‘OK, what’s wrong with this sentence?” Nils said, writing in large letters on the board because some of his students couldn’t afford to buy glasses: BARKING LOUDLY IN CLASS, SVETLANA TOLD THE DOG TO BE QUIET OR IT MIGHT DISRUPT THE LESSON. He liked to use students as characters in his sentences, to help the class relate. Nils scanned the rows of squinting faces before glancing at the lump of pork buns sitting on his desk. Every day some new offering appeared there, native foods from China or El Salvador or Kazakhstan, home-cooked blinis or pupusas. Once, returning from a break at 10 in the morning, he’d found a grease-stained paper bag filled with a bundled sheaf of chicken feet.
“What means ‘disrupt’?” Noemi asked. Noemi had a proprietorial relationship with English, and was angry when people used words she didn’t know.
“Like ‘interrupt,’ ” Nils explained. “To make the class stop.”
“I no like this word,” she said, shaking her head. “This word make me aggravate.”
“OK,” Nils said patiently, erasing the word. “We’ll change it to ‘interrupt.’ ‘Barking loudly in class, Svetlana told the dog to be quiet or it might interrupt the lesson.’ But what’s wrong with this sentence?””
I don’t have a dog,” Svetlana said in her meticulous Russian accent. It reminded Nils of someone trying to pick a safe with her teeth. Unlike most of the students at Arriba Language and Vocational School, she had impeccable grammar. “I don’t understand this having dogs. They are very dirty creatures, and frequently lick you with the tongue. No one needs a dog licking you with the tongue, where other people kiss.”
“Blind persons need dog,” Noemi said.
“If I were blind, I would use a cane for dignity and not have a dirty creature take advantage of me.”
“Not clean,” Mei Ling said, nodding and holding her nose. She often ate dried fish in class and burped obstreperously, without apology. The Chinese women, who had to tackle a heroic language barrier, generally had the worst English in class. “In China, no dog come in house. Too much smell.”
“Dogs very dirty,” Zhao Jun agreed, bending to scribble something in her notebook. She carried the same notebook with her wherever she went. Once, when Nils was telling a joke to some students in the cafeteria during lunch, he’d seen her transcribing his words carefully, like a secretary taking minutes. Nils felt vaguely like he couldn’t breathe.
“OK, but imagine–for the sake of argument–that Svetlana has a dog. Hypothetically, right? What’s wrong with this sentence?”
“You can’t bring dogs to school!” Edwing said triumphantly from the back row. He worked at Safeway every night and spent most of class in a lizard-like trance. “This is correct,” Svetlana said, smiling at him. “Same with my little Yefim. I tried to bring him to school, but they wouldn’t allow him in class for computers. No day care, so I ask you as full-time student, what can I do?”
“Put him to sleep,” Edwing said equably.
“You don’t understand.” Svetlana turned white. “Yefim is not my dog.”
“No should bring other person’s dog to class,” Mei Ling said. “Russians crazy.”
“Crazy!” cried Zina, who always sat next to Svetlana. Since he’d started teaching at the school a month ago, Nils had rarely seen the two Russians part for more than a minute. Once, when Svetlana showed up to class with a new pair of sneakers, Zina had stared at them throughout the lesson and arrived the next day with an identical pair. “Eat foots of chicken, you call Russians crazy.”
“OK,” Nils said weakly. He thought of the priests in Dante’s “Inferno,” rolling boulders in a half-circle until they smash into each other and have to retrace their steps. “Concentrate on the grammar, if you can. According to this sentence, who’s doing the barking?”
“Dog’s doing barking,” Noemi said with supreme confidence.
“No,” Nils said curtly. He turned to the corner of the classroom and looked at Lorena Poot, his last resort. Lorena was 60 years old and nearly toothless, a Latina woman with the sullen, breathtaking eyes of a Hollywood starlet. Though she didn’t speak English perfectly, she studied harder than anyone in class and regularly scored 100 percent on the tests. “Please, Lorena–maybe you can tell the class. Who’s doing the barking in this sentence?”
“Svetlana,” she said indifferently, refusing to meet his eyes. “Modifier in the wrong place, like you talked about yesterday.”
Nils thanked her with genuine gratitude, feeling the oxygen drain back into the room. He passed around a worksheet and put the students into pairs so they could wrestle with the answers together. The classroom was bare except for a sign on the back wall–“SPELLING RULES”–printed on a long flag of paper in faded, dot-matrix letters. Someone had taken down the actual rules, so that it seemed like an exuberant slogan devised by the Board of Education.
Except for the drabness of the rooms–and despite days like this, when he feared his students weren’t learning a thing–Nils loved teaching at the school. It was rowdy and unpredictable, gratifying in a way he couldn’t explain. His parents, of course, thought he was crazy; if he was so bent on being a teacher, why not teach at a private school where he could earn a living? “What’s this compulsion to save the world?”
Actually, Nils wasn’t under any illusions about saving the world. From the outside, he knew there was something faintly ridiculous about a middle-class do-gooder teaching immigrants proper grammar. He thought of those tough-love teachers from Hollywood movies, inspiring gangbangers to find the area of a circle. But he had no desire to spoon-feed “The Great Gatsby” to a bunch of drowsy teenagers. He wanted to help people, however naive that sounded: to teach people whose lives he could actually improve.
As usual, Lorena Poot refused to work with any of the other students, cutting a small and lonely figure in the corner, hunched over the handout like a prisoner hoarding a meal. Nils watched sadly as she scribbled out her answers. Her new dislike of him was baffling and seemed to exclude reason. Lately, when he was discussing some clear and indisputable law of grammar–the difference between “who” and “whom,” say, or the past participle of “grow”–she would sigh disruptively and shake her head in disbelief, scoffing when he asked her what was wrong. The kinder Nils was, in fact, the more she seemed to hate him. As the class was leaving for the day, squaring their desks and rupturing into a Babel of languages, he called Lorena’s name and asked her to stay behind for a few minutes.
“I want you to be happy in class,” Nils said, sitting on the edge of his desk. He smiled and looked at the gold cross hanging flat against her sweater. Sometimes, between classes, he noticed Lorena sitting by herself in the corner of the cafeteria, her head bowed in prayer. “Tell me, please, is there something I did to make you angry?”
Lorena stared out the window. A low-rider floated by on the street, the Godzilla steps of a rap beat booming through the walls and rattling the chalkboard. “The last test,” she said finally. For the first time, Nils noticed something peculiar about her nose–a gleaming smoothness out of keeping with the wrinkles of her face, like the burl of a log stripped of bark. “You put a question sign next to my sentence.”
