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I read Ivan’s messages over and over, thinking about what they meant. I felt ashamed, but why? Why was it more honorable to reread and interpret a novel like Lost Illusions than to reread and interpret some email from Ivan? Was it because Ivan wasn’t as good a writer as Balzac? (But I thought Ivan was a good writer.) Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac’s novels—written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry—were not; and so wasn’t what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?
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The adult education program assigned me an ESL student, Joaquín, a Dominican plumber with white hair, tinted glasses, and ramrod-straight posture. He came right on time and greeted me warmly in Spanish. I smiled but didn’t reply. With ESL students, we had been told to pretend not only that we didn’t go to Harvard but that we didn’t know any Spanish. We were just supposed to have dropped out of the sky, Martian-style.
“How are you today?” I asked.
His face lit up. “Joaquín,” he replied.
“Not who are you—how are you.”
He beamed.
I drew three faces on the blackboard: one smiling, one with a straight mouth, and one frowning. “How are you?” I asked. Then I pointed in turn at the faces. “I’m great,” I said. “I’m so-so. I’m terrible.”
“Sí,” said Joaquín.
“How are you? Are you great?” I tapped the smiling face.
He squinted, took off his glasses, and put them on again. “I,” he said, then pointed from himself to the board. “I. Joaquín.”
“It means cómo está,” I said finally.
“Ah, cómo está?” Joaquín repeated, beaming more widely. “Bien, bien. Pues, sabe, estoy un poco enfermo.” It turned out Joaquín had come to America to have a specialist treat his diabetes-related eyesight problems. His son lived in Boston with his wife, who was a nice girl but careless. Joaquín asked where I was from, what kind of a name Selin was, what my parents did, whether I was a student. I answered everything in English first, but then also in Spanish. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “Your parents must be very proud.”
The next week, I was supposed to get him to say what color things were. There was a worksheet. He was supposed to say that the paper was white, the pen was blue, and the board was black.
“The paper is white,” I said, holding up a paper.
He nodded. “El papel es blanco,” he said.
“Right, so repeat after me. The paper is white.”
“Papel, es, blanco,” he said, with a serious expression like mine.
“No, repeat the words I’m saying,” I said. “The paper is white.”
After twenty minutes he could say, “Papel iss blonk.” He said it with an expression of great patience and kindness. We moved on to “The pen is blue.” We started with “El bolígrafo es azul,” and eventually got to “Ball iss zool.” Then our time was up.
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Whether because the shuttle had a particularly high ceiling, or because the passengers that day were unusually short, large numbers of people seemed unable to reach the handrails. With every sharp movement, people stumbled into each other and someone ended up in someone else’s lap.
Clinging to the handrail, I felt overwhelmed by fatigue. What was I doing? For whose benefit? Who would understand what Joaquín meant by “Papel iss blonk,” let alone “Ball iss zool”? That wasn’t English. It was some kind of creole. No—a pidgin. If we had children and they grew up talking like that, they would add more grammar and then it would be a creole. It wasn’t even a creole.
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Back at our room, I took a Snackwell low-fat brownie, Hannah’s least favorite snack, from a care package her mother had sent her, and ate it in front of the computer. I found an email in Turkish from someone called Y?ld?r?m ?zguven, sent from a German university address. It didn’t say much, just that it had been a long time since we had been in touch, and he wished me success in my studies. I didn’t know anyone called Y?ld?r?m ?zguven, a name meaning “Thunderbolt Self-Confidence.” I thought about it for a long time and I was absolutely positive he was a stranger. Probably he had looked in the Harvard directory for girls with Turkish names and, drawing on the hereditary self-confidence his family was known for, had written me that stupid note. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. How could this guy be so presumptuous? How dare he assume that I knew his “garb”? Why did that keep happening to me?
Gradually this anger settled upon its secret, rightful object: Ivan. What gave him the right to sit down at three or four in the morning and write whatever came into his head, about clowns or vertigo, and then send it to me? I took a shower and, though it was barely nine-thirty, crawled into bed and fell immediately into troubled sleep.
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At two-thirty I was wide awake. I knew there was no way I would fall back asleep, not for hours. I put on sweatpants and went downstairs to the computer room. The only light came from the Coke machine and the “Flying Through Space” screensaver. I put six dimes in the machine and a can tumbled out like a body falling down the stairs. The Diet Coke was cold and spiky against my warm pink throat. I could feel my eyes clearing. I sat at one of the computers. Dear Ivan, I typed.
I have been teaching ESL for community service. Instead of “The paper is white,” this guy says “Papel iss blonk.” I understand, because I was there when he invented it. But as far as teaching English goes, I’ve failed. I am now the interpreter of a language that only he and I can understand. It makes me so tired, even angry. Why should I have to figure it out? Why don’t any messages come to me clearly?
I don’t understand what you wrote about alcohol. Is it about alcohol? Or about the other disgusting things that might not seem disgusting, once the desire to experiment takes over? How can vertigo be the desire to fall and not the fear? Why not just jump? I don’t understand why you told me these things.
I do want to understand you.
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When I woke up again, it was snowing. I had slept through Russian. It was time for the philosophy of language. The same pale words, “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white, were written on the board for about the hundredth time. The class mechanically turned to look out the window.