Love in English

by Maria E. Andreu

  We don’t have to erase everything about us. At least not all at once.

  —but I do not say it.

  She sighs and studies her cracked cuticles. Her sweater hangs loosely around bony hips. Her hair is falling out of her ponytail. She never would have gone out to a store looking like this back home.

  “Ana, tu padre piensa que esto es lo mejor,” she says finally in Spanish. Your father thinks this is best. I notice she doesn’t say she thinks it’s best. She didn’t use to hide behind his rules, especially not in the years it was just her and me.

  She puts the bottle back on the shelf.

  “We try,” she says, her eyes earnest and wide, something close to pleading. Or asking me to help and not hinder.

  Tears of anger prickle the soft skin under my eyes. But when I look up, ready to tell her that this is not fair, that I want to go back to the apartment, that I can’t do this anymore, I see her eyes are glassy with tears too. I notice that her face is lined in new ways.

  Suddenly the meandering march through the store makes sense, clicking into focus like a camera that just needed a minute to take in the light. Maybe she is as lost as I am. Maybe the objective is to find our way, together. My heart feels tender for her. I’ve always known her to be a woman who knew how to do things, who to call, where to turn. But here, she doesn’t.

  Back home, when she was a girl, her family used to tell her she’d grow up to be a doctor, because she always would run to get a bandage when someone needed one, steady-handed, estomago fuerte. Because she always aced school. But they were poor, and she dropped out of high school to bring money in for the family. After leaving school, it was hard to go back, although she always meant to.

  So much of her life has been unpleasant surprises. Even this, which she longed for and planned for, has left her adrift, far away from her sisters, from the place where she knew the names of everything. I can see it in the tight line of her mouth, in the hands she won’t stop rubbing together. In the seeking of answers in the labels she can’t read.

  “We try,” I tell her. “We try.”

  La Americana

  Valentina calls me on WhatsApp. My heart sinks at the sight of her name on my phone. Not because I don’t love her, but because of how much I do. She was born one day before me and we grew up basically like sisters. I was the bookish one, she was the science-loving one. She was my best friend, my confidante, my schoolmate. Now she’s a face on a screen. Still, it’s a familiar face, with her big, serious yellow-brown eyes and her smattering of freckles on her nose. I can tell she’s braided her hair to make it wavy, the way she always would practice on me. I often tried to get out of it, since she pulled much too hard as she combed and braided. Now I wish she was close enough to do it.

  I pick up.

  “Ahí está la americana!” she says.

  I smile. Seeing her, my old life rushes back in: walks in el centro, our mothers in a café while we roamed the stores on our own, feeling so grown up. Nights under el parral behind her house, picking fat grapes while her father scolded us from the kitchen window. Swapping clothes, and listening to music, and getting dressed together for our first formal dance.

  I ask her how she is. She tells me that she’s been chosen as the Reina de la Vendimia. It’s a big deal, being reina. Vendimia is the grape harvest, and each neighborhood picks a reina for the parade. We used to talk about how great it would be if one of us could get it. She used to say it would be me. But now that everything has changed and it’s her, I’m both happy and sad. Putting down a life to pick up another one is hard, a swirl of regret and excitement and what-could-have-beens and what-will-bes.

  She asks me if everyone here is gorgeous and rich like in the movies. I snort-laugh. I remember what people used to imagine about being here. What I used to imagine. How do I explain that it’s both everything we thought it would be, and also nothing at all?

  As we’re about to hang up, she holds up her jewelry box. I’ve seen it in her room a thousand times, quilted with delicate fabric on the outside, with a spinning ballerina inside that pops up when you open it. She pulls out the bottom drawer. It’s got a roll of bills in it.

  Valentina tells me that she’s helping at the panadería on the corner after school. She says maybe soon she’ll have enough to visit me.

  I fight back tears. “Espero que sí,” I say. I hope so.

