Home Leave: A Novel (11 page)

When the Kriegsteins leave Atlanta for Shanghai in 1992, with a six-month layover in Madison, Wisconsin, where Chris’s company headquarters are located, they are desperate to be overseas again. After three months in Shanghai, they will be desperate to return home. Like Persephone’s annual permitted return to her mother aboveground, by the gods in Olympus, the powers that be at Chris’s company will grant the Kriegstein women “home leave” once a year, each summer, when they will stay with friends and relatives, the flights covered by the company. In September they will be forced to leave again, back to China. This habit of home leave will cement Atlanta as “home” in their minds, since they always fly back to the Atlanta airport. In other words, the oblivion of the good years will become dissected, memorized, fossilized, and neatly placed in a glass jar with the label “home.” Years later, as an adult, when asked where she is from, Leah will always say “Atlanta,” as if we come from our joy, as if, aside from their goodness, there was anything to say about the good years.

A
fter several years in Asia, the Kriegsteins will grow accustomed to long layovers in airports, and Sophie and Leah will rank their favorites. Tokyo is number one, for the Oreo cookies you get in the business-class lounge. Any domestic Chinese airport is a nightmare, where you better pray you don’t have to pee. The Seoul airport is number two, for its emptiness, which allows for races down travelators and hide-and-go-seek among the potted plants at midnight, fluorescent light bouncing off the tiled floor, tired Korean flight announcements echoing in the halls. Singapore is ranked number three, for its excellent gummy bears. The Atlanta airport is actually a million times better than all of them, because it means they are back home for the summer.

But for now, the Kriegsteins’ six-month stint in Madison, in between Atlanta and China, is their first and longest layover, a pregnant pause in a spotless midwestern state before heading off to a Communist one. It resembles spending a good while in the shallow end, trying to gather courage before advancing to the deep part of a chilly pool. Their months in Wisconsin are meant to build up their collective confidence, to reassure themselves that moving isn’t a big deal. We can do this, they think, in September, unpacking boxes in their temporary suburban abode, and then, in April, telling themselves the same thing, as they pack them up again. But moving to Wisconsin in order to prepare themselves for China is about as effective as training for surfing in Hawaii by boogie boarding in the Gulf of Mexico.

Over the six months, as Leah takes up the trumpet, as Sophie learns to play ice hockey, and as Elise becomes self-conscious of her southern accent, they forget that they will soon be leaving again. The only reminder of this is their biweekly Mandarin lessons at a local Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon, where they struggle, unsuccessfully, to remember the Chinese words for one another:
Mama
,
Baba
,
Mei Mei
,
Jie Jie
,
Nu er
,
Qi zi
,
Lao Gong
, and console their clumsy mouths with sweet and sour pork and fortune cookies.

In Madison, unlike Atlanta, snow never means you can stay home from school. Oddly, Sophie and Leah spend the six white months eating copious amounts of Dairy Queen Blizzards: Leah orders hers with Nerds, Sophie hers with M&M’S. Elise had anticipated dismissing all midwestern women as repressed robots but is both annoyed and relieved to discover that many are voracious readers and some don’t even shave their legs. Chris, at Logan’s corporate headquarters, being groomed for his upcoming Chinese assignment, looks like a golden retriever who finally, after an agony of searching and frantic paddling in the water, finds his stick and swims back, proud and fully himself. Chris is relieved to be back behind a desk, giving and taking orders, overachieving, and as reticent to talk about more than the weather as all the other German American Lutherans around him.

On April 17, the date of their departure, there is still snow on the ground. Sophie and Leah receive “Good Luck!” cards with signatures from all their classmates. Elise’s new girlfriends throw her a luncheon with no fewer than ten casseroles. Chris’s secretary shyly presents him with a certificate to Chili’s, which Chris irrationally packs to carry with him to Shanghai, even though it will be three years before a McDonald’s comes to Shanghai, let alone a Chili’s.

The Kriegsteins wave good-bye to Wisconsin with studied ease, board the Northwest plane, and snuggle into business class feeling like celebrities. It is only midflight, four hours from Tokyo, that Elise panics about not having put Ada’s quilts in storage, Leah has a nightmare about getting her period the first day of school, Sophie can’t get warm under the thin Northwest blanket, and Chris stares at his blank yellow legal pad, trying to come up with a stirring speech to give his new employees on the first day. The plane soars serenely over the Pacific Ocean.

