My father is hunched over his plate, angrily shoveling food in his mouth. My dad of back home would find this dad rude.
Then again, a lot of things about my dad have changed.
My mother clears her throat. “Your father and I were talking,” she says.
I look at her. She has her head cocked at him in the “well?” position.
He sits straighter. “Yes, we were,” he says. He chews for a long time, longer than anyone ever has to chew anything. Finally he takes a deep inhale and says, “I am sorry I yelled.”
I study his face. I’ve heard him apologize to my mom, but never to me. That’s not how fathers are where we’re from.
He goes on. “When I came to this country first, I knew why I came. But I didn’t know how it would knock me down to be without you and your mother. I felt so much responsibility. I had to find the right town for us. I had to learn the language as fast as I could. I had to figure out how things worked here, how to protect you. But here I was most nights, just weighed down by so much loneliness. Just wondering if we had done the right thing. But then you were here, and you were practically a woman, and you seemed so distant and . . . well, I don’t know you anymore, it is true. I pushed, I know. I was stubborn. But you were stubborn too, of course.” He smiles.
I smile back.
He goes on. “All this is to say, I don’t know all the answers. I don’t know if I’ve done the right things. But everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.” He puts his hand on mine. “Estoy tan orgulloso de ti. You must know that, right? You’re learning English so much faster than I ever could. You are a poet. You are my greatest joy, Ana.”
A tear spills out of my mother’s eye. She looks relieved, and something else. My father even looks a little misty. He gets up and I stand up too. My mother reaches her arm around us. We haven’t hugged like this, all three of us, in so long. Not since we got here. My father kisses my hair.
The tears that come are sweet.
“I’m sorry too,” I say. “I shouldn’t have lied. I won’t do it again. But sometimes I just didn’t know how to tell you things, or ask you things. I’m not the little girl you left behind.” This line I say directly to my father. My mother was there the whole time. But for him, I was one person, then I was a different one.
“I know,” he says softly.
I give him another hug. For the first time in a long time, it feels like it always used to.
“But there’s something more,” my mom says, a statement, not a question. She could always reads the currents of me, like I’m a boat map and she’s an old mariner.
“That boy,” I say. “Neo.”
“You had a fight?” my dad asks. “He was a jerk? Because if he was . . .”
I shake my head. “No. I was the one.” I tell them everything: Harrison, the fight, Neo getting suspended unfairly. I even tell them about the kiss and the awful moment by my locker. To their credit, they keep their faces even, although this is a lot for them to take in.
My father inhales deeply, lets out a sigh. “You really aren’t a little girl anymore,” he says wistfully.
I smile. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”
He nods. “Okay, well, then I’ll do my best to tell you what I think without imagining you in pigtails. This boy, the one who is leaving, he means a lot to you?”
I nod.
My dad puts his hand on my wrist. “No te preocupes, m’hijita. If it is meant to be, it will be.”
I laugh. “You’re not one to talk about fate much.”
He takes another deep breath. “Did I ever tell you I was in a band once? We played cafés in Buenos Aires, in Rosario, in Mar del Plata, spent a summer down by the lakes. I was going to be a singer, you know? The things you think about when you’re young.”
This is such a strange thing to learn about my dad, like he once lived on another planet. I guess I’ve seen pictures of him with a guitar, and I’ve heard him play, but I never knew it was something he did. Something he dreamed of.
“And then . . .” He smiles at my mother. “There was a girl I’d left back home. And I went back. I wasn’t sure if she’d wait for me, but she had. And I decided home and family were more important than whatever I was chasing in cafés and dance halls. And then you were on the way and I knew there was a different life for me.”
I can’t tell if he’s happy about this or not. Or whether this is in response to my comment about fate. Maybe this is a story about taking the wrong path.
“How do you know?” I ask. “How do you know what the right path is before you take it? What if in another life you could have been a famous singer, but you gave all that up for just this?”