“That’s right, sure,” he said. “I remember you got one wrong. I didn’t even count it because it was extra credit.”
“My son is very smart, native speaker. He was raise here and speaks only English. He says there’s nothing wrong with how I write.”
“He’s right, absolutely–you’re an excellent writer.” Nils walked to her desk, relieved. “If that’s all it is, Lorena, I’m glad. Bring the sentence tomorrow, and we can talk about it.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday, Mr. Rylander.” He shrunk slightly from her breath: a rottonish smell, like seaweed drying on the beach. Lorena reached into her bag and pulled out Nils’ test, flipping to the extra-credit section where he’d asked them to write a sentence using a semicolon. She read her answer proudly, as if she were recording it for a tape. “I tried to cross the busy street with my son; however, the cars were an enemy.”
“See there, Lorena. The grammar’s fine.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s just we don’t use the word ‘enemy’ quite like that.”
“My son says you don’t understand English.”
“Your son?” he said, smiling.
“He thinks you’re poco inteligente. Stupid.”
Nils removed his hand from her shoulder. “Lorena,” he said, clearing his throat. “I was born here. Even if I was stupid–which I don’t think I am–I’d still be able to speak English.”
“Born here!” Lorena looked him straight in the eye for the first time, her eyes damp and glowing. A look of radiant, unmistakable loathing. Nils was shocked to discover she was trembling. “So the rest of us, not born here, we don’t deserve to be smarter than you!”
Nils didn’t know what to say. He gathered himself to speak, but Lorena ducked behind her desk and grabbed the shopping bag she used to carry her books, stomping out of the classroom before he could defend himself.
After work, Nils walked to a protest rally he’d heard about from the other teachers at school. It was raining softly, a cobwebby tingle on his face. He headed in the same direction as his apartment, passing the little groceries and panaderias and “Mexicatessans,” taking in the buoyant rush of Spanish that greeted him wherever he turned. Pot smoke drifted pleasantly from doorways. It was only 5 o’clock, but the Pentecostal church on 24th Street was jammed with people; Nils stopped for a second and peered in at the service, listening to the heartfelt sputter of tambourines. He liked to walk around the neighborhood at this time of day because there were so many people outside, milling about on the sidewalk, playing baseball or barbecuing steaks by the curb or scratching at a lottery card with a toddler cleaving to one hip. The Mission District–at least the part he lived in–made the world of college seem bland and cultish. Originally, he’d moved here after graduating with the expectation of befriending his neighbors. He’d imagined borrowing Nicaraguan spices, trading his jazz CDs for brokenhearted ranchera music. His first day in the apartment, he’d left the door open to greet well-wishers. No one had come. Even now, his neighbors seemed to ignore him on purpose, averting their eyes as he passed them on the sidewalk.
Nearing Bryant Street, he paused in front of a small playground to watch two boys horsing around on the swing set. One boy was standing on the swing, gripping the chains and swinging in jagged parabolas over the second boy, who lay on his back among the orange peels and condoms littering the concrete. The metal seat of the swing brushed over the supine one’s face, which made him shriek with terror and giggle deliriously. For a second, watching the two boys, Nils felt a fragile sort of weepiness he’d come to associate with living in the city. He thought of Lorena Poot: aside from some petty grudges in high school, he’d never had someone hate him before.
He walked up to Mission Street, alert to the expanding number of cafes and trendy-looking thrift stores. The rally was being sponsored by the Anti-Displacement Coalition. The protesters–about 25 or 30 of them–were gathered around the construction site of a newly begun office development, undeterred by the increasing drizzle. People in raincoats or hooded capes blocked the sidewalk and carried homemade signs, mounted placards that read “EVICTION KILLS CULTURE,” or, “THANKS, MAYOR BROWN, FOR HELPING US OUT.” Nils stood on the corner and watched them protest, impressed by the diversity of the crowd. Except for Nils, most of the white people there had face-piercings and Puma tennis shoes. There was a banner tied to the fence of the construction site, a giant, silkscreened picture of a scared-looking Latino man crouched in an alley and wearing a sombrero. Above the picture was the mock headline: “LAST REMAINING MEXICAN FOUND IN MISSION DISTRICT.”
Nils wiped the rain from his face. While he watched the proceedings, an actual man in a sombrero stood next to the banner and made a fiery speech about keeping the Mission home to immigrants and artists. Nils guessed the sombrero was an ironic gesture. When he’d finished his speech, the man led the protesters in a chant, clapping out “We’re not on loan, so yuppies go home!” until the whole throng had taken up his words. The protesters shook their signs as they yelled, inciting passersby to join the chant. Nils chanted as well, caught up in the protesters’ fury. He was impressed by the volume of their anger, but what struck him more than anything was the illusion of a single shout: all the gleaming, different-colored faces, chanting in a perfect euphony of voices.
That night, Nils decided to throw a party for his students. He made up an invitation on a piece of construction paper and drew a map to his address, tracing a long arrow from the school and wending it through the eight blocks of urban streets to the door of his apartment. The arrow thrilled him, for some reason. At the top of the invitation, he wrote: “POTLUCK AT NILS’: BRING YOUR FAVORITE DISH.” It was against school policy, probably, but Nils wanted to bridge the authoritarian divide between himself and his students. For one thing, he thought it might stop them from bringing him so many gifts.
Mostly, though, Nils thought it would be fun. When he handed the invitations out on Monday, Noemi squinted at her copy and asked, “Who is this Nils?”
“Me,” he explained. “That’s my name.”
“You, teacher?” Mei Ling said. She looked at him skeptically, her eyes drifting down his body. “You need dishes?”
“No, I don’t need dishes. Dish means food sometimes. It’s a party. Cook your favorite food and bring it over for everyone to try.” He looked at Edwing in the back. “What’s your favorite food, Edwing?”
Edwing thought for a minute. “McDonald’s.”
“I see. Do you have any other favorite foods?”
“Shrimps. I like them a lot.”
“Oh,” Nils said encouragingly, “what kind of shrimp?”
“You know, the type you get from Sizzler.”
“Right. I was hoping you guys would bring dishes from your own countries. Traditional un-Sizzler food? Pupusas maybe? Like the food you put on my desk.”
