Repeat After Me (34 page)

“Why that one?” she asked.

“I like that hero,” I told her, “he looks strong and brave to me.”

“Does it remind you of my dad?”

I ran a hand through her bangs. “It reminds me of you.”

Twelve Junes ago the news was full of Tiananmen’s first anniversary. Thousands of teachers and students
gathered at Beijing University to mourn. They sang “The Internationale” and smashed bottles.

Da Ge left my Upper West Side apartment before I was awake on June 4, 1990. I tried madly to find him, left dozens of messages on his machine, alternately worried and cheery. It was a summer Tuesday, and I had nowhere to be, nothing to do. I asked Julia if I could borrow her car, and drove to New Jersey alone to sit outside of my father’s house. I parked in their cul-de-sac and sat fretting about Da Ge, dying for my dad. I hoped to see two seconds of him, even if only walking by a window, but they were gone on vacation. The house was shady and silent. I stayed for two hours anyway, studying the garden she must have planted: blooming marigolds, roses, a bed of half-dead impatiens. I wondered who came to water her summer flowers when she was away. I saw her on a plane, probably resting her head in the crook of my father’s neck. She had a magnificent magnolia tree next to the front door and giant bamboo stalks along the sides of the house.

When the sun began to set, I drove back over the bridge to my mom’s. She was out with Jack, so I let myself in and read news on the blue couch until they came home.

“Hi baby,” My mom said. “You hungry?” She disappeared into the kitchen before I could respond. I could hear her fixing dinner. Jack sat in an armchair across from me.

“What’cha reading?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Just news,” I said.

“Marion Barry’s drug trial started today,” he said, his voice extra-animated.

I nodded, but could barely mask my lack of interest. Jack must have sensed it, because he turned to the Tonys, probably thinking I was artsy. I felt for him.

“I was reading about China, actually,” I said.

“Oh. What about it?” he asked politely.

“It’s the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising.”

“Oh right, of course,” he said.

“Some guy tried to unfurl a banner, and was dragged away,” I reported. “But he kept shouting ‘Rise up!’”

Jack looked me over, trying to guess what I could possibly want in response.

I saved him. “I think it’s brave of him,” I said.

“I guess so,” Jack said. He looked sad.

“They interviewed some parents whose kid got shot in the back while he was biking to work four miles from Tiananmen last summer.”

“That’s terrible,” Jack agreed.

My mom walked into the room with a glass pitcher of gazpacho and three bowls. She began putting placemats on the table.

“The dad kept eighteen pigeons in a cage outside his living-room window,” I was saying. “The mother is having fits of craziness.”

“What are you two talking about?” My mom asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Then she and Jack and I ate soup, salad, and a baguette with brie. We talked about the weather.

I left later, desperate to find Da Ge. And then the day was emptied out and gone. That Tuesday night went blank, and then it was Wednesday. Unable to talk to Da Ge, I decided I would talk about him. For real. Julia and I were at her gym. She was in the hot tub, and I was on my way to join her, not realizing that you’re not supposed to boil your unborn baby in 110-degree water. My stomach looked almost no different; it seemed impossible that a peanut-sized person was in there, growing a spine. I had decided not to tell anyone until I was twelve weeks pregnant—in August. I bought a copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
at
the Columbia Bookstore, and discovered many things I should have been worried about, including eating two thousand kinds of yellow leafy vegetables I had never heard of—five times a day.

I walked the pink tile plank out to the whirlpool, where Julia was submerged in bubbles, leaning back on a jet with one arm stretched out of the water. I slipped in.

“I married Da Ge,” I said.

Julia raised her hands to the surface of the water and looked at them as if she’d never seen them before. I thought I saw something fall behind her face, but she kept whatever it was out of her eyes and words.

“I thought maybe you had,” she said, her voice staying even and warm. Her hair was slicked back, and the bones in her face were jutting out, wet from the steam and tight from chlorine. I loved her as wholly as I ever had. For protecting me from whatever she actually thought. For not bringing up the fact that I hadn’t told her earlier, for not making it about her. For being so familiar and always agreeing to suffocate under the weight of whatever new weirdness I crushed her with.

I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. I couldn’t really think of how to bring it up and then there was, you know, the Adam thing.” As soon as it was out, I wished I hadn’t punished her again, but it was also true. She winced.

“I was waiting for the right moment, I guess,” I said.

“It’s a citizenship thing? Or you’re in love with him?” she asked me.

I couldn’t help but wonder—if I answered about Da Ge, would she tell me that she and Adam were in love? I shrugged.

“Is he in love with you?” she asked hopefully.

I couldn’t lie. “I’m not sure. I hope so.” Hearing this embarrassed me, and Julia, knowing that, spoke right away.

“Have you told him about—?” she gestured toward my stomach.

“No.”

“Why not?”

I sighed. “I don’t know.”

She waited.

“Because what if he has an opinion on whether to keep her?” I asked, “Or worse, what if he doesn’t?”

“Right,” she said. “Why her? Is it a girl?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s a boy, somehow. And i-t-’s n-o-t-a-b-o-y fits on ten fingers.” I watched my fingers pinwheel in front of us as I spelled. “M-y b-a-b-y i-s n-o-t a b-o-y is fifteen.”

Used to this sort of tedium, Julia ignored it. “Are you going to tell him?”

“About the spelling?”

