“Hi!” she cries. “Welcome to America!”
Rosalie extends a hand and squeezes the girl’s damp, wormlike fingers. In contrast to this diminutive person, her own children are giants. Their faces are assertively sculpted, with patrician brows and jawbones. It’s striking, seeing these young people together, how God is capable of carving such variety from the same stone. As Rosalie studies the girl’s face, she decides there is a slanted kind of prettiness there—something that flickers in and out, dodging and diving.
In the short-term parking lot, Rosalie gestures to the titanic Grand Caravan, gleaming silver. “Here it is,” she says. The girl’s pointed face shows no change. For a moment, Rosalie sinks with the suspicion that this was all a mistake, that they have gotten a dud, that the next several months will be suffocating. But, no. It is her job to make it work. She is a mother, first and foremost, and this stranger will soon be like her own child. She takes a quick gauge of the girl’s height and weight: borderline. To be safe, she gestures her into the middle booster seat. The girl fidgets but does not resist as Rosalie buckles her in.
On the Hutchinson River Parkway, Rosalie keeps to the center lane, tolerating the maniacs weaving around her. These initial surroundings are disappointing, the cramped multifamily dwellings along the exit lane, the frightful megaliths of Co-op City.
“Don’t look!” Hannah says jubilantly to the girl. “This isn’t where we live. I’ll tell you when to look.”
“How was the flight?” Rosalie attempts in her best motherly tone.
The girl’s voice barely rises above the sound of the car engine, soft and musical. “It was okay, thank you.”
“You must be tired.”
“Yes.”
The Grand Caravan finally merges onto an emptier highway, wide and clean, edged with lush leafwork, and Rosalie feels a familiar sense of relief, of spatial freedom. As they pull off the exit and drive through the center of Old Cranbury, she prickles with a feeling of pride for this place, its preserved character, the quality of its people.
“That’s the hardware store,” Hannah says, “and the handbag store, and the health food store, and there’s where we get our hair cut.”
Rosalie glimpses the girl’s profile as she looks out the window, brightened by the lucid and fair New England sun. She has cleared her own calendar these first few weeks. She’ll write her “In the Spectators’ Stand” column at night, after the children are asleep. She will devote her daylight hours to acclimating the student to her family and its roster of enriching activities.
“This is it,” Hannah announces as they pull into the driveway. Rosalie tries to see her home through the girl’s eyes and imagines it looks like paradise. There is a barn-style garage door, borders of neat Belgium block, stone pillars flanking the driveway. The flower boxes are full. She has added these careful details to the property over the years without ever altering the original structure. She is proud not to have wasted money on expansion, even as her family has burgeoned. The boys occupy two bedrooms, and she has transformed an attic storage space into a funky, garret-like room for the girls.
This is the room that Nayana will share. Rosalie has purchased a roll-out trundle for her, along with cheerful bedding, careful to avoid television characters she might not recognize. At home in Bangladesh, according to the exchange agency, the girl sleeps in a single room with her entire family. Rosalie has a picture in her mind of this room, of disheveled blankets, stained mattresses on the floor. The mother probably sweeps with a straw broom, ushers the dirt right out the door. Is there electricity? This point has been omitted by the agency. Rosalie has warned her children that this might be the student’s first experience with it.
At dinner, the family eats quietly, a kind of humming suspense in the air. Rosalie is pleased that the kids have remembered her guidelines, to not ask too many questions and to speak more softly than usual. Nayana’s family is probably not as rambunctious as the Warrens. There are cultural differences that need to be respected. Rosalie sorts through a muddle of feelings as she watches Nayana pick at her macaroni and cheese: pity for the girl, mixed with pride in herself for having invited her here, and a surging affection for her own children, sitting respectfully with their forks and knives, each of them excellent in his or her own way.
The girl is obviously exhausted. She lays her fork down as if its weight is too much for her and looks up to Rosalie in supplication.
“Why don’t you go ahead and get ready for bed, Nayana. I’ll show you where everything is.”