Repeat After Me (16 page)

“Good night,” he said, and started toward me.

“Good night.”

He crossed by me, giving me the sense of an edge—of something straight and horizontal, a wall, maybe or a window. Da Ge had a sharp, glassy flavor about him, more a metal color than a smell. I heard him close the bathroom door, turn water on. I went into my bedroom and read the first page of
The Remains of the Day
over and over until I heard Da Ge back in the hallway. Then I turned off my light, cracked the door, and peered out. He had wrapped the towel around his waist. Now he sat on the futon, his shoulders wide and thin. He looked like a wasp ready to lift off. The skin over his stomach was stretched taut, the muscles underneath it square and even. Then he folded so that his elbows rested on his thighs and he held his face in his hands.

I should have gone in there, apologized for the awkwardness, said I would marry him or asked for a week to consider. I should have climbed into bed with him. We both had a lot of face at stake, which seems stupid now, but doesn’t protecting your face always seem idiotic with hindsight? I, for one, keep doing it, even knowing. Back then, I wasn’t even considering what motivated me. I guess I didn’t want to risk his turning me down for sex, even though he had just proposed marriage. It’s ludicrous, but I couldn’t be brave. And I figured we had all the time we needed. I crept backwards into my room, took a sleeping pill from my nightstand, and swallowed it without water.

I woke the next day with an icy start. Da Ge was gone and the futon was made. There was a note on it:
Thank you to Aysha
. At the bottom were two Chinese characters, and underneath them,
Da
and
Ge
. I put it in my jewelry box and called Julia.

“I was sleeping when you called last night,” I lied.

“Was someone there?” she asked.

I thought for a minute and then said yes, Adam had been here.

“No,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“He called me last night to see if I wanted to have a drink. He said he wanted to talk about you. He was worried. That’s why I called. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Really?” I asked. “The truth is, he slept here the night before.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He said so.” We both waited.

“Come over,” she said. “I’ll make you coffee.”

I put on sweatpants and went to her apartment. She answered the door in tights.

“Why this?” I asked.

“I have an audition,” she said.

“Julia!” I said. “That’s great! Is that what you called to tell me last night?”

“Sort of,” she said. “There’s something else, too.”

I sat down on a stool. I had sat in this precise position thousands of times. I wondered if this was the thousand and eighteenth or the thousand and thirtieth. Julia turned to the stove, poured boiling water into a French press. The smell of coffee filled the room. Suddenly, I hated her.

She was silent, but her shoulders were moving in a gesture I recognized instantly.

“Why are you crying?”

“It’s complicated,” she started, “what I have to tell you.”

I decided not to help. Time dragged across the kitchen, carrying a stick with its possessions tied to the end. It was a crayon-drawn mouse, moving out. Tom and Jerry.

“I saw Adam last night,” Julia said.

“Right. You said he called. So?”

“I slept with him.”

In spite of myself, I felt a laugh rising up into my mouth. “You’re kidding,” I said.

“Aysha, I’m so sorry. I can’t—I didn’t mean—It was just—it was a mistake.”

She threw some monosyllabic words around—drunk, we, fucked, up—I heard the consonants catching in her throat like metal hooks. Mistake words have a lot of
k
’s in them. They’d fucked? Yuck. I tipped the stool forward and walked out, took the stairs back down to my place. I swallowed, thought I might digest my heart since it had been in my mouth. Julia and Adam? Something about it reminded me of the way most people feel about their parents having sex. It was dirty, disconcerting, off. And they were my only friends. It was wretched that they had betrayed me together. Who would be on my side about it? I could hear Julia calling down the stairs after me. I closed the door behind me and stood in my hallway, thinking.

“I’m sorry,” said Da Ge, and I realized that he had appeared from the living room and that I was crying. “I bring breakfast,” he said, holding a paper bag. “Some bagel.”

I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned in his note that he was coming back. And how he’d gotten back in. I wiped my eyes.

“Why?” he asked me.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I went running. The wind. You know. Thank you. For the bagels, I mean. Uh, let me take a quick shower. Maybe you can toast them? I’ll make coffee when I get out. Oh, wait, you don’t drink coffee, do you? I’ll make tea. Just wait here a second, don’t go.” I heard my mania, mostly suppressed for the last six months, surface in my voice like a friend who’d been abroad. Welcome back, I thought.

In the bathroom, I reached into the shower and turned the water on, stripped my sweatpants off, and climbed in. Within five seconds, Julia was knocking on the front door. I climbed out of the shower and grabbed a hand towel to hold over myself as I collided with Da Ge in the hallway. I put a finger over my mouth, and shook my head toward the door.

“Don’t open,” I mouthed.

He nodded and backed away. I turned into the bathroom, wondering, in spite of my misery, whether he had taken a look at me in my small towel. I turned the shower up full blast and sat down in the tub, figuring I’d count the streams of water as they came out of the nozzle. I was at 83 when Da Ge opened the door. He pulled the curtain back and I shrieked.

“It’s okay,” he said, “don’t feel nervous.”

Then he turned the water off and bent down. He was holding a towel. He reached into the tub and picked me up, wrapped me in the towel like a child. Then he carried me to my bedroom and set me on the bed. He covered me up and then he lay down, too, on the outside of the quilt and put his arms around my mummified body. We didn’t speak, and after a while, I fell asleep. By the time I woke up, he was gone.

Much later, I would ask Da Ge why he had come to get me in the bathtub that day, and he would teach me a Chinese grammatical construction I now know better than I ever knew him:
ni shangxin sile
. “You were heartbroken to death.”