The class looked at Svetlana, as they often did when they didn’t understand something completely. She touched her hair and stood up, facing them from the front row. “We should cook homemade food and bring it in Tupperware,” she explained. “Everyone shall eat at our teacher’s house, to taste the lost nourishment of our countries.”
Of course, Nils couldn’t have said it so beautifully, with the same Russian contempt for banality. The class broke into a bedlam of voices, inspecting the invitations and glancing at the street sign through the window to check the map’s veracity. Nils felt a deep flush of pleasure. He’d developed a great affection for his students; just last week, he’d sat with Svetlana and several other students after class, talking about the global spread of American culture and leafing through elaborately staged pictures of their families. At the rear of the classroom, Lorena Poot seemed barely in control of her face, lips clamped together but moving strangely at the same time, as if she were shelling a sunflower seed with her tongue. She had folded the invitation into a small square and placed it at the very top of her desk like a dirty Kleenex. Weirdly, Nils found himself craving her approval. Her eyes were clear and beautiful, and for a moment he forgot himself, mesmerized by the ferocity of her stare.
“You always itch!” she said in a strange voice.
“What?”
“None of the other teachers itch!” She was almost shouting. “I don’t understand it. But you! Itch and itch and itch!” The class had gone silent, leaning in their chairs to look at Lorena.”What do you mean?” Nils asked, bewildered.
“You itch like a mono. Monkey!”
“Scratch? You’re angry at me because I scratch, Lorena?”
“You itch your head, everywhere. Always itching.” She scratched her head and chest in pantomime, like a mad woman beset by fleas. Mei Ling started to giggle. “None of the other teachers itch in class, so it makes me wonder why you’re hired.”
“Lorena, I don’t know what you mean,” Nils said quietly. He took a step backward and bumped into his desk, trying to keep his voice steady. “If you have a problem, calm down and speak to me after class.”
He walked to the blackboard and began to outline the three planning criteria for an interoffice memo. “PURPOSE. AUDIENCE. MAIN IDEA.” When he was done, he turned to see Lorena mocking him behind his back, hunched over her desk and scratching her head and armpit in a crazed allergic spasm. Her lips were peeled back to look like a monkey’s. Some of the students were laughing, and Nils tried to see it as an attempt at humor. Except it wasn’t funny–it was nightmarish and grotesque, this bright and toothless woman scratching herself without mercy. He did his best to ignore her, teaching to the middle of the classroom and pretending Lorena wasn’t mocking him in the corner. Finally–after the third or fourth time–he swung around suddenly and slammed the textbook he was holding down on his desk.
“Lorena, stop it! You’re disrupting the class, like a 5-year-old! I have to ask you to leave.”
“My son never itches,” she said, standing from her desk with a look of triumph. “He’s your age and has perfect manners.”
Nils looked away from her, his heart leaping once to calm itself. “Leave the class until you can settle down and act respectfully.”
Lorena grabbed her shopping bag of belongings and swung it at no one in particular, muttering in Spanish as she stomped across the room. She looked wild, her hair puffed into a cloudcap and a few gray strands webbed to the corner of her mouth. Before slamming the door behind her, Lorena turned and spat in Nils’ direction, a thread of saliva sticking to her chin. He listened to her footsteps banging down the hall. She was mentally ill, no doubt about it. He refused to accept the alternative: that she despised him so much it drove her beyond reason.
“Lady go look for her marbles,” Noemi said, orbiting an ear with her finger, and he had to keep himself from siding openly with the class.
After the other teachers had left, Nils stayed at the school and helped the education coordinator with busy work, making fliers and hunting down the janitor so they could fix a leak in the computer room. He tried to keep his mind on what he was doing, but the image of Lorena Poot’s trembling face disrupted his thoughts, flashing in his head like a jammed or broken slide. He pictured her wandering the neighborhood, scratching her armpits at strangers. On his way to the teacher’s room, he stopped in the Student Services office to see if he could look at Lorena’s file.
“No history of mental illness,” said the Student Services manager, a former student who threatened to quit before the beginning of each month but always showed up on the 1st with a sheepish look of contempt. “One of the walk-ins. Not on meds, far as we know.”
“Do you know anything about her life?”
“Muy tragico. Her husband’s in jail for battery. All the time beating her and her kid. She leaned over her desk in a confidential crouch. “Fijate. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I know this from the case manager’s file. This husband bit off her nose.”
“What?”
“That’s what it says, if you can believe. Went berserk and bit her nose off–most of it, anyway. They had to. . . what do you call? Reconstruir. Build again from scratch.”
At home that night, Nils glanced out the window and saw two people standing on the far side of the street, half-hidden by a withered sapling, staring up at his dark apartment through the glare of an arc lamp. It was Lorena Poot, peering through the branches like a ghostly incarnation of his thoughts. She was clutching something in her hand, a white paper she’d rolled into a wand. Nils wondered if it was the invitation he’d handed out in class. Beside her was a young man twice her size, his long face caved into a scowl, dressed unseasonably in a scarf and corduroy blazer. He looked like a hit man dressed up for a picnic. He reached up and scratched his head. Nils opened the window and called Lorena’s name just loudly enough to hear. She stepped back, startled by his voice. “Wait!” Nils cried. She turned and began to walk off, yanking at the sleeve of her accomplice, who gave Nils a fearless and vindictive look before heeding his mother’s tugs. Nils wanted to tell her something important, maybe even indispensable, but he couldn’t think what it was. He went downstairs and unlatched the front door and ran out in his socks, calling to them from his gated stoop, but they had already left.
The next day in class, glancing at the empty desk in the corner, Nils felt a strange and unnavigable sorrow; there was a splotch of yellow paint on the wood chair, as if Lorena Poot had melted in her seat and left a buttery stain in her place. Sometimes, straying to her side of the room, he thought he could smell the toothless odor of her breath. He should have been relieved, perhaps, considering how well the class got on without her; but this new, easy rapport made Nils feel ashamed. Watching students work together on a run-on sentence exercise, he felt adrift from his own legs as he wove the aisles. He mentioned Lorena Poot’s name to the other teachers, who seemed unconcerned, even blase. Students dropped out all the time–it was just the nature of the demographic they served. Though he knew it was wishful thinking, Nils held out a secret hope that Lorena would show up for his party. On Friday night, Nils lost himself in the rush of getting ready. He hung a sign on the front gate that said “WORLD FEAST IN APT. B,” watching for guests and feeling a twirl of hidden pride that his neighbors would see people arriving at his door with faces similar to their own. He knew the pride was wrong, perhaps even racist–but he couldn’t help it. He wondered if he’d invited Jack and Melissa, schoolmates from college who lived in town, simply to show off his students. No, they were his friends: it would be worse not to invite them, to segregate your friendships according to class.
