Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  He smiled. “I know you will.”

  And that made me smile, a lot.

  By the time that we arrived at the restaurant, I could tell that Cooper was getting all tense again. He just had that feel to him. Also, he was clenching his hands into fists and scowling. “You’re doing the glower,” I noted, as he gave the keys to the valet. I watched him try to relax his features. “Like this,” I said, and then demonstrated a smile. He bared his teeth, which was as good as it was going to get.

  We had gotten there early to be ready, so we were seated when they came in. Cooper and I both stood up. He introduced me to everyone: Mr. Aoki, Mr. Hirose, and Mr. Mori, who was in charge.

  “Konbanwa,” I told them. Good evening. “Watashi wa Szczupakiewicz Ione desu.” My name is Ione Szczupakiewicz. “Nihongo wo benkyoshiteimasu.” I’m learning Japanese. “Cooper is too. It’s very nice to meet you all. Detroit e yokoso.” Welcome to Detroit.

  They all just about fell over, and it was a great way to start off the dinner. I explained how Cooper had been studying Japanese to communicate better, just for them. They were extremely impressed. Maybe a little less so when he said a few things, but they still really liked the idea that Cooper had taken on Japanese for their benefit. They kept saying things to see how far we had gotten, so I kept having to answer, “Sumimasen, wakarimasen,” that I didn’t understand, or, “Motto yukkuri hanashite kudasai,” to ask them to speak more slowly. They loved all of it. Mostly we talked about studying Japanese, rather than robots.

  “Please say your last name again,” Mr. Aoki asked me. “Will you write it here?” He produced a pen and paper and I did. All three of our guests looked at it, then at me and Cooper.

  “It’s a difficult name,” Cooper told him. “I had to practice it quite a few times.”

  He did? He had? “It’s not English, it’s Polish,” I explained. “It’s not pronounced how it looks.” So we all said my name, over and over, until everyone had it just about right. Or close enough.

  “Do you speak Polish?” Mori-san asked me.

  “I do. My grandma didn’t like speaking English very much, and I lived with her and my grandpa. When I started kindergarten, my first year of school, I actually didn’t speak much English.”

  “Really? When I asked you if you learned other languages as easily as you have with Japanese, you didn’t mention that you speak Polish,” Cooper said.

  “I thought you meant in school. In school, I only studied Spanish. I spoke English there, and Polish at home. Polish and French,” I amended. “My grandma spoke French too, so I picked that up. And a little German, enough to get by. But I’m pretty sure I speak it all with a Polish accent.”

  “You’re very accomplished,” Mr. Hirose told me.

  “Me?” I laughed. “Thank you, but not at all! I didn’t really learn anything. It was just around me, so I absorbed it.”

  “You’re also very modest. And very lovely,” he said.

  “Oh. Thank you.” I looked at my entrée. Then Cooper changed the subject and they somehow ended up talking about baseball, which interested me none.

  When we left that night, everyone was happy and smiling. All three of our dinner guests were saying that next time they were in Detroit, they would bring their wives, and they hoped we would show them some of the cool landmarks and interesting things we had talked about. “Of course! You can all come to my house and I’ll make some of the Polish food I described,” I said. How fun would that be? And then we said goodbye and they got a car back to their hotel.

  Cooper held the door for me when the valet pulled up his car. As soon as we got in, he turned to me. “I don’t know how to thank you enough.”

  “For what? Getting to go to a great restaurant and enjoy an amazing dinner? I should be thanking you! I really had fun.”

  “You had them eating out of your hand.”

  “No, don’t be silly. But I think you may have some new customers. If I know how to read people—”

  “And you do,” he put in.

  “Thank you! I’m pretty sure that it’s in the bag for you. I really, really hope it works out.”

  “Well, I’m really, really grateful that you came out tonight. It would have been excruciating without you there.”

  “No,” I told him again. “You would have done fine. But I admit, all the Japanese we spoke was a good icebreaker, just like you said.”

  “You were the icebreaker. I thought Mr. Mori was going to try to adopt you.”

