reception was held at Eady’s Pub on the river in Hallowell, where people could dance to piped-in Irish music, though no one did this, thank God. The funeral was the start of the time when my parents began going to the Congregational Church and it helped. It seemed like they needed church, and maybe I’d needed it, too, which was why I was envious of Osana, the woman at the hotel in Lijiang who moved the furniture away to receive God.
My mother became active in her congregation, which was Tonya York’s husband’s church, the woman who’d started our Bible club years ago, but my mother seemed to have forgotten all of that. When I asked her about it at Uncle Whit’s funeral, she said Tonya York sang in the church choir and had the most beautiful voice. “Like a songbird,” my mother said and smiled, and that was all she had to say on the subject.
“Go get your father and take me home,” she said some minutes later and reached out her hand so I could pull her from her metal chair. “I need to lie down with my Margaret.”
I was twenty-two years old and about to move to Ireland. Nothing in my sister’s room had been removed. My mother kept the same sheets on Margaret’s bed, and it was a place she often went to lie down in. None of us questioned her about the room. None of us dared. My father drove us home from Eady’s that day, and I saw maybe for the first time how clearly my mother held herself apart in her grief, and I didn’t want to be like that. Separate.
· 44 ·
The part of the Great Wall we were on was mostly in ruins and it became impassable, so we had to get down and cross a pasture where black pigs stood in the mud. A wooden hut had been built into the side of the hill, and two barefoot children stood near the door and stared at us. It was a ten-minute walk to the temple from here, and the sky was dark like the inside of a steel bell. We stayed up on the ridge, and Mei said, “It will not be long before I am going to bed with the American.”
I laughed and thought she was joking and was glad to be with her. I envied her life and wanted it. She made me feel it was possible to paint again, and though none of this makes sense now, for a short while I had no other life than my life in Shashan.
“I have never slept with any man except Leng,” she said with her same matter-of-factness, and smiled and wasn’t embarrassed.
Lukas once told me that he was playing music at a secret club for a senior Party official who appreciated Western music, and the official got very drunk so it was hard for him to sit up. The young girl who served the beer to him had an uneasy time, and there was, as there often is in China, the hint of sexual subservience. The older woman who ran the club told Lukas she needed to leave early because she was having an abortion. She and Lukas had known each other for almost ten years, and she spoke about the abortion casually, like she was going on holiday, and he was relieved by how clear she was.
The Great Wall was the color of iron on this part, and the kang sleepers hardly stopped talking while they walked and sounded like siblings. I missed my sister who wasn’t alive and my sister who was alive, and realized you could miss people you hadn’t seen in a long time just as much as you could miss people who were dead. I was far gone to my girls by then, but I knew they were okay because of the talk I’d had with Mei about telling the truth. Sometimes I vow to stop putting hope in other people like this, but then I meet someone like Mei.
We took a path through a field of apricot trees into a darker forest of cedar and pine and low-lying brush with dried-out branches. Ulla thought she saw the Mongolian hawk and put her arm out and made us stand still in the woods, and we couldn’t speak while the bird sang its little song and Ulla stared through her binoculars. Then the bird flew away. “A very large warbler,” she said and made a remark in Swedish that was probably like dammit.
We started walking again, and Hunter told Andre that his fat
her co-owned a number of coal mines in China, all of which needed new carbon-monoxide monitoring systems, and which the father had sent Hunter to implement. He laughed then. Maybe because it seemed difficult to monitor many things in China.
When we got to the temple, it wasn’t one temple but several stone buildings inside a grassy clearing. Some of the buildings were shaped like cones or rounded pyramids, which Justice said were tombs for dead monks. The larger building was made of paler stone, and Justice took us inside to look at a large wooden Buddha head that appeared recently painted. The top of the head almost touched the ceiling, and Justice stared at it and smiled with pride, and I smiled, too, but had the feeling I sometimes get in China that I’m meant to rise to the occasion and am falling short.
I walked as far away from the group as I could and found a fir tree behind the largest tomb. Justice called this an hour of silence and we weren’t supposed to speak again. If a thought came into our minds, we were meant to acknowledge the thought and let it go. It was harder than I imagined, but I did sit for an hour and my thoughts had to do with the suspicion again that my left arm was being zapped.
Then I remembered a girl I’d seen once in Dublin standing next to the cemetery gate with reading glasses on and a purple cloth purse. She wasn’t wearing any shoes in October, and we’d already had one light snow. She stepped into the street and put her hands out to steady herself the way you do on a trampoline. The cemetery was one block from the house where I rented my rooms, and it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood with foot traffic because there wasn’t any commerce. A short-term homeless shelter had opened next to a nearby chicken processing plant, and people at the shelter took the walking path up to the part of the cemetery near my rooms to do drugs, and I wondered if the girl had done that.
