Elsey Come Home

by Susan Conley

  I watched each noodle go into their little mouths. Each sip of water. Their stories in between bites were long and involved: what happened at recess with a girl named Shua and an older girl named Lin, and the bad choices these girls made on the jungle gym. I worried that Mei found it tedious.

  “Let’s move it along, my pets,” I said. “Finish so I can put you in the bath.” It was only six-thirty.

  “Elsey, why are you rushing them?” Mei asked. “They are not even being done yet. Let them eat.”

  She began singing a Chinese folksong to them about a boy with a long name called Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo, who falls into a well and needs his brother to go find help to get him out. Sunny had taught the girls this song years ago, and they sang it with Mei and I hadn’t known Mei could sing. Lukas came in from the bedroom to listen, and when they were done with the song all of us clapped. Elisabeth threw some pasta in the air and tried to catch it in her mouth and missed. I asked her to pick up the pasta off the floor and she pouted, but then she did it. Mei got up and refilled their water glasses in the kitchen and told them she wanted to watch them ride their bikes the next day on the paths around the apartment complex, and I hadn’t expected her to understand them like this.

  At bedtime I told the girls I loved them more than I could say, and Elisabeth closed her eyes and said, “I love you more than rocket ships.” Until then they hadn’t fully let me in. All afternoon they’d been relaxing back into me and the idea of having a mother, because it’s a big thing, the idea of a mother. We hadn’t had any delusional conversation in which I established my love for them.

  “Sing me a rocket-ship song,” Myla said, and I smiled. “No. No. Sing me a spaceship song instead. Please lie down on the bed. And take your hair down. No ponytails allowed. Take your hair down and sing.”

  · 56 ·

  The pain in my arm was better, and I didn’t tell Lukas about it. How I felt about the pain confuses me now, but I think it was evidence that things could still get bad again. Lukas and Mei and I ate the pork with the delicious, almost burnt-tasting hoisin sauce he’d made, and they talked about how it was impossible to make art in the country now.

  “I want to leave China and go to your America.” She smiled at me. “Even though you are very casual with your America, Elsey, and someday your president Trump might break it.”

  Lukas tried to explain that once she left she’d be an exile and could probably never come back, or at least not for a long time. He sounded pedantic and condescending, which was unlike him, but she listened and nodded.

  “You may lose your influence,” he added, and I got irritated. Angry that he didn’t know my arm hurt and that we didn’t have any Belgian beer or bad sauvignon blanc in the back cupboards where I used to hide it.

  “I have nothing to lose.” Mei waved her arm in the air. “The young people here care only for video games and Internet and cell phones. But the artists? The painters and filmmakers?” She lit a cigarette and put the burnt match on the table. “We can’t make real art.”

  I saw again how she didn’t have guilt, and I decided I wasn’t going to have guilt anymore, either. I made a promise to myself while she talked that I would paint every day because she never missed even if it meant doing something small in a book she kept in her leather bag for this purpose. I also promised myself I’d hire Sunny full-time and have her stay until seven every night, and that I would go to my studio religiously and only join the girls later for dinner.

  “Yes, Party propaganda everywhere.” Lukas nodded. “It is not possible to question public policies.”

  Mei dragged on her cigarette and looked out the windows at the city. I was tired and wanted to write down the promises I’d made to myself before I forgot them. I thought they were important, and when we said good night I went to the desk in the back corner of the bedroom and scribbled the promises on the inside cover of a book on Mandarin verbs, and they’d already lost some force and looked overly complicated. Lukas came in and we climbed into bed, and at first he appeared so far away I couldn’t see him.

  I trusted the silence or pretended to trust it. Then I said, “I missed you.” Because it was true.

  “Oh, really.” He began kissing my neck.

  “Do you hate me a little for going away?”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say.” He tucked the hair behind my ear. “I want to hear now how it was. I want you to tell me everything. The yoga. The silence. Everything.” When he kissed me, he tasted slightly metallic. He kissed me again, and I moved away and didn’t speak, and he finally turned on the light. “So where are you now?”

  “Under the fir tree in the temple courtyard, and I’m not allowed to talk.”

  “Come back. Our apartment is safe.” He laughed. “You can talk here.”

  Then he reached his arm around my waist and pulled me to him, and I moved away. “Els,” he said. “This is the part where you tell me about the mountains and the people. I’ve been waiting.”

  But I was tired and couldn’t translate it. It was too early, and Mei was in Myla’s room, and when this happens and I have too many people to please, I stop pleasing my husband first. He’s the one who gets sacrificed.

  “Tell me about the girls,” I said by way of not answering him. “All about them.”

  “The girls are good. The girls are fine.” He was saying that the girls didn’t need me and were perfectly capable without me.

  I wasn’t more willing to look at things in our marriage yet. It’s one of the worst parts to go over. I wasn’t telling the truth about the pain in my arm, either, so no one in the apartment except me understood this fear. And it wasn’t my arm that really scared me. I was afraid of not being there for my children, which may be another way of saying I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to control their lives anymore.

