by Jud Widing
It was a collision of cultures, on the intersection of national pride and interior design. There were no survivors.
“Ah, what a lovely home you have,” Nur bluffed like a champ.
Amy beamed proudly at this. Her glee was infectious, to such an extent that Nur began to believe her pro-forma compliment. Come to think of it, it was, in its own peculiar way, a very lovely home. Amy absolutely owned the space and all its idiosyncrasies, and that confidence bled into the walls.
That was Aunt Amy, anyway. None of this tracked with what she’d heard of her Uncle…
“Why thank you!” Amy bellowed in her charmingly labored Creole, learned at a late age for love.
Deirdre gestured back towards the door. “Should we leave our suitcases on the front step?” she mumbled.
“Anywhere you like!” Amy opened a drawer on a decidedly Colonial side table and fussed around for a moment. “You two must be tired! Jetlag? There’s a coffee maker in the kitchen.” She pointed. “There’s the kitchen! There’s also food upstairs.”
Amy ran into the kitchen. Leapt back out. “Sorry, scratch that, the food is also in the kitchen! Your beds are upstairs. You’ll be sharing a room, your Uncle may have mentioned that. But not beds! He’s not here right now, your Uncle. Nor am I. He’ll be back soon. As will I. I have to go.”
Amy hustled over to the coatrack by the door, and swung a heavy trench coat on. “I don’t need this,” she announced as she removed the coat and put it back on the hook.
“You two can entertain yourselves for a few hours, right? Or go to sleep? If you want to walk around I put T cards on the kitchen. The T is the public transit system here. It closes a little after midnight, so don’t stay out too late! Also the cards are in the kitchen, not on. With the food. The kitchen. The cards. In my hands.” And there they were, two tap-cards in her hands. Nur didn’t see Amy pick them up, and in all probability, neither did Amy.
“You’ll figure it out,” their Aunt smiled brightly. It was a smile that said yes, they would figure it out, if for no other reason than to not cause such a lovely smile to have been in vain. “I have to go now. Sorry I can’t stay longer. Bye bye!”
Amy swung open the door again, and gasped. “Girls, I’ve found your missing luggage! It’s on the porch! Goodbye!” She leapt over the luggage and bounced down the walkway towards the well-lit street.
Nur and Deirdre silently pulled their not-so-missing luggage inside, making a point of locking the door. Deirdre staggered over to the couch and zonked out halfway between the vertical and the horizontal, quite literally falling (while) asleep. Nur made a cursory effort to pick her sister up, that she might take her upstairs and get her into bed, but hoisting somebody else’s luggage off the carousel had sapped her strength. The joke was on Deirdre after all. So satisfied, she settled for taking off Deirdre’s shoes.
Nur went upstairs by herself and slept in a foam bed that changed itself to support her.
CHAPTER 2
Jab. “Hey.”
Jab. “Nur.”
Jab. “Wake up.”
Ja-
“Whu?” Nur inquired.
Deirdre stood beside the bed, a pouty crescent frown plastered on her face. “Wake up,” she repeated.
Nur turned over. “I’m sleeping!”
“I know. That’s why I want you to wake up.”
A dry moan crawled up from deep within Nur. Finding the time disagreeable, it tried to scramble back down. The resultant noise was half air raid siren, half duck.
“There’s a no-Creole zone down there. They won’t let me talk to them.”
Nur rolled onto her back. She slapped her right hand over her eyes. “Can you ask them to cut me in on that?”
“No, because they won’t let me talk to them. Dummy.” With an unbecoming note of desperation, she tacked on “please come downstairs.”
Sigh. “Alright, alright, give me a minute. I’ll be right there.”
Deirdre nodded, which was as close to a ‘thank you’ as Nur had expected, and left the room – but not before throwing open the curtains of the east-facing window.
“Aaargh!” Nur cried as the sunlight punched her right in the photoreceptors. She threw her other arm up to shield herself like a vampire in a silent movie.
As her pupils shrank to pinpoints, she shimmied up onto her elbows and got her first good look at her room for the next year. In contrast to the rest of the house, it was tastefully Spartan. Two twin beds with a varnished wooden sidetable between them, a bookcase bearing weathered paperbacks and hearty succulents. It was a room unfinished, a room that demanded spare personality from whoever might be occupying it.
She beat a hasty retreat from the room, because that was a demand to which she wasn’t sure she could accede.
Nur descended the creaking wooden staircase with the side-to-side swagger of the sleepy. She wrapped a hand around the curling banister and let inertia spin her around 180 degrees towards the kitchen.
The table was small and bright, bright orange. Deirdre sat at the end furthest from Nur, facing her. Aunt Amy sat on the right side, attacking a bowl of oatmeal with far too much relish (far too much peanut butter, actually). And at the nearest head of the table, back to Nur, sat Uncle Dr. Bernard De Dernberg. De Dernberg lore spoke of Uncle Dr. Bernard in hushed tones, because it didn’t have very many nice things to say about him. He was a man whose reputation preceded him, mostly so it could shake people by the shoulders and say “we’ve gotta get the hell out of here, he’s right behind me.” Nur found herself trembling slightly. Her extreme case of the tummy-grumbles played its part, but mostly it was nerves set to rattling at the thought of falling under her Uncle’s gaze.