“Hijole. Too much space for live alone,” said Noemi, who arrived 20 minutes early with a giant stockpot and a bagful of groceries.
Noemi’s bangs were sprayed into delicate strands belling crisply from her scalp, like a row of question marks floating over her eyes. She went directly into the kitchen and pulled a white apron from her bag. Amazed, Nils watched her tie the apron around her waist and start cooking something on the stove, chopping onions and cilantro on the bare linoleum of his counter.
“Noemi, please,” he said. “You don’t have to cook. It’s a party.”
“Oh no, very easy. Caldo de pollo. You will eat like orphan.”
He had an uneasy feeling that she’d misconstrued the point of the party. Nils felt better when the Chinese students arrived, bearing giant boxes of store-bought dim sum and filling the kitchen with a gummy, nectarous smell. They were dressed in high heels and windbreakers, like a varsity squad of ballroom dancers. After unboxing each dish and mounding them onto plates, the women inspected Nils’ kitchen with deep and silent interest, seeming especially fascinated by his refrigerator, whose door was plastered with photographs. One photo, taken at a New Year’s Eve party in college and showing Nils kissing a casual acquaintance amorously on the lips, drew the most attention. Mei Ling said something in Cantonese and the women all burst into laughter. They talked comically for a minute, and then Mei Ling grew serious, her lips drawn into a scowl.
She asked Nils why he put pictures up on the refrigerator for everyone to see.
“I don’t know,” Nils said, taken aback by her vehemence. Did he want people to know he had friends? “Just a custom, I guess.”
Mei Ling glanced toward the stove and leaned into a whisper. “But your housekeeper–she can look at private life? She can stare at your secret kissing?”
Nils’ heart sank. “That’s not my housekeeper.
It’s Noemi. Noemi Lopez, from class.”
“She works very hard,” Zhao Jun said, equally serious. “Cook each and every night.”
“No, listen. She’s a guest like you! You know her from class. Noemi, turn around and show them.”
Noemi turned from the stove with a haggard expression. The question marks of her bangs had steamed into squiggles, pasted flat across her forehead. “Cook and clean, like slave–he is more bad than my husband.”
The doorbell rang and Nils went to answer it, hearing a bright burst of laughter as he left the kitchen, realizing only then–Noemi’s voice repeating his words in broken English–that they’d played a joke on him. He felt relieved and vexed at the same time. Before long the apartment was jammed with people. Zina and Svetlana arrived wearing the same blue eye shadow, bearing Tupperware containers filled with pelmeni and a remarkable salad that looked like a stratified cross-section of the Grand Canyon. “Herring in a Furcoat,” Svetlana called it. Not surprisingly, Jack and Melissa were the last ones to show up, squeezing through the crowd with a plate of steamed artichokes and a ceramic bowl of mayonnaise. There were so many entrees that Nils moved some of them to the living room, setting up a card table by the window and stacking it with paper plates, the dark pane of the window smudging with steam. Guests helped themselves to dinner, shuttling between portions of pelmeni or caldo de pollo, though Nils couldn’t help noticing that people stayed pretty faithful to their own contributions. The “Herring in a Furcoat” was studiously avoided by the Chinese students, just as Zina and Svetlana avoided the doughy balls of dim sum glistening like jellyfish. Jack and Melissa made a concerted effort to interest guests in the artichokes, showing a cadre of Chinese women how to scrape a leaf clean with their teeth. Jack offered some artichoke to Zhao Jun, who nibbled gallantly at one end and then stuffed the remaining leaf in her coat pocket.
“Very good,” she said, smiling. “I keep to show husband.”
Nils alone tried to sample all the cuisines, heaping everything on one plate and encouraging the promiscuous blending of sauces. There was no more space on the floor of the living room and he ate standing up. Remembering how Melissa had spent a college semester in Guatemala, he coaxed her from the card table and introduced her to a group of Latina students passing photographs on the couch. She told them a story about getting strip-searched in Flores, recounting the anecdote in slang-filled Spanish, but the students seemed far more interested in her pierced lip than her travels. Melissa showed them her tongue as well, a single stud nesting there like a pearl, which caused Amada Espinoza to cross herself with her eyes closed. Surveying the room, Nils was dismayed by how quickly his guests had broken into groups, dividing themselves by race and culinary preference, but he counted on people mingling after their meal was done and tried not to worry about it.
But even after dinner Nils’ guests remained ensconced in their groups, speaking Cantonese or Russian or Spanish in schoolyardish cliques. The Chinese women cleaned their teeth in the corner, shielding their mouths demurely with one hand. Even Jack and Melissa gave up socializing eventually, discussing last week’s episode of “Sex and the City” at one end of the couch. After a while, out of frustration, Nils moved to the center of the room and announced that they’d play a game together as a group.
“What kind of game?”
Zina asked.
“Charades,” he said, because it was the only game he could think of. Jack groaned. “We’ll take turns acting out the names of different things. One team acts out the name without talking, and everyone has to guess what it is. Like a secret.” The room was silent. “OK. Right. I’ll go first, to demonstrate.”
Partly to punish him, Nils grabbed Jack and pulled him to the center of the room. He decided to do a movie, trying to think of a film famous enough that everyone would know about it. He whispered the name in Jack’s ear and then started acting out the first word of the title, tracing a star in the air with his finger. Jack followed his lead, making a halfhearted attempt to accompany his mimes. When the star-drawing failed to elicit a response, Nils looked up and pointed at the sky, gesturing with two hands, which caused many of the guests to stare at the ceiling and murmur to each other. It occurred to him that his guests believed they were watching a play. With a growing sense of doom, Nils moved on to the second word and lowered himself to a soldier’s crouch, skulking around the floor and pretending to shoot Jack, who stared at him with an authentically savage regard for the enemy. After a few minutes, feeling desperate, Nils stopped in front of Melissa and pleaded with his eyes for help. Some of the Chinese women started to clap.
” ‘Reservoir Dogs?’ ” Melissa said.
“Right!” Nils said. He stole a look at Jack, who smirked at him peevishly. “I mean no. Close. It was ‘Star Wars.’ “”I thought star,” Svetlana said, nodding. “But why do the stars commit war?”
