Repeat After Me (38 page)

I arrived at Ocean Seafood five minutes early and saw that Xiao Wang and Jin were already seated. They looked as if they had been at the restaurant for weeks, waiting. I looked at my watch defensively, but Xiao Wang stood and put her hand on my arm, showing Jin how close we were. I was distraught that Da Ge wasn’t there.

“Did you hear from Da Ge?” I asked.

“This is my teacher, Aysha,” she said to Jin, who was standing.

“Aysha, This is my husband, Jin.”

“Of course! Hi, Jin, how are you? I mean, welcome to New York.”

He reached his hand out, and I shook it. He wore gray slacks, a white shirt with a label visible on its sleeve, and, to my surprise, a leather belt with a metal Playboy bunny buckle. He was significantly more handsome than I’d expected, thin and strong with a jaw so defined it made his face look like a TV set. His eyes were animated, suggested intelligence and wit. I felt pathologically nervous, as if he were about to interview me for a job.

“So, um,” I said, “Da Ge didn’t call you, huh?”

Xiao Wang shook her head no.

“Jin already orders for us—he gets nice food, I think you’ll like.”

I tried a polite nod in Jin’s direction. Later, Xiao Wang let it slip that Jin had not approved, that he found me too
luan
, and
hutu
, chaotic and confused, to be a good influence.
I can’t blame him for that impression or for warning Xiao Wang. The fact is, I don’t remember a single moment of our conversation that night, even though Nai Nai’s health had begun falling apart and they must have told me, maybe even talked about it all night. Did I not respond? Did Xiao Wang guess what was happening? That I was pregnant? That Da Ge was gone? She told me months later that that wretched night was when Lili was conceived.

“Maybe because you are pregnant, it’s easier for me to become!” she said.

“But you didn’t even know I was pregnant yet.”

“No matter,” she said, “this is a situation of the body knowing.”

All I knew that night was panic. What I remember is not my pregnancy, the news about Nai Nai, Xiao Wang’s fertility, or Jin’s disapproval. It’s that Da Ge never showed up, and I was frantic because I knew something was terribly wrong.

He never called me about our fight or the dinner he missed. The next day, Wednesday, he was supposed to take his history test. When Xiao Wang called me, it was to say that Nai Nai was bedridden. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her if she knew where Da Ge was. She was crying on the phone. I didn’t know what to say.

I called Da Ge’s and left messages on a machine whose outgoing words I couldn’t understand. I tried apologizing, cajoling, begging, wishing him luck—anything. I said Xiao Wang’s grandmother was sick, that she needed him. I said I needed him. Then I began walking. I walked block after block, uptown disappearing behind me. Exhausted at 42nd Street, I took the subway down to Chinatown. On the train was an ad featuring the Statue of Liberty. The photograph glistened, its water spinning out at me. I studied the city, perched vertically at the edge, while the Statue of Liberty raised her hand, flaming green-gray above the waves. I imagined
calling on her in class. “Yes? Ms. Liberty? Do you have a question?”

On Mott Street, video shops were papered with posters of martial arts movies, the heroes’ faces angling up toward cameras, violent and pretty. The planes of Da Ge’s cheek flashed before me, his scar. I walked into a grocery store that reeked of roots and antlers. Vegetables I’d never seen were stacked, flanked by shelves of condiments so dark and sweet they looked solid. I touched as many things as I could: rice noodles in plastic packages, zip-locked bags of peppercorns, leafy cabbages. I walked the aisles, breathing in hot oil, peppers, fish, and blood. I wondered if babies can smell and then realized of course not, that there’s no air for them yet. Reeling, I bought some Chinese sesame candy and then walked out as fast as I could.

The air outside was damp with heat that made the street lights sweat and glimmer. Fish vendors stood next to tables covered with melted ice and dead fish. The sidewalk was littered with shaved scales. Makeshift awnings hung from the roofs, flapping lazily every time a humid breeze oozed down Canal. I hailed the first cab I saw, pulled the door open, and climbed into the cold world of leather seat, air freshener, and car light that snapped off when I shut the door. “Where to, Miss?”

