Love in English

by Maria E. Andreu

  She points theatrically, a game show host displaying the brand-new car you’ve just won. “That’s Harrison’s bedroom,” she says.

  I turn to her. “What?”

  “Harrison is my neighbor. He’s been my neighbor for, like, ever. We once tried to run a string from his room to mine so we could #### ####### #### messages. Marbles, one time. It was this #### ###### thing. We were like eight. The string kept breaking. Our parents were pissed.”

  “He’s your neighbor?” I ask, still catching up.

  Suddenly, as if to prove her point, Harrison walks past the window. She screeches, which makes me screech. She pulls me down to the carpet.

  As we crouch there she says, “So Harrison, huh?”

  I nod.

  She shrugs. “All right. I wouldn’t have guessed bland white boy is your type, but at least he’s a nice one. Aunque un poquito soso, ¿no?”

  Bland? She thinks Harrison is bland? “¡No es soso!”

  “Relax.” She laughs and leads me back downstairs. “So-so is in the eye of the beholder. Speaking of which, time for your makeover.”

  I smile that soso and so-so are the same in English and Spanish, although I don’t think they mean exactly the same thing. But somehow the two languages started in different places and made their way together in “soso.”

  We go to a room off the family room where Altagracia has what looks like a whole film studio set up. Umbrellas with the lights inside. A fancy-looking camera on a tripod. A low table covered with makeup, and another makeup caddy with enough tubes, palettes, and brushes to stock half the department store makeup section.

  She waves her arm. “Voila. ##### ######. Where the magic happens.”

  She walks over to the camera, makes an adjustment, then flips on the lights. I squint. They’re really strong. Altagracia turns to the camera and puts on a full-wattage smile.

  “Hi, gorgeous! It’s me, Gracie. I’m here with my beautiful new model, Ana. Doesn’t she have just perfectly smooth skin? This is without primer, people. It’s insane. Today we’re going to give Ana a kissable ###### like you would not believe.”

  I smile, not sure what else to do.

  “You’ll remember I did a recent video on how to tone down your lips to a soft nude for things like a job interview? You can find a link to that video in the comments below. But buckle up, honeys, because this tutorial is not that.”

  Altagracia mutters to herself, rummaging through a bag. “I’m not sure I’ve got foundation light enough for you. This will have to do.” She puts the foundation on my lips. It feels like wet chalk.

  “Okay, first we start with a neutral base.” She whispers to me, “You repeat it.”

  Me, through wet chalk: “Okay, honeys, we begin by putting on a neutral base.”

  She laughs. “You’re a natural.”

  I smile. Being with Altagracia doesn’t feel familiar, not exactly, but I wonder, just maybe, if I have made my first friend in America.

  Con Eso Tengo Bastante

  After school on Monday, I walk home, satisfied the trip is making more sense each time. The markers are becoming familiar. Even the bland brick facade of our apartment building does not look as foreign to me today. I climb the stairs and open our door. It’s tight in the frame, and it makes a barking noise when I force it open. It is the opposite of Altagracia’s electronic keypad entry.

  “Y entonces que va a hacer?” I hear my mother ask.

  I follow her voice to the kitchen, with its brown stove and dingy light from one tiny window.

  “Ma, acaba de llegar la Ana,” she says into her phone. Of course. The phone.

  She thrusts it at me with a sense of mission. “Toma. Habla con la Abuela.”

  I put the phone against my ear. The familiar voice croons at me from the other end, so crisp she could be next door, so far she could be on Mars. “M’hijita, como te extrañamos.” And then she starts to cry.

  I want to tell her I miss her too. But it’s too big a chunk of words to bite off, and suddenly the Spanish won’t come to me. I want to tell her that I made a new friend. That English is revealing itself, slowly and then quickly and then slowly again. That it is hard to hold the pain of missing them and of being here all at once, that I feel guilty that I don’t reach out more, but that it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten them. That keeping them close hurts too much sometimes and it is easier to hold them at a distance. I want to tell her that my mother is so unhappy, that I was sure this was all a mistake, except for sometimes, lately, when I wonder if it could be something beautiful. Maybe.

