Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  Ah, that explained it. Her mom’s taste ran a little old-fashioned. “Why are there so many people here already?” I asked, as we went into the partitioned area that was their bedroom.

  “You’re late,” Karis told me. She woke up her laptop. “Did you check your calendar?”

  I hadn’t. “Sorry. I was sure that you had said seven.” And I saw on the clock on her screen that it was 7:30, anyway. We looked at the pictures of the dresses, all of which had been pre-approved by her maid of honor, Augusta. Whatever was fine by me, anyway, because I was mostly concerned about Karis being good with everything. I asked her about Reid, because that always made her happy, and she broke into a big smile and told me about how sweet he was acting, telling everyone they were getting married and so excited about it. He was always sweet to her, because he was so crazy about her.

  And Karis was so cute when she talked about Reid, blushing and doing her funny thing where she tapped with her fingers when she got nervous, like when by mistake she mentioned the word “bed” and then got all red and flustered. She told me more about the wedding dress that her mom was making for her to wear—the maid of honor had approved that design, too—then we looked in her closet for a more summery look for her for tonight’s party and I went out to mingle while she changed. I felt like the human body was meant to be admired and shared but Karis definitely didn’t feel that way. Not at all.

  Much later, mostly everyone had gone home and I was curled up on Karis’ couch talking to her and a few of the friends who had stuck around.

  “I don’t understand. Why would you study Japanese?” Reid, Karis’ fiancé and my boss, asked me. “Are you thinking about traveling there?”

  “No, not right now.” I thought for a moment about that.

  “Why…” Reid trailed off. “Ione, your decisions are sometimes beyond me.”

  “Like what? My decisions make perfect sense.”

  “Sometimes you’re not very logical. For example, when you bought your car.”

  “What’s wrong with my car?” I asked, puzzled. I loved my car. It had been a little funny, how I had found it, but it had worked out great.

  “Besides how you bought it, it’s so small. And…” He stopped again.

  “It’s ugly,” Karis’ maid of honor, Augusta, put in. “It’s the ugliest car I’ve ever seen. If there was a contest for the ugliest car in America, yours would win.”

  I wasn’t offended. Not everyone had the same taste, and again, I really tried to focus on the interior, not the exterior of things. My car did have that hole in the floor that let some of the exterior into the interior, however. “It was a great deal. Less than a thousand dollars for a car! And it runs.” Generally, it did.

  Reid laughed. “Well, it has been getting you to work on time better than when you depended on the bus.” That mattered to him as my boss, I knew. He took Karis’ hand as she walked by and tugged her down onto his lap, where she sat primly until he tickled her sides and she smiled and leaned back against him.

  Reid was right, that usually my car got me to the office. Except for when I had found a guy asleep in it because the locks didn’t work all the time, and that morning when Corrie and I had gone to breakfast and I couldn’t find my keys, or when it got below 50 degrees because then it wouldn’t start, or two weeks ago when I had run out of gas on I-75 due to the faulty gauge and forgetting to fill the tank. Even with its issues, I loved my car, and I thought my choices made sense. To me, anyway.

  “So far, I love learning Japanese,” I said, to explain that a bit more. “It’s so much better than all those business courses Karis made me sign up for.” I had been trying to learn stuff so I could do better at my previous job at the real estate company, but I had been a lost cause. I had dropped out of those classes as soon as I had quit working there.

  Karis sat up straight again. “But Ione,” she started earnestly, and she again tried to explain to me why she thought I should continue with my business studies. I listened, but there was just no way that I was going to go back and keep trying to stuff all that into myself while my brain was actively rejecting it. No way at all.

  Augusta glanced over at me and got Karis redirected by talking about the wedding, which we were all pretty excited about. Augusta was curled up on the other couch with her husband, who was playing with her auburn hair that I loved to paint, and Karis was still sitting on Reid, and now he was kind of nuzzling her neck. I was sitting on the other couch, alone.

