The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Later that month, I went to South by accident on a day when the students had no school, and bumped into Miss Pauline in the hallway. We talked a little about her work. Her struggles turned out to parallel mine: Without disclosing anything in particular that a given student had shared in therapy, Miss Pauline admitted how difficult it was for her to get some of the newcomers to discuss the past. She often had meaningful conversations with the sisters from Iraq, but she was not as successful with the boys from the Congo. I told her that I had also found the Congolese brothers to be guarded. On the few occasions when I had tried asking about prior events, Solomon had been willing to give some sort of answer, albeit fairly abbreviated, but Methusella had a tendency to just laugh at my questions, as if they struck him as ridiculous—which I’m sure, from his perspective, they must have been. Miss Pauline had similar experiences. I did not know whether to consider this a problem. There was that whole Congolese reticence about digging up the past. How did that mesh with American ideas about therapy and “letting it all out”? Other issues might have been at play, too. My own son is highly reluctant to reveal his emotions, and he would have clammed up in such a scenario as well—in other words, I thought gender played a role. In terms of connecting with the students in Room 142, Miss Pauline was as adept as I could imagine any therapist being, but in certain cases other approaches seemed to work better. Such as sports, especially with the boys.

  * * *

  After Mr. Williams passed along the news that Yonatan was earning medals for the South track team, I started attending his track meets. It was unusual for newcomers to join a sports team during their first year in America, because they were typically too busy trying to learn the language and understand the bus system to figure out after-school activities. (The only other student in Room 142 who was playing a sport was Abigail, who had joined the school’s tennis team.) Several other students from Eritrea were running track, however, and they had recruited Yonatan to join the team.

  The school’s long-distance coach—passionate, intense, freckle-faced, redheaded John Walsh, a math teacher at South—did not mind that he could not communicate directly with the newcomer. Usually he asked one of Yonatan’s friends to serve as their interpreter. Despite their inability to speak one-on-one, by mid-April Mr. Walsh was referring to his new long-distance star as Yoni. Yoni proved to be a devoted team member who never missed a practice or a competition, earning his coach’s respect.

  At one track meet, I found John Walsh sitting in sweatpants on a bitingly cold aluminum bench, in the part of the stands where the South runners had congregated. It was spitting rain and windy—a day stuck halfway between winter and spring. Everybody was huddling into their rain gear, trying to stay warm. Mr. Walsh was surrounded by an island of kids in bright purple, several of whom were spreading mayonnaise onto slabs of white bread and heaping on cold cuts, as they badgered the coach for information about when their given races would be held.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Walsh was conferring with a sports psychologist in training, a young woman in the middle of getting a graduate degree from the University of Denver. I asked her what she had been working on with Mr. Walsh’s long-distance runners. She said she had been teaching them the art of reframing: thinking their way toward victory instead of toward defeat. She had been teaching them about the effect that anxiety had on their performance. Diaphragmatic breathing and positive self-talk were two tools the sports psychologist had given the runners to control their anxiety. “If they are saying to themselves, ‘I won’t get a good time,’ I try to teach them to say, ‘Oh, those are just thoughts, it doesn’t mean it will happen,’ ” she explained. “Or if it’s windy, like today, and they are worried about that, they should remind themselves that the wind will help on one side of the track, even as it will hurt on the other side, so the net effect might be inconsequential.”

  I could see how those tools might help Yonatan in all kinds of settings. Physical exercise itself was immensely healing, because of all the endorphins that the body releases. Also critical for children who have lived through trauma is the ability to form a safe, close relationship with an adult who causes them no harm. I thought of both Mr. Williams and Mr. Walsh as serving in that capacity. Mr. Williams was a gifted teacher, and Mr. Walsh meant the world to his runners, but these relationships were simultaneously augmenting the overall psychological health of their charges, beyond what they were accomplishing in the classroom or out on the track, by teaching the students that it was possible to trust an authority figure.