  “That was so sweet when he said that I reminded him of his daughter.”

  “The other two…” He glanced over at me. “Do you ever get tired of it? Men act like such asses with you.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Yes, they do. In the short time I’ve known you, I’ve seen it several times. My brother is talking about taking you to the prom.”

  “Oh, God. No.”

  “I’m kidding. Luckily for you, it already happened.”

  I thought about Augusta’s closet. “That is lucky, because I wouldn’t have anything to wear.”

  Suddenly Cooper laughed. “You know what I feel like? Ice cream. That was an amazing dinner but I was too nervous to eat it.”

  “Oh no, really?” I laughed too. “I’m in for ice cream. Always.”

  So he bought me a chocolate cone and I didn’t get any on Augusta’s dress, and he didn’t mind at all when we had to go back to the restaurant to get Augusta’s purse that I had left behind. All in all, it was almost a perfect night, right up until he dropped me off.

  “I won’t be at class tomorrow. We have a staff meeting that will run late,” Cooper mentioned. He pulled into my driveway and stopped. “I’ll see you next Monday.”

  “Maybe we could see each other over the weekend,” I suggested.

  Cooper turned off the car. For a moment, both of us watched some people straggle out of my house. “I don’t think so,” he said finally.

  “Ok. Sure.”

  “Ione, I appreciate very much you coming out tonight. I can’t thank you enough. And if I can do anything for you—”

  “Nope, I don’t need a thing.” I got out of the car into the humid darkness. “Goodnight, Cooper. Oyasuminasai.” I went quickly up to my house, a tight ache blooming in my chest. A woman came rushing out as I walked in, bumping against me and knocking me sideways. I slowly traversed the party, trudged up the stairs to my studio, unlocked the door and went in, then carefully removed all of Augusta’s fancy items and pulled on some of my old clothes. I laid out her dress on my couch and set up the jewelry, purse, and shoes around it.

  “Ione?” Over the cacophony from downstairs, I heard Corrie’s voice as she knocked on my studio door.

  “Hi,” I said as I unlocked it. “Want to hang out up here with me?”

  She sat down next to Augusta’s clothes on the couch. “I saw you come in. You looked so nice. Where were you?”

  “The dinner I told you about, the business dinner. Just business. I borrowed the dress.” I gestured to it with my pencil. “Now I’m drawing it.”

  Corrie peered at me. “Were you crying?”

  “Not too much.” I took one of my rags and wiped under my eyes.

  “You just smeared crap all over your face,” Corrie informed me. “Paint, I think.”

  “That’s ok, I don’t care. What’s new?” I went back to drawing as she told me what she had been doing, which seemed to be hanging out at various places with different people who fought and argued all the time and didn’t do much besides that.

  “So I told them to fuck off and left,” she concluded. “But the party here sucks. These people are so weird, they keep doing this chanting thing.”

  “I heard them. I don’t know what that’s about.” I looked at her face, the contours and shadows. “Did you finish high school? And can I draw you?”

  “Yes. To both.”

  I flipped to a new page in my sketchbook. “Did you ever think about getting a job?” Her face changed from
neutral to disgusted. It almost made me smile. “How do you make money?” I asked. I watched her carefully as I moved the pencil across the paper.

  “You don’t want to know,” she told me.

  “No, I probably don’t. I didn’t want to get a job but I had to, and now it’s not so bad. I like seeing the people there. Maybe I could look around for you, too. I bet there are openings even in the building where I work.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as my friend Karis explained to me, it’s better to be financially stable. She worries a lot about that.”

  “No, I mean, why are you always so nice to me?” Her whole face was now suspicious, confused.

  I put down my pencil. “Why wouldn’t I be nice to you?”

  Corrie shrugged and stood up. “I’m going out, I can’t stay here with all the poetry going on downstairs.”

  “You can hang up here. I won’t talk about a job anymore.”

  She was already heading out the door. “I’ll see you later.”