  Blue Bird

  It feels like a different planet in this school sometimes. I have this image of me in a thick metal suit of I don’t understand. Everyone else is used to this gravity, but it sucks me down into the chipped tile floor. There are wondrous things, too, though, on this strange planet: the smells coming from the cooking classrooms, and the teachers letting us listen to music in class with our headphones after we’ve done our work. There is a two-story atrium with delicate sculptures hanging from the skylights, papier-mâché birds suspended in midflight.

  There is also math, where I can actually follow the lessons. Math, where the cute boy sits to the left of me. Who knew math would be the bright spot in my day.

  I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s in a forest-green T-shirt today with a sailboat stenciled on it in white, like a drawing you’d use to build the boat. On the shoulder closest to me, in script, it says Sponge Diver Supply. I copy the letters into my notebook. I’ll look up each word later, like I do a hundred times a day. Sponge. Diver. Supply. I’ll work out how they fit together. Or, like other times, I’ll wonder what in the world they’re doing in one sentence.

  His hair isn’t messy today. It’s haircut fresh. What would it feel like to touch it? It looks soft, but with a bit of curl to it.

  The teacher turns to the board and starts talking as if she’s explaining the problem to the whiteboard itself. She’s such a mumbler, there’s no way anyone behind the second row can hear her. Luckily I’ve already covered everything she’s explaining. Last year. Back home.

  About five minutes into class, it’s clear the teacher is only going to discuss the equation with the board. The boy opens the front flap of his textbook and pulls out a small stack of perfectly square pieces of papers of every color, each about the size of his palm. One has water lilies on it, bright pink on a watery background of green and blue. Another is a field of stars, metallic silver and gold on a field of deep blue. Another is a geometric pattern, reds and oranges, another a picture of a cupcake with yellow frosting. His hand lingers over them, then he slides one out. It’s a repeating pattern of piano keys, the light ones a buttery ivory. He begins to fold the paper. I try not to stare too obviously, but the movement of his fingers captivates me. I just have to watch his nimble, elegant hands.

  Whatever he’s doing, he hasn’t done it very much, because it goes slowly, as if he’s trying to remember how. He bites his upper lip in concentration. It makes me notice his lips again, really a beautiful mouth. He looks like the gorgeous boys from the American movies Valentina and I would watch. No, no, focus. Math. But he makes a fold in the paper, runs a finger on it, then undoes it and tries to make the paper flat again.

  I’m not very subtle because the boy looks me right in the eye before I can pretend I wasn’t staring at him.

  He smiles and whispers, “# #### #### math, but #### ### ## # bore.” I catch “bore” because I remember it from a passage I read in English class back at home, about a child who escapes a boring day by finding a door in the base of a tree that leads to a land of fairies.

  I smile back. “Boring. Yes,” I say. My heart thumps at the thought that any minute I’m going to say something stupid. And, also: cute boy. Now that he’s talking to me I’ve got an excuse to linger over his features, the planes of his face, the half smile.

  He sticks his hand out into the aisle between us. “I’m Harrison, by the way. I ##### ### ## ######### ######.”

  I put my hand in his. It’s warm. He squeezes. “Ana.” Behind him, a blond girl cocks her head in our direction. Two other girls turn to look, one with straight bangs
and penciled-in eyebrows, and another with inky-black hair. I’ve noticed them before. I’ve started to think of them as the Very American Girls in my head. I mean, obviously all the girls here are Very American. But somehow these look more so, like they would get picked for an ad, if the United States needed an ad. They look how we assumed back home that American girls would look, scrubbed faces and sharp eyes. Confident. Quick with a comeback. I focus on Harrison.

  “Ana? Do you know anything about Algebra Two?” he asks.

  I nod.

  He launches into a long speech, complete with hand gestures and a funny voice. I give him my best “interested” look. But between how physically distracting I find him and the fact that I’m only catching like every fourth word, all I can do is hope it doesn’t morph into “completely confused.”

  “Problems one through seventeen, page two hundred thirty-two,” the teacher says from the front.

  “Fuck,” Harrison says. That word I know. I’ve made a game out of cataloging American curse words. We have lots of good curses at home, but some of the ones here are truly bizarre.