“It’s a movie,” Nils said. It occurred to him “Star Wars” probably had a different name in their country. “Luke Skywalker? Darth Vader?” He looked around the room, suddenly exasperated. He tried to think of an enduring figure from the film, someone mythic enough to transcend cultures. “You’ve never heard of Chewbacca?”
“R2D2,” Edwing said, the first words he’d spoken all night. He was sitting by himself on Nils’ stereo speaker.
“R2D2, yes!”
“His friend is C3PO.”
Nils was overjoyed. “C3PO!” he said to the Chinese women, who smiled and continued cleaning their teeth. Zhao Jun opened her notebook and wrote something down. He felt encouraged. “OK, your turn. Mei Ling, everybody? Choose your topic.”
“We don’t know which topic,” Mei Ling said.
“Anything. A song maybe. Go up and act out the name of a song.”
The Chinese women looked at each other and then stood up reluctantly, drifting to the middle of the room with solemn expressions. Mei Ling said something to the group and they began to speak heatedly in Cantonese, arguing–Nils suspected–over what to perform.
Lai Chu, a Mandarin-speaking woman with a perpetual cold, seemed bewildered by the proceedings. While the other women conferred, she wandered to the card table where the entrees were set up and studied the food through her glasses. Before Nils could warn her, she plucked one of the artichoke leaves and popped the whole thing in her mouth. Nils watched her chew the leaf with stoic resolve, not wanting to embarrass her in front of the party. He looked ruefully at his watch, ready to give up on the game altogether. As the Chinese students argued, Lai Chu drifted toward the group and then stepped through the tumult of voices, commanding the room’s attention. Inspired, she started to pace back and forth in a vigorous mime, flapping her arms up and down. The Chinese women regarded her with amazement and then flapped their arms as well, a roomful of panicked birds.
” ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ ” Melissa said.
Noemi jumped up. “Chickens in war!”
Lai Chu stopped flapping and pointed at her mouth. She pretended to gasp, turning a deep crimson and clutching the arm of the couch.”
‘Every Breath You Take,’ ” Zina said. “By Police band. This famous song in Russia.”
“I think she’s choking,” Jack said.
Nils leaped up to save her, but Edwing had already jumped off the speaker and grabbed Lai Chu by the waist, smacking her on the back with the base of his fist. The artichoke leaf flew from her mouth and struck the window. Lai Chu dropped to her knees on the floor, breathing in deep, sputtering gasps, her glasses skewed across her face and dangling from one ear. Nils’ guests crowded around her to make sure she was all right. Catching her breath finally, Lai Chu tottered to her feet and tamped down her hair, face glowing with vanquished terror, as if she’d just dived successfully from a cliff. Nils wondered if he should call an ambulance, but she seemed to have recovered. Tenderly, with a mother’s instinct, Zina unhooked Lai Chu’s glasses and fixed them again to her face. Nobody touched the errant artichoke leaf, which had snailed down the window in a half-chewed pulp.
For the next half hour Edwing held the attention of the crowd, goaded into recounting his rescue while Nils’ students interrupted here and there to make him more heroic, swarming him with toasts. Edwing blushed at their praise but didn’t refute it. Beneath his pleasure and relief, Nils felt a faint tinge of jealousy. He couldn’t help reflecting that despite his best efforts as host, only an aborted tragedy seemed to bring everyone together.
Predictably, Jack and Melissa were the first to leave, explaining that they had a “circus rave” to go to in Oakland. The rave was supposed to have fire dancers and an actual live tiger. Seeing them out the door, Nils was surprised by how glad he felt to be left alone with his students.
“The Chinese women are adorable,” Melissa said, kissing his cheek on the front stoop. Turning back to his apartment, Nils noticed a sheet of paper posted like an advertisement to his door. A page of “e” words photocopied from a dictionary. At the top of the page, someone had scrawled in big letters “YOU SHOULD LEARN ENGLISH BEFORE DECIDING TO BE TEACHER!” The note was signed “Fausto Poot (son of Lorena).” About halfway down the page, the same person had circled part of an entry in red ink:
enemy
en e me, -mi
n, pl enemies [
L in-, not + amicus, friend] 1: one that seeks the injury, overthrow, or failure of a person or thing to which he is opposed: ADVERSARY, OPPONENT 2: something injurious, harmful, or deadly (drink was his greatest (tilde) )
The second definition was highlighted in yellow marker. A soggy despair seeped into Nils’ bones. He pulled the paper from his door, detaching each of the corners with care and folding it into his pocket. He went back inside and started to clean up the kitchen, which was an incredible mess. Guests strolled in and out, sobering their faces for Nils’ benefit and asking if they could help. After a while he told people to go home and they obeyed him like a teacher, stacking their plates and Tupperware with complaisant smiles and shuffling out the door.
Later that night, Nils woke from a dream, his heart clocking in his throat. He couldn’t stop imagining Lorena Poot’s face in the dark. He got up finally and went to the living room and finished the cleaning he’d started before bed. Straightening the couch, he found a photograph stuck between two cushions, a Polaroid of Noemi and two people who looked to be her sisters. She had her arms looped around their shoulders, smiling extravagantly at the camera, standing in the busy square of a Latin American city. The background was blurred, but you could see the scaffold of a market stall with a row of leather bags hanging from a rope. On the back of the picture, someone had written: “Navidad 1998. Te extranamos mucho.” We miss you very much. Nils was overwhelmed by shame. He had no idea, actually, what his students had left behind. He stared at the photograph for a long time and then hung it on the refrigerator in the kitchen, covering up the foolish image of him kissing.
Surprisingly, at least compared to his own predictions, Nils’ students made progress in the class. By the end of spring, most of them could write a simple office memo that was–if not free of errors–at least comprehensible to a native speaker. And there were other successes as well, both in and out of the classroom. Edwing, who’d gained greatly in popularity since saving Lai Chu’s life, seemed like a different person in class, calling out answers from the back of the room and joking with the Chinese women as if they were old friends. Once, walking to the bathroom during lunch break, Nils was astonished to see Edwing and Lai Chu posed erotically in an empty classroom, the shy and pleasant Safeway worker stripped half-naked on the teacher’s desk. A grid of glass bulbs suctioned Edwing’s body; Lai Chu knelt beside him, guarding some empty bulbs by her knees and surveying the mottled field of his back. She lit a match under one of the empty bulbs and then cupped it quickly to a space near Edwing’s hip, so that a pinkish swell of skin plumped into the bulb and filled it with an Edwingy glow.
