“Vicki, it’s good to leave your comfort zones,” said her father.
“Yes, and discover adventure,” added her mother. “We love you.”
She got right back up and boarded the plane. She hated good-byes. She didn’t mind a good-bye meant for a short amount of time, but she couldn’t control time or death, so how was she to know the outcome of any good-bye?
As she tucked her large carry-on bag under the seat in front of her, she remembered that she had forgotten to pack the most important thing in her life—Rebecca. Her friend and walking, talking Spanish dictionary. Suddenly she missed Rebecca with an unbearable longing. This was why she couldn’t stop crying. They were supposed to be going to Spain together today. She was supposed to be meeting her at her layover in New York. That was the plan.
She fidgeted with a seat belt that first felt too tight, then too loose. She could control her breathing, but not the plane. No, the pilot would control the plane. She considered walking up front to meet him, but the flight attendant started talking on the microphone so she stayed put. She again bent down, this time pretending to fuss with the purse under her seat. She caught a little air that way, but not enough. She reached up to redirect the air control, aiming it in her face, and asked the people on both sides of her if she could turn their air controls toward her too. For the first time, she carefully watched the flight attendant describe the oxygen-mask procedure.
The darn creatures in her gut decided to rehearse again, but the plane’s takeoff disturbed their choreography, and they scattered about inside her. She felt dizzy, as if the earth were whirling around the sun. Faster and faster it went. But it couldn’t be. That would cheat our calendar days. No fair. The earth must take its full three hundred and sixty five point two days to rotate fully. No speeding allowed.
Dear Grandma,
Here I sit at La Guardia Airport in New York. Rebecca hasn’t arrived yet, but she’s always late and me, well, I’m the early bird. Oh, who’s kidding whom? I know she’s not coming. I’ve kept my end of the deal, and I’ve even brought her team of angels with me. I sure wish she could have kept her end. I don’t feel like boarding this plane without her. I just traded in American money for euros, but I don’t understand how the two relate to one another. I gave one hundred dollars and got a hundred and ten euros. What a deal, I think?! Oh well, if I didn’t have a ton to learn, this wouldn’t be a learning experience.
P.S. I feel alone, but I know we are not alone for a single moment. We are surrounded by beings we cannot see. How I would love to put on glasses that allowed me to see their mammoth white wings glistening and surrounding me like bodyguards!
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
AT BARAJAS AIRPORT, NINE miles outside Madrid, Vicki showed the taxi driver the address she had carefully tucked away in her purse. She silently applauded herself for having written it down in advance and rewarded herself by sitting peacefully and passively in the backseat of the taxi, no verbal effort needed. She had also decided to keep a pad of paper and a crayon in her purse at all times, hoping she could simply scribble pictures of whatever she might need. The crayon reminded her of Rebecca and the goals they had scribbled together on the white paper tablecloth that night. Now, in the backseat of the taxi, Vicki used the crayon to draw a toilet, then a stick figure sipping a glass of water. Well done. Her most urgent, yet basic needs jotted down on flash cards, stored in her purse, just in case her Dutch accent dominated and perhaps trampled over her classroom-learned Spanish accent.
The taxi turned off a busy metropolitan street and pulled up to the curb of a narrow street, lined with meat markets, bread shops and tall apartment buildings decorated with black cast-iron balconies. A woman in her late sixties stood on the curb holding a long, thin loaf of white bread. Vicki wondered if it might be Rosario, the señora she would be living with. Her college had assigned her a Spanish family and given her their address, as well as the names of the family members.
The woman watched Vicki carelessly toss the taxi driver money, and after the taxi driver deposited the luggage on the curb and drove away, she then walked up face-to-face with the American girl. “Vicki?” she asked, wiping her hands on her food-stained apron, then pushing fallen strands of dark gray hair back into the clip of her bun.
“Si, si. Rosario?” asked Vicki.
