Repeat After Me (15 page)

“One. How was your vacation?” I said. The scratching of pencils filled the room.

“One,” I repeated, “How was your vacation?”

“Two,” I said, “Was your vacation relaxing or stressful?” Everybody wrote.

I was calm and in control. I walked toward the back of the classroom, making my way to Da Ge, checking their papers without being disruptive. Some of them finished early, looked up and smiled. “Two. Was your vacation relaxing or stressful?”

Da Ge had written nothing on his paper. There was a drawing in the center of the page of a long rope. A stick figure hung from it.

“Three.” I said, “My vacation was exciting and fun, thank you.”

“Three,” I repeated. “My vacation was exciting and fun, thank you.”

Da Ge looked up at me, unsmiling. His eyes were so hard and red they looked like marbles. I cleared my throat. “Four,” I said, “I’m glad to be back at school.”

They turned in their papers, and we talked about whom we had visited and what holidays we had celebrated. “Naomi is my mother, and I spent the Jewish holidays with her and her boyfriend Jack. We celebrated Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday.” Then I said, “Who can make up a sentence that involves both family and holidays?”

“He is my uncle,” said Russ. “At Christmas, I do not love him.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Why don’t you love your uncle, Russ?”

“Because I do not have uncle,” he said. His eyes were wide and earnest.

Once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. Maybe it was the tension over Da Ge, or my feeling that something bad was about to happen, a feeling I got the moment I met Da Ge and never lost until something terrible did happen. But I was uncomfortable laughing in my classroom, and didn’t want
Russ to think I was making fun of him, so I pretended to be coughing and excused myself. In the hallway, I bent over the drinking fountain and heard my mother’s voice say, “Don’t touch your lips to the drinking fountain,” which made me laugh more. I wondered what Dr. Holderstein would have thought of my mother’s obsession with not putting her lips on a drinking fountain. I was still laughing when Bonita, the ever-cheerful Embassy administrator walked up.

“What’s wrong?” She asked, whacking me on the back.

“Nothing,” I said, “Nothing. I just had a coughing fit. I’m perfectly fine now.”

She hit me on the back again, this time lightly. “Well, take care of yourself,” she said, and walked away.

Back in the classroom, the atmosphere had changed.

“Sorry about that,” I said. Everyone was silent. “What’s wrong?” I asked them, but nobody said anything. I stared at them, bewildered. Xiao Wang had her hands over her eyes. I walked to her desk. “What is it?”

No one spoke. “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” I said.

Russ said, “Xiao Wang and Da Ge fight.” He was staring at his hands.

“About what?” No one said anything. At a loss for what to do, I opened my book. I’m just going to start the lesson again, I thought, I’m just going to—

“Fuck you.” Da Ge said. I couldn’t tell who he meant. He pushed his chair back and stood so fast that he knocked it over behind him. Xiao Wang moved her hands from over her eyes to over her ears. Chase stood up, as if to warn Da Ge that he’d protect any one of us Da Ge chose to attack. I was not afraid that he’d do anything.

“It’s okay,” I told Chase. “Da Ge, maybe you should go outside.” My voice was absurdly high and came from somewhere other than my body.

“I am outside,” he said. He swung a hand at the class, including and insulting us.

“You fuckers are inside. I am outside.”

When he came to see me that night, I was already standing by the window, watching for him. He pulled up, and I went downstairs and stood on my stoop in the snow. Streetlights reflected off the wet pavement, making the night unnaturally bright. Da Ge saw me and raised his head almost imperceptibly. He did not smile or wave. Soon he was standing silently in front of me, his helmet on his right arm. His head seemed to weigh his neck down. He looked at his shoes, losing their shine in the slush.

“You okay?” I offered. I reached out a bit toward him, but he didn’t seem to notice the gesture. My arms felt heavy. Would they drag when we walked inside?

“I am sorry for class today,” he said.

“What happened?”

“It’s a lot story.”

“A long story?”

He looked up, ready to fight, but then blinked instead. I saw him give up.