“No,” she played along. “About the baby.”

I smiled. “I guess eventually he’ll notice.”

“And you know for certain that it’s his?”

Did she think it might be Adam’s? And if so, would she be heartbroken?

“It’s his,” I said, and then, “Are you a good babysitter?”

She nodded.

“If I never see Da Ge again after I tell him, will you be the daddy?”

“I’ll start right now,” she said. “We should get a doctor appointment for you to make sure everything is going okay.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll name the little muffin Julia.”

She took my hand tentatively on the walk home and then increased her grip until I thought she might cut my circulation off. I knew, regardless of how many times it had been or whether it was still happening, how sorry she was about Adam. She called her doctor the next day, supplied prenatal vitamins, borrowed
What to Expect
, and began
cooking leaves and weeds and bringing them to my apartment. She fussed over which fish had too much mercury, and bought me organic shampoo so no chemicals could seep into the baby via my hair. I was four and then five and then six weeks pregnant that June. The first time I saw Julia Too’s heartbeat, a bright musical flutter in a sea of green ultra-sound light, Julia One was with me in the room.

Da Ge came back to my apartment at the end of June, looking like a video game character. He appeared at my door, carrying nothing, not even a helmet or his backpack. He hadn’t called or come by since the fourth. I pulled him into the apartment and hugged him and then held him out so I could look at his face. His skinniness had become a kind of horror. I did not ask where he had been. I didn’t want to scare or crowd him, to “remove a fly from his forehead with a hatchet,” as the Chinese saying goes. Maybe his problem was a manageable one, I pretended, something we could address gradually. As for avoiding the topic of our peanut-sized baby, I justified that with circular logic. Having told him nothing, I couldn’t expect him to confide in me, either. And since he didn’t confide in me, I couldn’t very well tell him I was pregnant.

“It’s hot,” I said, “let me fix you some iced tea.”

I cracked ice cubes out of trays and dumped them into a pitcher, poured cold tea over them, and squeezed lemons in. Then we sat on the futon together, drinking and watching light blast into the windows. Time was as slow as heat that summer, the pavement steaming with sun and pollution.

Tears were percolating under my eyes. “So,” I tried. “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing,” he said, “you?”

We were in an ESL skit. I was crying.

“I’ve been driving out to my dad’s a lot.”

“You have seen your father?”

“No,” I said. I was too tired to form words that didn’t crack. “Vacation.”

“But you go to his house?”

“I sit outside his house.”

He nodded, reached over, and saying nothing about it, wiped my cheek.

“They have a garden,” I said. “She has a garden.”

“Have you seen Xiao Wang?” Da Ge asked, surprising me.

“Her husband’s here, visiting.”

“I know.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t met him yet.”

“I think she’ll like to introduce you,” he said.

“Have you? Met him?”

“No.”

We sat silently for a moment while I tried to conjure up images of a baby’s face with his scar across its fat cheek.

“Will you lie down with me?” I asked. He nodded, and we went into my bedroom where I took his clothes off first, slowly, and then my own. I pulled the covers over our heads. Underneath the blankets we were still and quiet, which I disliked. Feared. I climbed on top of him, propped myself up. If only I knew where he lived, I thought, next time he was lost I could go there and find him.

“Can you take me to your place downtown? I want to see your life,” I said.

“Right now?” He looked at me searchingly, ran his hands up my sides.

“Afterwards,” I said.

That night he took me to a Chinatown restaurant I would never have entered on my own. I wore my cream wedding dress. To my great displeasure, his wax-faced caramel apple of an uncle joined us. Zhen Ming ordered food for the whole table, which I found bizarrely rude, especially since it
involved sea slugs, lobster, and beef tripe. It was a gesture of generous hosting, his way of wining and dining us. I wish I had been able to appreciate that at the time. Zhen Ming and Da Ge spoke in Chinese. Occasionally Da Ge turned to me to mumble a half translation.

“Zhen Ming is a businessman,” he said. I took this to be an apology for not including me; maybe they were talking about business and Da Ge thought I’d be bored or couldn’t understand. Zhen Ming didn’t even try to mask what I took to be his utter lack of interest in me. I pretended to be engrossed in using my chopsticks to hide a shrimp under some fried noodles. Since growing a shrimp in my stomach, I had lost my appetite for the shiny, veiny things. They looked like little intestinal systems to me, science models of internal parts, ultrasound photos. Being pregnant was like being manic; every sensory experience was exaggerated. I kept myself busy for the duration of the dinner by sniffing the air and staring wide-eyed at food I once might have liked, unable to believe that anyone could eat anything but white bread, plain pasta, and marshmallows.

When Zhen Ming finally excused himself to go, Da Ge walked him to the front of the restaurant, shaking his hand the whole way. There was something about the way they walked together, shaking hands, that gave me a bad feeling.

When Da Ge came back to the table alone, I was sullen.

“For you,” he said, “it’s boring.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s boring.”

We stared at each other.

“I think you want to see Chinatown,” he said.

“If I wanted to see it alone, I would have come alone.”

“Tonight,” Da Ge said, looking at me, “you are pretty.”

That was the moment I almost told him. And then the waiter showed up with cubes of cut watermelon, said Zhen
Ming, now long gone, had picked up the tab. And the moment was gone. Someone dropped a glass across the restaurant and it smashed.