The Spanish woman nodded, then stepped closer and kissed her, once on each cheek. Vicki could smell the juice of freshly minced garlic on the woman’s skin. Rosario placed the bread under her arm and grabbed two of the heaviest suitcases. Vicki felt embarrassed, as if the woman might be judging her a materialistic American, unable to leave home without everything she owned shoved into two large suitcases, one small carry-on suitcase and two more carry-on bags disguised as purses. She placed her hands over the señora’s hands that smelled of garlic. She wanted to carry her own luggage but, after a tug of war, she surrendered, allowing the woman to drag her load up four flights of stairs.
The climb up the stairs felt long. All the way up, the out-of-breath woman offered her new guest a fast flow of shouted words. The words came loud and fast, and there were no pauses between them. The words, sentences, and paragraphs went unrecognized and sounded like static in her mind. The words hit hard and fast, and with her hands full and her dictionary tucked away in her pocket, she felt as though she had been caught in the midst of a rainstorm with her umbrella at home.
“Baño,” Vicki said once inside the apartment. It triggered no response. “Baño, necesito baño, por favor.” She felt her bladder was ready to burst, like a water balloon hooked to the faucet, as big as it’s going to get. Okay, if her words didn’t sound familiar to Rosario, flash cards surely would, unless Spanish toilets were designed differently from American ones. As she flashed the crayon drawing of what looked like a stick figure sitting on a donut, Rosario took hold of her hand and pulled her down a long, dark, wood-floored hallway.
After the water balloon had been emptied, Vicki tried communicating again. “Agua, por favor.” No one could convince her that “agua” didn’t mean water, yet Rosario again stared in misunderstanding.
“¿Qué?” asked the woman.
“Agua? Agua, por favor.” She had heard the word on Sesame Street her entire life, and the puppets pronounced “agua” no differently than she was saying it now. But then, they were American puppets. Would Spanish puppets say agua differently? How many ways could one possibly say it? After attempting some more unique pronunciations of the word, aware that her Spanish professor might expel her from being a Spanish major if he heard, she took out the picture of the stick figure sipping a glass of water. Proving the worth of pictures, Rosario hurried down the long hallway once more, this time to the room at the end, the kitchen.
“No hurry. It’s not that urgent,” Vicki mumbled to herself as the woman slid around the corner, returning with a glass of agua, which today meant, and had always meant in the past, water in Spanish. “Agua, agua, agua,” practiced Vicki out loud.
The tour of the apartment differed from the tour of the staff house. The place was as cozy as a bed-and-breakfast, and Rosario was as welcoming as an innkeeper. Vicki knew the woman spent most of her time cleaning to make the antique wooden table shine, the silver teacups in the hutch sparkle, and the bed linen smell like a breeze of fresh autumn air. For a moment she feared she might have felt claustrophobic in her new, windowless room—not much larger than a walk-in closet—but at least the ceiling was high. The colors of the apartment, mahogany, rust and shades of brown sang out calmness and peace, like the colors of crisp leaves. Anything bright or pink would clash like a tulip opening in October.
Rosario pulled a chair out from under the dining room table and, with dramatic hand movements, motioned for her to sit down. Then she shouted something about soap and twins over and over in Spanish, and “Victoria, Victoria, Victoria.” It sounded as if she were saying there was a bar of soap that had a twin named Victoria. Beside herself, the woman dramatically turned on the television
and waved toward the screen.
Oh my goodness gracious! I can’t believe what I’m seeing! Vicki covered her mouth with her hand. It’s a Spanish soap opera, and I look exactly like the woman on the screen. Only she’s Spanish and not a true blonde.
Rosario shook her head in disbelief as well, staring at the television, then at Vicki. “Victoria, Victoria, ¿si? ¿si?” She walked up to Vicki and again kissed her once on each cheek, then joined her hands together as if saying a prayer. Vicki felt very welcome, as if this woman had been counting down the days until her arrival. For their first hour together, the Spanish señora and the American student sat at the dining room table eating marinated black olives and watching a soap opera called Victoria.