  Suddenly I felt very odd. I looked back and forth between the two couples. “I’m going to go home,” I said, standing up. “I’ll see you guys on Monday.” I even pretended to yawn a little. “I’m just really tired.”

  That was a lie. I didn’t feel tired, just strange. I had looked at everyone there, so happy and snuggly, and it made me feel…bad. I thought I should go back to my house, with my other single friends, and hang with them for a while. But when I got there, the house was full of a lot of people I didn’t know, people Fox had apparently met at some club and invited over. I stuck around downstairs for a while but it was crowded and very hot, and some guy kept following me around and kind of rubbing against me, even when I asked him to please stop, even when I told him it was making me uncomfortable. He just laughed and stepped closer.

  So I went up to my studio to work, locking the door behind me, but instead of painting, I stood at the window, trying to feel some cooler air. I watched Devesh and Sania argue on their back deck under the bright outdoor lights that they had installed, the ones they left on all night and kept me awake sometimes with how they shone into my window, too. I couldn’t understand the language they spoke, but no one could have missed the anger between them as Devesh waved his arms and Sania clamped hers across her chest.

  Then, a few minutes after she shook her finger at him and they disappeared back inside, Sania started pounding on my front door, yelling now in English that it was late and we were too loud, that she would call the police. The party downstairs broke up. I had known it was coming; my neighbors never wanted anyone to have any fun.

  I sighed. I felt hot and bothered, but not in a good way. It was just too hot and something was under my skin, like a piece of sand in an oyster’s shell. Something was rubbing me wrong.

  ∞

  “Ichi, ni, san…” We counted the rest of the way up to ten, repeating in a unison sing-song.

  “Turn to your partner and say it again!” Gin urged us. “Then ask three questions using the numbers we’ve just learned.”

  “Itchy knee sand…” Cooper stopped. “What’s next?”

  “Shi, go,” I prompted.

  “She goes,” he responded. “That’s one through five.” I counted quickly, the rest of the way up to ten.

  I had slid in next to his chair when I arrived, a little late. “What did I miss?” I had whispered.

  Cooper kept typing, then quietly turned his laptop screen so that I could read it. He took really, really good notes. There were extra little annotations for things to help him remember pronunciations, which I found really funny, because he had written everything out phonetically but still said it all wrong.

  Today we were learning numbers, which, apparently, was not as easy as just learning the vocabulary words. Gin had been giving a brief overview when I came in, but then Cooper had started to ask questions. Soon we were learning that in Japanese, numbers came from two languages, so there were two separate sets of numbers and you had to choose which set to use. When Cooper kept asking things, Gin explained how after you picked that, then the numbers themselves also changed depending on the different things you were counting. It was all very depressing, because I thought that not only would I not be able to read letters, I wouldn’t even be able to read numbers either in Japanese. But then when Gin wrote them on the board, he just wrote regular numbers like I did, so I had no idea what was going on.

  “Fascinating,” I heard Cooper murmur. Fascinating? It was so confusing! Finally Gin stopped trying to explain it all
and told us not to worry, that we didn’t have to learn any of that anyway because this class was Conversational Japanese, and people would understand us if we said the numbers as he taught them to us. He smiled and had us recite, then came the request to turn to our partners and ask questions using the numbers.

  “Do you understand this thing about counters? What the hell are they?” I asked Cooper, and he started to explain. I got it a little better the second time around. “Thanks,” I said gratefully. “I hate not being able to understand stuff. Isn’t it a terrible feeling? I used to have this job where I had not one, ichi, idea of what was happening. Like, zero, zero, clue as to what I was supposed to do. For almost two, ni, years.”

  “How did you keep that position for two years if you couldn’t actually do the job?” he asked, staring at me.

  “Well, mostly my coworker, my friend Karis, did it for me. I gave her a lot of paintings.”

  He was still just staring at me.

  “Ok, let’s start,” I announced briskly. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “One. Itchy. Itchy brother.”

