Susan Conley
award-winning author of five books; her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere; winner of the Maine Book Award, the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council; faculty of the Stonecoast Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine and co-founder of the Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids in Portland
Chapter One
About a year ago my husband handed me a brochure for a retreat in a nearby mountain village. We were standing in our Beijing kitchen while the girls played make-believe dog at our feet. The brochure was more like a handmade pamphlet—four pieces of white computer paper folded in the middle and stapled three times along the crease. There was a grainy photo of a cement terrace on the cover, and a more alarming photo of people sitting in a room with their eyes closed, and text under the photos that explained something called “a day of silence” and yoga and the chance for participants to reinvent themselves. My husband, Lukas, told me these things would make a good week’s vacation for me, and he smiled while I looked at the photos, but it was a distant smile.
He went back to his bowl of rice, and I pressed myself against the edge of our stove until my lower back hurt, and I felt so lonely I almost cannot say. I knew if I went to this village, the week would pass slowly and I’d be changed, and that this was the point of him sending me there, but also that Lukas and I might not ever find each other again.
I’d recently had a small surgery with my thyroid, and the Chinese doctor said I would get better, and he was right and so I did. But I’d been in and out of hospitals that previous winter, and when I was home I lay on the couch while Lukas and the girls continued on with their lives. Myla was eight. Elisabeth was seven. They sweetly cleared their plates and cups from the table and put them in the dishwasher upside down. Lukas often read the bedtime stories, and I saw he was trying hard to help me, but that I wasn’t needed as much as I thought, and that I must learn how to be a different kind of mother. A different kind of wife. It still feels like that now while I write this. That I cannot go back to the way I was before.
I will also say that when Lukas handed me the brochure in our kitchen I didn’t know how to be in a marriage. A real marriage. I’m not sure he did, either. He was from Denmark and had lived in Beijing for fifteen years, making music, and he stormed about the government’s crackdown on journalists and rising nationalism, but I’m not sure he’d ever learned how to really listen.
The day before I left for the retreat we took the girls downtown to a Japanese restaurant called Hatsune, which is lined with dark wood and tatami and serves large ceramic bowls of ramen and a sweet, sticky white rice Myla and Elisabeth love. After the rice got served I told the girls I was going away for the week to a tiny village called Shashan, and they stared at me with their grave eyes and clouds of hair. Then the fresh lemon sodas arrived, and neither of them seemed to register my announcement again, even though it was a rare announcement because I hardly ever left them. They played tic-tac-toe with a small pad of paper and pens I’d brought in my bag, and got up to look at the oversized catfish in the aquarium.
During the meal Elisabeth politely asked for a mayonnaise sandwich even though Hatsune was her favorite restaurant in Beijing, and she has always hated mayonnaise and refused to eat anything with mayonnaise on it. When we got home, Lukas made her the mayonnaise sandwich, and I stayed with her in the kitchen while she ate it so Lukas could put Myla to bed. There are two steel stools with black matte leather seats at the end of the stone counter, and Elisabeth and I sat on these while she ate the whole sandwich, which became, I think, a kind of statement. Her long hair was tucked behind her ears, which saved it from getting in the mayonnaise, and she didn’t say anything else about my leaving for the mountains.
from Elsey Come Home by Susan Conley (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
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