by Jud Widing
‘So where are you from?’ Nah, too obvious, answer and question alike.
‘What do you do for a living?’ Nope, she didn’t think she could manage pretending to be interested via translator.
‘When are we going to…’ no no no, she’d given Deirdre more than enough ammunition by her very presence.
So what?
As if by magic, a question suggested itself. It was ‘how long have I been sitting here furrowing my brow in thoughtful silence?’ She was loathe to hear the answer, and so decided to open her mouth and be surprised by whatever came tumbling out.
That whatever was “What is the most American thing you’ve done since you’ve gotten here?”
She and Hyun-Woo both looked expectantly to Deirdre, who was surveying the ceiling through wink-squinted eyes. Nur nearly snapped at her – pay attention! – before realizing that what she was seeing was attention. Deirdre was puzzling over the translation as though it were a calculus problem she was trying to solve upside-down.
Finally, she turned to Hyun-Woo, and said what sounded like it was probably a faithful translation. Nur heard and understood familiar words, like “what” and “you” and “American”, and a heretofore unacknowledged knot of tension made itself conspicuous by its unraveling. She’d been anticipating her sister to mistranslate, even with the promised solo night out as collateral. But those fears appeared unfounded, and what a relief that was.
Hyun-Woo laughed quietly, but that laughter slipped effortlessly into a look of good-natured concentration. It was a silly question, but he was taking it seriously. And, much to Nur’s surprise, she couldn’t wait to hear his answer. Hopefully it would lead to an amusing anecdote (poor Deirdre, she thought without sarcasm, recalling her sister’s look of pinchfaced cogitation), but if nothing else it would give her an idea of what he thought of as quintessentially “American”.
Cynicism, she realized, would annoy her. She was quite taken by the melting pot, even if there did seem to be the odd rotten apple or overripe squash floating around.
She’d find out soon enough, anyway. He said something to Deirdre, something with multiple, distinctly-voiced characters and hand gestures, and as that something got longer and longer, so too did Deirdre’s face. Hyun-Woo chuckled out the last few words, and Deirdre laughed. A whipcrack of petty jealousy shook Nur – Hyun-Woo had told a joke meant for her, and Deirdre had gotten to enjoy it first! – but as always, rationality quickly reasserted its control, much as a pilot will always clutch tightly to the controls as the plane flies into the side of a mountain. Bummer that Deirdre got to hear it first, but if not for her then Nur would never get to hear the joke.
Still, rationality could only do so much. “What did he say?” she snapped at her sister.
Deirdre scratched her chin. “Um, well he said ‘I think the most Ameri-‘”
“At the end! When you laughed! What did he say?”
“-can…wah? Oh, um, he just said he could tell by my face that maybe he better stop talking and let me translate.” She punctuated this sentence with a pointed look.
Nur raised her hands and shrugged.
“Anyway, he said, basically, I think I have this right, he basically said ‘I think the most American thing I did since I got here was I was at a red light one car back from the intersection…’”
So he has a car, Nur noted.
“’…and I saw a woman on a bicycle crossing the street when the red hand light said she should not be crossing the street, but she did and then the old man in the car directly in front of me pressed the gas and moved forward a little bit and tapped her, and she fell off of her bike and screamed like a whistle.’ I – and this is me, Deirdre – I think that might be a colloquialism I’m just not understanding or mistranslating, anyway…”
“You’re doing great,” Nur whispered in genuine awe.
“Thanks, full disclosure, there was some stuff I didn’t understand so I filled in the blanks as best I could from context. I don’t think I’m too far off the mark with any of them. ANYWAY, all the cars stop and this…I guess he used a word that’d translate as greasy, this greasy guy leaps out of his car and points at the lady on the bike who fell, and starts screaming ‘Hey lady, you ran the light!’, and she didn’t seem to mind except to give him a rude gesture, so he turned to the people around him, which included Hyun-Woo, and started telling all of them that the lady ran the light.
“And then this bald guy comes out of nowhere, and gets right in the greasy guy’s face, and starts shouting about how never mind the bike lady, because ‘I saw you go barreling through that last light back there!’, that was the bald guy saying to the greasy guy, who replied by saying ‘no you didn’t’, which was nice of him because it just disputed that the bald guy saw it, not that the event actually took place.
“Now this pushy lady, probably about 50 or so, gets out of her car and just starts saying ‘Sir, sir, she did not run the light, I will give you my name and information,’ and she wasn’t really saying this to anybody, she was just sort of saying it for the benefit of anybody who could hear her. And all the while she’s saying this, the bald guy pulls out his camera and points it at the greasy guy, and shouts ‘I’m gonna take your picture!’, and so the greasy guy asks “Oh yeah?” and then tells him to go right ahead, except you can tell he didn’t mean it because he also called him a word that’s like ‘anus’, only worse, or maybe better depending on what you’re after. He rescinds the offer to go right ahead when he sees the bike lady, who’s still just lying on the ground in front of the old guy’s car, turn the phone she had been using to take pictures of said old guy’s car towards him, being the greasy guy, to start taking his picture.