  Midway through the track meet came the first call for the one-mile. Mr. Walsh mentioned this would be only the fourth time Yonatan had run the one-mile in a formal setting. I spotted the newcomer down in the center of the track, stretching his legs with two Eritrean friends I recognized from their visits to Room 142. Yonatan was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his head and a pair of scanty purple shorts. On his feet were fluorescent orange-and-aqua running shoes that he saved for races, carefully removing the expensive shoes and putting them into his backpack as soon as he finished a competition. Around his neck was the large crucifix that he wore in the classroom every day. He tucked it inside his shirt as he joined the mass of young men gathered at the starting line. A female official fired a bright orange starter pistol, and the young men surged forward.

  Yonatan was blockaded in the middle of the pack. By the end of the first lap, however, he slipped into fourth place. He edged into third place, and then into second. In the final lap of the race, he clung to his second-place position, but then one of the other runners, who had saved more reserves for the close, drew near. At one point, Yonatan glanced back to confirm what he must have been able to hear: footsteps coming from behind. The other runner passed Yonatan about twenty yards from the finish. Once he could see that he was going to place third, Yonatan slowed down significantly. He was barely jogging when he crossed the line. Still, his time was 4:43—a personal best.

  I joined John Walsh on the spectator side of the silver chain-link fence surrounding the track. When Yonatan and an Eritrean friend named Henok drew near, the coach asked Henok to repeat everything he said in Tigrinya. First the coach congratulated Yonatan on running a personal best. Then he told his runner how he could improve. “You looked back,” said Mr. Walsh. “Never look back. Only look ahead. You can hear someone coming from behind, but you need to always be focused on where you’re going.” Yonatan listened to Henok, as his friend repeated what the coach had said, with his hand tucked inside his track shirt, feeling his heart pound from the race he had just run. He nodded at the coach. “Second, you have to finish at your fastest speed,” Mr. Walsh added. “You’ve got to run all the way through the finish line. You can’t slow down right before you get to the end, and you did that.” Yonatan nodded again, as soon as Henok finished speaking.

  Later that day, Yonatan placed second in the two-mile, running the race in 10:46. He took a picture of himself wearing the medal he received and posted it on Facebook and Snapchat, enhancing his fame at South. These days Yonatan’s name was mentioned frequently in the school’s email blasts, and other Eritreans were boasting about his prowess on social media. In the cafeteria, a bevy of followers surrounded him anytime he grabbed a booth. Yonatan was already outperforming most other runners in his age group, and he kept shaving time off his performances. At another meet later that month, Yonatan wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt that said on the back, THE WILLINGNESS AND CAPACITY TO SUFFER. It was a quote from the memoir of long-distance czar Alberto Salazar, a Cuban-American phenomenon, who believed that the key ingredient behind stellar distance running was mental capacity, or sheer guts. Yonatan had that quality, Mr. Walsh believed. He grew visibly excited whenever he spoke about Yoni’s potential. Who knew how fast he would run next year, if he ran cross-country in the fall, and then track in the spring?

  I could see the salutary effect running had on Yonatan here and now. There was a general loosening of his features, a friendlier at
titude toward his peers. Once I began attending his meets, his relationship with me shifted, too, and I started to get shoulder bumps when we passed in the hallways. He had never reached out like that before. Running had filled him with confidence.

  * * *

  For a long time, I had been wondering what emotions Jakleen carried within. She had adopted the hijab without saying why, and then she had taken it off without much of an explanation. “Not bad” was about as explicit as she’d been in terms of naming her inner state. All year long, she kept herself veiled emotionally. That spring, however, as the park burst into color and the classroom came to life, Jakleen also began to reveal herself. One day toward the end of April, she watched Lisbeth engage me in yet another full-on headlock of an embrace. This time, Lisbeth was hugging me because I had inadvertently made her feel embarrassed. I had asked, in English, “What is your favorite food?” And Lisbeth had answered happily, “I’m doing fine! How are you?” I had laughed out loud. Then I had said, in Spanish, “Lisbeth, no, no, I’m asking, ‘What’s your favorite food?’ ” She had said, “Oh! Pupusas! ” And then she gave me the big, slamming hug, to accommodate her chagrin.