  Everyone turns to page 232. Most kids open their notebooks and start writing, a few others stare off into space.

  Harrison looks over at me. “## ### #### ##### ####?” He talks really fast. That’s what’s getting to me about English. I know some of the words, but everyone talks like they’re in a race. Also, they don’t move their mouths as much as we do in Spanish, so all the words sort of blur together. My mother says they always sound like they have a mouth full of potatoes.

  He’s asking me a question, but I have no idea about what. I smile and nod. Can’t go wrong with that. I hope.

  He opens up a binder he has under his notebook, then clicks it open, takes out a piece of paper, and hands it to me.

  Oh. He was offering me a piece of paper. I run his words back through my head. “Paper.” I know that word. I should have caught it. “Thank you,” I say.

  He pulls out his own piece of paper. I turn to my textbook and start working on the problems. They’re not too hard. It takes me less than ten minutes to finish them. I look up at Harrison. He’s got two on his paper. He is staring at number three.

  “Help?” I whisper helpfully.

  He scrunches up his eyebrows. “I’m not gonna be much help,” he says, shaking his head slowly.

  No, no. “I help?” I say, and point first to myself, then him.

  “Oh! You get this stuff? ## more ## # geometry guy. Yeah,” he says, and pushes his page to the edge of his desk closest to mine. I squint to see what he’s written. His handwriting is small and neat. He makes his sevens funny. His twos have an unnecessary loop in them.

  I lean over. Harrison has gotten the formula wrong. I wish I could explain this with words, but I can’t, so I just circle where he messed up. Then I write, in light pencil, how he should have set it up. I point back at the textbook, then lean over him to the section where the formula is explained. I make a circle over it there, keeping the pencil in the air so as not to mark the book, then back to his paper. I smile.

  “Oh!” he says. “I see #### # ### #####!” He erases what he had on his paper, then writes it the right way. I point to the next step, and he does it, nodding, like something has clicked.

  “Thank you,” says Harrison. Then he says a bunch of other things. I wish I could understand more of what he’s saying. Until this moment I hadn’t realized how much I ache to just be spoken to—how are you? where are you going after school?—since I started walking around in a bubble of silence. Well, not silence really. A bubble of undecipherable noise.

  He takes his squares of paper and holds them up in my direction, fanned out like playing cards. He runs his hand in front dramatically, like a magician enticing me to pick a card.

  I scan them and point to a bright-blue one with different metallic shades, from turquoise to the dark blue of the ocean before nightfall. I love the smile that comes over his face when I do. He puts the rest away and starts folding that one. Fold, fold, turn over, fold. He hands me his blue creation. It’s a bird, I think. The part that’s supposed to be the beak skews slightly to the left, and one wing is bigger than the other, but it’s the nicest thing that’s happened to me since I walked into this school.

  “Thank you.” I smile, fighting the urge to hug the paper bird to my heart. Get ahold of yourself, Ana.

  “No problem,” he says. “Only nine hundred ninety-nine to go.” Nine hundred and ninety-nine is a lot of paper birds. But then numbers were one of the first things they taught us in English class back home, so I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.

  The bell rings.

  “Bye, Harrison,” I say. He stands, gathers up his things. I stand too. He faces me, slinging his bag over his left shoulder.

  He repeats, “Harrison,” putting extra emphasis on rolling the rr’s. Trying to pronounce it like I did. He can’t do it. That’s another thing I’ve noticed about English: no double rr’s. “Say it again,” he says.

  “Harrison.”

  “First you teach me math, then you make my name beautiful.”

  I smile as I zip my bag. Your name is beautiful, I think, but is another thing I do not say.

  I wish you could turn into an equation

  So that I could understand everything about you.

  I wish I could be like one of your paper birds

  But sprout real wings

  and fly free.

  Can I Spank Your Hoarder?

  Mr. T. collects our first assignments today. I’m a little embarrassed that the first piece of writing I’ve handed in is about a boy, but it’s too late now. Besides, it’s a poem, and I’m not sure I’ve translated everything correctly. He may not even understand what it’s about.