“And he goes ‘You’re gonna take my picture? Well I’m going to take your picture!’ and then he proved it by pulling out his phone and taking everybody’s picture. All this while that pushy lady is saying ‘sir, sir’ and offering her name and information to whoever wants it, and he – Hyun-Woo – said there was a solid fifteen seconds of just two lanes of traffic frozen at this intersection while they all took pictures of each other, and then he realized that the ‘sir’ the pushy lady has been talking to is the old guy in the car that hit the bike lady, and the old guy hadn’t said a single thing in this whole time. He’d just been sitting there, dead quiet, staring at the lady lying on the ground in front of his car, taking pictures of two guys who had nothing to do with anything, other than being behind the old guy when he hit the lady who was crossing when the red hand light said she shouldn’t have.”
Deirdre took a deep breath and nodded, looking utterly pleased with herself. And Nur couldn’t blame her for feeling that way. She also couldn’t help but wonder if leaving Deridre home alone with Aunt Amy all this time had led the latter’s…linguistic imprecisions to rub off on the former.
“Wow…wow, um, thanks for translating all of that.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Um…can you ask him what happened after that?”
She did. He responded.
“He says nothing. He managed to squeeze by them by driving a bit through the parking lane and then he just went on his way. He heard sirens approaching as he was leaving, so police and an ambulance probably showed up. But that’s the entirety of his story. He says it’s the most American thing that he saw.”
Perhaps that wasn’t quite what Nur had asked him, and perhaps it wasn’t quite the answer she’d been expecting (she didn’t wholly understanding what he was even getting at with that answer)…but she loved him all the more for it.
IT!
She loved it all the more for it.
It being the answer he gave. The first it, anyway. The second it was how unexpected and unique the answer was.
She loved the answer.
Well, word that’s like ‘feces’, only worse, or in this case better, given what she was
after.
CHAPTER 14
Nur was a romantic who had never been in love. She read books and listened to songs and watched movies by people who, she could only imagine, had been in love, all with an eye towards fabricating the feeling in herself. Naturally, there was no way to check her results against the real thing, having never felt the real thing before. Which led to another dilemma: how would she know when she was feeling the real thing, if all she had to compare it to was the lumbering quilt-monster she’d stitched together from the shreds of devoured pop culture?
An even more troubling thought had given her some sleepless nights – what if she already had been in love, and the real thing was so underwhelming as to pass by unnoticed? She’d certainly been infatuated before, and lust was well…well trod ground, let’s say. But nothing had come close to the full-body furnace feeling she’d been led to expect from love. What if the rarified pronouncements of song and literature were the adult equivalent of Santa Claus, a lie for the uninformed perpetuated by the disillusioned, in a pointless attempt to inject some magic into reality?
Troubling questions all, but not nearly as troubling as the answer which was now suggesting itself.
This can’t be love, she assured herself, because that would be stupid if it were.
Stupid because she didn’t know him that well. Or at all, really. Were she called upon to count the ways she loved him, she would make it to “number one”, which would be “one time you saw a lady on a bike get hit by a car or whatever”. Yes, please, marry me.
Were she to count the ways love towards this man in this moment would be stupid, however, she’d graduate from fingers and toes before she’d gotten her shoes off. Point one was already covered; how about that they lived on different sides of the Equator? How about that her prospective career tied her to that location for the foreseeable future? How about that they couldn’t speak to each other without Deirdre as intermediate?
Once again, all together: How about they didn’t know each other at all?
Sure, the workings of the mind had little sway over matters of the heart, she knew that perfectly well. She’d only heard it a billion times. What the poets of yore had failed to mention was that the heart needed more than the gentle course-corrections of the higher faculties; the heart was a first-class twit who needed a shaking of the shoulders and slapping of the face, or ventricles or whatever.
And yet…and yet she felt something for Hyun-Woo that was unlike anything she had ever experienced. It was both ecstatic and matter-of-fact, a glorious affirmation of something she could easily take for granted. Nothing about it made a single lick of sense, which was more annoying than anything else. And yet it didn’t bother her, because hey, what’s one more counter-intuitive sensation among friends?
Hey.
Or more than friends.
HEY.
Wait a second-
“HEY,” Deirdre repeated once again. “Are you trying to relive that story in real time? Say something!”
Christ, they were both still sitting there. So was she. Nur had just vanished into the depths of her own navel while Deirdre and Hyun-Woo were just sitting there, staring at her.
Mortified, Nur inhaled deeply, as one does upon waking from a surreptitious classroom nap. She recommenced the facilitated conversation, which took a very long time and is hardly with recounting in full. The highlights are as follows:
They found out where they were each from. Nur knew exactly where South Korea was, and much to her surprise, Hyun-Woo knew all about Seychelles, which on the sliding scale of foreigners’ understanding of African geography meant that he recognized Seychelles as a place that existed somewhere on the planet. While Nur had lived her entire life in her native land, Hyun-Woo had spent precious little time in his.
They found out what they each did. Nur was a student and worked in her family’s hotel after school. Hyun-Woo had tutors but no consistent formal education, as he was constantly traveling the globe with his parents. It didn’t feel right to think of this as “not doing anything”, but from an occupational standpoint, that’s what it sounded like to Nur.