“There’s nothing ‘just’ about this, nena. But, can I tell you what? I got quiet one night, and looked at the stars, and it was like I could hear your mother’s voice asking me to come home. So I did. And what I learned was: some things call you home.” With that, my dad gets up from the table and goes into the other room. When he comes back, he’s holding a small package wrapped in tissue paper. “This was outside the door today. It’s for you.” He hands it to me.
It feels like a book. I hold the bundle to my heart, give my dad a quick hug. “I’m going to sit outside for a little while, okay?”
My dad smiles. “Sí,” he says.
The Glossary of Happiness
I sit on the bench in front of the apartment building. I turn up my face to the sky. It is an orangey blue. The moon is massive and alive, and it seems to want to say something to me. Neo is probably on his way back to Cyprus now. Come back to me, I whisper. The sky beams down wordlessly, embarrassed for me, I think. Some wishes are too big even for the moon.
I take the tissue-paper-covered notebook in my hands. It’s tied with cream-colored twine. I unlace the knot and pull back the pink tissue paper. Inside is a small wire-bound notebook. It’s got a little window cut out of it, and through the window I can see, stenciled like an architectural drawing, the words “The Glossary of Happiness.”
I turn to the first page. It says, “Joyous: how I feel when you smile.”
The tears sting almost at once.
I go back to the first page. Inside, there’s a piece of lined loose-leaf paper folded in four. I unfold it. It says:
Dear Ana,
All this year I’ve been thinking a lot about words. About how we all feel the same things, all over the world. About how we all find our own words to say the things we feel. I looked at how hard you worked to collect every single word. How that day at the poetry slam you let them out of you, like a piece of you being spoken.
When I started this notebook, I never meant to give it to you. But when I went to pack it, I realized I would regret it if I didn’t tell you. This notebook would never have happened if I hadn’t known you. Every time I wrote in it, I was writing about you. I couldn’t leave without telling you all that.
Ana, leaving makes me sad for a lot of reasons, but most of all because I didn’t say all the things I could have said when they could have made a difference. But a lot of those things are in this book.
I hope you are happy. I hope you learn every word you want to learn and speak every one you want to say.
Goodbye, Ana. I hope you have a beautiful life.
Neo
I thumb through the book. Page after page of words. There are definitions and jokes and observations. All the words we talked about that have no definition in any other language: gezellig, in Dutch, like the English “cozy,” but not quite. And a bunch of the Spanish words I told him I couldn’t find English words for, like trasnochar and sobremesa, the word he liked so much that day in ESL class. I read them all, then read them again.
The book makes me sad, but full of hope, I realize. I want to find my voice, and that’s about more than just memorizing all the right words.
I close my eyes and think about what my father said at dinner. I get quiet, and look at the stars, and ask them what the right path is.
Dear N
eo,
Thank you for the notebook. I am sorry for the things I didn’t say, and sorry for the things I didn’t hear.
I have been thinking a lot about words too, but now that you’re gone, so many of them sting. Movies. Dragon. The Empire State Building. Because words aren’t really just sounds scribbled down. They are the whole thing that they stand for. Collecting words is collecting little bits of life.
I hope you’ve landed safely. I hope it’s okay to email you every once in a while. I know you may not want to hear from me, but I want to try, Neo. I miss you already.
Love,
Ana
Dear Neo,
I hope you’ve settled in back home. Your family must be happy to see you. Things here are different without you. But some things are good, like that kid who bullied you got expelled. I wish he would have gotten expelled for what he did to you instead of the other fight he picked the week after they let him come back to school, but I guess we can call it karma, as they say here. Altagracia is dating Leticia (remember I told you about her? From art class?) now and she seems so happy. Valentina finally came to visit, and she and Altagracia got along so well! My parents went to a party at the social club, and they got all dressed up, and my mother came back looking happier than she has since we’ve been here. It’s funny, trying to find the balance between where you’re from and where you are now. I’m beginning to wonder if I won’t always be a little from both places.