  I look at my mother’s hopeful face. How long have they been on the phone? What does she tell her about our life here? Does she pretend to be strong, or does she cry out her loneliness to her mother? Would I tell mine? I have her right in front of me, and I don’t.

  My mother jerks her chin at me. “Dale, decile algo a la Abuela.”

  But it all threatens to pull me under, a wave too big to swim through. Why does my mother do this to herself? How can she let her body live in one place but her heart live in another?

  “Ma, I have to go to the bathroom,” I say, handing her phone back to her. I stride down the hall feeling awful about being so abrupt with my grandmother. I should have made chitchat about school. I should have told her about Altagracia. I should have told her about Mr. T. telling me I was a poet. She would have understood. She used to sit with me down next to el hornito behind her house and read me love poems by Alfonsina Storni or recite “La Profecía” from memory. She loved beautiful words.

  Loves, I remind myself. Loves.

  But I wonder if learning one language doesn’t sometimes mean forgetting a little bit of another.

  El ayer se borra

  Poco a poco

  A little bit at a time

  For today to shimmer

  Yesterday has to fade

  Como la neblina.

  If the past we carry folded up inside is too heavy

  There is no strength for today.

  I sit by a stream

  Let yesterday pour through my fingers

  To wash myself clean

  For today.

  One Good Thing About America

  I wait outside the school library, grinding the ball of one foot into the top of the other through my black flats, waiting for Neo. Where is he?

  But before I can get too annoyed, Neo turns the corner from the main hall. He’s carrying big red-and-white striped boxes of movie popcorn and a bag in which I can see soda cans. He smiles a big, goofy grin.

  “We breakfast!” he says a little too loud.

  He makes me laugh in spite of myself. “Shh! They’ll hear us. No popcorn in library,” I say to him.

  “Is okay, is okay,” he says breezily. I hold open the door since his hands are full. Instead of trying to sneak in the snack, he strides right to the librarian’s desk.

  “Neo!” she calls out like a long-lost friend. “You found the microwave.”

  “I find,” he says proudly.

  “I have room three all set up for you. The DVD ### # ##. Let me know if you have any trouble with it.”

  “Thank you.” He smiles sweetly. He must be one of those boys grandmothers and store clerks love. School librarians too, apparently.

  Once we’re in the room, I ask, “How did you get permission to do all this?”

  “Library lady nice. Very nice. Spend one summer in Crete, loves Greece. I explain we do this for class.” His words are choppy but he sounds more confident than I’ve heard him before. He puts down the stuff he’s carrying and takes a sweeping bow. “Here we are movies.”

  He hands me a box of popcorn. From the exchange with the librarian, I understand it is not actual movie popcorn, though it is in movie popcorn containers.

  I point to one. “How?”

  He gives me a satisfied smile. “Ways.”

  He points to the DVD player. “Ready?” I nod. He takes the tiny remote control and starts the DVD. It’s already at the home
screen, so he presses Play. Then he points to the light switch. “Okay?” I nod again, and he turns off the light. Very eighties music starts to play.

  The scent of popcorn is full of memories of epics and cartoons and friends giggling in the front row of a darkened theater back home. But now it also means this: this unexpected gesture from a boy I barely know.

  The movie starts. Slowly. Very slowly. The Breakfast Club. A very long shot of the front of a gray school. Classrooms, lockers, pictures, signs. Why are old movies so slow? Nothing happens for, like, ever. Then finally a girl in a nice car whose dad gives her a present before she gets out of the car, which she doesn’t seem to appreciate. Other kids arriving at a school, but not as many as should arrive for a full day. The school is empty except for these five. Why are they there? I have looked up every word Mr. T. wrote on the board—princess, brain, jock, rebel, recluse—but didn’t google the plot.