“Fifth Avenue and Eleventh, please,” I said.

I cooled in the cab, safe. Chinatown, now out the window, was another world, one where I felt sure I’d never been. I unwrapped a piece of sesame candy and put it in my mouth. The rice paper melted on my tongue, the sugar dissolved and left the seeds, rough against the backs of my teeth. I watched the chaos of the city ride by outside, each frame gone as soon as I’d seen it. Then I closed my eyes, leaned my head back. The driver was listening to Latin music. I wondered whether he knew how to salsa and tried to imagine his hips, swaying back and forth.

At Fifth and 11th I paid him and jumped out, ran up the steps to Dr. Meyers. My mind was racing. As soon as I’d begun to have one thought, a new one chased it away. I thought of chasers. Chases, changes, chances. Words scrolled out in my mind, choices. I couldn’t spell sentences because I couldn’t finish them. Afraid, I told Dr. Meyers I might be in trouble.

“Would you consider getting back on lithium?” she asked gently. I hadn’t told her that I’d stopped taking it. I was surprised she had figured it out.

“It’s okay, Aysha,” she said, reading my thought. “I’m not judging.”

“Are you ready?” I asked Dr. Meyers.

“Aysha,” she said, “look at me. Nothing you tell me can shock me. I will not be surprised, and I will not judge you. It will help you make it through whatever you’re suffering if we iron it out.”

I loved the expression “iron it out.”

“I married one of my students, and I’m three months pregnant with his baby,” I told her. When I said it, an image of a baby flashed through my mind, and I imagined I could feel our baby eating sesame candy.

“I see,” Dr. Meyers said.

“I didn’t tell him.”

“You mean you haven’t told the baby’s father that he is the father?” she asked.

I said I hadn’t told him anything, and when she asked what I meant by anything, I told her that I was in love with him.

“Or about the baby,” she said, softly.

“Yes,” I confessed, “or about the baby.”

“Do you want to tell him?” she asked.

I felt stupid. “Actually,” I said, “I was planning to tell him tonight.”

She nodded, encouraging.

“He had his citizenship test and we have a dinner date, but I can’t find him.”

“Is citizenship why you two got married?” she asked me. She was careful with the words. I pictured how they lined up in her mouth first, auditioning for their parts in this sentence. They were well cast, too. Compassionate, nudging words.

“I don’t know,” I told her, honestly. “I think maybe it was the reason he wanted to marry me at first, but it’s complicated. I mean, he knew me in the hospital, but I didn’t realize it, and then he came to my house drunk and my mom was over and she knew him so I asked him and he said he’d been in a motorcycle accident—” I ran out of breath.

“Slow down,” she said. “We can sort this out for a while together.”

I wondered why shrink and laundry vocabulary overlapped so often. We will iron and sort, I thought. I imagined folding sheets with Da Ge again. This time, it would be the four of us: Da Ge, Dr. Meyers, Xiao Wang, and me. One on each corner of the futon, tucking a contour sheet underneath. At our sleepover, the roof would blow off my apartment building and the four of us would lie on our backs, looking up at the open sky.

“What are you thinking?” Dr. Meyers asked.

I did not hate her for this.

“I am thinking of folding sheets with you and Da Ge, and the roof blowing off my apartment and all of us sleeping in the living room.”

“We’re going to figure this out.” Dr. Meyers promised. She smiled at me with such warmth and patience that I wondered for the first time who her children were.

“Your kids are lucky,” I told her.

“Thank you,” she said. I blinked. Instead of offering me a tissue, she lowered her eyes a bit, so that I would see where
she was looking on the desk. I picked the tissue box up myself and put it on my lap.

“I don’t know where he is,” I said.

“He’ll come back,” she said.

“What should I do?”

“You should wait.”

But he didn’t come back.

