Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  Her: free spirit. Open door (literally). Open heart.

  Him: serious. Steady. Closed OFF to love?

  On paper, Ione and Cooper just don’t make sense.

  Luckily, Ione loses all the papers that she accumulates, along with her phone, her purse, and her shoes, so she's not paying attention to what anything says about her and Cooper! When they meet in Japanese class, things are flowing along in her life, taking her with them. But the more she thinks about it, she may not be entirely happy with how things are flowing, and where she's headed.

  Cooper is everything Ione isn’t: driven, responsible, and unfortunately, totally unavailable. He thinks that she would be a good study partner, maybe even a friend—and that’s all.

  But when things go sour and Ione’s life turns upside-down, Cooper’s the guy who has her back. So will this be love, or just friendship? Can Ione and Cooper find common ground, a common language to speak to find happiness, together?

  Love in Many Languages

  Jamie Bennett

  Give me that glass, and therein will I read.

  Richard II (4.1.266)

  Copyright © 2019 by Jamie Bennett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at JamieBennettBooks@gmail.com.

  This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  “Konnichiwa!”

  There were some murmurs back, but mostly, everyone just stared.

  “Watashi wa Marumo Gin desu.”

  More stares.

  “My name is Gin Marumo. Welcome to Conversational Japanese 101!” the instructor clarified.

  Ok, good! I was in the right place. Sometimes it happened that I wasn’t, but things usually worked out.

  “Please call me Gin,” the teacher announced. He had a lovely smile. He told us more about the class and I looked around at my fellow students rather than listening as closely as I should have. There was an older lady to my right who already looked half-asleep. I studied her, thinking she would be interesting to paint.

  “Let’s get started! Please say the phrases along with me,” our teacher said. He turned to the whiteboard and pointed to the sentences he had written out. I read them, but they weren’t what I had been expecting. Hm. Gin said the words and we chanted them back to him.

  “Very good!” He smiled again. “Now I would like you to introduce yourselves. Turn to your neighbor and use at least three of these phrases to get to know each other a little.”

  The older lady to my right was now out cold. I wondered if I should wake her up—it seemed like a shame to miss the first day of class! But she was frowning angrily in her sleep, so I turned to the student on my left instead.

  “Konnichiwa!” I announced. I tilted my head and read what was next on our list of phrases. “Watashi wa Ione desu.”

  The man to my left looked blank. “What?”

  “I said ‘hello,’ then I introduced myself,” I explained. I pointed to the words written in green marker on the whiteboard. “Watashi wa Ione desu. My name is Ione. Onamae wa? What’s your name?” I prompted.

  “Cooper.”

  “Hajimemashite, Cooper!” I smiled at him.

  He just looked perplexed, so I pointed to the board again. “‘Hajimemashite, Cooper’ means, ‘Nice to meet you, Cooper.’”

  “Oh, right. Washboard was Cooper Jesus.”

  “Watashi wa Cooper desu,” I said slowly.

  “That’s what I said. My name is Cooper.”

  “Yes, good job!” I encouraged him. Oh, no, it really wasn’t.

  “How did you learn to say all that so fast?” He ran his hand over his short, dark brown hair. There was a little grey at his temples but I didn’t think he was much older than I was. I put him at about 30, so maybe five years or so on me. He looked very serious, very intent.

  “I’m just reading what’s up there on the board,” I said.

  “Hash browns shitty,” he responded.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Now I’m saying that it’s nice to meet you,” he explained.

  “Oh!” He was trying to say “hajimemashite.” I smiled. “Thanks,” I told him, and waited to hear if he would say any more.

  “Oh she won’t want dessert cup?” Cooper asked me. “I’m asking what you do, what your job is.” It was the third phrase on the board: O shigoto wa nan desu ka?

  I had understood him. “I’m a receptionist at an app development company here in Detroit. What do you do?” I asked him in Japanese as well.

  “Robotics.”

  “Like Transformers?”

  Now he squinted at me. “No, nothing like Transformers.”

  “I used to love that cartoon,” I said, and smiled, remembering.

  The older lady on my other side poked me. She had woken up. “I’m not following this at all,” she complained. “When do we do the computers?”

  I turned to her to help, and we figured out that she was there on the wrong day for Introduction to Email and Browsers. Also, she didn’t have a laptop or a tablet, which I thought she would need. She left, then Gin moved us on to introducing ourselves to different people. I heard my old partner say “Cowabunga” to greet the next person he was working with and I got a lady who wanted to tell me about her daughter who was stationed in Okinawa. It was a very interesting class, but not exactly what I had been expecting.

  I went up to the front of the room at the end of the 90 minutes to talk to the professor but there was a big group of students around his desk. Lots of people were taking this class before trips to Japan, and they had a lot of questions about the country. I thought I would just ask later, or maybe we would get to my interest in the next class on…I stopped and looked at the paper calendar my friend Karis had gotten for me to carry in my purse when she realized that the phone reminders just weren’t cutting it for me. The next class was on Wednesday. The datebook was really great, except when I forgot to look at it. Or when I lost my purse. I looked at today’s date, and realized that I’d had a dentist appointment at lunch that I had missed. Shoot.

