Repeat After Me (39 page)

“Bring Yang Tao,” she said, “and your mom. And Julia Too can sleep over.”

I blew her a kiss through the phone, and hung up. My mom pounced on the bed like she’d been stalking me for hours.

“Who was that?”

“Shannon. She says hi.”

“Oh! Tell her I say hi.”

“I’ve already hung up the phone, Mom.”

“I
really
like him,” my mother said, ignoring me.

I squinted at her. “Yeah?”

“He reminds me a little of Da Ge.”

This made me quiet.

“I don’t mean in you know, that sense. I just mean he’s kind.”

“I don’t know if Da Ge was kind, exactly,” I said, surprised she would even bring him up. We almost never mention him.

“Do you ever talk about him with Julia Too?”

“Yang Tao? We had a scalding conversation about him last night during dinner.”

“I meant Da Ge, but what do you mean,
scalding
?”

“She doesn’t like him as much as I do.” I smiled.

“Does she get a vote?”

“She gets the most votes. If she doesn’t come to like him, I’ll leave him.”

“I’m not sure that’s the right—”

“I know. But this is her house, and she and I have been on our own together a long time. If she’s unhappy it’s not worth it to me.”

“What about you? What about you being happy?”

“Right,” I said. “There is that, I guess.” I shrugged. “But my happiness depends less on Yang Tao than it does on Julia Too.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“In so many words.”

“Maybe that’s all she needed to know. Maybe she’ll like him now.”

“I hope so.”

“Do you ever talk to her about Da Ge?”

I felt exhausted by my mother. “I try to.”

“Do you and Old Chen talk about him?”

“Never.”

Now there was a long, awkward pause.

“I tried to talk to you about your father sometimes, darling.”

“I know you did. Don’t worry about that.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me now?” She looked at me fretfully.

“No,” I said. I did not add that it was late, or that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Instead, I turned mild. It was what my mother would have done.

“I appreciate all your help with Julia Too this summer,” I said.

She sighed with relief. “I want to help give you time to yourself. I think it’s wonderful that you’re writing a story for her. I can’t wait to read the story myself.”

“I hope you like it,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t.

“I will,” she promised. “I wish I’d written something for you.”

I looked at her. “There’s still time.”

My mother and Old Chen showered each other with bizarre presents this morning at dumplings, as is the custom and their habit. My mom brought the old man Cuban cigars, which he loved even though he doesn’t smoke, a Gucci tie, and a Mont Blanc pen set. He had outdone himself with his present for her, a sculpture of a plump ballerina in a rough, textured dress. Spinning, with her arms out and palms up. It reminded me of the giant stone statue in Red
Moon’s courtyard. My mother shrieked with delight when she saw it, and then spent such a long time kvelling and asking questions that Old Chen was finally too embarrassed to continue and had to wave his hands in the air to shush her.

“It’s nothing! It’s nothing!” he said, “just a little gift from China for you to have in New York. Maybe your dance students will like to see this Chinese art.”

“Well,” my mother said, “they’ll have to come to my house to see it, because this is going right in the center of my living room. It’s the most incredible thing I own.”

“Um, can we eat, please?” Julia Too asked.

“It’s like a Chinese Degas in 3-D,” my mother said. “I mean, the delicacy of her body under that rough dress—it’s a statement about human frailty, don’t you think?”

I was worried about how Old Chen might take this, but he smiled. “That’s something common to us all. This piece is called
I don’t know don’t know do you know
.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Old Chen. “That’s why I like it.”

His maid came out with a tray of dumplings, and Julia Too began eating as if we’d been starving her for years. My mother held her chopsticks all the way at the top and lifted a dumpling off the plate as if it were a rare gem she was holding up to the light. She took a tiny nibble and none of the filling dribbled out. I watched, mesmerized.

“What do you mean that’s why you like it—because you don’t know what it means?” Julia Too was asking Old Chen in Chinese.

Old Chen answered her in English, rare for him. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,” he said, “but because it has a song.”

“Or some ancient Chinese wisdom it wants to tell me,” said Julia Too.

A
PHONE CALL WOKE ME ON THE
F
RIDAY MORNING MY
brother was scheduled to come to see me in New York. It was August 10, 1990. Bolts of light jutted through my windows, and I jolted awake at the sound of Bonita Verna’s hello. She was the administrator from Embassy, on the phone. But school didn’t start for three more weeks. Her voice made no sense. Before the words were even out of her mouth, my blood had become something other than blood. It was soda, bubbling through my veins.

“There’s been an accident,” she said, apologetically. “I’m calling the staff.”

I was instantly so cold I thought the baby might be born a Popsicle. I heard my voice as if it were on a tape. “What happened?”

“It’s Ben Rosenbaum. He was assaulted last night outside his apartment. Um. He’s at Mount Sinai.” My lungs clamped shut. “Aysha,” said Bonita, “you still there?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m here. I’m here.” I took some breaths. “Will he be okay?” As soon as I had asked, I already didn’t want to hear.