  “I’m not sure I can do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Stop drinking. I’m really not sure I can.”

  “But I thought you had. I thought you hadn’t done any drinking since you got there. This is good. This is a start.”

  Maddening. Did he really believe it was as easy as that? “You didn’t ask.”

  I cried then because of my certainty that I’d drink. It was easier to drink than to do the work required to not drink. I didn’t know what that work was, but I could tell it would be hard and contingent on me. No one else was going to save me. It was silent in the bed after that for maybe five minutes and I almost fell asleep, but I felt terrible and far away and then I guess I did fall asleep.

  · 57 ·

  Mei stayed at our apartment for a week, and I made many calls to the States for her and went wherever she went—to her friends’ shops and galleries so she could say goodbye. On Monday we drove to Dashanzi to see her art dealer, a woman named Wu Lei who wore layers of red canvas clothing and had shaved her hair. She’d been to the States several times and was skilled at attracting Western customers for Mei’s work, and she took us to the back of the gallery into a storage room with a cement floor, where a younger man in a dark suit coat poured us tea. Then Wu Lei got out her cigarettes and eased into her plastic chair and began smoking. She never looked at me, and I’m not sure she understood why I was there—the American. She was interested only in Mei and why she was leaving.

  A lot of the time it sounded like the women were shouting at each other, and there was great emotion underneath the yelling. Wu Lei said it was sudden and would appear weak for Mei to leave, and could they not have one more show in which Wu Lei brought out all of Mei’s work? A retrospective, she said. She needed time to bring it together. One month.

  Mei said no. A month was too long. “I have lived with Leng since I was eighteen and I am forty now. It is not sudden to leave. I will be being gone by Friday.”

  * * *

  —

  Leng
gave a talk on ancient calligraphy at the Beijing Museum. I think it was on Tuesday of that week. I know this because Tasmin went and called me afterward and told me Leng didn’t name Mei exactly but he said Chinese artists who leave China are traitors who should never be allowed back.

  “What are you going to do with her?” Tasmin asked me on the phone that night after Leng’s talk.

  “What do you mean do with her?”

  “And Hunter. He’s gone. I heard at the embassy party last week that he’s flown back to the States. Was in way over his head.”

  “Hunter is gone?” I was repeating each thing she said and trying to store it in my head.

  “Mei can’t live with you forever, Elsey. You and Lukas will be questioned.”

  “Tasmin, please.”

  “No, really. She can’t stay with you. You know that. She’s too high-profile. She’s too watched.”

  “Thank you for this.” I couldn’t hide my irritation with her, and it was the first time I was clear and let her see my emotion. “What am I meant to do, Tasmin? No, really. Please tell me if you have a solution, because I have none.”

  · 58 ·

  Several other painters and artists came to our apartment to say goodbye and to tell Mei it was good she was leaving Leng. They smoked in our living room, and I made them tea.

  On Wednesday night, Lukas found me in our bedroom after the girls had gone to sleep and told me Shashan hadn’t changed things for us.

  “That isn’t true. I’m different now.”

  “I wouldn’t know if you’re different because you’re never here.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder.”

  “I haven’t had a drink for fourteen days.” I was proud of this, and it’s hard to believe now that I thought fourteen days of not drinking was my crowning moment.

  “I’m not sure it matters.” It was at a time, he went on, when he needed things from me and to see if I was the person he thought I was.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t taking him seriously. It was as if I had amnesia about how much he mattered. Mei had gone into Myla’s bedroom to get a sweater, and she and I were going to the Baochao Hutong to hear Justice’s band play.

  “Where is Leng in all this?” Lukas asked. “I mean, come on. The man is too famous to let this happen on his watch. Couldn’t he come and take her home?”

  He sat down in one of his leather chairs facing the turntable. “I don’t understand why it’s you doing all of this for her. I mean, my God, Elsey. The man has to be wealthier than Mao. Isn’t he going to come fight for his wife?”

  I couldn’t tell him about Leng and the pool hall and the knife. He would have been so angry and there was too much to explain. “We don’t want Leng here. He’s too complicated.”

  “We’re all complicated. Tell him to come see his wife. Tell him she needs him.”

  · 59 ·

  The doorbell rang Thursday morning while Mei and the girls were in the kitchen cutting pictures of animals from National Geographic magazines. I was hanging wet clothes on a wooden rack next to the fridge because our dryer didn’t work. Lukas had been set on getting our dryer fixed for months, and the landlord said he’d send someone but never did, so we gave up. The bell rang again, and I looked through the spy hole and saw a man in a black suit with a metal toolbox. He rang again, and Lukas flung the door open and began yelling in Mandarin that we’d heard the bell the first time and why couldn’t he wait. “It is the polite thing to do! To wait!”

  “I am here to fix the dryer,” the man said in English. He was small and thick like a hydrant with a shaved head.

  “We’ve been waiting months,” Lukas said in Mandarin again, “for someone to notify us about scheduling the repair.”