C
hris’s great-grandmother, Mechthild Mayer, left her village in northwest Germany at the tail end of summer, as winter’s hard red berries popped onto bushes, as the
Septemberkraut
began to brown. She wept on the train to Hamburg, wept as she boarded the ship that would take her across the Atlantic. She wept across the pitching, aching passage, pausing only to vomit overboard, wipe her mouth with her sleeve, and continue where she’d left off. At first, the other passengers tried to comfort her. When she did not respond, but simply wept harder, they began ignoring her. Her sobs continued, and they grew irritated. They made fun of her or yelled at her to shut up, depending on their moods.

Only a little girl, Katha, seven years old, whose mother was too busy taking care of her brothers and sisters to notice her absence, was kind to Mechthild. For Katha, the crying woman, who sat immobile, aside from her shaking shoulders, was like a giant doll. Katha combed and braided Mechthild’s hair, told her stories as she stroked her hand, and bossed her around, telling her she should find a husband, repeating what she’d heard her mother say about Mechthild to the other women. And Mechthild wept, beautifully. It was what Katha liked most about her.

Just one month earlier, Mechthild had laughed at sentimental women, the kind who cried when the bread came out wrong, or when their sweethearts forgot their birthdays. That was before she had rounded the corner in her small house, where she lived with her parents and her older brother, having forgotten coins for shopping in the village market, and entered her parents’ bedroom, the midmorning sun falling gloriously on the entwined bodies of her mother and Mechthild’s fiancé.

That image, so stunningly, unquestionably lit, like the stained glass scenes of Christ in the village church, which Mechthild had loved to stare at as a child as the preacher droned on, would not leave her vision now. The gray, choppy sea, the rough pine of her bunk, Katha’s large blue eyes and grave gaze, taking her in, merely framed the other image, the horror. When the ship reached New York and the passengers stepped, shakily, onto land, they were so consumed with the details of their new life in the new country—counting offspring, practicing English words, sniffing the air expectantly—that they didn’t notice Mechthild had stopped crying.

Mechthild never returned to Germany, though she spoke German with Gregor Kriegstein, the man she wound up marrying two years later, whom she chose for his doglike loyalty and his toughness. Gregor would make it in America, she could tell. He was a thick branch hanging above her, as she was being swept down a cold current, which she grabbed and held on to. It was she who would have affairs, later, while Gregor was in the fields, after they had moved to a German community in Indiana and begun a small farm. It would occur to her, picking hay out of her hair, lying in a square of hot afternoon light in the barn, in the arms of a neighbor, that her decision to emigrate, the moment she left her parents’ bedroom, had been a melodramatic one. It had just been lust, after all. The long voyage, the years of hard labor and loneliness, the foreign taste of English on her tongue: her mother probably wouldn’t have slept with her fiancé again, after being caught, and Mechthild could have kept her place at the table at Sunday dinners.

Mechthild did not have a child until she was forty-two. She had assumed she was barren until the sperm of the Polish handyman, traveling through town, repairing broken farm machinery in return for a warm meal, was lively enough to rouse her lethargic eggs, and she gave birth to a black-headed screamer the following February, to her blond husband’s resigned suspicion and to her great joy.

What would Mechthild Mayer have said, watching the four Kriegsteins climb out of the airplane in Shanghai after a mere twenty hours (as opposed to her twelve-day sea voyage), stretching from the flight, searching for their baggage on the carousel, Chris trying to assume a manly knowingness, Elise looking after the girls, Leah taking Sophie’s hand, the four of them walking to the taxi that would take them to their new home? Mechthild would have laughed. Laughed and laughed, just as long and hard as she had wept on the ship to America. To think that her descendants, after all her struggles as an immigrant, would have the arrogance to simply up and relocate, to another continent, another culture, with no thought of the consequences of their actions. Or perhaps their relocation was the very consequence of her own actions? At this point, Mechthild would have stopped laughing and concentrated all of her energy on wishing them well.

T
hose first days, we were awoken by the sounds of ballroom dance music at dawn. Old tunes from the fifties, like “Jailhouse Rock,” along with waltzes and tangos.