  Jakleen took in all of this. Then she walked over with her composition notebook and opened it up to a page of black, flowing Arabic script. She knew that I loved the way Arabic handwriting looked. Previously, Mariam and Jakleen had spent an entire lunch hour amusing me by writing derogatory things about one another in beautiful yet indecipherable letters heading right to left across Mr. Williams’s whiteboard. When I asked Mariam what she had written, she said gleefully, “Jakleen is a donkey!” And when I asked Jakleen to translate her response, she replied, “Mariam is a fish!”

  But what was in her composition notebook? Jakleen stared expectantly at me. I knew she had been watching me interact with her new best friend, the compulsively gregarious girl from El Salvador. I figured she wanted to give me some sort of hug, too, but she possessed a more restrained personality; she had opened her notebook instead of her arms. And her face was saying, Look at this. She was sharing something important, I could see, but the page she offered was covered in that gorgeously drawn but to me unreadable script. All I knew was she was saying something from her qalb. I told her I wished that I could read Arabic.

  “Yes, yes!” Jakleen said impatiently.

  She grabbed her cell phone. She typed speedily into Google Translate, and I could see various English phrases pop up as Google tried to ascertain her meaning. Her cell phone said, alternately, “Do you like poetry?” Then it asked, “Do you like Allah?” And then, “Do you like amchi?” That satisfied her; she held up that question.

  What was amchi? I had no idea, but I gathered it might be something untranslatable. Which probably meant that it was critical. What was she trying to convey?

  “Jakleen, I don’t understand, I’m so sorry,” I told her.

  She tapped her notebook and said, “My father.”

  “This is a letter to your father?”

  “Yes.”

  I asked if I could photograph the pages, maybe someone could translate them for me. She nodded. When I ran my fingers over the paper, it was like reading Braille inversely. She had pressed down so hard the script was palpable. Although I couldn’t read the letter, I liked being handed this undeciphered declaration. I was glad it was in Arabic. It made me wonder, What did she sound like in her own tongue? And, of course, I also longed to know, What did the letter say?

  6

  * * *

  Busy, Busy, Busy

  Ebtisam opened her door, hair tangled, wearing a camisole and pajama bottoms. It was 7:30 in the morning. We lived close to the mountains, in a place where winter stretched late, and even though it was April, outside the snow was coming down thick and heavy.

  “Holiday!” Ebtisam announced sleepily.

  It was not an official holiday. At South, Mr. Williams was busy teaching the students who had braved the lousy weather. Jakleen and Mariam were sound asleep in their beds, however, as their mother had looked outside and concluded that nobody was going anywhere. Her decision demonstrated a certain wisdom, for I had driven past three car accidents on my way to her apartment, including one crash that had left a city bus jackknifed across the road. I felt bad about rousing Ebtisam (we had planned to spend the day together), but the visit also illuminated for me the mind-set that existed in her household: Clearly she endorsed the idea of her daughters staying at home whenever the weather was foul. I told her to go back to sleep.

  Several weeks later, it happened to be snowing again on a day when I had made plans to meet Jakleen and Mariam during their lunch hour. Knowing we would find the two girls at home, I telephoned Nabiha and she telephoned Ebtisam to ask if we could meet her daughters at the apartment. Ebtisam said that would be fine. She was not at home herself, because she had just found a job. She was working on an assembly line at a small family-owned manufacturing company, and her shift started at 6 A.M. When Nabiha and I arrived at Pine Creek, close to ten, we found Jakleen and Mariam still in their pajamas (another word that had moved from Arabic into English through Spanish), sitting at the breakfast table, eating flatbread and drinking black tea. Watching over them was a family friend named Sara, a Christian woman from Saudi Arabia. She was an old friend of Ebtisam’s husband’s family; at this point, she had become Ebtisam’s closest friend in the United States. Sara was spending the week with the family, so that she could help with the girls as Ebtisam was transitioning into her new routine. That morning, Sara had been in charge of getting the girls out the door, but she had failed to do so because Jakleen had woken up saying that her arm hurt, due to another round of vaccinations, and then Mariam had said that if Jakleen got to stay home, she didn’t want to go to school, either. They greeted us with guilty, pleased smiles about being caught at home, where they were patently enjoying themselves.

