Repeat After Me

  Repeat After Me

  Repeat After Me

  RACHEL DEWOSKIN

  First eBook edition 2011

  This edition first published in the UK in 2010 by

  Duckworth Overlook

  90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF

  Tel: 020 7490 7300 Fax: 020 7490 0080

  info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  Copyright © 2009 by Rachel DeWoskin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBNs

  Mobipocket 978-0-7156-4121-7

  ePub 978-0-7156-4120-0

  Adobe PDF 978-0-7156-4119-4

  For Zayd, for Dalin, for Light.

  Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is

  To watch the year repeat its days.

  It is as if I could dip my hand down

  Into time and scoop up

  Blue and green lozenges of April heat

  A year ago in another country.

  I can feel that other day running underneath this one

  Like an old video tape—here we go fast around the last corner

  Up the hill to his house, shadows

  —ANNE CARSON, Glass, Irony and God

  September 1989, New York, NY

  Dear Teacher,

  In 1966 I am born in cement four garden courtyard house in Beijing PRC. That house belong to the father and mother of my father. They are handsome old couple. My Grandmother is kind of lady with tall hair and wearing a jacket and winter underwears until summer. When I am small she force me to wear it too, so I have to hide in the alleyway and shed that underwears so the other boys will not curse and mock me. Her dumplings are tasty, filled with pork and garlic greens when we have some or grass when we have nothing. My Grandfather is quiet, maybe too “henpeck” by my Grandmother. Or maybe because he do not like my father. He only love books and birds. And me. I like that grandfather very much. He never speak, just read that old books and keep birds and carry those cages every day to Ritan Park. He swing the cages so the birds will feel exciting, not bored. This kind of birds love that swing activity. It trick them to think they will fly away. My Grandmother smoke a lot of tobacco but she is kindly lady. From the moment I am born, she can see my macho natural. For her it’s ok. But even though later it attract many girl, it scare my mother that I am this machismo son (thank you for teach me this word. I think it express my feeling in English very well).

  Da Ge

  CHAPTER ONE

  Septembers

  I MET DA GE ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN THE FALL OF 1989. New York was orange and confident then, leaves breezing the curbs and towers poking above the skyline. I was teaching English as a second language at a school called Embassy when he arrived two weeks and fifteen minutes late. He stood in the doorway watching the class with an expression it was hard to identify—some combination of grin, smirk, and sneer. I thought he might be shy.

  “Hi,” I said, “come on in.”

  He didn’t move. “I’m Da Ge,” he said, hacking the G out of his throat. Dah Guh. I thought maybe people mispronounced his name all the time. Or that he was a chain smoker and couldn’t speak without choking. When he looked up, it was from the tops of his eyes, with the sullen affect of a teenager.

  “The G is hard,” he added. “Dah. Guh.” I smiled, delighted that he knew the difference between a hard and a soft consonant. Maybe he’d be my teacher’s pet.

  Although I must say he didn’t look the part. My students and I stared at him, curious. He was wiry, wearing ill-fitting jeans held up by a metal belt. He had a double-breasted navy blue wool coat, which although clearly expensive, gave him a bird-scaring affect. A scar extended from his left cheekbone to his jaw, raw and raised enough to seem recent. His hair flopped over his eyes, and he pushed it out of the way several times. He had the cumulative undereye shadows that mark a real insomniac, and surprisingly shiny shoes. He carried a blue backpack.

  When he turned to take a seat, I noticed that the backpack had a cartoon duck and rabbit on it, both wearing spacesuits. Planets floated by. Under the duck were the letters “Ur,” followed by a hyphen. Under the rabbit it said, “anus.” It took me a minute. Uranus! It was a teachable moment; I should have explained why it’s safest not to hyphenate certain words. But I was too chicken.

  “Hi, Da Ge,” I said. “I’m Aysha Silvermintz. You can call me Aysha.”

  He didn’t respond. I turned to the class.

  “Run,” I said.

  “Ran,” they said back to me.

  “Tomorrow?”

  Someone said, “Will ran,” someone else, “Running!”

  “Ingyum,” I coaxed. “Tomorrow I . . .” She looked away.

  “Someone help her,” I said. No one responded.

  “Da Ge?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know the future tense of run?”

  He stared at me lazily, moving his eyes from my shoulders down to my waist and then back up. I felt something like irritation rise hot to the roots of my hair in a blush.

  “Run,” he said. I tried to mask my annoyance.

  “What does it require in front of it?”

  “Something to chase.”

  So his English was too good for my class. I decided to let him carry the backpack for the rest of his life.

  “Who can help Ingyum out?” I asked.

  “It’s ‘will run,’” said Chase.

  “Thank you, Chase. Ingyum, can you use ‘will run’ in a sentence?”

  “Um. I will run. You will run.”

  “When?”

  “I will run tomorrow,” she said. “And you will run tomorrow.”

  “Great!” I said. Now I felt like the teacher again.

  Then Da Ge rolled his eyes and murmured, “I give big fuck,” under his breath. If he’d gotten the syntax right, maybe I would have felt attacked. But I looked straight at him and tried not to laugh.

  “Say it louder,” I encouraged. He glared.

  “The only way to make progress is to let everyone hear what you say.”

  “I give big fuck,” he said.

  “A big fuck,” I corrected him, my mouth twitching. “I give a big fuck. Or, to punctuate the sarcasm, you could also say, ‘Like I give a fuck.’ The ‘big’ is weird.” I waited for what I thought was a polite interval before turning to my other students.

  “Let’s ask Da Ge some questions,” I suggested. He was staring at me with an openness I found brazen.

  There were four students in the course that semester, all adults. Ingyum was from Seoul; her husband had been invited by Columbia’s political science department, and their kids already spoke fast, fluent slang. Chase and Russ were cousins from the Dominican Republic who worked as security guards on the Upper East Side. They said the doorman had helped them pick their American names. When I asked what they’d been called originally, they looked at each other, confirmed the existence of some private contract, and said they preferred to be called by their new names.

  Then there was Xiao Wang, a Chinese woman who never spoke unless I demanded it and had only smiled once so far—a wide, accidental beam—when Ingyum had sung a song in English.

  And now there was Da Ge.

  “Where are you from, Mister?” Ingyum asked.

  Da Ge glowered. “New York,” he said, in a tough voice. But it was difficult to be surly in someone else’s native language, and he made for a skinny, inconsistent rebel. I smiled.

&nb
sp; “Chase, please ask Da Ge some questions.”

  “Where is your hometown?”

  “Good one!” I said.

  “New York,” Da Ge said again.

  Chase was unfazed. “Where is the hometown of your mother?” he asked politely.

  Da Ge yawned. “My mother is from Tangshan,” he admitted.

  Xiao Wang lit up. I called on her immediately. She fumbled for words, her cheeks flaming. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I reminded her. “You don’t have to be sorry. Ask your question.”

  “I’m sorry, are your parents okay for the, um, how do you say dizhen?”

  “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 pin
ky 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.