  “It is a very busy time of year to fix dryers.”

  Lukas laughed and turned to me. “We have long given up on the dryer.”

  I hadn’t seen my husband unnerved like this before, and I could tell he was tired and near some kind of breaking point.

  “I would like to come in,” the man continued. “I will not take long. I am very fast. I have tools.” He pointed to his toolbox, and I thought Lukas might hit him, and I became worried that this man didn’t know how to fix a dryer and had been sent to us maybe by Leng or who knows who sent him.

  Lukas swore at the man in Danish and slammed the door in his face. And what got him, Lukas told me later in the kitchen after we’d walked the girls to the school bus, was that the repairman wouldn’t speak Mandarin even though Lukas had spoken only Mandarin to him. “I’ve been in this country fifteen years.” He looked out the one window in the kitchen. I saw how he’d made the mistake of thinking he belonged, and this was the rule, to never think you belonged here or were important, but it wasn’t the time to remind him of this because I was still too far away for him to listen to me.

  · 60 ·

  Mei packed her suitcase after Lukas left for the club, and the girls fought over who was taller. Then Myla lay down on Elisabeth on the rug in Elisabeth’s room and kept her knee on her neck until I came in and found Elisabeth sobbing. They fought over who got to sleep in the top bunk, and when I turned out the lights, Elisabeth kicked the slats so hard she hurt her foot and sobbed again. But I was sort of suspended above my family. My life felt static next to Mei’s. She was moving to Hong Kong, and maybe I wanted her life to be my life.

  How the girls acted after I’d gotten home had been different than I imagined, and Elisabeth no longer let me kiss her on the cheek during the day, only at night before bed. Myla didn’t seem to care if I came or went. I’d gotten a note home from her teacher that afternoon saying she’d spilled yogurt on her shirt during art and had changed out of the shirt and had worn just her zipper sweatshirt. But then she’d spilled yogurt on the sweatshirt, too, so she and the teacher went to the lost-and-found bin and got her another T-shirt.

  “As you can imagine,” the teacher wrote, “she was very emotional about this, but we did the best we could, and eventually she stopped crying. Her clothes were not quite dry when it was time to pack up for the bus. Is Myla upset about anything at home? She doesn’t quite seem herself.”

  Before we went to bed, Mei had a cigarette on the little balcony with the glass railing where I never went because it was so high up it made me dizzy. She told me we needed to appear to be together at the airport. “Like family. We need to seem to be being related so the authorities will let me go.”

  “Related how?”

  “Through marriage.”

  And when I raised my eyebrows, she laughed.

  “As in you are the gay widow of my dead sister?” It was the first time I’ve ever used my sister in a joke.

  “Well, not that exactly.”

  “It’s in your documents, yes? Your marriage to Leng?”

  “Yes.” She took a long drag.

  “It’s better not to lie.”

  “It is decided then. But where is your sister, Elsey? I did not realize.”

  “She died years ago.” I didn’t say anything else. I had no interest in explaining it. Mei was leaving and needed the plane ticket and to withdraw more money, and we needed to focus on these parts of her life.

  · 61 ·

  I told only Sunny about Hong Kong. I did not tell Lukas because I didn’t think he’d let me go. At the airport I kept waiting for Leng to find us in the new terminal that’s like a football stadium with the domed ceiling. Mei smoked a Yuxi down to the filter while we walked to the gate, and her hands shook while she lit the next one.

  “I am not a fool, Elsey,” she said. “I know that the plane is built to take off into the sky, but I cannot trust how it stays up there.”

  It was so bright in the terminal, it was hard to keep our eyes open. Shiny, square metallic tiles everywhere. At the gate a middle-aged Air China representative with a sm
all vertical scar on his forehead asked Mei how long she intended to be in Hong Kong. It wasn’t a trick question.

  He said he didn’t see a return ticket, and by law he needed to know when she was coming back to China, and I had to look away. I thought everything was riding on her answer.

  “One week. To see my daughter. Then I return.” And the man let her through. I thought she’d made it.

  The bookseller’s shop sat on a lane of chicken stalls and massage parlors and noodle houses. The bookseller, Justice’s father, was a thin, white-haired man named Hong who smiled when he saw Mei and put his thumb to his lips and shook his head over and over again because of how much she’d grown. He sold trade paperbacks and romances and antigovernment literature, and he had a bedroom on top of the shop where Mei could stay while she waited for the American visa.

  There were stacks and stacks of paperbacks on the floor and on the wooden shelves that lined the front room. A fat orange cat sat in the street window. Mei sat in the torn armchair in the back corner and smoked and waved me off. No hugging. We never hugged.

  “Thank you, Elsey.” She looked out the window at the traffic in the one-way street. “For being my first American friend.”

  I laughed, because she was trying to sound sarcastic, and she often said American sarcasm was something I’d made her better at. Of all things to teach someone.

  I thought she’d get to America. The visa could take months. Or never. But she had many friends of friends who could get her jobs in Boston, and she was resourceful. She’d figure it out.