Slowly, his head began to turn, exposing the salt-and-pepper temples where color was sacrificed to keep the rest of his slick mane jet-black.
Turning, turning, slowly turning, she saw his clean-shaven cheek, his wide crag of a nose, his downturned lips, still turning, turning, and given those sparkless owl eyes of his, she’d hardly be surprised if his head kept turning without his shoulders as chaperone.
Mercifully, he did stop turning, with one arm draped over the back of his chair. Uncle Bernard stared into her eyes and out the other side, and didn’t seem overly impressed with what he saw. Sensing a challenge, Nur locked on to his gaze. The floor was a handsome hardwood pa-
She had averted her eyes downward. When had that happened? She wasn’t aware of doing so. With great effort, she dragged her eyes up up up to meet Uncle Bernard’s.
“Good morning,” she ventured in Creole, “thank you so much for allowing us to st-“
“NO,” he thundered. Deirdre flinched. Aunt Amy gave a half-apologetic ‘that’s my Bernard!’ shrug and kept on eating. “I am going to say this once, in Creole, so you understand me. You are here to learn English. You’re not here to enjoy yourself. You may, but that’s incidental. Your parents paid for you to come here, to learn English. So from the moment I conclude this sentence, we will only speak English in this household.”
Uncle Bernard held his stare for a few more moments. Nur sought desperately for some humanizing imperfection in that thunder-cleft visage. A bit of egg on his chin, or some pink eye, or perhaps it would be too much to hope for a runny nose…still, she checked. Negatory across the board. Uncle Bernard’s face was too perfectly itself for human flesh, and perhaps that look of eternal frustration was at the injustice of not being born as a slab of marble.
Slowly turning, turning, turning back to his meal, Uncle Bernard quietly resumed eating. Nur looked up to Deirdre, who was trying her best to make an “I told you so” face. Smug satisfaction didn’t quite gibe with such fearfully slanted eyebrows.
Nur fixed herself some toast and fruit and sat down. The four ate in silence.
“RAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOHHHHH!” Deirdre mentioned hal
fway to the nearest T stop. “I can’t take the silence! ‘You’re not here to enjoy yourself.’ Why is Uncle Bernard being such a butt?”
Nur walked alongside her sister, hands stuffed in her pockets. She too was less than thrilled at the ‘English only’ edict; the likelihood of meeting anybody else who spoke Seychellois Creole in this city was slim, which meant that until she learned English, the only person Nur would be speaking to for the next year of her life would be Deirdre. She wasn’t expecting to get on especially well with her uncle, but at least he’d be…well, not Deirdre.
Off to explore the city full of conversations in which they could take no part, they got on the inbound C line at Summit Ave with an absolute minimum of hijinks. They tapped the T card on the T card tapper, the tapper said beep and in they went. After ten-odd minutes of jostling, they emerged from the underground Copley Station as planned. It was a journey completely without incident and therefore not worth mentioning, except to say that it was completely without incident, which for two young people in a strange land utilizing a public transportation system for the first time is worth mentioning.
Of all the sights Deirdre had expected to see while climbing the stairs into the sunlight, a giant Romanesque stone church was low down the list. Behind the autumn-tinted leaves of two haphazardly placed trees (urban beautification on a budget), a boxy bell tower stretched upwards from the low, earthy edifice spread along the whole block. Somewhat undercutting the majesty was a shirtless guy with drumsticks banging on an overturned bucket, but Deirdre supposed there was no right way to practice one’s faith.
Nur, meanwhile, was hardly surprised at the sight of the church. She had done her research, after all. She nudged Deirdre with her elbow and pointed up towards the bell tower. “That’s the Old South Church, I’m pretty sure. Built in…1873? It was o-“
“Why do you know that?” Deirdre signaled her level of interest in the answer by pulling out her phone and staring at like it had just insulted her.
“I know because 1873 was also the year Napoleon III died, wh-“
“Not how. Why.”
Nur ignored that and turned around, pointing to the structure directly behind them. It was nearly the same height and length as the Old South Church, but sans tower or dome or compensatory adornments of any sort; it was a building with the self-confidence to eschew make-up on a hot date. “That’s the Boston Public Library. Look at the size of it! There are over 23 million things in there, books and maps and manuscripts and-“
“And we can’t read any of them.”
“Yet,” Nur corrected, though she privately wondered if she’d ever be able to do so. “Come on over here…” She guided her screen-gazing sister towards Copley Square, a charming little oasis of green amongst the architectural hodgepodge.
A lifetime of hospitality training made Nur a natural tour guide. She pointed through the patchy copse of well-trimmed trees to another long, squat stone building, this one shaped a bit like a dumbbell with a stomach tumor, its seven stories looking especially unhealthy in the shadow of the only true skyscraper in sight.
“That,” Nur chirped, “is the Fairmont-Copley Plaza. Very famous hotel, in this city.”