Julia Too spent New Year’s of 2002 in New York with my mother. She’ll turn twelve in February. and she and my mother propagandized me for months about this trip, finally convincing me that that means she’s old enough to fly alone. In honor of her first solo flight, I taught her “Avanglavish,” a
secret language my aunt taught me and Julia One in third grade. We practiced until we were so fluent we could have hours of conversation about other people in front of them. It was a scrumptious tool. Avanglavish is a simple formula, really: just add an “av” before every sounded syllable of English. Julia becomes “Javulav iava,” Lili becomes “Lavilavi,” elbow “Avelbavow.”

I told Julia Too that she and Lili (whom she decided to teach) have to be nice with the language, that they’re not to use it to exclude other girls. I don’t know how that will work out, really, or what the point is of having a secret language if you can’t use it to keep secrets, but I thought I should remind her of the rule about being nice to other girls anyway. We were packing. I was barely stifling my panic at the impending week away from her, a prospect that sent a vacuum of blood away from my heart.

“Havair bravush,” she said, putting her hair brush in the suitcase. Then she asked, “What about Chinese Avanglavish? Chavinglaivsh? Navi havao is
ni hao
!” She ran to call Lili, and I thought I’d like to tell Yang Tao about Chavinglavish. He’d appreciate it.

When Julia Too came back, I asked her why she’d chosen Lili, and she knitted her brow. “I don’t know about Phoebe yet,” she said.

“Don’t know what?”

“Mom?” She fiddled with the ear of a ratty teddy bear. “Was my dad a criminal?”

“No,” I said. “What gave you that idea?”

“Phoebe said everyone in Beijing knows that.”

“I see. It’s not true.” I said it without pausing, and she nodded, ready to believe me.

“I’m sorry Phoebe is making up stories that hurt you,” I said, trying to hide my horror. “You should try as hard as you can not to worry what other people think.”

“But Phoebe isn’t other people. She’s Phoebe,” Julia Too said. “And she was just telling me so I would know what everyone was saying.”

I could hear that this was something Phoebe had said. “What about Sophie?”

“Sophie’s opinion is important, too.”

“What is Sophie’s opinion?”

“She always agrees with everything Phoebe says.”

“I see. What about Lili?”

“She doesn’t even go to our school.”

“But is she on your side?”

“Yes.” That night, I sat up watching Julia Too sleep in a bed crowded with a stuffed lion, two monkey puppets with Velcro arms wrapped around each other’s necks, and a doll named Sam. I remembered Julia Too’s baby life, how many mornings my mother showed up, packed Julia Too and the diapers, wet wipes, sippy cups, Cheerios, balls, sunscreen, hats, and countless other necessities, and went to the park so I could read, bathe, or sleep. So I could get sane and finish Columbia. So I could eat, teach, manage. Even after she married Jack, my mom was always everywhere all the time. And I don’t know whether it was in his nature or my mom tutored him, but Jack is loving and generous too, signs cards Grandpa Jack. So how big a favor is it to put Julia Too on a plane to see them? My mother would pick her up at JFK. Julia Too would be fine. I kept reminding myself. There are so many ways in which I do not want Julia Too to be like me. I’d like her to feel safe. Whenever she cried as a baby, I snatched her up immediately. What was in store for her seemed already so terrible; how could I let her weep over lesser tragedies?

Unlike me, Julia Too was thrilled about her first solo flight. At the airport she patted her backpack when she said good-bye to me, as if to say, “I have everything I need; I’ll be
fine.” It was a gesture I found stunningly mature, even though I knew the bag held Sam-the-doll, a Hello Kitty wallet, lip gloss,
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
, and vanilla milk. Julia Too tapped her pink cell phone.

“I’ll call you as soon as Nomi picks me up,” she said, and walked away, turning around once to grin and blow me a kiss. Her bangs flopped over her eyes.

Seventeen hours later, in my Beijing evening, the phone rang. I was in Julia Too’s room organizing stuffed animals by color: shelf of black and white penguins, pandas, beagles, seals, polar bear. A rainbow basket held red Elmo, an orange doll, two yellow ducks, the green monster, blue cat, hugging purple monkeys. I had done the dollhouse first; each miniature creature waited in place for Julia Too’s return—at the table, in the bathtub, in bed. She was outgrowing her toys faster than I was my love of arranging them. Her young-adult books were alphabetized by author, the kid ones in order of descending size. I leapt up and ran for the phone, tripping over a stack of pink pigs and the dress-up trunk.

Julia’s voice sounded close, and I could hear my mom’s whole place through the wires: swirly antique rugs, blue velvet couch, the lunch I knew she had already set out, had probably been considering for weeks even though it was just for her, Jack, and Julia Too. Lox, tomatoes, bagels from Absolute on 108th, homemade quiche, rugelach. I could see my mother’s hands under a stream of water from the silver faucet. Her kitchen island with its bowls of apples, avocados, olives, and lemons; my Grandma Leah’s painted glass shakers full of salt and pepper. I even imagined my dad, leaning against the counter with a cup of coffee in one hand, mail in the other, laughing. I closed my eyes.

“I don’t have the jet lag!” Julia Too shouted gleefully, a rare trace of Chinglish in her English. “Nomi and Jack are
taking me to Rockefeller. They got me my own skates! I won’t have to rent skates at the China World anymore!”

Her voice on the phone gave me a rush of hope—that she’s tougher, better adjusted than I ever was or will be, in spite of Da Ge and his genes. That she’s an unbroken girl.