“I mean long story,” he said. It was the last time I ever corrected him.

Upstairs, we were less formal. But he didn’t sit on the futon with me, just took a seat at the table and rested his chin on his open hands.

“I have some trouble,” he said.

He feels watched, I thought, potentially ambushed, so I stood and put on an old CD of my dad’s, Vivaldi cello sonatas. I wanted music with no words.

“Do you listen?” he asked me.

“To the CD, you mean?” I said.

“No,” he said, “to me.”

“Yes!” I said, too loud. “Of course I do. I wish you would talk more.”

He swallowed, and I watched his throat move. “I wish you listen more,” he said.

I was hurt by this and worked not to be defensive. Don’t hurt him, my mind reminded me. He’s not entirely wrong. I looked up, tried to meet his eyes.

“I do listen to you. I like to listen to you.”

“But not only,” he said.

I was quiet, spelling. I d-o-n’-t l-i-s-t-e-n w-e-l-l. Fifteen letters and true.

“Aysha?” He was looking down at the floor. “It’s okay I stay here tonight?”

I took this to be the most overt pass that had ever happened and felt reckless and thrilled. “Sure,” I said, trying for nonchalance. I shrugged. “If you like.”

“I can sleep here,” he said, and patted the sofa next to him. So maybe it wasn’t a pass. When his hand came down on the sofa, I watched it, wanted to see the blood move through his veins. I wanted to pick his hand up off the couch and put it under my shirt. He looked disturbingly calm. He was difficult to follow, unlike most guys I knew. When Adam lied, which it turned out he did frequently, it was so obvious that his pants burst into flames. When Da Ge spoke, I had to inspect him for signals of dishonesty, and then I couldn’t read them. He was like a book with whiplash plot twists. Choose your own adventure, written in a hybrid of English and Chinese.

“I have sheets and extra pillows,” I said, backing into the hallway to get bedding.

“No,” he called. “Please, no trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all, really,” I told him. I sounded like an English teacher. I opened the door to the closet and managed to collect a set of flannel sheets from behind the air
conditioner. Back in the living room, Da Ge had stood up. He was looking at black and white photos on the wall above my table. I began making the futon into a bed.

“It’s you?” he asked, pointing to a faded photo of my brother Benj and me in full-length sleepers with feet; I am on Benj’s lap, my head thrown back, laughing. He has one arm around my waist and is tickling me with the other. Sam the doll, now Julia Too’s, is lying on my lap, her plastic eyes blinked shut. Benj is six, I am three, and Sam is new—we look as if we’ve been stacked like blocks in order of descending size.

I nodded at Da Ge, swallowed the rise in my throat. I stopped fanning the top sheet over the futon, let it fall into a wrinkled mess. Da Ge was watching me carefully.

“Do this question make you feel unhappy?” he asked.

“It’s just a long time ago,” I said.

“You are fat and white,” he said, smiling.

I stared at him. The CD began skipping, and I went to fix it.

“
Pang pang bai bai de
,” he said in Chinese. “It’s good things for a baby.”

I liked it when he spoke Chinese to me. I had written down “
pai
the
ma pi
of America,” in case I ever found myself in a conversation with a Chinese person and needed to talk about horse-ass patting. Of course, I had no idea at the time how well it would serve me. As with fat fat white white, which I’ve used to describe every baby I’ve met for a decade.

“Who is this?” Da Ge asked, pointing at Benj. In the photo, Benj’s hair is standing on end in a halo of static. Maybe our mother had just pulled a sweatshirt over his head. I felt my heart move up closer to throat. I sat on the messy sheets, put my hands in my lap. They looked like they were someone else’s.

“That’s my brother, Benj,” I answered, and the grief in my voice was so revealing that I called upon my English teacher voice to hide me for a moment. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

Now Da Ge’s eyes clouded over. He looked mean, and I remembered how he’d seemed the first time he’d come to class. But when he said, “No, it’s just me,” his voice was so dark blue that it reminded me who he was now. Or who I thought he was.