“I am almost cupped,” Edwing said, smiling at Nils when he entered the room. “Lai Chu is an expert in China. You should try for your stress.”
And one day Svetlana came to class with her hair pinned in a stylish chignon, wearing gold earrings and an expensive-looking skirt. She announced that she’d gotten a job at an insurance office and was set to start tomorrow. When Mei Ling asked her how much it paid, Svetlana blushed proudly and refused to answer.
“Sixteen dollars an hour,” Zina said, beaming at her friend’s good fortune.
It was more than Nils made. It dawned on him, shamefully, that he hadn’t truly expected any of them to get jobs.
“That’s fantastic,” he said, moved. “Svetlana, really. That’s amazing news. You’ll be managing the place in no time.”
On his way home, though, Nils felt an unlikely gust of sadness. He decided to stop by another protest for the Anti-Displacement Coalition, heading down 21st Street instead of his usual route. A small yet bustling carniceria–one that Nils used to shun because of the smell, actually crossing the street to avoid feeling ill–had disappeared without a trace, transformed into a Bikram yoga center with a rainbow painted over the door. Nils wondered if he had the wrong address, until he looked down and saw the sidewalk stained faintly with blood. The protest was being held in front of a multimedia office center that, before its fancy new conversion, had housed some small businesses and nonprofit agencies. Protesters crowded the doors, shouting anti-corporate slogans and spilling into the street. Nils recognized many of their signs from last time; it disheartened him somehow that they hadn’t bothered to make new ones. There was a lectern set up on the sidewalk, and the same man as before–the charismatic Latino with the sombrero–mounted the podium and started to talk about corporate-sponsored fascism, how the “Goliath of big business” was waging a silent war on the underclass. The crowd cheered at the end of each sentence, hissing unanimously whenever the man said the word “yuppie.” It all seemed true of course, just as before, but for some reason the hyperbole depressed Nils. It seemed flashy and naive, disproportionate to the number of protesters. If it were truly a Goliath–this heartless corporate world that included insurance companies–then what chance, really, did they stand against it?
Scanning the crowd, Nils recognized Lorena Poot standing a short distance from the lectern, watching the protest with the young man he’d caught spying on his apartment the night before his party. The man was wearing the same scarf and corduroy jacket, even in the sunny warmth of May. He seemed distracted, glancing around indifferently and fidgeting with his scarf. Worried he’d lose them again, Nils waved across the crowd until Lorena’s son noticed him from afar. The young man lurched forward without warning and headed straight for Nils, bumping through the knot of protesters, a look of calm yet purposeful belligerence on his face. It looked like he meant to knife Nils in the stomach. Nils clenched his fists, trying to remember the two or three jujitsu moves he’d learned as a teenager. The man stopped in front of him and stared at Nils without speaking.
“Do you like Pokemon candy?” he demanded finally. His breath smelled like peanut butter.
“No,” Nils stammered. “I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.”
“I like Pokemon candy,” he said in a confidential way. “It tastes like fruity flavors.”
The man’s face had a sleepy sort of strangeness, like a boxer’s after a fight, and a yellow glob of snot clotted his nostril. Nils’ muscles unfroze, a gentle thawing in his veins. “Are you Fausto Poot?” Nils asked. “That’s your mother?”
“My mother doesn’t like Bulbasaur. She doesn’t even like Pikachu.”
Nils glanced up and saw Lorena observing them from the verge of protesters, her face a deep and startling red. She whipped around, ducking through the protesters until Nils had lost her in the crowd. He wanted to race after her but couldn’t just leave her son, who was ogling a butch woman in a sleeveless T-shirt, staring at the tattoo of a black widow crawling up her neck. Standing on his toes, Nils thought he saw Lorena’s small figure reappear a ways down the street, crossing Mission Street without looking and then vanishing behind the busy corner of 25th.
“Fausto,” Nils said, addressing him sternly. “Where do you live?”
“San Francisco, California.”
“OK,” he said, nodding. “Me, too. And what street do you live on?”
Fausto regarded him with sudden contempt. “I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Right. Of course.” Nils looked at his watch, trying to figure out what to do. He tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine a humiliation so severe that you’d abandon your own son. Fausto seemed to take an interest in Nils’ watch as well, staring at the digital face as if it were a rare and expensive coin.
“How much does your watch cost?” he asked.
“I don’t remember. Not very much.”
Fausto pushed up the sleeve of his coat, showing him the imitation Rolex squeezing his wrist. The face was cross-hatched with scratches. Fausto loosened the watchband and slid it off his wrist, which was marked with a Lilliputian tractor tread. It took Nils a minute to realize he wanted to trade.
“OK, tell you what,” Nils said, inspired. “I’ll trade with you–for an hour–but you have to take me to your house. Your mother’s already gone home. You wear my watch and I’ll wear yours. You don’t have to tell me anything. just show me where you live.”
Fausto strapped Nils’ dime-store Casio to his wrist, dropping to one knee on the sidewalk to steady himself. Nils knelt as well and helped him buckle the plastic strap. Fausto didn’t seem at all worried about his mother’s disappearance. Rising cautiously, he threaded his way through the crowd and then broke into a brisk and imperious march, keeping his head down as he walked. Nils had to rush to keep up with him. They turned up 25th Street and walked for a long time before veering down Florida, heading in the direction of Cesar Chavez, reaching a trash-strewn block lined with runtish trees and bland, stucco-walled apartment houses. Curtains were drawn in all the windows. There were old cars parked on the sidewalk, some of them stranded from a flat or smashed up like Coke cans, so that Fausto and Nils had to weave around them and edge into the street. A dog paced one of the roofs, barking furiously at them from above. Fausto looked up and barked back. Abruptly, he crossed the street and stopped in front of a ’50s-style apartment house with filthy windows, pausing at the garage door next to the front steps. The paint on the garage door was chipped and flaking into scales.
Nils realized, his uneasiness cresting into fear, that the man was lost.
“Fausto!” he said sharply. “That’s somebody’s garage.”