“This is exactly why I said I’d never live in an apartment building again,” Mom told Dad on our third morning in Shanghai. “Remember the Schmidts in Hamburg? The parties they would throw?”

“You were just mad they never invited you,” he said.

“They ruined John Denver,” Mom said, ignoring him. “You could always tell a party was winding up when ‘Country Road’ started playing, over and over.”

“Hey,” Sophie interrupted. “It stopped.”

We all listened. She was right. The apartment was silent, except for the refrigerator whirr and a distant whine of traffic. Then “What a Wonderful World” started up.

“That’s it,” Mom said, and stormed out. Five minutes later, she came back, mystified. “It’s not the neighbors,” she said. “I think it’s coming from outside.”

We all crowded onto the balcony. It was just after seven, and the sun had barely risen. I stayed close to the door because I didn’t like heights, and our apartment was on the thirtieth floor. Mom was right—the music was coming from the street. It had to be deafening down there, because it was still loud by the time it got up to us.

“Over there maybe?” Mom pointed vaguely across the street.

“I can see it; there, in front of the big building!” Sophie’s voice was shrill with triumph. Of the two of us, she always spotted things first, but only because she was obsessed with winning. Technically, I had the better eyesight, a fact proven each time we went to the doctor for eye exams, which drove her crazy. “Down there!” she yelled, even though we were right beside her. “They’re dancing!”

We had already begun to say “they” to refer to “them,” i.e., the locals, the Shanghainese, the not-us. Those first weeks were full of “What do you think they’re yelling about?” and “Are they pointing at us?”

Dad looked at his watch. “I need to run.”

“Can we go down there, Mom?” Sophie asked. “I
have
to check this out.”

Mom looked at me. “I’ll keep an eye on her,” I said.

“Like I need it,” Sophie scoffed, and went after her sneakers.

“Take the swipe card to the apartment building,” Mom said, fishing through her purse in the living room. “Here’s the apartment key. If they look upset that you’re there, come back up right away. Maybe it’s closed to foreigners.”

“Mom.” I rolled my eyes. “Come on, it’s a public square. The
People’s
Square, remember?” We’d learned that much from a short tour around our neighborhood the previous day, led by one of Dad’s employees. Sophie and I had spent the half hour giggling and poking each other whenever we saw stuff like the neat rips in Chinese toddlers’ pants, so they could do their business anywhere; or how people spat on the street as casually as if they were blowing their nose into a Kleenex. Back in our neighborhood in Atlanta, Sophie had been something of a spitting legend: she could spit as far and aim as well as any of the boys. “This is my kind of country,” she had whispered to me, watching an elderly lady let one sail across the sidewalk, prompting Dad to turn around and shush us.

“Yeah, the People’s Square!” Sophie called now, from the hallway. “As in, all people, including Americans:
helloooo!
” That elongated “hello” was a new tic of hers, something she had picked up during our six months in Madison that I wished she hadn’t. “Come on, Leah! Before they’re gone!” She was out the door. Mom smiled ruefully at me.

“Careful crossing the street,” she said.

I laughed obligingly. It was our family’s first inside-China-joke, since we’d nearly gotten run over every time we’d attempted to cross the street in the past two days. “Deal,” I said. I liked my new wise-older-sister role, which had somehow fallen on me with the move. I gave Mom a tired, grown-up-looking smile in return.

I dropped the smile as soon as I left our apartment. Sophie was in the elevator, holding the doors, which had begun to squawk in protest. “What took you so long?” she demanded. I hurled myself inside just before the doors shut.

“Ha!” I said.

“Ha yourself,” Sophie returned, and we both started jumping up and down as if we were on a trampoline, acting on a recent discovery. If you jumped right before the elevator stopped on a floor, it “shielded” your stomach, as Sophie said (a word she had made up but pretended she hadn’t), like being on a roller coaster, or going over hills fast in a car. Back when we had a car, that is, back when there were hills.

The Shanghai air hit us as soon as we left the lobby of our apartment building. Dusty and smelly. We giggled at it, like one of us had farted.