Maybe he wanted to hide, too, because he said, “China has a rule of this. You can only have one kid. For population.” Of course this rule hadn’t been in effect when he was born, but this was before I knew that.

Then he stood up straighter all of a sudden, and looked oddly formal.

“Aysha,” he said. “I need to have certain history of my life, and for this I must become American.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe I like to marry with you, so I can be American. I know it’s a rude favor. I am sorry for this. Maybe you cannot agree to it. Or maybe I can pay you some money?”

I stood up, reeling and dazed, felt myself catapulted into a soap opera. I sat back down. It was as if as soon as I didn’t know what to do with my words, I also lost track of what to do with my body. I gathered some of the sheet in my hand and squeezed it. “We hardly know each other,” I heard my voice say. I looked around the room as if a teleprompter might appear and guide me.

“I have to tell you that I take your class so I can meet you,” he confessed. “Sometimes even before that, I follow you. I feel I like to know you, to marry with you.”

I stood again and began pacing. I considered walking straight out the door and into Julia’s apartment, telling her everything, saving myself. Because the “I follow you” was
even less what I had been expecting than the proposal, and it scared me.

“I think what you need is not to be a stalker,” I said.

Some light in his face went out. “I don’t know this word,” he said dejectedly.

What offended me most, I know now, was the offer of money. Right off, I relished, in the way only a cracked person could have, the idea that Da Ge wanted to marry me. I would be the protagonist of a bodice ripper, the wife of a Chinese dissident, his savior. We would be madly in love. If he hadn’t offered me cash or called it a favor, I could have coolly omitted the awkward fact that we had met three months before. Because I found Da Ge, in all his wanna-bethugged-out bookish splendor, fascinating. I had started to dress more sexily, to consider before teaching whether I had lipstick on. I took time in the mornings to slick my bangs with various gels. I dreamed of going to China with him, trading my broken life for a new, improved, international one. Or at least seeing
The First Emperor
together at the IMAX. Marrying him would mean the effort I had put into seducing him had paid off; it would be less sordid than simply having sex with my student, which I thought I couldn’t resist in any case, should it come up. I would be like one of those teachers who seduces her student and gets pilloried by American society even though men bed their female students like unapologetic rabbits and no one seems to mind.

I went to get the red, plastic Chinese dictionary. When I came back, holding it, Da Ge’s eyes widened. “Why you have this?”

“So I can understand you.”

“I can go now,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“No, no. Stay.”

I sat down, thumbed through the dictionary.

“What is the word you use?” Da Ge asked me. There
was no entry for “stalker,” and I couldn’t think of a synonym. I found stalk and walked over to the table. I stood behind him and showed him the entry, pressing my fingernail into the soft page just beneath the word. His hair smelled like peppermint shampoo.

He looked at the entry under stalk. “This is like grass?”

“No, wrong word,” I said, annoyed even though the whole stupid thing was my fault. “That’s a different kind of stalk. I can’t find the right one in there. Forget it. A stalker is someone who watches someone else.”

“A bad word,” he said.

I shrugged.

“It’s okay for me to go,” he said.

“Stay.”

The phone rang. “I’ll let the machine get it,” I said, hoping it wasn’t Adam.

“Where are you?” said Julia’s voice. “Call me as soon as you get this.” I wondered how I would both not call her until the next day and not tell her anything. I wondered why I didn’t want to tell her anything about this.

“Do you want to sleep?” Da Ge asked. He said nothing else about getting married. I didn’t know what he meant by sleep.

“Uh, sure.”

“If I stay, it’s okay I shower?” Da Ge asked.

“Yes, of course.” I handed him a towel and a washcloth, and put a quilt my mother had made out of my baby clothes over the futon. Whenever she made her bed at home, I liked to jump on it immediately and lie there, flat, seeing how little damage I could do to the fresh blankets. Da Ge stood quietly, watching me. I hoped he would leap onto the bed and ruin it. But he hadn’t moved at all. I considered offering to help him shower, but wasn’t sure I could get the nuance right.