  When she left, I didn’t feel like drawing. I hung up the dress and lay down where it had been on my sofa, looking at the pattern that Sania’s spotlight made on my ceiling, listening to the sounds of chanting coming from the dining room. Things would be fine, because that was life. I had read about it: shoganai. It meant accepting things as they were and moving on. That was what I had always done, without even knowing that there was a cool word for it. The ceiling was starting to get lighter with the sun when I went to sleep for a little while.

  The next day I went over to get my car after work. It was sitting outside the bay at Brody’s Garage, literally sparkling. My little orange Gremlin had never looked better.

  “Wow,” I said, walking around it. I could already see that the hole in the floor was gone. I was amazed.

  “For a friend of Coop’s, we gave it a little polish.” The mechanic, Digger, was grinning at me from inside the garage.

  “I wouldn’t say we’re friends,” I told him. “Remember? Cooper and I are only school friends. No, we backslid to acquaintances.”

  “I’m still not sure about the difference.” Digger walked over and handed me the keys. “Let’s go for a ride. I think you’ll notice a few changes.”

  Well, right off the bat, I could tell that the brakes were working a whole lot better, because I was able to stop directly at the corner instead of going out into the intersection by mistake. And the loud noises were all gone, too. It was odd, riding with the car so quiet. “It’s amazing,” I complimented Digger. “It seems like you performed a miracle!”

  He laughed. “That’s me, the automotive miracle worker.” He started to explain the specifics of what he had fixed. It seemed like it was a lot more than what he had put on the estimate, which Karis had gone over with a fine-tooth comb. I started to get a sinking feeling about what I was going to have to pay him.

  “Why aren’t you and Coop friends? Why are you only acquaintances now?” Digger asked me, taking a break from telling me how he had rebuilt something else that needed it. Another thing that hadn’t been on the estimate, from what I remembered.

  “He had a girlfriend in California and they broke up. Now he says he doesn’t have time for a relationship, but I think it’s his nicer way of saying that he doesn’t want a relationship with me. We went out to dinner last night with some people from Japan, that he’s trying to sell robots to. It was really fun, and I said maybe we could go out again, but he said no. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling. I can’t even imagine what my aura looks like right now.”

  “Well, you seem pretty upset about it, judging by how you’re crying.”

  “Yeah.” I wiped my eyes. “I’m in a little downturn at the moment.” I pulled back up to the garage and we got out. It was scorching again, just miserable. Digger held the door for me to go back into the office and a different woman was at the front desk, a giant fan wafting all the papers she had spread out before her.

  “Lori, find her invoice,” Digger ordered. “It’s under S. S and then a lot of letters.”

  I looked at the woman as she hunted around the desk. She had very interesting tattoos that I would have loved to draw.

  “God damn it, Rebecca organized all my shit again. Now I can’t find anything!” she groused. “Whenever your wife is here, she messes up my system with her neatness.”

  “It’s not our fault you’re working part-time. Or that you don’t know the fucking alphabet. I said it’s under S. Why are you holding a file with a B on it?”

  “Suck it, Dig!” They continued to bicker but I could tell that they didn’t mean anything by it. Finally, the woman handed me a piece of paper, which I read carefully, imitating Karis.

  It was wrong. “I think I owe you more than this,” I told Digger.

  “Nope.”

  “No, this is the same price as it was before, and you fixed more than what was on the estimate,” I insisted.

  “Consider it a favor for a friend of a friend. An acquaintance of a friend,” he corrected himself. I felt my face fall. “No, hey, don’t get down about Coop,” Digger urged me. “He’s a smart guy, and you’ll work it out.”

  I heard the woman at the desk mumble, “Softy.”

  I nodded at Digger. “Thanks.”

  “You know what? My wife and I, we’re having people over this weekend,” Digger continued.

  “He loves to say ‘wife,’” the woman with the cool tattoos said.

  “I’m even letting Lorelei come. Maybe,” he said, looking at the woman. She flipped him off. “Here, let me give you our address. Bring over the Gremlin and let my friends take a look at it. They’ll love it.” He wrote on a little piece of paper and I immediately took a picture of it so I would have it in two places, then put the paper in my shoe.