  I started laughing, it sounded so funny how he had said it. A moment later, Cooper smiled at me. He had a very nice smile, that started kind of slowly, but lightened his whole face.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Didn’t we only learn the numbers up to ten?” He looked a little anxiously at the whiteboard.

  “I’m just curious,” I explained. I was curious about him.

  “I’m thirty-one. How about you? How many brothers and sisters?”

  “Zero.” That was easy; it was the same word in Japanese and in English. “I’m an only child. My dad lives in Canada and my mom passed away when I was a kid. I grew up with my grandparents in Hamtramck. And I’m twenty-six.”

  “Oh.” He seemed taken aback by the rush of information. “Ok.”

  “What about you?”

  “I…what about me?”

  “Are you from here? Detroit?”

  He nodded slowly. “I am. I just moved back, about two months ago.”

  “Where have you been living?”

  “Out west.” He glanced at the whiteboard again. “How many feet are there in a yard?”

  “San. Why did you move back here?”

  Cooper swiveled his eyes to me. “I came home to work at the company my parents started. To take over for them. How many planets are in the solar system?”

  “Um…” I thought, counting quickly. “Roku.”

  “Six? No.”

  “Your company makes robots? That’s what you said before. Like R2D2?” I asked.

  “No, not like R2D2. They’re robots for assembly lines.” He ran his hand over his hair. “What’s your lucky number?”

  I sat back, surprised. “I can’t tell you that! That’s a very personal question.”

  “No, I didn’t mean your number of sexual partners!” he exclaimed, and looked very embarrassed. “I meant, do you have a number that you feel is lucky?”

  “I knew what you meant,” I told him. I leaned forward and whispered. “Shichi. Seven.”

  “I don’t understand why…” he whispered back, then cleared his throat. “Ok, those were your three number questions.”

  “Ok, here’s another question for you. What’s your phone number?” I asked.

  “That’s hard.” Slowly, he worked it out. “Hot cheese, sand…”

  Hachi, san. I wrote the numbers down as he said them. “Good job, Cooper!” I smiled at him, and again, he smiled back. “It’s probably important to learn to say numbers if you’re in the robotics business. You said that you were studying Japanese for business.”

  Now he frowned. “Not really,” he started to answer, just as Gin started talking again at the front of the classroom, so I didn’t get to hear why learning numbers wouldn’t be important to him. I found that I really wanted to know.

  After class, I waited while Cooper folded up his slim computer and I walked next to him out of the room. “Not really what?” I asked him.

  “Not really what, what?”

  I heard thunder rumble in the distance. Maybe the heat would finally break. “You said it. ‘Not really,’ it’s not really important for you to learn numbers in Japanese for your business. Why?”

  “No, I want to learn as much as I can. I mean, I guess the other parts, the conversational parts, would be more helpful to me.” He sighed. “I don’t know if any of this will be helpful to me.”

  “Why?” I asked. He was walking up the street so I went that way too, wondering a little where I had left my own car.

  “I’m trying to learn Japanese because I’m trying to do business with some Japanese companies. Specifically one company and—” He broke off and shrugged. “I don’t know if it will help me, at all, but at this point I would do anything. Learning Japanese seemed like an easy way to get a leg up on our competition.”

  “Really? Learning Japanese would be the easy way? What would be the hard way, exactly?”

  “Why are you taking this class?” Cooper asked me. “Are you going to Japan?”

  “No.” But everyone was asking me that. Maybe I should. “I had taken a few classes at this college and I dropped them mid-semester. My friend Karis was trying to convince me to keep taking them and one of her arguments was that I was throwing away my money. I went to the registration office and asked for a refund so I could tell her that I got my money back, and the man who worked there was so nice! He tried very hard but he couldn’t give me a refund, but he did give me credit on my account, so I can take two classes to make up for the ones I dropped.”

  “That was nice. I didn’t know they would do that.”