At supper, they broke bread and ate. Rosario’s chair remained empty as she hurried back and forth into the kitchen for more courses to the meal. There were two other empty chairs as well, and Rosario said something about her two older sons who once sat there but now sat at their tables with their own families. Rosario had a keen eye for when her family wanted the next course, and only then would she introduce it to the table. It started with red table wine, white bread, and more olives. As she brought out a platter of anchovies stuffed with garlic and strips of pimento, she explained that life itself was meant to be savored, just like a meal. “Never rush any part of it,” she said in Spanish, and Vicki proudly translated into English. “The appetizers are as important as the dessert. Si, the beginning is as good as the end.”
Her husband, Señor Lorenzo, sat at the end of the table, and it was hard not to notice his enormous stomach. Vicki wanted to look him in the eyes, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from wandering down to his stomach. It was huge and hardly allowed him to push his chair close to the table, so he sat about a foot away from the table and leaned over to eat. Lorenzo was not at all intimidating. He didn’t give off a man-of-the-house or head-of-the-table personality. He closed his eyes as he chewed, opening them only to glance and smirk at Isabella, his grown daughter sitting next to him.
Next Rosario brought out bowls of stuffed squid boiled in its ink, fried shrimp with cloves of garlic, and seafood soup.
As Vicki glanced down at the bowl of soup before her, nothing had prepared her for what she saw. Tiny black snails were squirming for life. Perhaps instead of all the grammar and history textbooks, her curriculum should have included a text on Spanish cuisine. Was this a cultural thing? The creatures must have been freshly dumped into the soup and hadn’t boiled enough to be dead yet. They squiggled around frantically, taking cover under the hard-boiled eggs.
“My soup is alive! Esta viviendo, look!” Vicki screamed. “They’re still moving!”
All eyes stared at her, the eyes of her new Spanish family, and the eyes of the snails in her bowl, as she stood up, covering her mouth with her hand. She couldn’t possibly eat something slimy and still living. It had taken her several tries before liking sushi, and several more experiences before developing a craving for it, but the sushi she ordered was always dead, and didn’t have little ears and eyes. She brainstormed her escape as she looked toward the door. She would take the bowl of living creatures with her. Surely there was a pond or a mud puddle somewhere. Maybe they came from the Mediterranean Sea. Regardless of where they came from and what they were, they were full of life, and she would set them free. But then she noticed them moving less and less. Too late. They now looked nearly dead and swallowing them might actually put them out of their misery, if they were feeling any. Then again, what were they? She had mentally referred to them as black snails, but had never seen anything quite like them before.
Standing up in the middle of a meal the way she had must have made her Spanish family nervous because they were still silently staring, so she started speaking a universal language—a game of charades.
She patted her stomach, shook her head, then covered her mouth. “Estoy, um, estoy embarazada.” There, she said it, or at least something like it. She told them she was full, or maybe she said embarrassed. She didn’t know which came out.
Silverware dropped, as did a half-chewed anchovy from the father’s mouth. Rosario covered her mouth as she had many times during the soap opera, and they all started talking rapidly at once. Now she had a bowl of dying creatures and a Spanish family in an uproar, all because she had said she was full. It must have offended them.
“No, no. Estoy lleno por que comi en el plano.” She gestured with her hands to demonstrate that she had eaten while up in the sky in the airplane.
Their daughter, Isabella, shouted something loudly, grabbed a maroon- colored velvet pillow off the sofa, and shoved it down her shirt and in front of her stomach. Señor Lorenzo pointed to his daughter’s stuffed stomach, then to Vicki’s.
“Waaa, waaa,” he cried out like a baby with a Spanish accent. No, “Waaa, waaa,” he cried out, like a grown Spanish man pretending to be a baby.
“Oh dear Lord, what did I say? No, I’m not pregnant. Oh no, misunderstanding. Wait, wait.” Vicki slapped her stomach then flipped through the pages of her dictionary and, sure enough, the word embarazada meant pregnant.
