Love in English

by Maria E. Andreu

  We’re almost at school now. A pack of sports guys walks up the steps carrying sticks for a sport I don’t recognize. A girl kicks up the skateboard she just rode in with, tucks it under her arm, flicks bangs out of her eyes. I wonder what it feels like to be that effortless. I think maybe I was, once, back home. Except I just didn’t know it.

  “How?”

  “I think you should tutor me.”

  I turn to face Harrison now. “I . . . what? How?”

  “What do you mean, how? You show me how the problems are done. I do them. You point out why I’m a dumbass.”

  I can think of several thousands of reasons why this probably makes no sense. Like the thousands of words I would need to explain math to him but don’t know. But I can think of one very good reason why it’s a great idea, starting with the way Harrison sometimes bites his lip when he’s deep in concentration. And how his fingers move when he’s holding a pencil and doing problems. And . . .

  “Okay,” I say. “I can help.”

  He jumps straight up three times, incredibly high each time. We’re at the foot of the steps to the school. He hands me my earbud. “When I’m playing Madison Square Garden, I’ll give you a shout-out for preventing my mother from locking me in my room for math-related reasons.”

  I laugh. “I’ll count on it.”

  The Math of You

  Tú eres una cifra

  I can’t add or subtract

  Un problema I can’t factor

  A presence I want to multiply

  You’re a prime number

  Maybe one of those problems with no solution

  and the math of you makes so much sense to me right now

  No Todo El Monte Es Orégano

  After school, I’m at my locker stuffing it with textbooks that don’t want to fit. Altagracia pops up next to me, looking video-ready as always. Her hair is piled on her crown, and she’s got a subtle pink eyeshadow on that makes her eyes look a different color than they usually do. She’s in a white tracksuit with a cropped, belly-baring zip-up top trimmed in silver.

  “What would you say to a dinner date tonight?”

  “Dinner?”

  “It’s kind of an emergency.”

  “An emergency dinner?”

  “My dad wants me to play nice with his girlfriend.”

  “Decile que no.” I tell her. “Can’t you say no?”

  “Bonding, blah blah, this one’s the one, blah blah. So . . . will you come?”

  “How will I help, if I come?”

  Altagracia clears her throat, pretending to toss her hair over her shoulder and putting on an overly formal accent: “Oh, Altos Gracios, your father tells me you’re quite the internet mogul. My cousin/aunt/best friend/college roommate works for Macy’s/Sephora/Aunt Ginny’s Makeup Blog. I could hook you up!”

  I laugh.

  “Save me from the horror that is my father’s love life!”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “My father has incredibly expensive taste in restaurants. Does that help?”

  I scrunch up my nose. “Not really. It’s just that my mom . . .” I’m going to say that my mom doesn’t love me hanging out with people she doesn’t know, which is true, but as soon as I consider saying it I realize it makes me sound like a second grader.

  “Oh, overprotective parent? No problem. I’ve got one of those, although luckily she’s in another country. So . . . get Mom on the phone.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I’m serious. Parents love me.”

  I look at her hair, the shave on the side. I’m not sure she’s met parents like mine.

  “Come on. Please. I wanna meet Mom.”

  I laugh, take out my phone, dial my mom. When she picks up, I explain the situation. I don’t do it very well, because Altagracia keeps making faces at me, signaling for me to hand her the phone.

  “Hola, Ma!” Altagracia yells toward the phone.

  “Dejame hablar con ella,” my mom tells me.

  “Mrs. Mom,” says Altagracia as soon as I hand her the phone. “Sorry, cómo se llama?” Her disarming smile sounds like it crackles on the phone. I wonder what my mom thinks.

  “Le explico,” says Altagracia. She goes on to explain the situation to my mom. She offers her father’s phone number and says the name of a restaurant I’m sure my mother’s never heard of. Then she invites my mom to come too! I can hear my mother laughing. The mix of boldness and sweetness has worked. Altagracia hands me the phone again.

