Love in English Read online

  Epigraph

  For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

  And next year’s words await another voice.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Dedication

  For everyone who has ever strained to find the words:

  I hear you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Your Future Depends on Understanding This

  The First Day

  X+Y=My Actual Nightmare

  The Troll Who Lives Under a Bridge

  Eating Cake and Having It Too

  Breaking Ice

  El Objetivo

  La Americana

  Blue Bird

  Can I Spank Your Hoarder?

  A New Friend

  One Thousand Paper Tow Trucks

  When the Going Gets Tough

  Running a Relay

  The Club for Breakfast

  Buckle Up, Honeys

  Con Eso Tengo Bastante

  One Good Thing about America

  I Like Your Buns

  When You Finally Know the Way

  Buen Aniversario

  Counting on It

  No Todo el Monte Es Orégano

  You’re Not Allowed to Talk Aloud

  Potluck

  Albóndigas by Any Other Name

  The Girl with All the Words

  An Afternoon Like Fire Chai

  One Little Box Inside Another

  Noche de Paz

  When Escape Is Required, Check the Kitchen

  Welcome to My Palace

  Qué Vergüenza

  Hay for the Camels

  The Elephant in the Room

  ESL Class, Medium Rare

  Not on the Same Page

  Taking Flight

  In Pink, but Not So Pretty

  Añoro

  Ojos Que No Ven, Corazón Que No Siente

  My First American Wedding

  The Things Unsaid

  The Things Said

  A Thousand Ships

  What’s the Big Idea

  Los Nueva Yores

  Empire State of Mind

  The Worst Call Ever

  The Fallout

  Neither Here Nor There

  Things That Happen at Lockers

  Upside-Down Cake

  Amiga de Verdad

  The Hard Conversation

  The Last Day of the Brain Jock Rebel

  The Things That Call You Home

  The Glossary of Happiness

  One Year Later

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Maria E. Andreu

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Your Future Depends on Understanding This

  Primero, lee todas las instrucciones. No te olvides de llegar hasta el final.

  (Si crees que final es una palabra que entiendes, algún tipo de pista, estás equivocada.)

  Las instrucciones son así: Escucha a todos, aprende todo, mantente al día, no extrañes nada. Y hazlo todo en un idioma que no entiendes.

  ¿Sí?

  Okay. Let’s begin.

  The First Day

  I smooth the front of my skirt, then run a finger on the checked gray felt of the front seat of the car. My toes are cold in my boots even though it is not cold out. I wasn’t nervous this morning getting ready. But now I feel locked in. Like: This is the outfit. This is the day. This is the me that does it, not some imaginary future me.

  My dad studies my face and hands me a box of Tic Tacs, the base of his left hand on the steering wheel, like he’s bracing himself. Tic Tacs. Our old before-school routine since I was little. If there was a reason once, I’ve forgotten it now. I shouldn’t be surprised that there are Tic Tacs here, but I am. Their rattle feels like it comes from far away. I pop one in my mouth. I hand the box back.

  Everything has been strange in the two weeks since my mom and I got to this new country. To our new home in New Jersey, on Eighty-Fifth Street in a small town. It is a place that hasn’t decided if it wants to grow up to be a farm or a strip mall. Everything is green and pushy here, insisting on itself. The landscape is not scrappy like it is back home in Argentina. My mom listens to the radio in Spanish, but it’s not the Spanish we speak. Cashiers always seem to be in such a hurry, like they’re paid by the customer. Another strange thing: we drive everywhere, moving from bubble to bubble—from our dingy new apartment to the car to the store and back. And now this school.

  I sit and look at the building’s unfriendly brick face. My father’s eyes watch me.

  “You will be okay, Ana,” he says in English. He insists that my family only speak English so we can learn it faster. “You just have to get through the first day.”

  That’s not true and he knows it. Today is the first of more days than I can count.

  He continues, “Everyone will want to know who the new student is.”

  I still do not look his way.

  “It’s our new adventure,” he says in a tone that begs me to agree.

  I look at him, finally. It is still jarring, this new father of mine, three years older than the one who last lived with me. His face is rounder. The battalion at the front lines of his head has lost several rows of troops to the Balding Brigade. We used to Skype with him all the time when my mom and I were back home and he was here, but it’s different in person. Everything is different in person.

  Suddenly, I want to cry. I did not ask for this adventure. But as soon as I think that, I feel guilty. I close my eyes and remember my cousins back home telling me how lucky I am. And I am lucky.

  But today I don’t feel lucky at all.

  Los números

  19,000,000: The number of people who apply for the USA Diversity Visa Program each year.

  Less than 1%: Immigrants who get a Green Card.

  17: Times my father entered the immigration lottery to get papers to come to the United States.

  3: Years my dad spent here alone before he sent for me and my mom.

  4: Years of useless English classes.

  14: Friends I left behind. True, laugh-until-you-cry best friends.

  52: Steps I climb to the tiny, airless box of an apartment we now live in.