Ignoring him, Fausto gripped the rusty handle and slid the door part way up its tracks and ducked inside. Nils crossed the street after him and stopped in front of the half-open garage door, wondering how he’d explain what he was about to do to the police. He crouched down but couldn’t get low enough to see anything. Hesitantly, he followed Fausto under the door and stood up into a large, well-kept space, surprised to find that the lights were on. An International pickup with blue California plates stood in the middle of the garage, rusting in blotches along the hood. Nils’ eyes adjusted to the light and he started to notice other details as well: a Formica table jutting from behind the pickup and set carefully with silverware, a twin bed in the nearest corner made to immaculate perfection, a muddle of pots covering one wall and dangling over a Coleman stove attached to a propane tank. Near the bed was a large gray refrigerator, its doors flung open to reveal a row of shirts hanging from a wire. The shirts were creased down the sleeves and beautifully ironed.
Slowly, Nils walked around the pickup until he could see a smaller room in the back of the garage, the walls narrowing into a sort of alcove, carpeted and fully furnished. Lorena Poot sat in a couch against the wall. Her face was flushed, the controls of a Nintendo console scattered near her feet. Nils stopped by the front wheel of the pickup, half-hidden by the ridge of the fender. Despite the disconcerting presence of the truck, he was impressed by the largeness of the garage, how much bigger it was than his own apartment. On the TV across from Lorena was a vase of fresh-cut lilies.
She asked Fausto, who was sitting on the rug and untying his shoes with two hands, where he’d been.
“The man gave me a watch,” he blurted, showing her the Casio. He glanced back in Nils’ direction. Something–the fragile intimacy of the scene, perhaps–prevented Nils from revealing himself immediately. Lorena blanched and stood up from the couch, unaware of his hiding place behind the pickup.
“Take it off right now,” she said angrily. “Ese hombre no es tu padre.”
She grabbed Fausto’s wrist and clawed the watchband with her fingers, trying to undo the buckle with one hand. Fausto leaped to his feet and pulled his arm from his mother’s grasp and raised it beyond her reach. His hand towered above her. For a second, before realizing Fausto was on the verge of tears, Nils thought the man might strike his mother.
“It’s time for your bath,” Lorena said, turning away. She kept her eyes down, as if ashamed of her outburst. “You smell like a cerrano. Take off the watch or you will ruin it.”
Fausto wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, a bubble of snot blooming from one nostril. In the excitement, he seemed to have forgotten about Nils–or perhaps accepted that he’d gone home. Lorena walked over to an old clawfoot tub on the far side of the garage, turning on a brace of spigots on the wall and adjusting the squeaky knobs for temperature. The tub was right out in the open, next to a folding screen that formed a private room in the corner, concealing what Nils guessed to be a toilet. A sculpture of Jesus on the cross hung conspicuously above the tub.
Nils was about to emerge from his hiding place–to face Lorena’s wrath and guiltily return the watch, perhaps work up the courage to ask her back to school–when Fausto began taking his clothes off, struggling out of his shirt and pants until he was stark naked in the middle of the garage. His body, freed of clothes, was strong and hairless and magnificent. He looked athletic, even graceful. Barefoot, he padded over to the tub against the wall, bee-lining halfway across the floor before pausing deliberately to scratch his head–a nervous tic Nils had seen earlier but only now discerned as habit.
As the tub filled, rattling a pipe against the wall, Nils noticed a framed picture hung above the stove in the kitchen. The picture was large and showed Fausto and Lorena standing on some steps, posing with a man who looked to be in his 60s. The man was smiling at the camera, one arm draped over Lorena’s shoulder; though he couldn’t be sure, Nils thought he recognized the strip of silver glinting from the man’s wrist as the watch he was wearing.
He knew he should leave, that he was snooping on Lorena’s poverty, but he felt a secret, adversarial thrill at living up to her opinion of him.
Fausto got into the tub and Lorena knelt beside him on the concrete floor, tucking the gold cross she wore into her sweater. She dunked her son in the water and started cleaning him carefully with a sponge. She soaped each limb with long, worshipful strokes, singing a child’s melody in Spanish, lifting his arms gently to reach the pale of his armpits. Her voice, like her eyes, was beautiful and startling. When she got to his feet, she sponged each toe with particular care, taking time to scrub under the nails. The movement of the water made flame-like squiggles on the ceiling. Lorena paused now and then to wipe the steam from her face, beginning a different song. For some reason, the illogical beauty of it made Nils angry. When she’d finished, Lorena remained on her knees and pressed the sponge against the nape of her neck, as if to relieve a pain.
“Is it prayer time?” Fausto asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad you remind me. Who today should we pray for?”
Fausto laughed, splashing the water with his feet. “Maybe the man with bad English.”
Lorena stiffened. She dropped the hand from her neck. “Mr. Rylander?”
“He likes Pokemon candy, I think.”
She turned to look at Fausto, sharply, just enough for Nils to see the dark contortion of her face. She pleaded with her son, but he seemed to have lost interest in the topic, sliding deeper in the tub until he was submerged to the chin. Water dripped from the spigots and pleeked into the tub. After a minute, her face disciplining itself to a frown, Lorena nodded at no one in particular and glanced at the Jesus dying on the wall. She reached under her sweater and pulled out the cross. Then she clasped her hands and rested her forehead against the rim of the tub. Her hair had come down in front, slipping from its bun, and the loose strands coiled in the water. She started to murmur something in Spanish, her voice low and reverent. Nils couldn’t understand a word. She mentioned his name, Senor Rylander, and Fausto looked up from the tub. He seemed to be staring in Nils’ direction. A breeze swept under the garage door and lifted the hairs on Nils’ neck. When Lorena finished her prayer, Fausto broke his gaze and glanced back at his knees. He said “Amen,” pronouncing it like his mother’s Spanish.
Nils rose from his crouch and crept out of the garage as silently as he could.
Rather than the exception, Svetlana turned out to be the rule: Several of Nils’ students got placed in jobs even before they graduated, making considerably more money than they’d expected. Nils was surprised at first, watching them leave school suddenly and head out for jobs at Mexicana Airlines or Crane Pest Control, their foreheads breaking out from excitement. The students credited Nils for their success, showering him with exotic gifts. Strangely, though, walking home with a set of Russian nesting dolls or a year’s supply of ginseng tea, Nils had a vague sense of having betrayed them. As the cycle wound down, and more and more students found work, he found himself staring out the window during assignments, or checking the clock to see how much time remained in class. Whereas before he’d walked around the room and helped slower students with their exercises, tutoring them in verbals or subordinating clauses, now he sat at his desk and waited passively for them to finish. Obviously, he was thrilled they were getting jobs–so why was he depressed? He wondered if he’d hoped for more than that, but what the “more” was he couldn’t say. He told himself his students were entering the economic mainstream, that they were tangibly better off than before they came to school, but it didn’t erase the fact that they were leaving him.