“Let’s
go
,” Sophie said, all urgency, and grabbed my hand. We tore down the sidewalk. There was something about being stared at in China that made you want to either go hide under the covers or do something crazy, like scream and sprint down the street. When Sophie was there with me, I often had the latter impulse.

We managed to cross the street, dodging raging bikes and honking cars, and reached the People’s Square, where we slowed down, suddenly shy. We were in a sea of senior citizens. Most of them were dancing to “Twist Again,” but some of them were off to the side, doing random moves with swords. Another pack, farther to the back, looked like somebody had pressed a slow-motion button on them. I punched Sophie in the arm and pointed, but she didn’t even turn around, she was so caught up with the dancers.

Thankfully, nobody was crowding around us, saying “Hello!” or shoving their babies into our arms to take pictures, as they had the few other times we’d left the apartment. “Let’s dance!” Sophie said, and took my hands. I didn’t really feel like dancing, or doing anything to draw attention, but Sophie was already spinning away from me and spinning back, singing “Like we did last summer,” at the top of her lungs. Some of the couples gave us thumbs-up signs, but most seemed to be so intent on the rhythm that they didn’t want to bother with us. They were astonishingly good dancers, didn’t miss a beat. The majority were old married couples, I guessed, but there were also quite a few women dancing together, who looked like they’d gotten fed up with their husbands stepping on their toes and had asked their best girlfriends to be their partners instead.

The only time I’d done any dancing, aside from tap lessons in fourth grade, which I’d done largely to appease my best friend, was at a school dance in Madison, four months before we moved to China. A boy from my grade, Robby Chestnut, had approached me during an R & B song. We began the awkward seesawing step so beloved of middle schoolers, like standing on a rocking boat. “Let’s waltz!” I’d suggested, when the chorus hit. “I don’t know how to waltz,” he replied, probably already regretting he hadn’t approached someone less weird. I didn’t know how to waltz either, but I grabbed his right hand and placed it on the small of my back, took his left, and started moving like I was Scarlett in
Gone with the Wind
. He shuffled along for a few steps before muttering “Sorry,” and fleeing back to his friends. My cheeks burned now, thinking of it. My first day at Shanghai American School was in three days, and I was anxious for a fresh start, determined not to commit social suicide anymore.

After the song, everybody clapped, including Sophie and me. I wandered away from her to get a better look at the geezers in slow motion, until I heard an outraged “Hey!” behind me. I whirled around. Sophie was holding the back of her head like she’d been hit. “What happened?” I demanded, pulling her to the side, as the old people around us began a slow tango. We kept getting knocked by elbows and hips, and received multiple annoyed looks and old-people mutters of disapproval.

“That lady just came up and touched my hair,” Sophie said, jerking her head back in the direction we’d come from. “Let’s get out of here. It’s dumb.”

“Hold on a second. I want to check out those slow people over there.”

“I said, let’s go!” I had never seen Sophie cry, except in photos when we were really little. But it was in her voice now, all right.

“Okay, okay. Take a chill pill.” I scanned the crowd, looking for a path through the spinning bodies. “You first.”

Sophie began moving towards a narrow gap between the dancers and the sword swingers, charging through like she was Moses. I hurried after her and linked arms. “Follow the yellow-brick road,” I sang, and we started doing the yellow-brick skip through the square, not caring now if we collided with the dancers. Some of the old people even tried to imitate us, and I flashed them a smile. Sophie kept her eyes on the ground, singing faintly. But by the time we were back in the elevator, she seemed fully recovered. She didn’t say anything about the lady touching her hair to Mom, so I didn’t either.

The next incident occurred three weeks later, on a trip to Suzhou with Dad’s company. Mom had conned us into going by saying that we could have a sleepover the following Friday with our new friends from school. It was a bizarre bribe, since she would have happily said yes if we’d asked for the sleepover ourselves. Not that I had any friends that I wanted to come over, except for maybe Evgenia, this Russian girl who was the only person in my grade I felt normal around. But something about Mom’s asking looked so desperate, like she didn’t want to be stuck on that trip without us, that I said yes, and knocked Sophie in the ribs when Mom went to the kitchen, and Sophie said, “Yeah, okay,” too.

