Repeat After Me (2 page)

“Earthquake,” Da Ge said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Everyone waited. Ingyum fingered a strand of pink freshwater pearls around her neck.

“Are your parents okay for the earth-cake of Tangshan?”

“They were in Beijing then,” he said.

“Oh.”

Again, there was silence. Russ and Chase looked at each other. Xiao Wang raised her hand.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m sorry. I have other question. It’s okay for me to ask?”

“Of course,” I said. “Go ahead.”

She glanced at Da Ge. “Do you miss the China?” she asked.

As he looked her over, I gritted my teeth. Maybe she won’t get whatever he says, I thought, in case it was mean.

“Yes, I miss it,” he said. “Do you?”

She flushed with pleasure. “For me, it’s okay.”

His face softened until the scar was like the line of an expression. “I’m glad,” he said to her. And then he looked at me. I looked away.

When I dismissed them, Da Ge lingered near my desk. I tried to measure the distance between us without looking up, failed, met his eyes.

“Have you registered?” I asked.

He grinned. “Yeah.”

“You’ll need to make up the work you’ve missed.”

“I like it very much,” he said. Then he took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, offered me the box. It had a picture of a pagoda on it, under clear, crinkly wrapping. It looked clean. And so did Da Ge, gleaming, almost.

“Do you like a cigarette?” he asked. “It’s good brand.”

“I’m impressed,” I said, “but you’ll have to wait to smoke until you’re outside.” He glanced around, almost nervously, squinted at me. He had stopped smiling.

“What means this ‘impressed’?” he asked.

On the way home I counted the stairs down to the subway platform, feeling like if I stood still the pavement might move under my feet anyway. The train came, and I jammed on, smelled recent cigarettes on the coat in front of me. I thought of Da Ge sliding the wrapped pack out of his pocket, looked up at an advertisement that featured a Latina girl with Chiclet teeth. Under her, the caption read: “Lose your accent now! Improve your professional life by sounding American!”

I regretted my sarcastic
impressed
, wished I had taken a cigarette just to be kind. I didn’t want my students to lose their accents or “sound American.” Especially, for some reason, Da Ge.

That night I woke from a dream in which I spun like a naked dreidel in front of dozens of students, and had no lesson plans. It was 3:48
A.M
., and I staggered upstairs to my best friend Julia’s apartment and rang the bell twice fast, once slow. She opened the door in a pink tank top and underpants, rubbing her eyes.

“You okay, Aysh?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry to—”

“Sit.” She yawned and walked back in, gesturing to a stool and then lighting the burner under her teapot. I sat.

The floor in Julia’s kitchenette consisted of fifteen pieces of red and white tile we had assembled ourselves after Julia peeled up some linoleum and found a festering jungle underneath. The rest of the studio floor was covered with wood planks; we could only imagine what rat and roach amusement park might be thriving beneath those.

Julia hummed quietly, poured boiling water into mugs, and dunked Sleepytime tea bags in. The cups steamed. I looked out the window, imagined manholes smoking too, waiting for men to lower themselves down ladders under the city. The urge to count something came over me like a craving for food. I took a sip of tea and scalded the roof of my mouth. I hate tea and Julia knew that, but she would never have agreed to serve me coffee in the middle of the night.

“Let’s go to sleep,” she said.

“But I just burnt my mouth, and it feels all hairy.”

“Sleep will cure it.”

I trailed her with my tea. We sat on her gigantic bed, a gift from Greg, the most recent investment banker to have
dumped her. Greg, who looked like he was wearing television makeup on his rubbery mask of a face and said the word ‘aggressive’ constantly. Every time his mouth opened, euphemisms poured out. Needless to say, he had hoped they could be best friends forever.

But they couldn’t of course, so I slept over whenever I couldn’t sleep, approximately five nights a week. It was symbiotic, since Greg’s bed was a lonely ocean. Once I gently suggested getting rid of it, but the delivery service had included “free removal” of her old bed, and Julia didn’t want to buy a new one.