  “Qué lindo que tenés una amiga así,” says my mom. She’s happy I have a friend like Altagracia.

  I’m happy to have a friend like Altagracia, too.

  A good day

  When you didn’t know you needed a

  Parent-whispering

  Dad-girlfriend-avoiding

  Old-lady-driving

  Green-fingernailed

  makeup-genius friend

  Who can make you laugh at anything

  But you’re lucky enough to find her anyway.

  You’re Not Allowed to Talk Aloud

  “So you see here? If you solve for this, then the formula works.”

  Harrison squints his eyes at it. I check the time on my phone. I’m not sure how long it’s been, and I told Neo I’d meet him here for our movie after I tutor Harrison. We’ve been at it for nearly an hour, and he’s better, but not fully there yet.

  I find him very distracting. The slight smell of something soapy, the perfect fingernails. If I’m honest, I’m only hearing him in stretches, like when he’s asking me a question. But after I scratch out the problem with my pencil, and then he starts to write too, I go somewhere. Somewhere to tight-throat/shallow-breath land. Somewhere to ohmygodthatcurlbyhisear land. Somewhere else. I wonder if he notices.

  I watch him. His eyelashes shift a millimeter at a time as he scans the page, in little jumps, not one smooth glide. His shampoo . . . is that lemon? Would it be weird if I asked him about his shampoo?

  Yes, it would be weird.

  “So like that, you mean?” he asks, his eyes serious.

  I look down. I have not been paying attention. I check his work. He missed one step, and it messed the whole thing up. I show him.

  He puts down his pencil. He takes a deep breath, laces his fingers behind his head, and stretches his elbows back. I watch his chest move with the inhale. We’ve been working hard, and I can see he is near the end of his attention too. “You may have gotten yourself into an ######## struggle here, Ana.”

  I shake my head. “No. I don’t think so. With math, there is only one answer. Wrong. Right. Not like English. You want something impossible? Try English.”

  “I always hear that, but what’s hard about English? I take French, and that language was designed to injure your tongue.”

  I laugh. “Are you serious?”

  “You sound like you’re doing okay.”

  I lack precisely the thing to explain what I lack. The words. For every word I get out, there’s a whole iceberg of thoughts and hopes and feelings that stay unspoken. But how do I speak them?

  “It is very hard.”

  “Give me one example,” he says.

  I close my eyes. There’s always a river of what? that I’m swimming in. How to grab a branch, pick just one thing?

  “The machine that makes the noise that wakes you up.”

  “The alarm?”

  “Yes. What does it do?”

  “The alarm? It rings.”

  I sigh. “The other way you say that.”

  “The alarm . . . goes off?”

  “Yes. Off what? The alarm goes on, no?”

  He laughs. “I mean, isn’t it that way in Spanish?”

  “No. La alarma suena. It sounds. It doesn’t go off anything. Also, the other day, my teacher said someone passed a test ‘by the skin of his teeth.’ Besides how disgusting that sounds, teeth don’t have skin?”

  He laughs again.

  I’m on a roll. “And another thing. What is
the sound of the first letter of the alphabet?”

  “A? A.”

  “Is it? How do you say P-A-N-I-C?”

  “I guess then it would be pay-nic,” he says, smiling.

  “There are so many ways to say A. Ah, eh, ay. You know how many ways in my language? One.” This is probably one of the hardest things about English, how each vowel could be pronounced a bunch of different ways and just when you think you’ve learned them all, you hear another one, or the exception to a rule.

  We keep going on about the difficulty of the English language and I can’t believe how many examples I have to share. There is everything from “always” to “all ways” and “whack” to “wack,” which seems to mean uncool. “Or how about this? You are not allowed to talk aloud in the library.”

  Harrison tips his chair back and falls to the carpet on purpose. His messy hair falls behind him on the orange wall-to-wall carpeting. “You win. I am slain,” he says, hands on his heart.

