by Diane Zinna
Many of them would write about being new to the country and all the ways they were struggling to fit in. They didn’t realize how much I connected with them, how keenly I felt their descriptions of not having the right words, of not being in on the jokes, of laughing along to something you didn’t understand when laughter was the last thing your homesick heart could bear. Grief can feel like homesickness.
I was just an adjunct, but I thought that having a few hours each day in front of the room, having the students’ rapt interest and respect, made up for some things. I wasn’t liked by several of the other professors in my department. Maybe they thought I was too young, or that I talked too softly, or too fast. I started out liking them very much. The first semester, some would ask me an occasional question, dropping breadcrumbs because they knew I was hungry for conversation. Weren’t you working in the college library before this? How is it that you’re now teaching in the international program? I’d realize, too late, that I was confessing to them parts meant for friends—a glimmer of connection with a student, a better way to teach something. They brooded. They didn’t like any of my ideas. They didn’t like that I’d never completed my thesis, that I taught at Stella Maris without a PhD.
Was that applause coming from your classroom, Lauren?
Yes, but it wasn’t for me. Someone shared their paper and it moved the others.
Well, of course it wasn’t for you. Do you hear that? She thinks we thought the students were applauding for her. Just close your door, will you? It’s a distraction.
I could have borne it all more easily with one good friend.
It was a wintry January morning when Siri Bergström first came to class early with steaming coffee, one cup in each hand, her portfolio case slung across her back.
I’d noticed her in class. She always sat in the front row, off to my right. When students came in, she would acknowledge each one, sharing a sigh with a girl who also had a long walk from the dormitory, quickly trading notes from a math class with another, always smiling, telling them hej, the other students waving at her, the whole classroom gently tipping in her direction.
“You are so young to be a teacher, right?”
We sat opposite each other in the stillness of my first-floor classroom. Bright, floor-to-ceiling windows met behind her at a sharp glass angle, striped with condensation. We were alone, with just the hum of the radiator and the heat coming off my coffee cup.
“People think that,” I said.
“You write a lot on our essays.”
I looked down at the paper I was grading, at my skinny trail of words winding down the margin. I felt embarrassed.
“I like to read them. They are like whole letters you’re taking time to write,” she continued. “When this class is over, I’m going to save them. Just for what you’ve written down the sides.”
She smiled. I realized she was being earnest. She shook out her hair with her hand and a sprinkle of glitter fell and dusted her desk.
I motioned toward her portfolio case. “What kind of art do you do?”
From her bag, she drew out her compositions: neon paint, glued-down metal grommets, glitter, and brads. They were sparkling multicolored ovals, like geodes, with enough depth that they looked heavy, about to drop through the desk to the floor. I couldn’t think of the words to convey how their complexity startled me. I noticed a tear toward the bottom of one of the canvases that was filled in with gold.
“Some Japanese artists repair broken pottery with liquid gold. It’s a way to highlight what went wrong, to say a break can make something more valuable or more precious.” She ran her fingertip along the sparkling seam. “It’s the same with people, right?”
I smiled. “Right.”
“This is just very, very fine gold glitter. But I use it whenever I make a mistake now.”
She stared at my face intently, like she was listening more to the curve of my mouth than my reply.
“You’re wonderful,” I said, and her face lit up.
That’s how it started. In the beginning, that was all it was. She would come to class early and share her compositions with me. I’d fumble for words to compliment them, but mostly I could sense she just wanted me to tell her that she was good. Then she’d slide them back in her big flat bag, and we’d sit together in silence, attending to our work.
It wasn’t much, but I came to look forward to those quiet half-hour intervals. She seemed to like being around me even when I wasn’t on. And I started to feel, when the others filed in and filled the seats, when the bell rang and I took my position at the front of the room, that Siri was a friend in my corner, rooting for me to do well.
Siri was a sprite. She was freckled, small and thin, with a pair of skinny jeans in every color of the rainbow. Little accent—she could have been from anywhere. She wore her blond hair short and sometimes dyed it to match her bright pants, but it seemed to me that the way she cared about people made her an old soul. Like she had come from somewhere with the authority to discern goodness in people and had decided there was some in me. I don’t think people knew that I doubted that about myself. I think I appeared like I had it all together. I didn’t.
Siri turned out to be a good writer, though mostly she didn’t understand the purpose of personal essays. None of them did. Often, if my students didn’t know a word in English, they would just write the word in their own language. Siri did it, too. In one of her first essays, she used the word ensam for “lonely,” over and over, as though no English speakers had ever had to express that feeling.
“It may mean the same thing technically,” she said. “But it seems to be missing something. Doesn’t it?”