They found out what their parents did. Nur’s were in the hospitality racket. Hyun-Woo’s were both diplomats (Nur almost asked what their domestic disputes were like, but decided not to hinge a risky zinger on Deirdre’s translated delivery). This explained all of the traveling Hyun-Woo did, as well as his outrageous fluency in so many languages – he had spent his formative years bopping across the globe, soaking up customs and tongues. Nur envied him his fortunate birth, and quickly stamped out the embers of resentment smoldering within the envy. Hyun-Woo was a child of privilege. Hardly an endearing quality, though he couldn’t well help it, and he at least seemed aware of the unearned nature of his happy station.
They found out what they each wanted to do. Nur wanted to follow her parents into the hotelier business. Which wasn’t entirely true – she wanted to make her family proud, and it just so happened the best way to accomplish that was donning a stupid vest and bidding tourists welcome to the De Dernberg Towers. Were she to write her own ticket, it would likely be one-way out of Seychelles, to forge her own path. But the thought of letting her parents down overwhelmed her self-interest, and so hotelling it was.
Hyun-Woo, meanwhile, wanted to do…something? As far as Nur could gather from Deirdre’s translations, the man wasn’t a particularly political animal. Trying to reverse engineer his tone from the timing of the translation, he seemed to view diplomacy the way most people looked at vacuum cleaners – necessary for keeping things clean, but never as clean as they promised on the box, and they made a god-awful racket I’d rather not have to hear, thank you very much.
So what did her maybe-love want to do with his life? What was his ambition? Nur hadn’t the slightest clue, which put her in good company, because apparently neither did he.
Well, it must be love, she realized, because lack of ambition was a terrifically unattractive quality to her, and yet here she was, continuing to be attracted to him.
Perhaps ‘lack of ambition’ wasn’t fair. Lack of realistic expectations? Hyun-Woo knew he wanted a job that would allow him to keep travelling, and he knew he wanted a job that would pay well, and he knew he wanted a job that would be enjoyable, and he knew he wanted a job that would be fulfilling, and he knew he wanted a job that would be exciting, and he knew he wanted a job that would leave him with a lot of leisure time.
What he didn’t seem to know was that everybody wants these things, but nobody gets them all because that job doesn’t exist.
His naiveté was charming, she supposed. That was probably why she was still attracted to him.
Or because it’s love.
Alright. Or that.
The chatted for a bit longer, moseying right up to the four hour mark of their marathon conversation. “Chat” was the right word for it, because their discussion mainly covered the topics of “this” and “that”. Nothing profound, nothing deep. They both wanted to – at least, Nur wanted to, and she got (or projected) the impression that Hyun-Woo did too. But it was tough to muster the requisite enthusiasm when those needling questions and revealing answers would be running the gauntlet of Nur’s younger sister. Admirable though her translation job had been so far, Nur wasn’t about to give Deirdre any more dirt than she already had.
And so, through some unspoken agreement (and how painful it was to know that they’d have to return to the arena of the unspoken once again), Nur and Hyun-Woo both embodied the essence of ‘wow would you look at the time’, said their prolonged, three-person goodbyes, and went on their ways, feeling as though they had crested a low hill of interpersonal understanding, only to be afforded a sweeping vista of All The Things I Don’t Know About You.
On the T ride home, Nur put her arm around her sister. She’d be hard pressed to say whom this surprised more; it certainly h
adn’t been planned, and she could feel Deirdre recoiling from her embrace. Once Nur recovered from her own shock, she gave her little sister an affectionate squeeze.
“Thank you,” she managed, with a sharp formality that disappointed her. “Really.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Deirdre replied dismissively. But her shoulders slackened under Nur’s arm, and she didn’t try to buck said arm off for the entire ride back to Uncle Bernard’s. Nur was so touched by this gesture that she, for the duration of the journey, forgot all about the debt she now owed to her sister.
She would have been even more touched to know that Deirdre did as well. But then the journey ended.
CHAPTER 15
Deirdre’s big night out came three sunsets later, when Deirdre said “tonight’s the night” and Nur bit her tongue before it could form the word “no”. A promise was a promise, a deal was a deal.
A promise and a deal were also both opportunities to exploit loopholes opened by imprecise phrasing.
To wit: it was, at no point, stated that Nur couldn’t follow Deirdre on her night out, from a distance. Sure, they did say it would be solo, and she’d be going out alone, but that was still true! She would get to wander the city of Boston all on her lonesome, and Nur would be wandering the city of Boston all on her lonesome. It would just be coincidence that their paths would be one and the same, just as it would be nothing but personal eccentricity that would see Nur ducking behind parked cars and hiding in bushes, if it came to that.
And really, come on: Deirdre had to know Nur would be following her. She was a smart girl, and she knew her big sister well enough. So by failing to add the stipulation and by the way you aren’t allowed to follow me, wasn’t Deirdre tacitly inviting Nur along as a shadow?
Hardly worth answering, that.