  While I was walking down the hall, looking ahead through the rest of the week so that I didn’t miss anything else, I smacked right into someone, my forehead connecting hard with his shoulder.

  Cooper, my former partner. “Sumimasen,” I told him, and rubbed my head.

  We had just learned that expression, but he looked at me uncomprehendingly. “That means sorry, excuse me, remember?" I asked. "I was looking at my datebook instead of watching where I was going.” Where was that thing? I had dropped it somewhere. “I had it in my hand…” Both of us bent to pick it up, and bumped heads.

  Now I laughed. “Cooper, sumimasen!” I said again, and waited. “You should try saying it, too,” I prompted him.

  “Summer sun,” he answered.

  Oh, man. “It was nice to meet you,” I said. He nodded and turned to walk away. “Ja ne! See you,” I called after him. I followed him with my eyes for a while. Wow, he was bad at Japanese! But I loved how seriously he had taken the class, paying attention all the time. He really wanted to learn. I realized I was watching his butt a little bit, too.

  I walked slowly to the corner to find the bus stop but then remembered that I had driven, so I went back to find where I had left the car that I had bought a few months before, and drove home to Hamtramck. Before I ev
en got all the way into my driveway, my neighbor came bounding out of her house.

  “Ione! May I speak to you for a moment?”

  I thought she had probably been waiting for me and got myself ready for her complaints. “Hi, Sania,” I answered.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the music. Last night…”

  “I know, I’m really sorry. They were very into that beat, so they kept playing it.”

  “For over an hour. Ione, it’s really too much.” She was obviously angry.

  I felt bad, but I also got a little annoyed. It was just music. “That group left, so you won’t be hearing the drums anymore.”

  “Well, we are also concerned about that. The coming and going, at all hours, of all these different people.” Sania looked past me at my front door, where a guy was exiting as we spoke. He looked vaguely familiar to me. “Who are all these people?”

  “Friends,” I said, because they were, to some degree. Anyway, it wasn’t her concern who came in and out of my house and when. Sania and her husband and two kids had moved in a few months before, and I had started to hear complaints from her almost immediately, about almost everything.

  She was still making the angry face, so when she opened her mouth to tell me something else that I was doing wrong, I waved and said, “Ja ne! That’s Japanese for ‘see you later,’” and I ran up to my house, past the guy who was now sitting on the front steps. He didn’t look familiar at all, when I got close. I said hello, but he just stared blankly out at the street.

  There was a circle of people in the living room, sitting on the floor because the furniture had slowly walked away. I had a little pang when I thought of how my babcia, my Polish grandma, had it so lovingly decorated. She had bought everything in about 1960 and the décor hadn’t changed in all the years since, until I had decided on the open-door policy to the house. Stuff didn’t matter, I reminded myself. It was the people who were important, and more often than not I had rooms full of people creating art, having fun, making connections with each other. That was what was important, not how things looked. I myself had given away all the mirrors I owned to the Humane Society, because I wanted people to focus on their inner lights, rather than on all the outside parts of ourselves that got so much attention.

  But all my focus on connections and people and emotion, the inner rather than the outer, had left the house a little bare. Now the only thing that was left for furniture was my babcia’s big, heavy sewing table. My grandpa had made it for her right in the house, exactly the size she wanted, and it was too big to fit out through the front door (and I knew that because one night I had come home and found it wedged in there). So the table had stayed while the rest of the furniture had slowly disappeared or I had given it away. Mostly I used the table for dancing on now, and no one sewed on it anymore, but I always remembered my babcia sitting at it in the front window and copying things out of pictures for me to wear to school, telling me about my mother and how they had sewn together, too.

  It seemed like the people in the living room were working on a play. They were holding dogeared bunches of paper and yelling things like, “It’s a crisis of our souls, Sheila!” and “You wound me to the most bitter core, Antony!” very dramatically. And loudly. I waved hello but they were focused on their lines, so I went into the kitchen to see what I could find. Someone had put a note on the fridge saying, “Whatever you take, replace!” but lately not much replacing was happening. It was mostly bare in there except for a very old, very squishy cucumber.

  I poked it, but it just did not look appetizing. I ate some gum out of my purse instead and went into my studio. That was the only room with a lock on the door, because I really, really didn’t like to be disturbed while I painted. Also, a few months before, almost all my supplies had walked away, and that had been hard. I started to work and I got so engrossed that I didn’t even hear the chanting that had been going on in the dining room. I really did not understand what they were doing in there.

  “Ione?” I glanced at the clock when I heard someone call my name from the hallway. Sometimes, when I painted, I got very caught up in things, and I hadn’t noticed that it was almost two in the morning (if the clock was right, which I wasn’t sure about). I opened the door and found Fox in the hallway, his arm around a woman with pink-tinted hair.