We started to talk about that word like we were talking about something else. It was all the ways ensam had been defined for her in her lifetime, from her childhood, with her family, and now in the United States without them. For people she had lost, she seemed to want an English word that bore ensam’s same lonesome sound, its own turning-in, serious-mouthed hum. I pulled out a thesaurus and read her every English synonym, but it was the sound of her word she wanted, the right to use it and keep it. She told me ensam was the loss of her mother, and that’s when I told her to leave it in.
“How did your mother die?” I asked.
“Nobody knows for sure,” she said with a wave of her hand, a smile again. I knew that gesture, that means of waving things away, that smile to put another person at ease. I nodded. She had found a word that held something for her. I could see why she was protective of it. Both my parents died when I was eighteen. I was an only child without any other family. Without language for it, I’d floated a long time.
No. I’d white-knuckled it. And scrambled, and cried, and ruined my chances, and lost myself. But when I look back, it felt like floating, because before then I’d been so rooted.
Siri didn’t seem to be floating. She seemed to know exactly who she was. Teaching gave me a sense of who I was supposed to be at twenty-eight. But there was something of Siri’s earnestness that was my should-have-been younger self, the person I might have been at eighteen. I remember thinking, looking at her, I could have worn my hair that way.
Me, at eighteen: It was the end of August, when all my friends were going off to college for the first time in faraway towns. It was the dwindling end of summer. One by one they left in roof-packed cars, me helping to tighten their bungee cables, kissing them on their cheeks. Some remarked that I should have been the one to go away, that I was too smart not to go, that I would love their school. Others admired me for my resolve to stay back, work, and save for a year. I put on smiles and told them my plan—I’d spend the year reading all of Shakespeare and teaching myself Latin. I’d publish a short story before I even applied to school. The truth was that we didn’t have the money for me to go.
The days grew short so fast, the community pool too cold to swim in,
no one left in town to go with anymore.
In our house it was a September of tears and one-sided arguments. Stupid things. Me slamming the door. Me slamming the door, never my parents. Me losing my temper because the town was too small, because I got passed over for a promotion at the supermarket when the managers knew I needed it more than any of the others. Because I was talking again with my parents at dinner while my friends were in college cafeterias. Because even after I slammed the door, they opened it softly and told me they understood what I was feeling, but they couldn’t help but feel glad to have me at home with them for another year.
So I felt, when it happened, that I’d brought it on myself.
At the hospital, I was shepherded into a little green room. The yellow-haired counselor asked if I could call another family member to come get me. But there was no one else. It had only ever been the three of us. Dancing on the linoleum, cooking beneath the open window of the kitchen, looking at the stars while lying on our backs on the patio table. There was no one else. A family of three is like a bet.
I was too old to be an orphan. Old enough to drive. Too young to know I wouldn’t be able to make things work alone. They had been driving on the harbor bridge, on their way home from dinner in Port Llewelyn, from a restaurant I could never remember their going to without me. There had been a young college student on a bike. His girlfriend was sitting on his handlebars, and my father swerved, but he lost control of the car and it went off the bridge into the water, just before the posts where the ferries came in. I grew up watching those ferries from my bedroom window, their faraway lights like stars to wish on.
The story was in all of the papers. And then it wasn’t. People could not understand that I had no other relatives. The people in town who knew my introverted parents were first sympathetic to me, then more and more started to become curious, demanding details. We drive that bridge every day, they’d say. How could that have happened?
When I met new people, I did not tell them about it. The nature of my parents’ deaths made it hard for me to talk about. The idea of their drowning in a car—I feared that by sharing it, the image would continue to live in other people’s minds. And they’d want to say something, but what can someone say? The car would just rev and dive in the strangers’ thoughts, and they’d be left on the bridge without a clue how to respond to me. I came to believe the most polite thing to do was let the memory of it die inside me. And part of me started to die away with it.
I was too young to go through that alone. But I was old enough to balance a checkbook. Too young, perhaps, to anticipate the predatory instincts of some men. Old enough to know how to assuage a social worker’s fears. I learned to lie. The years passed. I stayed adrift. I floated. I turned inward, my whole life a serious-mouthed hum.
Ensam. Loneliness.
After that conversation with Siri, I grew more hesitant to correct the first-language words in my students’ essays, afraid I would tread on something important and untranslatable. I made a list of them. I related to the way any topic I assigned could become, for them, an essay on homesickness. For all of us, the college was a planet far away, and our growing index of untouchable words a language by which to navigate it.
“Why are we learning personal essays?” one of my students asked. They always wanted to tie what they learned to the real world. “Do you ever write such essays for pay?”
Hesitantly, I told them that outside of school I was a technical writer. Manuals. Warranty guides. Contracts and operating instructions and warnings in big letters appearing prior to the step to which they applied.
My students were all intrigued by this, and one girl asked, “How does one break into such a field?”
That girl was an expressive, beautiful writer. I told her she should never aspire to do that kind of work.
“Why not?” she asked. “People need safety instructions.”