  57,600: Times I’ve wished I was back home.

  231,100: Words I don’t know in the English language. (According to the Oxford dictionary there are 231,100. We won’t even mention the 47,100 obsolete words.)

  I know I’m lucky. I know there are people who dream of coming to America. I know there are people who are dying to come to America. I know there are people who die to come to America.

  But sometimes I don’t feel lucky at all.

  X+Y=My Actual Nightmare

  School smells different here. Back home, it was a sweet smell, something close to the sugared milk my mom made me when I was sick. Here it is like everything else: foreign. Like bleach and eraser.

  By this third year of high school, I should be the girl who carries the flag in the processions, the one who gets away with just a little more than I could last year, with teachers who have known me since I lost my first baby teeth in my small school that went from kindergarten until the end of high school. All of that is erased now. But then there’s this other feeling that ties have been unfastened, rules on stone tablets have been cracked. I have come to the land where everything is possible.

  Math is the first class of the day. The classroom: too many posters, like a box lined with magazine ads. The kids: arm in arm and laughing even though the teacher is speaking. The teacher: fidgety and black-clad, impossible to understand.

  Here’s another th
ing: I’m overdressed. I’m in a stretchy black skirt, black tights, and a red bolero jacket. At home, I would practically be in uniform in this outfit. But here, the girls are in stretch pants and oversize sweatshirts, hair scraped up into scrunchies on their crowns, faces washed of makeup. One girl is actually wearing plaid pajama bottoms. I’m suddenly self-conscious of the extra time I took to elaborately curl and clip strands of my brown hair around itself so that it does more than just hang halfway down my back, not quite straight, not quite wavy, like it usually does. It would have been more fit for a party than for school even back home, but this morning it somehow felt like a good idea, like putting my best foot forward. Now I realize I look like the only kid who listened to her parents and dressed up for a party. Like I’m trying much too hard.

  There’s this, though: a cute boy is sitting to the left of me. I’m relieved to have a normal thought, just: this is a cute boy. I let myself take a look at him sidelong. He’s wearing a burgundy T-shirt with a line drawing of an old-timey diving helmet. His hair is combed, starting to kick up at the neck like it’s been a week too long since his last haircut. He is everything I imagined American boys to be: Netflix-series handsome, with angular cheekbones and wide, beautiful lips, his skin perfect except for a smattering of spots near his temple, just enough of a shadow on his jaw to make it known he did not shave this morning, but does. He looks relaxed, bored, even, leaning back slightly, flicking a pencil around in long, knobby fingers. He looks like the world is exactly the way he expects it to be. I’ve noticed that about the Americans in my new town. So many of them look like they’ve lived lives empty of bad news, of unpleasant surprises.

  “Ana?” the teacher says, flipping the longer side of her hair back, looking at a list.

  I look around. Could there be more than one?

  “#### ########## ## #####,” she says. She waits, looking at me. She’s expecting something.

  My heart starts pounding. “#######,” she tries again. To me, she could be saying anything. I took four years of English back home. I watched all kinds of subtitled American movies and television shows. It was one of the reasons I didn’t worry about coming here: I knew this place before I got here. Or so I thought. Hearing English here, so fast, it’s impossible to understand. She’s just written a problem on the board. Does she want me to give her the answer? I squint up at the equation. I do know how to do it.

  I walk to the front of the class, wind-tossed trees for legs. I can feel eyes on me, and hear a few snickers in the back of the room. I hear one girl say, “Check this out.” She means me. I’m the “this.” I should take some comfort that at least I understood that snickering.

  I stand next to the teacher, waiting for her to hand me the marker. Her badly dyed hair covers half her face. She looks at me, confused. Giggles are popping up like popcorn in more parts of the class, and so I pick up an extra marker and quickly begin the problem. Two guys laugh louder in the back, and one slaps another on the chest backhanded. Still, the teacher says nothing.

  I search my panicked brain for appropriate words, but all I can say is: “I do . . . math?”

  The whole room bursts into laughter.

  A ripple goes over the teacher’s face, and confusion is replaced with pity. She feels sorry for me.

  “Oh, honey, no,” she says. “###### ######## ## ####### #####.” More words I don’t understand. Finally, she picks up a book off her desk. She asks, slowly and greatly exaggerating her syllables, “You . . . have . . . book?”

  Oh

  Dear

  God.

  She asked me if I had the book, not to come up to the board and do a problem. I clench a fist and rub out what I’ve written on the board with the edge of it. More laughter. My insides turn to ooze and filter down to my knees. Please let me melt and slither away in a liquid version of myself. Preferably an invisible one.

  She says something to the class that sounds scolding, but I can’t make it out through the rushing sound in my ears, a sound like a river. I grab the book from her and make my way back to my desk.

  Deep breath. Don’t cry. Crying would make this so much worse. Still, the shame comes in waves and threatens to pull me down into full-on sobs.

  Don’tcrydon’tcry.