  “You understand?” Neo asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Me too,” he says in agreement. “Maybe they get murder? Then solve murder?” he says this almost hopefully, like at least then something would happen.

  I snort laugh. “Maybe.”

  The kids on the screen are getting talked to by a guy with the greasy hair of someone you should not trust. They are sitting in a library that sort of looks like the one in this school.

  There is no breakfast.

  Nothing happens. They sit together. Are they supposed to figure out how to get breakfast? Is that the challenge? They mumble when they talk and I don’t catch most of it. This is a talking movie.

  Finally Neo says, “Which one . . . are you? Princess? Brain?”

  The five different types of kids in the movie. Isn’t that how high school is, everyone sorted into neat categories? Back home I knew my category very well, but here I am not in a category. Or maybe I am, to the other kids. To them I am Outsider.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Recluse, maybe?”

  He laughs, like that’s a silly thing for me to say. “Back home, I’m the athlete. Brain too, good with school,” he says with no hint of self-consciousness. I would have been embarrassed to say that about myself, although I did well in school back home too.

  “Lots of boys like angry one, back home,” Neo adds.

  “Where I’m from too,” I say.

  “Why you come here, Ana?”

  It’s only five words but such a big question. So much bigger than my English can hold, so much bigger than my brain can hold sometimes.

  I have learned enough English to know the answer is “a better life.” It’s what teachers say. It’s what I heard a lady at the office say when I was waiting for her to photocopy some medical records from back home and she thought I didn’t understand what she was saying. “They come here for a better life, I get it, but we have lots of people here without jobs,” she said. But “better life” is not quite right. It makes me feel disloyal to my abuela, to Valentina, to my family and friends back home, like somehow my life with them was something that needed bettering. I don’t know if it’s better here. There’s a different word I would choose.

  “A bigger life,” I say.

  “I like,” says Neo. If he’s here for a bigger life too, he doesn’t say.

  “What do you miss most about home?” I ask.

  He looks away, throws his hand wide. “Too many things. So much. The . . . how do you call?” He makes a motion and a sound like cracking a nut.

  “Nuts?” I say.

  “Yes. But big tree! In my family house,” he adds. “Also, every summer, very dry. Fire in the hills. Bad, fire, but smell . . .” He trails off. I understand. I miss the smells of home too.

  After the movie finishes, we google the plot. They were in school to be punished. This makes me giggle and I do my best to explain it to Neo. I understand why Mr. T. might have wanted us to watch this movie in which nothing happens . . . there’s a certain parallel to what we have to do every day, understand the things going on around us without a lot of clues.

  We laugh at this and then Neo shrugs. “So we do it again next week? New movie? We ask Mr. T. give us a list and we watch. Okay?”

  I smile. “Okay.” I study his face, the way it seems open, easy to read.

  He says a bunch of things in Greek, catches himself, scrunches up his mouth in frustration. I know, I want to say. I know what it’s like to want to say more.

  “So . . . rule? No Google,” he says. “No Google . . . what is word? Before?”

  He doesn’t want us to google the plot before, but to try to figure it out as we watch. That’s what I’m getting, anyway. Even though we were completely lost on this one, maybe we’ll start picking up some more as we go along.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay.” He nods.

  We walk out of the library and past the vending machine near the cafeteria. It is lit up, a beacon of Americanness that always beams its lights and calls me in. Neo turns to it.

  “They have food machines in this school. #### ##### ##### ####.” He says some things, and I’m not sure if they’re Greek or English. It is, as I’ve heard Mr. T. say, Greek to me. He walks up to the vending machine.

  “One last food,” he says.

  I nod.

  He feeds money into the machine. The machine stubbornly refuses his crumpled bills, but with a final gulp, it sucks the last one in. He punches the numbers like someone who has bought from this machine before. We watch as it groans, releasing a box off its ledge. He’s chosen candy with pictures of flames on it.

  He fishes it out of the bottom, opens it up, holds it out to me. I grab one. The little red nub bursts in my mouth with heat and cinnamon. I smile.