It compromises you, I wanted to say, feeling the layers of that word inside of me.
“How do you find such work?” Word of mouth. “Where do you do this work?” In my bed. “Where did you learn how to do this?” I always knew how to do this. “How do you get paid?” By the hour.
“Well, what did you want to be?” a boy asked, and I was caught off guard.
The students in my classes had traveled on their own from far away. For so long, I’d lived within myself, growing smaller and smaller—but they were bold, adventurous. I didn’t know how they managed, but I admired them. I loved drawing out their stories. And I enjoyed being with them, something I learned early on not to share with the other professors.
“I’ve always just wanted to be here,” I told them. “With you all.”
I somehow sensed in Siri’s gaze that she knew the parts I’d left unsaid. Hers was a gaze that always waited an extra moment, should you want to say something more.
“Besides, this kind of writing is important,” I said. “Knowing how to express yourself to one another in real ways…it can help with loneliness and distance. It can help when you are feeling ensam.”
I saw Siri sit up straight in her chair like I’d called her name.
I WORKED MY first year at Stella Maris at the campus library, checking out A/V equipment and helping professors pull books for their courses and unlocking the shredder cabinet when SecureShred came once a week, and repairing microfiche, and emptying wastebaskets. And reading, my ankles wrapped around the legs of a stool late nights when it was just me and a hive of students, with their headphones like blinders and gigantic 7-Eleven Slurpees.
I loved Stella Maris even then. It was nothing like the nondescript university I had eventually attended in New York, with its lecture halls designed by the same people who planned state prisons. My old college was better known for the force of its wind than anything else. There was a rumor that petite women had to wear weight belts there in the winter lest they be blown from campus. That fable was the most magic the place afforded me, but without anywhere else to go, I did graduate work there, too.
The wind that would carry me away came in the form of a boyfriend who was leaving town for Washington, D.C. Going with him meant leaving an opportunity to continue on for a PhD. I worried I was making a mistake, but I was more afraid of being alone. I got a decent-paying job at Stella Maris’s library, which felt familiar and safe.
I was not unhappy. I’d always longed for the elegance of a pretty school like Stella Maris, its alcoves filled with art, bronze plaques fastened to the corners of white buildings, hedges cut into the shapes of animals. There was a lovely path on the west side of campus strung with one hundred rose plants, set in the ground by the graduating class during the school’s centennial summer. All in a line, equidistant from one another, each bearing a black and white laminated tag with its name: Sonja, Red Planet, Mr. Lincoln, Diana, Peace.
I would bring my dog, Annie, with me for walks along this beaded fringe of campus nearly every morning. In time I memorized the name of each plant. Country Music was neon pink with petals that looked like plastic. Tropicana was my favorite, with bursting orange flowers the size of my hand. Having their names inside me made it easier when that boyfriend moved on again in three months’ time.
Some people on campus knew me from the roses—I was the girl with the dog. Others knew me from the elegant library with its four white columns out front, its atrium of pink marble, its lonely reading rooms. Both places full of scent and color, both mine in ways that no one else seemed to want. The half mile of a Rose Walk morning was as compulsive and solitary as my movement through the library stacks. Just as I knew the names of all the plants, when someone came asking for a text, I knew exactly where it lived. I knew all the titles on the professors’ book lists and thought that if I wanted to, I had a road map to take every class on my own, late nights, knowing everything they knew, filling up all the space in my head.
I had gone from one school to anoth
er, like a girl who marries up and moves into her in-laws’ home. I liked to think that at some point Stella Maris could feel like a family. The older professors I worked for could be aunts and uncles. My co-workers like a group of siblings. They knew I was steady and dependable. But mostly, people kept to themselves.
I was soon able to take on the role of teaching assistant for extra money. The students were not standoffish like the professors. They let themselves feel. They read the assignments through the prisms of being young, bold, afraid—and my job let me talk back to them in their essay margins. I had been let inside. I loved it.
And I’d grown privy to the conversations of the professors. In the faculty lounge, seated with my grading, I felt almost invisible among them, and I heard the rumors of male teachers who had eyes for female students, and women who graded easy, too desperate to be liked. I learned the hierarchy of the school, the unspoken rules. It seemed they had a loyalty not to their work but to this place, this body of bronze plaques and rose gardens, and they sought to pluck out anyone who’d tarnish it with something as lowly as a need for connection.
I could have taken my grading to the library or done it at home. But I kept going back to the faculty lounge, simultaneously detesting their gossip and craving it. Listening. Invisible.
I was there one day, making my way through a high stack of essays, when some of the English professors started discussing a half-erased sentence of Latin on a rolling blackboard.
Prope sine ture.
I still recite the words like they bear magic. I sifted through the papers while people guessed at the translation. The clap-back academics, the too-loud-then-look-around laughers, so many degrees on their walls; Latin to them was a secret clubhouse language.