  I want to jump on top of him. He is just so cute. I look around. Is it okay that we’re making this scene in the library? I guess you are allowed to talk aloud in the library after all. If I did jump on him, would anyone see?

  I look toward the door.

  Yes. One person would see.

  Neo.

  Neo is standing in the doorway.

  His eyes travel from me to Harrison on the floor with his hands over his heart. He’s here for our movie. I must have lost track of time. I feel a strange twinge, like I lied. I told him I was coming here to study. And I was. But . . . well, obviously we are not studying now.

  But why should it matter if we had a little fun at the end of studying?

  I extend my hand down to Harrison to help him get up off the floor. He takes it, hops up, then follows my line of sight to Neo. “Oh, is this your next . . . study thing?” He is back to being serious now, in one sudden moment.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You . . . okay, that’s cool. Tuesday, then?” I nod. Harrison picks up his stuff, puts it in his backpack.

  “Okay, well, see you,” I say awkwardly as I head to the AV room with Neo. It’s a thick silence, with a swirl to it.

  “You study different math than I study,” he says. There’s a bite to the statement, a little like an accusation.

  “We were just . . .”

  He waves his hand at me. “No, no, sorry. Bad day today.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you want to do this another day?”

  He shakes his head slowly again, breaks the gaze. “No, let’s watch the movie.”

  And we do, but it’s not like other times. We both have our minds on something else.

  Potluck

  It smells like empanadas.

  That happens like this: the right kind of meat from the best butcher you can find. That was a little hard this time around, since we don’t know the best butcher. But still, my mom used her special meat-choosing powers to pick the right ones: a cut of churrasco, then another one that in English they called “chuck” (which I think is a man’s name too?), plus another one with plenty of fat. Then home, cut the meat in two-centimeter cubes, put them into the brand-new meat grinder, once, then twice. It’s funny to see a shiny meat grinder and not the ancient one that three generations of hands from my mother’s family had washed. But this one works fine.

  The chopped-up yellow onions are simmered until they’re see-through. Then you add the meat, and the whole thing is cooked over the stove. It makes the entire place smell like the best thing anywhere: the meat, plus yellow onions, plus red pepper flakes, plus salt. It occurs to me that someday I may need to know how to make this on my own, so I ask my mother every time, “But how do you know how much salt?”

  “You watch,” she says. Which is no answer at all.

  The picadillo is put into the fridge overnight. When it’s cold and hard, the meat filling is easier to scoop into the dough. This made it hard back home at the high heat of Christmas, when you were racing against the balmy air to stuff all the empanadas before the juice ran and made closing them impossible. Which makes me wonder: What will it be like for it to be cold at Christmas, like in all the American Christmas movies we watched? Is everything really covered with snow?

  My mother and I carry out our usual tasks, the same thing I have done since I was four years old. She rolls out the dough she’s made by hand paper thin. She scoops out a tablespoon of filling. On each, I put one small piece of hard-boiled egg and one pitted olive. When I was small, the olives used to have pits, and then you could count how many empanadas each person had eaten by the pits on their plates. Then she wets one side of the dough, folds the other side over, cuts around it with a pizza cutter, and makes a magic little braid thing to seal it up, lightning quick, which I’ve tried a hundred times to make but just can’t. Then it’s my job to put them on the baking sheet and paint them with egg, which she’s beat, her hands moving like a blur.

  This is one of my favorite things to do. This says Christmas. It says birthdays. It says my aunts laughing around the kitchen table, telling stories of old unfortunate endings and boys who came to see them on bicycles, of dances and angry mothers waving rolling pins.

  And now, it says ESL potluck.

  Potluck. This is a new word. I had to look it up when Mr. T. suggested we all bring in something from our home countries to share with each other. I instantly loved this word: potluck. We did parties like this back home, too, but we didn’t have this fantastic word. Where could such wonderfulness possibly come from? I imagine ancient people believing that all the different pots brought luck. I hope that’s what it is, and I hope it’s true.