It was a disaster from the beginning. Dad’s colleagues picked us up in a van, and the driver put in a Michael Jackson CD before we had even left the parking lot. One of the most annoying things about living in Shanghai, I had already discovered, was how Chinese people always expected you to be in love with everything American, just because you came from there. I had always hated Michael Jackson, and hearing him now made me hate him even more. We got stuck in traffic, so what was supposed to be a two-hour trip took three hours. When the CD was through, the driver just played it from the beginning again. “Torture,” I mouthed to Sophie, and she mimed dying a slow death in the backseat, which made me laugh out loud, and Mom shot us a
quit it
look.

Meanwhile Mrs. Li, the wife of Dad’s joint-venture partner, who didn’t speak English but still wouldn’t leave us alone, kept plying us with disgusting local snacks. First she tried feeding us prunes covered with salt and a sourish orange powder, as if prunes themselves weren’t gross enough. Barf. I spit it out in a tissue, to Mom’s everlasting embarrassment. Next up was a packet of tiny dried fish, bones and eyes still intact, which stank up the whole van like a pet food store. Double barf. When Mrs. Li finally brought out the bananas, which looked like Twix bars in comparison to all the other crap, Sophie and I readily agreed to one, our first mistake. Between the driver’s twisting his head around, looking for us to sing along to “Billie Jean,” and Mrs. Li stuffing more bananas in our hands, Sophie and I looked like a low-budget circus act. I glanced at Mom, staring out the window absentmindedly, enjoying the rice fields flying by, and suddenly felt furious. Now I saw why she’d wanted us along: to be deflectors, so she wouldn’t have to deal with Mrs. Li. Convenient. “I think my mom wants a banana,” I told Mrs. Li politely, and turned on my Walkman, as the translator translated my words.

After that, Mary Chapin Carpenter drowned out Michael Jackson, and I relaxed, transported back to my bedroom in Atlanta, where I’d listened to
Shooting Straight in the Dark
a million times. With the headphones on, the translator couldn’t ask me about my favorite school subjects or whether I agreed that Chinese food was the best food in the world. I could see Mom mouthing “teenage moment” to Sophie in the backseat. But it wasn’t a teenage moment. I didn’t mean to act like a teenager; I didn’t feel like a teenager. I didn’t like band posters or lipstick or making friendship bracelets for other girls. I didn’t think listening to your Walkman fell into that category. It was all about survival, about not feeling awful. Mom and Dad had moved us halfway around the world; the least we deserved was the right to take personal timeouts, until we were ready to go back in the game. And sure enough, three songs later, I felt a little bit better, and even finished my banana like a good foreigner.

When we arrived in Suzhou we piled out of the van and went straight to a restaurant, even though we were already stuffed. Dad was the only one of us who ate the “drunken prawns” at lunch, which are exactly like they sound, and which turned me vegetarian, at least for the rest of that day. Dad would do anything to make his Chinese business partners think he was a good guy. Even eat an innocent, flailing, boozed-up shrimp.

Then it was time for a tour of Suzhou in the rain, with a translator who could barely speak English, his accent was so thick. Mom would say I wasn’t being fair, or sympathetic of “cultural differences,” but I honestly tried listening at the beginning and I couldn’t make out a word. I put my headphones back on and avoided eye contact with Mom. Sophie came over to me in the middle of the Suzhou Museum and tried to get me to give her a listen. No way.

It was in the next room, full of long scrolls of Chinese characters, that it happened. We should have known better when we saw the room fill with Chinese kids, all decked out in bright red scarves and blue baseball caps, like they were going to the World Series. Basically, when they saw Sophie they freaked out. I guess I was too tall for them, above their sight lines or something. But they went for Sophie like yellow jackets to strawberry jam. They all wanted to touch her hair. Mr. and Mrs. Li were smiling and laughing about it, like proud grandparents, and Dad was looking at them, smiling too, but I could tell Mom was worried, and suddenly Sophie screamed, superloud, “Get off me!” and booked it out of the room.

I ran after her, and had to run for a while. She sprinted out of the museum, down the road, people pointing and laughing, and then headed for a small park, where there was a pond with no one there, because it was still raining. When I got there she was crying, and I mean, crying crying. I didn’t really know what to do. I put an arm around her, and she shoved me away. “You let them come,” she said. “You were laughing.”