Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Shrimp and grits?

Like you’ve never had it before. Go eat. She waved at me. We’ll catch up with you later.

• • •

Just after I’ve dumped my plate in the garbage a little girl darts across my path, a blur of pigtails and blue satin, thigh height, poking a smartphone screen. She’s half, I can see that in a second, all Chinese features around the eyes and the mouth, but with an extra broadness in the nose and warm peach tones in her skin. Tall for her age, too. The one time we visited Wudeng with Meimei people came up to us on the street and said, so tall. So fair. So tall. Though Meimei was really particularly neither. And one old woman, a shopkeeper, said, American-born Chinese girls always have enormous breasts. Too much milk! Don’t give her milk. Give her tofu. We all laughed.

I stand there, still by the garbage can, transfixed for a moment. Her mother comes trailing after her, so obviously Chinese, so obviously transplanted — the same dress pants with chunky black heels, the same long ponytail — that I don’t have to wait to hear her piping voice speaking Mandarin and her mother answering back. They see me looking at them; how could they not? And the girl pulls her mother across the room and asks, holding out the phone, in her most polite four-year-old’s voice, excuse me, can you please take a picture of me with my mommy and daddy? I want to show my baby brother, he’s home with the babysitter.

We descend into the living room, with its faux-retro shag carpet, its leather couches and wall-sized TV, its woven baskets and Kara Walker silhouette and Basquiat poster, a room that announces optimism and arrival, a room that makes me wish I had money to give to someone. And I shake the father’s hand. Willard, friend of Peter’s, partner at Accenture. We take photo after photo. Isabella with Daddy, Isabella with Mommy. Mommy and Daddy holding Isabella up in the air like a cheerleader. Isabella Chang-Thomas , she tells me proudly. Finally she loses interest and runs off to join the others, still out on the lawn, and Willard moves off to grab more Lowenbraus, and I turn to the woman, Shen, and say, almost in a whisper, a conspiratorial sotto voce, wo nu’er jiao Meimei.

Conjugating verbs in Chinese is much looser than in English, and depends much more on context. In English you would have to say my daughter’s name was . Or my daughter’s name is. In Chinese the verb by itself seldom has so much power. To be technically correct I should have said, wo nu’er jiao Meimei le, the le indicating a finished action, or, even more unbearably, zhiqian wo you jiao Meimei de nu’er, danshi yinian qian ta sile. I had a daughter named Meimei, but she died two years ago. But you don’t introduce yourself to a stranger this way in any language. Much less the parent of a young child, whose body hasn’t yet acquired the solidity, the independent gravity, the fixed status of a separate human being; who is still for all intents and purposes an extension of your own body, an extra limb.

Your Chinese is excellent, she says. Where did you learn it?

Wudeng, in Hunan, on the north shore of the Yangtze. And where are you from?

Shaoxing. But I met Willard in Shanghai. And where is your family now?

Out of town.

But you live in Baltimore? How does your wife stand it?

What do you mean?

The Chinese families here are so provincial . She wrinkles her nose. No one speaks Chinese to their kids. All they care about is soccer and getting into the right private school. We bought my parents an apartment in Shanghai, and we’re there nearly half the year.

Noreen Phillips appears out of nowhere — it helps that she’s no more than five-two — takes her arm, and says, sorry, Kelly, but I’m going to be rude and steal Shen away for a moment.

Not at all, I say, grateful not to have to come up with a reply. And they leave me there, no drink in hand, temporarily unable to move, staring up at an enormous African mask mounted to the wall: a man’s face, with upraised eyes, his chin sticking out, mouth open, as if he’s trying to swallow raindrops.

The morning of the accident, Meimei was playing with a red boa from her dress-up bin, tying it around herself and twirling through the house, scattering downy feathers everywhere. When I finally returned from the funeral home, after making all the arrangements, it was mid-morning the following day; I’d been up all night in the chaplain’s office at the hospital, waiting for the bodies to be transferred, signing paperwork and trying not to fall asleep. My parents had arrived after midnight. They brought me into the house, all but holding me up at the elbows, and the feathers were everywhere, like a trail of rose petals. We tended to leave her messes till the evening, when we had time to get out the vacuum and clean up. My mother disappeared into the kitchen and brought out a broom, and I said, no. Leave them there. And they stayed for weeks, blowing into clumps, gathering lint.

I had no interest in the future. The future was erased. When you have a young child your world is their world: Meimei’s friends’ parents became our friends; Meimei’s school was the hub of our social life; Meimei’s needs were our needs; all with the promise that this is a full and justifiable life , this is a rationale for staying alive, a bridge to the future, and the arguments and complaining and sorting and competing — speak only Chinese at home? Speak Chinese with Mom and English with Dad? Buy an apartment in the city, or a house in the suburbs? Settle in Boston, or move somewhere with an actual community, like Flushing, or Vancouver, or L.A.? — were just the pulsing blood of that life. Without it, then, now, I’m a dry sponge, I’m thinking with a kind of muted, helpless rage, I’m like this guy, waiting for rain that never comes.

Deep in my pocket, now, against my thigh, my phone comes to life, actual life, with three short buzzes.

Where are you? Didnt leave, did you? Were in the back, come join. M

—

Beyond the pool, the outdoor bar, and the second buffet, at the far edge of an amoeba-shaped patch of grass, I find Martin in a teak easy chair, his legs up, like a mogul, one hand thrown easily over a half-drunk vodka, the other toying with his phone. Robin is gone. How did he do it? I wonder. How did she allow him to disappear so ostentatiously, to sit and — to all appearances — sulk in a corner?

Sit, he says, and slings his feet to one side, giving me a square foot of the end of the chair. Where the heck were you? I thought maybe you’d gotten cold feet or something. I wouldn’t want to be you at this party. Always hate having to go where I’m constantly introducing myself on a Friday night. It’s too much like work.

This is work for me.

Well, okay. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time. I should have had you more under my wing, had you meeting people. That would have been the polite thing, right? But I figured it would be just as good to have you be a fly on the wall. You’re the writer. You have to have your own point of view.

I’d be an outsider no matter what.

You sound offended. Isn’t that the whole point?

No, I say. Look, I’m not offended. Just a little tired. A little overwhelmed. All this double vision. This double life. You’re used to it. You chose it. I’m just a visitor here.

He gazes at me for a second.

Like on Seinfeld , he says, that one where Kramer gets an intern. You know what I’m talking about? Kramerica Industries. You get to live inside my craziness. Well, no worries. It won’t last forever. You’ve got your finger on the button, frankly. You’re the one who has to write it all up.