Deirdre darted her eyes up to it for a moment, which on the sliding scale of teenaged millenials was akin to a ten-second ooooooooooohhhhhhhh! “So maybe we can work there when our hotel goes down the tubes.”
Rather than encourage her sister with the reaction she so clearly wanted, Nur just plowed ahead: “Built in 1912, the F-“
“Again, why do you know this?”
There is a time for letting things slide, and a time for trapping sliding things under the heel of your boot and doing the twist.
Nur wheeled around and slapped half-heartedly at Deirdre’s phone.
“Hey!” Deirdre cried as she protected her precious smartphone by punching herself in the stomach with it.
“I know these things because I thought it might be a good idea to learn something about the city we’ll be living in for the next year. Don’t you? Can you try being open to a different culture?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Deirdre asked her phone, and then provided the answer: “I’m trying all the Wi-Fi networks without passwords.”
“Why do you need Wi-Fi?”
“Because we don’t have data here, so we can’t do anything witho-“
“No, why do you need Wi-Fi now?”
“Got one. Hang on…culture!” Deirdre pointed to the glass-paned skyscraper looming over Nur’s precious Fairmont-Copley. “That’s the John Hancock Building. Windows used to fall off of that and kill pedestrians.”
“What website are you on?”
“Culture.com. Does it matter?”
“That’s not culture.”
“Fine. It was built in 1976…” Deirdre mockingly pushed an invisible pair of glasses up the bridge of her nose. “…same year as Rocky was made.”
Nur threw her hands up. “Or how about the same year as Seychelles achieved independence?!”
“Because we’re in the Rocky city!”
“No we’re not! That was Philadelphia!”
“Then what city are we in?”
“Gah! You see? Culture isn’t just factoids! It’s-“
“You were just spewing a bunch of factoids at m-“
“Yes, I realized immediately after saying that that I contradicted myself. BUT, that doesn’t make me wrong!”
“Just inconsistent.”
Nur walked away. She had to. Had her sister ever been this bad? She couldn’t recall. The prospect of a year of this, no reprieve, no conversational pallet cleansers…she had to walk away.
“Let’s go find the school,” she called over her shoulder. The Big Sister instinct told her to follow her voice with a glance to make sure Deirdre was behind her, but at that moment in time she felt quite certain there were worse things than losing her little sister in a strange city. Most of them involved not losing her.
CHAPTER 3
Green streaks under golden trees between earth-tone buildings. That, based on Nur’s limited wanderings thus far, was Boston in a nutshell. Commonwealth Avenue was no different, save a considerable width that made room for a generous, well-groomed walking path between the two lanes of traffic.
Nur and Deirdre kept to the sidewalk on the side closest to Copley Square.
Trusty numbers ticked higher and higher as they rolled along the gentle southwestern slant of the avenue. The less trustworthy numbers deigned not to show their faces – 160 Commonwealth was easy enough to find, but, just for instance, 168 was nowhere to be found. Presumably it existed, and presumably it was this here four-story brownstone – so like the other four-story brownstones that shaded them from the rising sun – but you wouldn’t know it without spotting 160 and working from there. A shoddy job of ordinance enforcement, Nur decided, because she knew from her reading that American cities had a lot of ordinances.
Case in point: The Crabshoe School For The Language of English was 264 Commonwealth. Here were three four-story brownstones, each a slightly different shade of red clay. 262 Commonwealth, its three golden digits gleaming on the glass over the door, was a punchy tennis-court-red. 266 Comm Ave, taking a similar auric pride in its numeric placement, was a purple-tinted burgundy.
And what of the unnumbered, hueless sandpaper-tan intermediary?
A mumbling clutch of young adults loitered on the steps. Their blarbs had a warbling, staccato apprehension that Nur understood perfectly. They were saying this is the place.
“This is the place,” Nur relayed to Deirdre. The younger sister nodded silently, though with a look of attentive engagement she’d heretofore managed to suppress.
“Are you sure?” came her reply, though there was an unmistakable sincerity to the question.
“Yeah. Lo
ok.” Nur strolled up to the nearest throng of almost-definitely-students, only realizing too late that these were probably not the best people to be talking to. Not just because some of them were standing around puffing on cigarettes (a habit Nur found repulsive even before losing a beloved cousin to lung cancer). It was mainly because they were chatting in a language that wasn’t English.
Perhaps they were all more comfortable speaking a native tongue, but given the building before which they were sucking tar, more likely was that none of them could speak English yet. Nur had a scant few phrases memorized for English, but she had approximately zero for…well, everything other than Seychellois Creole.
Too late to turn back now. She was within chit-chat distance of the group, which was also second-hand smoking distance. Suppressing a cough, she raked her eyes over them and deployed one of the English phrases she had learned, knowing full well it would come in handy.
“This is…the English Language School?” she inquired. The pronunciation sounded on point to her, but judging by her audience’s faces perhaps left something to be desired.
Perhaps that something was an audience that spoke English.
Nur reverted to the old standby of universal conversation. She pointed to the numberless brownstone behind the smokers, coughed slightly, and reiterated her question at three-quarters speed. She was once again met with perplexity, now in double-time.