She turned off a standing paper lantern, climbed under the covers, and set to snoring the sleep of the non-neurotic. I sat up, looking out at the night. The skyline was a puzzle of metal, starless but for red light shot out every several seconds by antennae. If I blinked my eyes in time to the flashes, I could keep the city lit red. I did this for a bit; it was a kind of counting sheep, and eventually I fell asleep.

When I awoke the next morning, Julia had left for rehearsal. Giant rectangles of light made a puzzle across her floor. There was a pot of coffee on the counter. I poured a cup, scrawled a thank-you love note, and headed downstairs to my place, carrying the coffee. As I approached my apartment, I heard the phone ringing. I ran into my bedroom and grabbed it, out of breath, expecting my mother.

“Hello?”

“Hi, teacher.” My skin prickled.

“Hi.”

“It is Da Ge. Maybe we can have a lunch now.” It was ten in the morning.

“Oh. Um. I teach at one,” I said.

“I’m study in that class.”

“Right.”

“So we have a lunch, okay?” A smile came into his
voice. “At Tom’s Restaurant? I think it’s not far for you. Maybe we meet at eleven. Then I give you drive.”

He hung up. I sat down on my bed. He knew about Tom’s Diner. He had my phone number, knew where I lived, wanted to drive me to school. Was he a stalker? And if so, how did he manage opposite-side parking? Could he both move the car twenty times a week and take my class? I stumbled into the shower, and the phone rang again. Ready to leap out of the shower if it was Da Ge, I poked my head out, listened. My mother’s chipper morning voice.

“Good morning, darling! I can’t imagine where you are! Up at Julia’s?” She paused, waiting for me to pick up. I stayed in the shower. “Hmmm,” she said, filling half the space on my machine. “Is Adam back in the picture?”

At 10:50 I collected a set of essays my students had written about their hometowns, and some pages torn from ESL workbooks, and left. On 115th, cars were double-parked so tightly it infuriated drivers trying to get through. Some, including the street-cleaning vehicle responsible for the chaos, held their horns down in a blaring, endless honk. That, coupled with a construction team jack-hammering the pavement into kitty litter, created a deafening soundtrack. Now those New York mornings are choreographed into my memory: yuppies sipping coffee from paper cups with fake Greek font, toddlers waddling about Bank Street Nursery School, backpacked undergraduates at Columbia’s gates, and me, small, dark, all eyes and bangs, easing into a diner booth on the corner of 113th. We were all extras, but considered ourselves protagonists.

I sat at Tom’s, spelling words on my fingers. This is a game I liked to play then; if sentences “fit” on multiples of five fingers, they were true. The letters had to land on my pinky to be perfect. “H-e’-l-l b-e l-a-t-e.” Ten clean letters, landing on my pinky. So he would be late.

And he was, by one minute. He walked in as “Batdance” came on the radio, glanced around, took off black sunglasses, his agitated movements like a music video.
Vicky Vale, Vicky Vale. I want to bust that body right, oh yeah.
His eyes were bloodshot, one of them with a bruise seeping underneath it so that the eye itself appeared to be leaking makeup. The rest of his skin was unblemished, stretched over the bones of his face. He had seen me, was making his way over.

“Hi, teacher.”

When he smiled, a broken tooth punctuated the space it had left in his mouth. I knew suddenly that he had irony, although I couldn’t say how I knew. And even though he was using it against me, it was still a prerequisite for my liking anyone. I liked him.

“Hi, Dah. Guh.” I said, putting too much emphasis on the “guh,” because I wanted to show off my ability to get it right. He slid into the seat across from me.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes, I am well, thank you.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was making fun of my class. I thought so, but weighed the options: make fun of him back, find out he wasn’t mocking me and hurt him forever, or say nothing and look earnest and stupid. I chose the earnest and stupid route.

“I’m glad,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

He nodded and called the waitress over.

“What can I get you?” she asked.