What about you? Will you forget your time here and go back to being from there?
Or, maybe, can you find your way back here? I hope it with my whole heart, even if it is too much to hope.
Love,
Ana
Dear Neo,
I haven’t heard back from you, but I’m writing anyway. I don’t want to give up. I miss you so much.
I know I may never see you again. And maybe my dad is right when he says things happen as they should. Maybe you were meant to help me find my way here, learning along with me. Even if that’s the only thing we were supposed to be, you made a big difference in my life.
In some ways, things are good here. I tested out of ESL for next year. And I talked to Mr. T. about the poetry slam in the city, and he agreed to be the adviser for a new poetry club at school. I’m hoping we can have two big slams a year.
I hate how things ended between us. I’ve been thinking a lot about another word: regret. I wish I could do it all different, Neo.
Love,
Ana
Dear Neo,
I miss you.
Love,
Ana
Dear Ana,
I’m sorry I haven’t written. I haven’t known what to say.
I too feel regret.
I too miss you.
I made my decision to come back home too quickly. Home. What does home mean, anyway?
It came to me last night when I was looking at the stars and wondering if you saw the same stars.
Ana, I think maybe you are my home, too.
My application for college is due in the fall. The English I learned will make my TOEFL easier. I have found an architecture program in New York that I hope I can get into.
If I do, will you meet me at the top of the Empire State Building?
It will be a while, but I want to make up a new word, just for you and me, something that means: worth waiting for.
Love,
Neo
One Year Later
I spot him from far away, but he’s looking around, his eyes scanning the crowd. The wind is strong and my hair is flying everywhere. But then . . . we’re on top of the world. Of course it gets windy up here.
I offered to meet him at the airport. But he said he’d meet me here, at the Empire State Building observatory. Like the first time. Like a new first for us.
He looks a year different. His hair is a little shorter. He is deeply tanned. He is more muscular than last year, too. I’m nervous. I smooth the front of my dress. Will he still feel the way he did last year? I know that with every note I’ve gotten from him, my feelings have only grown.
But then he spots me and quickens the pace. And his arms around me tell me everything I was hoping to know.
I put my face in his shoulder. I feel his breath in my hair.
“Agapimu,” he says, squeezing tighter, letting out a sigh it feels like he’s been holding in a long time. I know what it means because he told me once, and later I doodled it in my notebook and tingled at the knowledge, even though he hadn’t meant it about me. I say it back to him.
“Mi amor,” I whisper, smiling up at him like the sun.
Author’s Note
I have spent a lot of time thinking about writing a book on not speaking English . . . in English. I once spoke no English. I came to the US undocumented and sat in many a classroom like Ana, wondering what was going on. Like Ana, I marinated in abject humiliation after I missed a word or a social cue. It’s been a long time, but I remember it vividly. When I decided I wanted to tell Ana’s story, I understood I’d be doing two things: explaining the experience of not speaking English but doing it as the person I am now, English speaker of many decades, lover of Shakespeare and Flannery O’Connor, English major, book nerd. And also, realistically, I am a writer in the United States. And many of my readers speak English, although, of course, it would be my honor for readers of other languages to find their way to it as well.
As a reader, I imagine I might have had the question: Is the story told in retrospect by Ana after she speaks English? Or is it translated? The simple answer is I want you to decide. I want you to create that part of the story. It is yours. It’s also occurred to me that, even to Spanish speakers, some of the words or conjugations in this book might look different from the ones you know. There are many variations to the language, and the one I learned uses “vos” instead of “tú.” So when you run across something quirky, I hope you’ll smile and realize that all languages have their idiosyncrasies.
There are words we hear in our world, see in our books. But they are just tools. Behind them all, there is the experience of being ourselves. That experience has no language, no issues of logic. This is a story of wanting to find yourself, of feeling excluded, or worrying whether you’re enough. It is also about how the people we meet and love and need on the journey mean everything. There is no language and every language for that.