She said, “They don’t really know yet.” She paused. “Something about his jaw, maybe, or his mouth. It’s wired shut? And something about his eyes, maybe. We’re all
sending a gift together. Should I sign your name?”

Twenty minutes later, I sat facing Julia on my couch and repeating compulsively, “He spoke such complicated English!” She had come over, and we were waiting. “What are we waiting for? What are we waiting for?” I kept asking.

“Try to breathe deeply,” she said. I felt for her. I stood up. I sat down. I stood again.

“Should I call your mom?” she asked. I didn’t think so. How could I explain everything I hadn’t explained? I didn’t think my mother could manage the avalanche of all of it at once. I know, I thought, we would go to Da Ge’s apartment in Chinatown. That would be a way to show him I was worried, to take initiative.

“That sounds fine,” Julia said when I asked her to come. She was scared.

We took the subway to Canal Street in a blur. I wasn’t sure where Da Ge’s apartment had been. We wound through tight streets, purses, fish and fake name-brand watches everywhere. I was frantic to see Da Ge, even to show him off to Julia. We passed a brick wall painted with the words “dim sum.” They seemed nonsensical, the way words get when contorted by repetition. It wasn’t until we accidentally saw the video store where he had rented
Ju Dou
that I recognized his apartment building and pointed at it.

“It’s right over there,” I told Julia. She looked skeptical.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She could not imagine that I knew anyone who lived in Chinatown, or that any of the apartments we were walking toward was familiar to me.

We trekked through the rush of garlic and oil up five flights of stairs, and knocked on 5-I. There was no answer. We waited in the hallway, looking at each other anxiously. The more we knocked, the more agitated I began to feel. A cool, sinking feeling rose through my bones. There was a sickening energy in the building.

“Maybe he’s out. Or doing laundry or something,” Julia said.

“Should we go downstairs?” I asked.

She said sure, relieved to have even a pointless Plan B. But down the stairs in the basement there were no washing machines. I guess Da Ge must have taken his laundry to a laundromat. As we moved from the dingy trash room into a corridor, I saw a shadow against the concrete wall. I stood looking at the shadow. “What’s that?” I asked Julia.

“What?” she said. And then she was screaming for me not to move, not to look, but it was too late. I had already stepped into the hallway and seen him. He was completely still, but had the after-look of hanging, a look I had never seen but recognized instantly, knew in some animal way that involved no words. He hung from a cord strung up over an exposed pipe. His neck was sideways. I couldn’t manage that part somehow, couldn’t take it in. I kept looking at his neck. Why was it sideways like that? Crooked, broken, wrong, the wrong angle, color, shape. There were his clothes: his collar, a button-down shirt I’d never seen, his chest and stomach still underneath. I knew the cargo pants, his thighs, knees, calves. His feet. I looked again, he was whole. But his neck. Why was it sideways like that? He could be rescued, I thought. My eyes fell back to his feet, saw the shiny shoes once maybe or a thousand times, flashing and motionless after what must have been the force of the swinging, and back up his ankles, waist, chest, shoulders, face, his cheek, the scar, everything, suspended, dead. He was dead. The word itself took shape in my mind. He faced down, was looking at the floor. I couldn’t see his eyes, didn’t know if they were open or closed. Underneath him was the metal bucket he had kicked savagely onto its side. I could hear it clattering, feel the cord scraping against the pipes and the delicate skin on his neck. His shoes were untied.

My mother tried to give me a pill, and I told her I was pregnant. There were some policemen in her apartment. Jack was there, in the background. “You’re what?” she said.

I lifted my shirt up and showed my stomach. She put her hand on the baby.

“Oh, Aysha!” she cried, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to, Mom,” I said. “I was waiting for the right moment.”

Maybe we were both thinking about that moment and how it wasn’t the right one. Julia was balled up on the floor, with her knees pulled up to her chest. I had two notes we had found, both in Chinese. I didn’t know what they said. Where was Zhen Ming?

Maybe we should go back to Chinatown, I said. I didn’t remember how we had gotten uptown. My head was on my mom’s shoulder. She combed my static hair with her fingers. The police were peering around. For what? Da Ge? The murder weapon? I thought of Clue. Mr. Tigerfood, on the pipes with the bucket. I didn’t cry. My head was dried up. I thought of the only word left: finished.

It is Friday, I thought, Friday. It’s August. The police were asking me could they ask me. My mother was shouting at someone. My mother, who never shouted. I couldn’t speak at all. Then it was Saturday, early morning. We were at my apartment.

My mother and I were in my bed. Life was a photo album: there were only several moments, and in each of them, we found ourselves in specific poses. I looked at us from the outside, as if flipping pages with plastic sheets over them. I suddenly wanted to have a baby. Of course the fact that I was actually having one was a coincidence. Julia was on the couch in the living room. Adam called. My mother took the call. I didn’t want to talk. My mother fed me some kind of breakfast that involved milk. “For your baby,” she
said, tipping the cup. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to herself. All of a sudden, I remembered my brother.