  “I guess usually they wouldn’t, but he made an exception. He also told me not to tell anyone, so please don’t tell anyone.”

  “It sounds like he did you a huge favor.”

  “He did, right? I don’t want to get him in trouble for it. I got the feeling that he was supposed to tell me ‘no refunds’ and send me on my way, but he spent about an hour helping me out. It was very sweet.”

  “Very sweet,” Cooper repeated.

  “The classes that I dropped were business and math, because I was terrible at them, and so I couldn’t do my job right like I told you about, but I was trying to learn. It didn’t work, and I quit that job, anyway, because the boss was awful, not because I couldn’t do it. Although, I couldn’t do it. And that’s how I ended up in Conversational Japanese.”

  Cooper nodded slowly without speaking and we walked up the street in the darkness. “Where’s your car?” he asked after we had gone another block.

  “I thought I was walking you to your car,” I said.

  He pointed to our left. “I’m in a lot a few blocks west.”

  “I’m back the other way. I guess I’ll see you at the next class. Good job with your numbers.” I turned and started down the street, but Cooper turned too, and he went with me. I watched him for a little while we walked, wondering if he was going to veer off somewhere so he could go home. But he walked me all the way back to my car, and when I struggled to get the door open, he took over and yanked on it for me.

  “You drive a Gremlin?” he asked. He had stepped back and was looking at it dubiously.

  I patted the orange roof. “Yes, this is mine.”

  He was still eying it, now with his lip curling a little as his gaze ran over the rust, the dents, the missing bumper in the back, all highlighted under the streetlight. “It runs?”

  “Pretty much.” I sat down in the driver’s seat and tried to start the car, and it did after I fiddled with it a little.

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to make that noise,” Cooper commented loudly. He said something else, too, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise that my engine wasn’t supposed to make.

  I turned off the car, pretty sure that it would start back up. “What did you say?”

  “My friend from high school has a shop downtown. They do
a good job. Here.” He grabbed a crumpled piece of paper from the bag he was wearing across his body, and wrote out a name. His handwriting was very square and precise. “If you want, you can mention that I told you to call him. I think it’s hard to get an appointment with him. Cooper Hughes,” he said. “That’s my name.”

  “Ok. Thank you, I’ll call him.” I hesitated for a second but then tried to restart the Gremlin, and the engine did rev back up. Cooper stood at the curb and waited for a moment as I drove back the way we had just walked.

  The paper on which he had written the name of the garage was the one I had given him, with the pictures of him that I had drawn. He must have wadded it up after I had handed it to him and shoved it into his bag, and given it back to me. Rain started to fall, finally, and one thing that really didn’t work very well on my Gremlin were the windshield wipers. I opened the window and put my head out to help myself see, and between that and the hole in the floor, I was pretty wet by the time I got home. I ran up to my studio, past the couple making out in the vestibule, the trio of people singing acapella in the living room, and Fox who went by me on the stairs, telling me not to wait up because he was going to meet some woman who was really, really into him. As if I had ever waited up for him, no matter where he went.

  I smoothed out the paper, the one I had given to Cooper and he had given back, with my drawings on it. Then I took out my big sketchpad and started to draw, just letting my imagination go for a while, and ignoring the light shining into my window from stupid Sania’s back yard. I had to go to work in a few hours. That day, then the next, melted slowly away in the June heat.

  On Wednesday morning, I woke up with a big crick in my neck from how I had slept on the couch. When I went into the bathroom, I found that someone had left the water running in the sink, maybe for the whole night. Work for the past two days had been so much of the same, it was hard for me to remember how much time had actually passed. But I was in a good mood anyway, because I remembered that it was Wednesday. I checked my calendar to make sure and yep, I was almost certain that it was.

  I ran into Fox, coming out of the green room. He looked up at me quickly and then called back into the bedroom, “I’ll be back in a minute, babe.” He shrugged a little, looking at me. “I can’t remember her name.”