  “Ana, so explain it again. Altagracia’s father did what now?”

  “Se enamora muy rápido, dice Altagracia.” He falls in love very fast. “Pero se le pasa pronto también. That woman from the other day?” I make the pfft sign across the neck of “over.” The woman Altagracia’s dad had been dating has already moved into the “ex” category.

  She laughs. She met my father when she was fourteen. All of her sisters and all of her friends did a similar thing. “You said he has that big house. Maybe money makes you do weird things.” She giggles.

  “¿Qué excusa tenemos nosotros?” I smile at her.

  She swats at me with cloth she’s got at her left side to wipe her hands free of the flour she uses to keep the dough from sticking to her hands. “Ay, Ana,” she says in mock anger. Then she adds, “Contame de la escuela. ¿Los chicos están lindos?”

  “There are no boys,” I say. I know better than to talk to my mom about this. For women who met their husbands at fourteen and stuck to them, there’s very little room for just liking someone. You do not bring a boy home until you’re sure he’s “the one.” And how you ever know such a thing, I can’t even imagine.

  “¿Así que tu escuela es solo para chicas?”

  I roll my eyes at her. “No, my school is not just for girls. I mean, there’s no boy that . . .” I don’t want to lie.

  She reads me instantly. “¡Te gusta un chico! ¿Un americanito?”

  She always sees right through me in some creepy, almost unnatural way. It’s always impossible for me to keep secrets from her. When I was little I used to ask her how she knew everything and she’d laugh and say, “I just do.” When she was mad, she’d say, “Mientras tú vas, yo vuelvo.” While you’re on your way there, I’m on my way back. I look at her. She’s rosy from the heat in the kitchen, with floury hands and a strand of hair escaping her ponytail. She looks like . . . herself. She looks happy. I nod.

  “Handsome? Tall?” She thinks all American men are handsome and tall, like in commercials.

  Except in this case, she happens to be right, so I nod again.

  “Cuidado, Ana,” she says sweetly, but just sharply enough for me to remember we’re on slightly different teams. Careful. It makes me pull back just a millimeter.

  “We’re friends, Ma,” I say. “Amigos, no más.” To her credit, she doesn’t push for
more.

  There’s not much more to tell, honestly. Harrison and I have been getting together a few times a week after school. And he’s been doing better in math, turning in every homework assignment, getting solid grades on quizzes and tests. Once we met in the music room to study, after all the band kids had cleared away, and he played me a song on a guitar. He has a beautiful, deep singing voice. I don’t think I was much help in math after that, with my heart thudding in my ears the whole time.

  Neo and I have made progress on the list of movies, too, but it’s been quiet, different from before.

  My mother clears her throat. She’s made six empanadas on a long stretch of dough, and she’s waiting for me to put the olive and egg on each of them. I scramble to do my part. She playfully folds and cuts as if chasing me.

  I study my mother again. It is still strange to see her here sometimes, like someone plucked her out of one TV show where she belongs and stuck her in the wrong one. But today is different.

  Today, for once, she looks at home.

  Albóndigas by Any Other Name

  On potluck day, Neo and I go to the refrigerator where the lunch ladies have let us store our dishes before going to class. Neo carries a big ceramic dish full of little cylinders of what looks like meat.

  “Albóndigas?” I ask, pointing to the dish. I’m hoping the word in Greek sounds similar enough to the Spanish so that he’ll understand, because I don’t know the word in English. In hearing him trying to explain things to me, I’ve caught a few words that are almost the same in Greek and Spanish: pantalones, for one.

  “Kefthedes,” he replies, like the answer should have been obvious. So, no, not albóndigas.

  “Can I?” I ask. I know we’re supposed to wait, but they look delicious.

  He nods. I pull up the plastic wrap, pop a whole one in my mouth. It is an albóndiga, by another name, with a little more of an herb taste than the ones my mother makes. So it’s an albóndiga, but it’s also . . . not?