I took four years of high school Italian, which means when I travel to Italy I can order my food in decent Italian (unfortunately, 87 percent of waiters respond in English). I once loved a man from Cyprus, so I used to be able to talk to his family in passable Greek. When my mother comes over every Sunday to drink mate (that’s “mah-teh” to English speakers), I speak almost exclusively in Spanish, even though we both speak English. My mother sang me lullabies in Spanish, but I sang to my own children in English, the (main) language of my beloved adopted land, save for one secret lullaby I did sing to them in Spanish.
We find many ways to say the things we feel. But what’s important is not what separates us, or the particulars of how you say a thing or how I do. What’s important is that in our similarly beating hearts, love sounds like love without any words.
Acknowledgments
If you are like me and enjoy reading acknowledgments pages, you may have caught on to the same trend I have: authors often feel the need to express amazement at just how big a group of people it takes to make a book and to support one writer’s dreams. I am no different. I’m close enough to the start of my writing career to remember the fantasy of the lone, brilliant soul at the old typewriter, the writer I aspired to be. The reality is more like this: one lone, often-muddled soul firing off emails and making calls to ask a thousand different questions, request support, plea for coffee dates wherein plot points can be discussed and literary wounds nursed with swigs of mango dragon-fruit lemonades and espresso. There is nothing solitary about it (in fact, it really can’t be done solo) and I am so grateful for that.
I’ve also st
udied acknowledgments pages and tried to figure out what the order of mention means. I’ll spare you the effort here: everyone on these pages is important and magical. That my brain came up with one name over another in any particular order is an accident of synapses that bears no inherent meaning. And, also, if you know you’ve helped me on my way and I’ve somehow neglected to mention you, chalk it up to those synapses firing a bit more slowly than they once did.
First, to the fantastic crew of writing friends who never tire of discussing All the Things, from craft to the best stickers to use as rewards on my calendar: you are a lifeline. From the SPA people who helped me see the bigger picture, to my writing group: Ismée Williams, Betsy Voreacos, Hannah Lee Jarvis, Lisa Hansen, and GG Collins, who never get bored of pointing out my blind spots, although you’d figure I’d have learned by now. To my sparkle ******* on Slack, Pat McCaw, Gina Carey, Gail Wilson, Tashi Saheb-Ettaba, Timanda Wertz, David Daniel, and Jamieson Haverkampf. To Anne Ursu, Laura Ruby, and Christine Heppermann, for being everything I want to be when I grow up, and to the Highlights Foundation for the comfy cabin and the loft. To Tracy Banghart, without whom none of this would have happened. And to the brilliant and ever-patient Yvonne Ventresca, writer extraordinaire and dear friend, a thousand years of good luck to you for being the tortoise to my hare, a perspective that this fidgety rabbit needs in the extreme. I am grateful for you every day.
To the Alloy team, a heart full of gratitude. To Viana Siniscalchi for the endless patience, to Sara Shandler for always knowing the right thing to say and for running a meeting like a boss, to Josh Bank for the wit and the photo with Wonder Woman, to Joelle Hobeika for the keen eye, and to Josephine McKenna for being all-around awesome.
To the Harper team: Alessandra Balzer, for teaching me that dreams really do come true and that cat pictures are best when shared, to Caitlin Johnson for the keen eagle eye, to Jackie Burke, Cindy Hamilton, Sabrina Abballe, Shannon Cox, Patty Rosati, Katie Dutton, Mimi Rankin, Andrea Pappenheimer, Kerry Moynagh, Kathy Faber, Megan Gendell, and Jon Howard for helping Ana find her way to readers, and for every other awesome human at Balzer + Bray and HarperCollins who touched this book. A special thank you to Jenna Stempel-Lobell, Rude, and Maja Tomljanovic for the gorgeous cover art.
Love in English Page 17