I read “Cloud in Trousers” to Julia, who was watching TV from her bed. “You think malaria makes me delirious?” I read. “It happened. / In Odessa it happened. / ‘I’ll come at four,’ Maria promised. / Eight. / Nine. / Ten.”

“This is not a good time to read Russian poets,” Julia said.

“I always think of this when I’m waiting for something. Eight, nine, ten. He was watching the clock, you realize, waiting for her.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But put that down and come watch mindless TV with me.”

“I can’t get back on lithium. The baby will have ten heads.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’ll make it the next six months okay. Come watch.”

She had turned to a talk show, the topic of which was “Married men who dress like women and sleep with other men.” A hostess with breasts so enormous she looked like an inflatable parade float was interviewing a guest who had slept with his wife’s gay brother. Julia changed the channels around and came back to the talk show. The man was going to confront his wife with this information on national TV and ask her to forgive him. Hope flooded me. I crossed my fingers that the baby got some, reached over Julia’s bedside table, and called California information for my brother’s number.

In the last five years, I had spoken with Benj only a couple of times. Once, when I was seventeen and still living at home, Benj came to New York and stayed with a girlfriend. He and I met for coffee that time, and he seemed to love me
still. We did not talk about our father. Benj was grown-up, with a button-down shirt and clean fingernails.

I saw him a few times when I was at Columbia. And I know he came once when I was hospitalized, because Julia One told me. He wanted both to come to the hospital, and, if possible, to avoid my mom. So he and Julia coordinated. I do not remember that visit at all, but Julia told me later that he was “dignified.” At her studio, I dialed the digits an operator had given me, and it seemed like magic when Benj picked up somewhere sunny on the other end.

“Hi, Benj?” I asked.

“Is this Aysha?”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“Hi. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“You, too. What’s up, Aysh?”

“Could you come home, please?”

He paused. “To New York?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, I know it’s—”

“Is Mom okay?”

I was surprised to hear him ask this.

“She’s fine, Benj. I just really want to see you.”

“Oh. Okay. Um. Of course. Let me figure out a ticket.”

Out of family habit or love, Benj spared me the embarrassment of further questions. I had never asked him for anything at all before, not even information on our parents. I wondered if now that the dam was broken and I’d begun begging favors, there would be no stopping me. I waited for him to respond. There was a shuffling on the phone, like newspapers.

“Would Friday work?” he asked me. “I have to work tomorrow, but I could come Friday night on a red-eye maybe and then—”

“That would be perfect, Benj—I can’t tell you how glad I’d be to see you,” I told him. “What should I cook?”

“Do you cook?”

“For you I can,” I said.

Relieved that I had this happy news to hold on to, I repeated the conversation to Julia, word for word. She asked what we’d do while he was here.

“I’m going to tell him about Da Ge,” I said.

“What about him?”

“That we’re married and I’m having a baby. I think if he’s here, he’ll see that it’s all okay, that I’m okay—and he can meet Da Ge, I guess. And maybe see my mom.”

“I’d like to meet Da Ge too,” she said. It was characteristically generous of her not to count the drunken encounter in my hallway or whatever glimpses she’d caught of him in the hospital as “meeting him,” not even to mention those. I thought of my fight with him and wondered where he was right now, what he was doing. I hoped as hard as I could that he was okay, closed my eyes, and failed to conjure up his face.

My mother came into my bedroom last night while I was on the phone with Shannon, gossiping about my trip to the embassy with Teacher Hao’s daughter. She got her visa. “Honestly,” I was telling Shannon, “I don’t know anyone—it was just luck.”

“Did you cosign her financial papers?”

“Yeah, but that’s not always enough. She’s a brilliant student, and a huge patriot. She’s definitely coming back.”

“We’ll see,” Shannon said.

“Since when are you so cynical?” I asked. “And besides, life in the States isn’t better than life here anymore. Why would she want to stay?”

“She’ll marry an American,” Shannon said. My mom was tapping her foot.

“I gotta run,” I said. “My mom. I’ll see you Friday night for majhong?”