  The teacher talks, but I can’t hear her, just the rushing in my ears. Then she sits down. Her desk seems too big for her. She’s written a page number on the board, plus “1–7.” People are scribbling. She must have assigned problems. I accidentally catch the eye of the boy next to me, the one with the burgundy diver’s helmet T-shirt. He smiles at me.

  I still want my desk to be sucked into another dimension with me in it, so I dart my eyes away.

  I put my things in my bag. The book is huge and barely fits. I shove it in and close the zipper over it. I walk up to the desk. The tears are right under the surface. The teacher looks up again.

  “Bathroom?” I ask.

  Thankfully, that word is a sentence all its own.

  I am

  “I am” is the shortest sentence I know in the English language.

  “Soy” and “estoy” mezclados, like here there is only one way to be, all permanent.

  I am Ana.

  I am from Argentina.

  I have sixteen years.

  I am sixteen years old.

  I am in this place, a “soy” kind of am, not an “estoy” kind of am.

  In Spanish, “estoy” gives you a way out. Here “I am” makes everything sound like an identity. Not a thing that can pass, like in Spanish.

  I am a poet.

  I am a poet without words.

  I am.

  I am.

  I am.

  The Troll Who Lives Under a Bridge

  The next class is my ESL class, which means English as a second language. I walk toward it with relief. I can’t wait to meet the other students who speak Spanish, talk to a teacher in Spanish.

  Anything in Spanish.

  The chairs are in one big circle, the desks pushed up against the walls. The class fills up quickly, and I’m surprised to be among such a diverse group of kids. Out in the halls, it’s a sea of white faces, but here we are a range of different skin tones and identities. There’s a boy wearing a turban, one Black girl with long braids that go down her back, two girls who look East Asian, and a boy with big brown eyes who could be from any number of places. Out there I feel the subtle scent of “foreign” on me, like all the other kids can somehow sense I’m from somewhere else. Something about my clothes, or how I do my hair, some nameless thing I can feel but not fix. Here everyone else has it too. And I imagine it’s even harder for some of them than it is for me.

  Then a thought occurs to me: They all speak Spanish?

  Another white student walks up to the front of the room. He’s in red high-top sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt that says The Clash on it under an open button-down. His hair is cut surfer-style, and he taps a pencil, eraser down, as he watches everyone file in. Why is he up there? When the second bell rings, he clears his throat.

  “I’m Mr. T.,” he says. Oh, he’s the teacher. “In case you were wondering, yes, I’m the teacher,” he says very slowly. “Not that Mr. T. #### ####### ########?”

  I look around. Everyone looks as confused as I do.

  “We’ve got eight kids who speak almost as many languages here. #### ############ ##### ########## ###### with the big new ESL class, am I right?” He laughs. No one else laughs. It begins to dawn on me: If people who speak a bunch of different languages are in one class then that means . . . ESL class is not in Spanish. A class where not only do I not understand the teacher but to understand my classmates we also have to learn multiple languages.

  Or we all have to learn just the one, which feels equally impossible right now.

  He turns to face us. “Okay, ##### ############## ####, people. Who understands me?”

  I tentatively raise my hand, because he’s speaking slowly and I’ve caught enough of what he’s saying from my tel
evision-show-and-lyrics and mostly-a-failure-English-classes-back-home English. Three other students do as well. The others look at us, a familiar panic in their faces, then raise their hands.

  “Okay, that’s good, that’s good. This is my first year here. ########### ######### ####,” he says with a smile. “#### our ESL book.” He holds up a blue book with a bunch of cartoon people shaking hands. He points to a pile on his desk and asks us each to get one.

  He has us turn to page five and then talks about something I don’t understand. The disappointment that this class isn’t in Spanish sits like a troll on my belly, the kind that lurks under a bridge and demands payment before you can cross. That’s English—the troll that won’t let me do anything until I pay him a price I can’t cover.

  The next thirty minutes pass by in a blur. As the clock winds down, the teacher starts going around the room, handing out notebooks from a stack. The one he gives me has a swirling pattern in red. I flip it open and the blank page stares back at me.

  “These are journals. ##### ###### ##########. Write! Write in English. Things you see, ideas, poems, ####, recipes, whatever. Questions. Anything. Only English. Even if you only know one word, write that word. Look up the words you don’t understand.” He holds up his phone. “If you don’t have a phone, ##### a dictionary. Like an app, but on paper.” He laughs at his own joke. “I’ll also be giving you some writing assignments to turn in.”

  The bell rings. That, at least, is one thing we all understand. The whole class gets up and starts filing out the door. I, for one, can’t wait for this day, this never-ending first day, to be over.

  “English journals! Write in them!” Mr. T. calls after us, but we are all already gone.

  Eating Cake and Having It Too

  Here’s a thing that’s the same: My mother still makes lentejas, which I hate, and chuletas, which I love. Her hemisphere has changed, but not her menu.

  “Bernardo, no me digas que no vas a comer más,” she chides my father. She always wants everyone to eat more.

  “Gisela, English at home.”