  Mr. T. has us write in our journals while he reads our work. At one point, his eyes flick up to me and then back down again. I wonder if he’s reading my poem, and I blush. Perhaps he can guess what I was thinking about, after all.

  A few minutes later, Mr. T. jumps out of his seat, almost as if sitting still for ten minutes has been as hard for him as it has been for us. He clears his throat at the front of the room and seems surprised when all eyes turn to him.

  “And now for a change of pace.” He opens his eyes wide, fingers playing with fingers in an almost childish show of thrill. “You guys all have your ######## ######### ######## in the office, right?” he asks. I, for one, cannot bear to dim his enthusiasm. I nod, although I have no earthly idea what he just asked. Around me, equally confused heads nod.

  “Excellent. Excellent. I have a big car. Let’s go.” Mr. T. makes the “follow me” motion with his arm, then heads out to the hall. He leads us outside, to the parking lot, and to a beat-up gray minivan. He takes keys out of his pocket. The car makes that tweep-tweep greeting. His car? He’s going to show us his car? Maybe to teach us the names of car parts or something? He did say something about a car to Neo during one of our first classes. It seems like the kind of thing he’d feel we needed to know. I haven’t been here very long, but I’ve already learned that Americans think they can’t fully live without their cars. At least the ones around here. There are more cars in the parking lot that belong to students than teachers, which is crazy to me.

  He opens the back door. “In you go,” he says. “A few of you in the third row so you can all fit.”

  Confused glances are exchanged.

  “Come on! Short ######! ###### ########### #### ######## bell!”

  Neo looks at me, then gets in. He hugs the far edge of the seat behind the driver. I go in after him, followed by the rest of my classmates.

  Mr. T. closes the door, and it’s silent. No one asks a question. It feels endless, but it only takes Mr. T. a few seconds to walk around the car to the driver’s seat. He rumbles the engine to life and backs out of his parking spot.

  He’s . . . taking us away from school? Can he do this? Is this allowed? Or are we somehow witnessing him losing his mind and taking a bunch of
students with him? He doesn’t look like it, though. He looks like he’s on vacation, smiling, chattering words I can’t catch.

  He takes a left at the light and pulls into a parking lot. The familiar yellow sign looms overhead. McDonald’s.

  He turns into the drive-through. “Okay, kids! ###### ######### more American than this! I don’t want to teach you from a ### old book that gives you bullshit phrases like ‘Excuse me, where is the library?’ ##### ######## live here. So lunch is on me. Except you have to order.”

  The intercom crackles to life. “Welcome to Alana’s. Can I spank your hoarder?”

  I shrug my confusion at Neo. He half smiles. Mr. T. orders. Then the boy next to him does, surprisingly well. Mr. T. rolls down the window on Neo’s side.

  “I like fries,” Neo says.

  “Would you like fries with that?” crackles the faceless voice.

  He looks at me. I shrug again. “Closer,” I offer, signaling with my hand.

  He leans out the window.

  “Fries!” he says, louder.

  “Got that,” says the voice, annoyed.

  “Burger,” he says.

  “Chicken tenders?” crackles the voice.

  I suppress a giggle.

  Neo turns to me, like he’s not going to try and correct her. My turn. “Fries and Big Mac.”

  “Would you like fries with that?” she asks again. Mr. T. laughs.

  I raise my volume. “Yes!” Mr. T. gives me a double thumbs-up.

  “Anything else?”

  The girls behind us go, then Mr. T. orders eight sodas, letting us off the hook on asking for those.

  “Drive around,” says the crackling voice.

  We get to the window, and Mr. T. hands over a credit card and someone hands him two bags of food. He passes them back and drives away. In two turns, we’re at the school.

  He doesn’t take us into the parking lot. He drives around the other side and stops in front of a giant tree with a bunch of picnic tables underneath it. I’ve seen this table at lunchtime before, its seats so full it looks like you would need a reservation. But it’s not lunch period yet. Two lone kids are smoking near the back door. If Mr. T. sees them, he pretends he doesn’t.