  “Thank you. Thank you for fixing my car. Thanks for everything.” I handed him a check.

  “No problem. We’ll see you Friday.”

  I drove from there over to Japanese class, which was just not the same without the guy next to me taking all the notes and butchering every word.

  ∞

  The Gremlin ran beautifully. So well that after work on Thursday, I had forgotten that it was on and left it running in my driveway until Sania came barreling over to yell at me about pollution. “I didn’t mean to pollute. It’s just that the engine is so quiet now!” I had tried to explain.

  “That thing is quiet?” She looked derisively at my little orange car. “It sounds like it’s about to explode.”

  But I thought it drove like a dream, after Digger had worked his magic on it. I directed it over to the Boston Edison neighborhood on Friday night, to the address that Digger had given me on the piece of paper. I had lost the paper and the picture I had taken somehow too from my phone, but luckily I had sent the image to my work email, and the IT guy was able to find it after it deleted somewhere in the dumb computer.

  Digger and his wife lived in a house that reminded me of Augusta’s, big and stately, as were the other houses on their street. I pulled up to the curb and parked, remembering to put on my shoes before I went up to the front door. It wasn’t unlocked like my house; I tried it, then rang the doorbell. After a moment, I knocked too, and a man swung it open for me. “Come on in!” he said. “Did you ring the doorbell? They haven’t fixed that yet.” He led me through the house, which, also unlike mine, was full of furniture. We went out to the back yard where there was definitely a party going on. “Who do you know here?” my guide asked.

  “Digger.”

  “Let’s go find him then.” He led me to where Digger was standing with his arm around a dark-haired woman, the same woman who had been working at the front desk of the garage when I first came in. I remembered the delicate bones of her face. She would be fun to paint, with the gentle, shy light that she had about her. Digger was keeping her tightly to his side, and every once in a while he would bend and say something close to her ear. In spite of the heat, they looked very cozy.

  Digger was glad to se
e I had come and introduced me all around. He let go of his wife, Rebecca, to get me a beer and I talked to her for a while, and to the woman with the tattoos who had been sitting at the desk when I picked up my car, Lorelei. She was a lot nicer when she wasn’t talking to Digger. I liked Digger’s wife, too, who was pretty quiet, but very sweet. Then Digger asked if I could lead a tour group around to the street to show off my car and at least 10 people came out to look over my Gremlin.

  “I learned to drive in one of these,” one of the women said. “The pickup was so bad, my dad could run alongside while I tried to accelerate, so it was the perfect car to practice on.”

  “I love my car,” I defended it. “And Digger has fixed it so well, I can stop whenever I want.”

  They all laughed like maniacs, although I had been totally serious.

  “How did you end up driving this?” someone asked, I thought maybe the man who had said that I reminded him of Aphrodite.

  “Well, I was riding the bus to work one day and it broke down. We all had to get out, and it was raining really hard, so I thought I would knock on some doors to see if we could wait inside.”

  “You thought you would knock on strangers’ doors and invite a crowd of bus riders inside their house,” the woman who had mocked my Gremlin clarified.

  “It turned out that no one would let us in, but I did happen to meet one man who had this car in his front yard. It was so bright and uplifting with its beautiful color on such a grey, sad day. He said he would sell it to me for seven hundred seventy-seven dollars, which I took as a sign.” I didn’t want to explain why, because lucky numbers were private. “I went back down the next day with my roommate and I gave the man the cash. We were so fortunate that it started, so I drove it right home.”

  “Did you make that up, or did that really happen?” Digger asked me. “You didn’t even try to start it before you handed over the money?”

  “He had told me that it ran great,” I explained, “which turned out to be not exactly true, but it did run and it got me to work and back. Pretty much.” Digger shook his head. He opened the hood and started to talk about what he had done to make it run more regularly and that was when I saw a very practical, very sensible car drive up and park across the street.