  “Is one good thing about America, no?”

  I laugh. “Yes. One good thing.” But today, I can think of at least one more.

  Review of The Breakfast Club

  Mr. T:

  Thank you for recommending The Breakfast Club.

  Our honest review is:

  Not enough breakfast

  Not enough murders

  Not enough words we know.

  But we like the dancing

  And what they wrote at the end.

  We also are rebel, recluse, princess, athlete, brain.

  And we add to that poet. And artist. And strangers.

  I Like Your Buns

  The hallway to the cafeteria is all windows. It looks out into a courtyard of trees surrounded by emerald-green grass. The courtyard bursts with ripe, old life, one tree with lemon-yellow leaves, another with juicy orange ones, a bush with dramatic red ones so bright I could see how it might have been the inspiration for the burning bush. Yes, leaves changed back home. But this wild, riotous vegetation that insists upon itself everywhere, in sidewalk cracks and even sprouting from the facades of neglected buildings . . . we didn’t have anything like this. The plants had more modesty there. Here, the nature shows off, just like everything else.

  I walk into the cafeteria. The volume is turned up to ten, voices going at once, bouncing off the double-height ceiling, bouncing back. I am not a fan of the cafeteria, but I forgot the lunch my mother packed for me.

  And so I am clutching the wrinkled dollars from the bottom of my bag, focusing on what I’ll need to remember to navigate the line, when I hear, “Hey! Ana!”

  I turn. Harrison, in a long-sleeved T-shirt as green as the grass outside, looking ruddy, like he’s just been running in cold air, sitting at a table between me and the line to get food. My hands twitch to touch his face. Stop thinking these things, Ana.

  He’s with the girls, the Very American Girls.

  “Hello, Harrison,” I say.

  “I didn’t know we have the same lunch. I never see you in here.”

  I shrug, hoping it looks mysterious. Wouldn’t you like to know what I do at lunch? Not like I scarf down my mother’s sandwiches at the back of a classroom so I won’t have to worry about finding someone to sit with, since Altagracia has a different lunch per
iod.

  “Where’s your food?” he asks.

  I point to the line.

  “Oh, cool. I was just going to go get seconds. You’ll sit with us? Frankie, you can scoot, right?” He nods toward one of the girls sitting at the table beside him.

  Frankie regards me coolly. I’m not sure what scooting is, but she doesn’t look particularly eager to do it.

  He’s already barreling toward the line, saying something about sausages and heaven. With the background noise, it’s even harder than usual to make out what he’s saying.

  The line moves with surprising efficiency. I take a tiny apple and a sandwich that looks like it’s stuffed with mashed-up eggs, which, frankly, mesmerizes me. I don’t know anyone who would put mushed-up eggs in a cold sandwich, held together by what looks like mayonnaise, one of my favorite things on earth. Genius.

  Harrison leads us back to the table, the scent of his second helping wafting behind him. He got a bunch of pieces of sausage and peppers on a giant bun.

  We sit. The girl he called Frankie pushes off to her left to make a space for me, bumping the girl with the sheet of straight black hair and bright-blue eyeshadow. They’re the ones from math class. Harrison sits across from me, and another girl I recognize sits to his right.

  “You know everyone?” asks Harrison, taking a giant bite of his sausage sandwich. I think of this word, “sandwich,” so like the Spanish word, “sánguche.” Which language had it first? Where does it come from?

  I don’t share any of these thoughts, because they race through my head all day long, and if I said them every time I think them, no one would ever sit next to me again. I give my head a small shake in response to his question, like maybe we can skip this part if I just don’t move that much.

  The girl next to me says, “No, ######, just because you know someone doesn’t ##### we just ###### ######, like through the ###### ###### of knowing people.” Her bangs are severe and she’s penciled in her eyebrows dark and sharp, giving her an intense look. But her eyes are smiling. “I’m Frankie,” she says. “Francesca, but can you even? So, no, Frankie.”