Rosario and her husband forgave the misuse of language, but laughed and joked about it. Isabella didn’t find it funny at all. She hardly ate anything and only played with her food throughout the dinner, despite pressure from her parents to eat more. The family talked for quite some time, but Vicki didn’t know what they said and didn’t try to understand. The physical trip to Spain had been accomplishment enough. Perhaps she’d try interpreting another time. Now, she needed a mental rest. She knew she would soon have to wake up and learn this language and this family. She longed to know what Isabella did for work. Was she dating anyone? How old was she? Simple questions in English, but quite complex to ask in a different language.
Soon, the anchovies were eaten, and Rosario brought out a pan with various cold sausages, pâtés, and small pieces of goat’s milk and other cheeses. No one spoke a single word of English, and they all took turns speaking with their new arrival. After each of their questions, Vicki offered them little more than yes and no answers, but they were delighted and she felt like a grown-up bundle of joy, something a stork had dropped off.
Rosario’s colorful meal continued as long as it would have taken for a family of five to go through the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant, eat, then go through and eat ten more times. Who had time for this? How did this family find the time to sit and savor food for hours?
Vicki could taste garlic, onion and tomatoes in the yellow rice topped with green peas and strips of red pepper. Señor Lorenzo took on the responsibility of educating Vicki on his wife’s comida, slowly explaining that rice is a popular ingredient in Spanish cooking and that any firm, white fish can be used with this dish. He patted his wife’s plump behind as she filled his plate, and everyone laughed. Then he picked up a mussel and a clam, and bragged that his wife had spent much of her day cleaning the ingredients for this dinner.
“Did the snails get a bath or shower?” she attempted to ask in Spanish. There was no reply. “Did the creatures enjoy their bath?”
The head of the table shouted something at his wife, and Rosario ran into the kitchen and returned with a bowl of shells, as if to show Vicki where the seafood originally came from.
“Mas, mas,” Señor Lorenzo urged as he broke off more white bread and dipped it in his rice. Mas meant more, so Vicki got a second helping and a third after that. After the ever-so-lively meal, Rosario brought out a bowl full of pears and apples, and they all continued to feast, proving the end was indeed as significant as the beginning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AS THE SUN STARTED TO rise over the city of Madrid, so did the aroma of baking bread from the shops below. Both reached the cast-iron balcony of the apartment four floors up. The noise of the waking metropolitan city worked like an alarm clock each morning, drawing Vicki to the balcony. But Rosario scolded her for standing out there with bare feet, so this morning she put on a pai
r of socks and shoes, and headed down the long hallway to the kitchen for their morning ritual of cookies and milk.
As she headed toward the noise of Rosario clanging pots and pans, there was no evidence that her Spanish sister, Isabella, had been sleeping on the floor. Rosario always picked up her pillows and blankets as soon as her daughter rose each morning, and there seemed to be no resentment toward Vicki for having stolen her closet of a bedroom. Isabella was in her late twenties and still living at home, now sleeping on the floor, and she held a full-time job as manager of a boutique in the Salamanca District, known throughout Spain as the quintessential upper-bourgeois neighborhood. She worked during the day and enjoyed a social life in the city streets below at night. Some nights Vicki heard her sneak in at around three o’clock, but it never upset her parents. And by the time she awoke, Isabella had left for the day.
How did this woman spend her nights on the streets of Madrid? Was it anything like the nights on Tarpon Key? Vicki missed staying out late, but interpreting a foreign language took much energy, and she collapsed into bed each night. This didn’t mean she fell asleep right away. Often she lay on her back, staring for hours at the high ceiling above her, wishing it were the Sistine Chapel so it would at least be interesting to stare at. But it was dull, painted in brown, and only her imagination turned it into something more. At times she saw ships coming and going, or tulips opening in intense colors, or a clean, white paper tablecloth, or a pure white canvas—she didn’t know which. Her nights of staring up at the ceiling were long and agonizing, and she missed her old nights on the island, exciting and brilliant.
As she took her seat in the kitchen, Vicki felt tempted to ask many things. Why does Rosario’s husband, Lorenzo, have such a gigantic stomach? Why does everyone leave the house but Rosario? She cooks and cleans all day. Why is that dead animal hanging on a rope upside down in the kitchen with its head cut off, and blood dripping from its neck into a pan?
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