The final week of classes, on Monday, Nils was rushing from the copy room on his way to Job Preparation when he saw Lorena Poot in the reception area. She was sitting with a shopping bag in her lap, her knees tucked primly together. He had to fight the urge to duck down the hall. Lorena stood up when she saw him but refused to meet his eyes.
“Lorena?” Nils said, catching his breath. “How long have you been here?”
“You have my son’s watch.” She dug in the shopping bag and pulled out Nils’ Casio.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I was going to get your phone number from Student Services, but haven’t had time.” The truth was, he’d been avoiding calling her. “Look, it’s at home on my desk. The watch. I have class right now.” He stopped and took a deep breath. A BB of sweat rolled from his armpit. Nils glanced at the recruitment fliers taped to the inside of the front door, remembering the excitement he used to feel walking through it every morning. He forced himself to lie. “I hoped, when I saw you, that maybe you wanted to come back to school.”
Lorena stared at the Casio without responding. The watch, fogged to an unreadable mist, trembled from her fingers. “I didn’t come to hear you teach,” she said defiantly, dropping her hand.
“You don’t have to. Not today, anyway. The students are doing presentations.” He watched her fumble with her bag. “What about sitting in class? For an hour? I was going to go home for lunch anyway–I can get the watch then.”
“You don’t teach?”
“They’re talking about themselves, to practice their speaking. About an interesting event from their past.”
Lorena looked up from her bag. Her eyes scoured his face, as though she were seeing him for the first time. Nils wondered if he looked different than she remembered. If he were invisible, the peculiar thought occurred to him, he might actually be able to help.
“Why do you need so much that we talk like you?”
“It’s not me, Lorena.” He gestured, alluding to the world outside.
“You seem like a very lonely man, Mr. Rylander. Perhaps you itch out of loneliness. Crazy itcher. I am like an itch, so you ask me to sit in your class and learn to talk.” She lowered her voice, which remained oddly calm despite the intensity of her eyes. “In this case, only for today, I will help you.”
Nils stared at her, at a loss for words. He excused himself for class and then went to the men’s room and stood by the sink. He splashed some cold water on his face, surprised by the sharpness of his anger. What had he ever done except be born here? He stood there for a minute, letting the water trickle down his face. The paper towel dispenser was empty, of course: the janitor, a drunk, was too lazy to fill it.
When he got to the classroom, Lorena Poot had taken her customary place in the corner, hands folded neatly on the desk, as if she’d been coming to school this whole time and he’d merely missed taking her attendance. She held her body perfectly straight, like a churchgoer. Something–the alertness of her posture, maybe–suggested that she’d wanted to return, that she’d used the watch only as an excuse. She’d forgiven him, for whatever reason. Her eyes were bright and victorious. Nils understood, in some oblique but deeply rational way, that her forgiveness was a privilege. The other students looked at their desks, embarrassed, but Nils decided to treat this like any other day. He opened the window to let in some air. It was cool and breezy, the first cloudless day of summer. Collecting himself, he asked for a volunteer to begin the presentations, an assignment he’d invented to help them conquer their fear of interviews.
With a chivalrous leap, Edwing got up first and began his report, which he’d scrawled on the back of a postcard featuring the Golden Gate Bridge. He read the title to the class–“My Family Is So Far”–and then talked about having a wife and two sons in El Salvador, whom he was supporting with his job at Safeway. He’d owned his own distribution company in San Salvador before the colon plummeted. Nils, astonished, had never questioned the fact that Edwing was single. “In conclusion,” Edwing said cheerfully, “I miss my family very much.” Zina, forlorn without Svetlana and somewhat confused, got up and talked about her strengths. She shouted her presentation, like a coach berating a pathetic football team. “I am team player,” she said, glaring at the class. “I am independent thinker.” Zhao Jun, one of the few students to fully grasp the assignment, talked about a time when she was sitting at a noodle shop in China and saw a man with no arms eating deftly with his feet. The man had had both feet propped on the table, maneuvering the chopsticks with his toes. “It was an eye opening,” she said. Nils, who’d retreated to a desk in the back of the classroom, kept glancing at Lorena Poot during the presentations to judge her reaction. She seemed absorbed in the hodgepodge of stories, more interested in her fellow students than she’d ever been in him. Nils was about to let the class out early when Lorena stood up from her desk.
“I would like to make a speech,” she said.
“Lorena,” he said quickly, “the other students had time to prepare. I don’t expect you to do a presentation.”
“I am ready.”
She got up before he could stop her and walked to the front of the classroom, which went drably quiet. Nils, fearing the worst, had no choice but to sit down again in the back row. Lorena stood there in front of the blackboard, surveying the silent faces with a weird smirk on her lips, as if she were about to break into a comedy routine. For a horrible second, Nils worried that she might start ridiculing him. Instead, she cleared her throat and began talking about her childhood in Yucatan, Mexico. She talked about the prosperity of her father’s farm, how her mother used to teach her Mayan words before bed. She explained that her last name was Mayan, not Spanish, that it meant “to dig a deep hole in the search of water.” Mayan was a language more precise than English; in fact, there were seven words for the color blue. Then she picked up the chalk and started writing the words on the board, aligning them in a straight and narrow column, just as Nils did when he was teaching new vocabulary. Lorena listed each of them, one after another, all practically the same word except for a slight variation in letters.
“This blue,” she said, pointing to the first word. “This is like the ocean, the more deep part you can see in distance, where it curves. And this one is like a papagayo–a beautiful parrot in my country. And this blue, very different, like the stomach of a shark.” She hesitated before explaining each of the words, briefly lifting her face to the ceiling. It occurred to Nils that she’d forgotten their real meanings. “This is the blue of my father’s toenail before it falls off. Our burro would step on his foot sometimes, and it would turn the color of this. This is like your green, but we call it differently–the color of la laguna. And this is a fire at night, far away where you cannot hear it. And this is dark blue, almost black, like the skin of our bananas.” Her face was radiant, transported. She pronounced the strange sounds carefully, cherishing them like secrets from her past. Her voice rang with confidence. Zhao Jun raised her hand from the back row, and Nils leaned toward her before realizing he couldn’t answer her question. He couldn’t help at all. She asked Lorena to repeat the list and the class recited each word together, impressively, invoking the lost language as if it were their own.