  “Hey, Fox.”

  “Hi, I just wanted to tell you that Carrie and I—”

  “Corrie,” the woman interrupted him.

  “Corrie and I are going to be in the green bedroom, and I hope we don’t disturb you. It might get loud.” Fox sounded hopeful, but Corrie already looked bored.

  “Ok, sure. Have fun,” I told them both, and now, for some reason, Fox seemed very disappointed. Of all the people who had come through the house, he had the most longevity. He had been hanging around since we’d met at community college, all through when I’d transferred out to get my bachelor’s degree, then while I went to art school, too. He put his arm around the woman, Corrie. She shrugged it off, but she did follow him to the green bedroom, which had been my room before I let the house go open. I had painted the floors, walls, and ceiling a shimmering green and it was such a cool place now. Sort of like an underwater cave. I hoped that the two of them enjoyed it.

  Unfortunately, I had to go to work in only a few hours, so I lay down on the couch in my studio and tried to go to sleep. It had been such an interesting day, after the work part of it. Not that I didn’t enjoy the people at my office, because they were all very nice, and I had a very good friend there, too. I liked being around them. And it wasn’t that I was trying to be whiny, because the job paid really well too, which I had come to realize more and more was very important. I just…

  I just finally fell asleep, even with Fox yelling his head off about how good it was and how hard he was going to come over in the green bedroom. God, he was loud when he got laid.

  When I came downstairs the next morning, I found the woman that he had been with sitting on the counter in the kitchen. Last week we’d had some chairs in there, but they had disappeared sometime over the past few days. “Hi, Corrie.”

  In the morning light, I could see that she wasn’t as old as I had thought. Maybe still in her teens, and way, way too young for Fox. Her pink hair looked faded now, dirty, and full of snarls.

  “Is there anything to eat around here?” she asked me.

  “Um, let’s see.” I opened the cupboards, but they were all bare, just like we were in some kind of nursery rhyme. “I guess not.” She sighed, and I did too, a little. “Want to come out with me for breakfast?”

  She eyed me warily. “Really?”

  “I’m hungry too. Where’s Fox?”

  “That guy? I thought his name was Fritz. He’s asleep, I guess.” If she looked any more bored talking about him, she would have fallen asleep. He had been really yelling the night before, but she had been quiet.

  “Let’s go eat something,” I told her, and we walked quietly through the living room where a few of the play practice people had conked out in various locations on the floor. I studied how one guy had thrown his arm over his eyes, and I pulled out some paper from my purse and made a quick sketch so I would remember it.

  The woman, Corrie, was staring at me when I looked up. “Are you drawing him?”

  I nodded. “Just his arm. I like the position of his wrist and fingers. See?” I showed her the sketch, which was when I realized that I had been drawing in my calendar right over today’s date. I couldn’t read anymore what I was supposed to be doing at noon. It was probably something lunch-related.

  She looked closely at my sketch. “That’s cool. You’re good.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled at her. “Ready?”

  “Don’t you need shoes?”

  Oh, right! That had been why my feet were sticking to the floor—I was barefoot. I found some shoes in the hall closet that looked like they could have been mine, just a tiny bit too big.

  As early as it was, it was already hot
. So far, the summer had been scorching around Detroit, unrelenting heat and now I wasn’t allowed to swim in the pool next door since Sania and her family had moved in. I checked my car, but that wasn’t going to work because I realized that I didn’t have my key, so Corrie and I walked over to a little restaurant near my house and she ordered a huge breakfast, pancakes and waffles and bacon and sausage and toast, and also a side of everything else. I was feeling pretty hungry myself. I had definitely eaten lunch the day before because my boss, Reid, had ordered sandwiches for everyone, but I couldn’t remember if I had eaten dinner before my Japanese class.

  “So what’s the deal with that house where we were staying last night?” Corrie asked me. “Is it abandoned?”

  “Where you slept last night? No, that’s my house!” I told her. I thought about how it looked from the outside. Maybe it was somewhat overgrown, and the blue paint did look a little strange. I had started off really strong, covering the siding, the window frames, and the door on the first floor in a beautiful cobalt color, but it had been hard to reach the second story, and things had kind of petered out.

  “Why are all those people there? I thought it was a flop house.”

  “No, I have an open-door policy,” I explained. “If people want to come and sleep, or hang out, or stay for a while, they’re welcome to. The only thing is, no drugs.” I looked at her while I said it, but she didn’t seem to care about that.

  “Like, anyone can stay? For how long?”

  “Anyone for as long as she wants,” I told her, watching her guzzle coffee and orange juice. “Can I ask how old you are?”

  “You can ask,” Corrie answered rudely. The waitress put down my oatmeal and plate after plate of food in front of Corrie and she ate for a while before she told me that she was 18.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Around.”

  “How did you meet Fox?”