  We all hung out for a while in the living room. Then Sara started watching a Saudi Arabian soap opera in Arabic, and Jakleen and Mariam showed us their bedroom. It was small and all the floor space was taken up by their two beds. Mariam slept in an attractive antique bedframe with tall legs that resulted in her double bed being perched very high off the ground. In contrast, Jakleen’s single bed was very low. Her bedframe was white-painted wood, but the frame was broken, and one of the corners lurched to the ground at an angle. Jakleen had piled three pillows there, to keep herself level.

  The only other furniture in the room were two dressers, which stood side by side. One was cheap, modern, and black, with a sadly hanging broken door, and the other was a nice old piece with a big round mirror. The girls kept their room orderly, and even the objects on their dressers were lined up in rows. On top of the antique dresser with the mirror they had grouped five bottles of perfume, three bottles of dark brown hair dye, one bottle of foundation, one tube of mascara, one tube of lip gloss, one box of eye shadow, and two hairbrushes. A perfume called Sweet Sensation came in a round pale pink glass bottle, and it had been placed in the very middle of the arrangement, like a centerpiece. Only two things hung on the walls: a Revlon hair dryer, attached by a thumbtack, and a black-and-white paper bag from Sephora, also affixed by a thumbtack.

  In their closet, there were eighteen hangers, and many inches of empty space. Between the two of them, the girls had three jackets, two sweaters, six pairs of trousers, and half a dozen tops. Some folded-up sweaters lay on the floor in neat piles. High up on a shelf above the items of clothing stood a row of stupendously high heels. All eight pairs belonged to Mariam, who was much shorter than Jakleen, and who often said she wished for greater height (“I want tall!” she told me one day at school). When she had worked as a waitress in Turkey, she had devoted her earnings to amass this teetering shoe collection. One pair had scary-looking six-inch heels, while the rest were all at least four inches high—they were the type of shoes in which you could get hurt. Jakleen said her older sister was shoe-crazy. Catching sight of the vampy collection of heels was unexpected,
because Mariam came to school every day looking like a librarian, with her hair in a long braid, wearing glasses and big cardigans. She seemed too straitlaced to possess such a daring shoe collection. After I saw what they had to work with, which was pretty meager, I was triply impressed by the way the girls always looked so pulled together.

  While we were sitting on their beds, Mariam mentioned that she had been given a ring by her fiancé, Abdullah, who was twelve years her senior. He had known her when she was a small girl in Syria. He had moved to Turkey after they did, and Mariam reminisced about how he used to take the whole family to amusement parks in Istanbul and Ankara. Jakleen teased her older sister about her so-called dates consisting of activities that were suitable for small children. One month before they had left for the United States, Abdullah had asked Ebtisam if he could marry her daughter. Mariam showed us the engagement ring—a half-inch-wide gold band with tiny diamond chips circling the top and the bottom edges—which she kept hidden in a secret location. She explained that she did not want to wear the ring, in case it got damaged while she was washing the dishes. I wondered if not wearing the ring might also reflect the idea that engagement was not really happening, even though the idea of the relationship remained of central importance. How would they be able to live together? Mariam said maybe someday Abdullah might move to the United States. Meanwhile, Abdullah had been helping her with her math homework, which he was very good at, because he was an engineer. Then we talked about Ghasem, Jakleen’s most assiduous suitor. Recently, the young man from Afghanistan had hopped onto their bus after school—even though doing so took him in the wrong direction—so that he could present Jakleen with a pair of dangling paste earrings, which he had bought with his hard-earned restaurant money. She showed us the earrings. The large stones glittered almost like real gems.