“Egg,” said Da Ge. She smiled.

“Only one?”

He looked directly at her. “Maybe give me menu,” he said. I felt for him, wanted to say something to make it okay that she had joked about his single egg, but couldn’t think of what that would be. I fumbled with my napkin, folded and unfolded its edges.

She handed him a greasy menu. “You want coffee?” she asked.

“Tea,” he said, gruff.

“I’d like coffee, please,” I told her. She left.

“Did you look at the workbook?” I asked Da Ge, hopefully.

“I think I need a favor,” he said.

“From me?”

But now he was distracted, staring at the menu. I wondered how good his reading comprehension was, and what he was doing here. In New York. In my diner, in my life. Crowding my space in some specific but unidentifiable way.

“Excuse me!” he shouted at the waitress’s back. She returned, upset, sloshed my coffee down.

“I like tea and this,” said Da Ge, jabbing a finger at the “hearty man” breakfast. Three eggs, bacon, coffee, juice, and a cheese Danish.

“Fine,” the waitress said.

“Do Chinese people like cheese?” I asked Da Ge. Xiao Wang had told the class she thought cheese was a kind of dirt.

“How do I know?”

“You are Chinese, right?”

“But I’m not represent the idea of every peasant. Anyway, what are you?”

“What am I?”

“What are you?”

“I don’t know. American? An English teacher?”

“I mean what
are
you, Not what
do
you.”

I didn’t correct his English. Just like lying about him, a habit I began as soon as Julia asked for details, the practice of never correcting Da Ge’s English snowballed. As a result, I failed to teach him a single thing about language. Or anything else.

“I don’t know,” I started to qualify, but he interrupted me.

“This, I already can tell.”

“You can tell what?”

“I can tell about you.”

His food arrived, lively and yellow on the porcelain plate. I thought of Sesame Street. Big Bird. I wondered whether Big Bird lays eggs. Whether he hatched from one.

“You don’t eat?”

“I eat plenty,” I said, criticized.

“But now?”

“Oh.” I realized he was offering me some of his sweaty food. I swallowed, gagging slightly. “No, no,” I said. “I already ate.” He seemed to soften at this.

“In China,” he said, “We say, ‘Did you eat?’ instead of ‘How are you?’”

“Really?” I thought of Xiao Wang, flushing when he spoke to her. His jaw was moving on the food.

“Why really?” he asked. “It’s weird to you?”

“No, just interesting. I’m interested in languages.”

“You are very American, I think.”

“Yes, I’m American. And?”

“Everything is the thing you know. Americans talk all the time—straight to the point of what. It’s never polite talk.”

He was one to talk, but I said nothing. Da Ge finished his food in several bites. His scar stretched when he opened his mouth; the black eye shined under the diner lights.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Just like this,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like American talk.”

He made a fist and smashed it upward, just missing my face. He blew air out in the sound of a cartoon punch. When I flinched, he laughed, a low and angry laugh that sounded
like it came from somewhere underneath him, not even his stomach but a hollowed-out section of ground. I saw him with a mining hat on, moving through a dark tunnel from which his own laughter emerged. The one bright light, hot in the middle of his forehead, would lead him out behind the echo of his laugh. He was watching me.

My heart rattled in a roller-coaster, Disney-movie-dark-part way. I thought he was the exciting kind of scary, that either doesn’t get realized or returns to safe and happy fast enough to have been worth it.

“What is your thought?” he asked.

I couldn’t have articulated it if I’d wanted to. “What was the favor you mentioned?” I asked, feeling brave.

He shook his head a little, as if reconsidering. “Do you know about Tiananmen?”

I scrambled in my mind for what he might mean and managed, “The protests in June? Of course.” I felt pretty good about having come up with at least that.

He looked skeptical. “Yeah, that ‘protests.’”

“I know only what I saw in the news. Why? What should I know?”

His scar crawled up the side of his face. “Most Americans only know a guy in front of tank,” he said. “But I was at that massacre. I watched that story.”