by Jud Widing
“No! No, um…”
“Yes?”
Clearly Hyun-Woo had skipped ahead to the lessons where ‘yes’ turns out to be an endlessly versatile word, because she didn’t understand the way in which he kept deploying it.
“I am nineteen years old!” she shouted as one big word, as though blurting out an answer in a game of charades (which, in a way, she sort of was).
He gave another thumbs up. “I am twenty-two years old!”
Obviously, Hyun-Woo was intelligent. He knew a bunch of languages, and…well, that was the only thing Nur really knew about him, but idiots don’t learn bunches of language! Still, though, she couldn’t watch people struggling to scale a language barrier without thinking they look like an idiot, even as she herself was scrabbling for purchase on the damn thing.
It was a simple matter of him not knowing the drinking age in America. He was old enough, after all, so he probably read about it at some point and forgot. But Nur didn’t know how to explain it to him.
This was perhaps the single most frustrating experience of Nur’s entire life. That said a lot about the relative good fortune with which she’d navigated her nineteen years on Earth, as well as about how headache-inducingly awful this was.
I know what I want to say. It’s sloshing around in my braincase. BUT I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GET IT OUT.
Hyun-Woo was looking confused. Nur managed to keep herself from slapping her forehead. Instead, she pointed to herself and decided to use the limited vocabulary she did have.
She pointed back down Boylston, the way the came. “Library is closed at five o’clock.” She pointed to her wrist. “Eight o’clock.” Shook her head from side to side. “Closed.”
He nodded, looking at her like she was the idiot. They both thought the other looked like an idiot. This first date was going very well.
Oh shit is this a first date? Thoughts and events were all spiraling out in different directions, and at the center was Nur, looking like an idiot.
Too late to go back. The moment of truth: she pointed to the bar. How do I say ‘bar’ in English? Perhaps a plaintive look to Hyun-Woo would bring forth the proper word. After all, he’d known what to type into his phone…
Plaintive look didn’t do it. So Nur scrunched her face up like The Thinker for the cheapseats and snapped her outstretched finger.
“Ah!” Hyun-Woo lit up. “That is a bar!”
“Yes!” Nur enthused. “The bar is closed at twenty-one years old.” She pointed to herself. “I am nineteen years old.” Pointed back to the bar and shook her head from side to side. “Closed.”
“AAAH!” It was the Fourth of July on that smooth, dimply face. Comprehension burst and flickered, and then there were those little crinkly ones that were stupid but, in the context of the whole spectacle, were fine, she guessed. “YES!!”
“HA HA!!!” she exploded in kind. The press of an idea yearning but unable to be expressed had been relieved, leaving the expanse of an empty skull ready to be filled by new thoughts.
Nur turned them around, and they strolled back down Boylston. Around Copley Square, she grabbed his hand. They walked that way down to the Boston Common, not talking, not knowing how, simply enjoying the sounds of the cool, dusky city and the warmth of each other’s company.
CHAPTER 8
What had happened there?
Nur had gone steady with guys, and Nur had hooked up with guys. She quickly learned that the latter was not for her, but hey, that’s what experimentation is for. Finding what works and what doesn’t. Point was, she was familiar with how both of those things felt.
Promenading down Boylston Street with her hand cupped in Hyun-Woo’s hadn’t felt like either.
The gesture was tender. Intimate, in such a way that dashing straight to holding hands was a multi-rung leap up her hierarchical ladder of intimacy. To her, kissing a fella was actually quite near the bottom. Making out was a bit of fun. Holding hands was intimate. The difference boiled down to physical versus emotional intimacy. The former was a respectable way for two consenting adults to pass the time, if they so chose. The latter was something more, more, so much more. It meant something. Physical intimacy could certainly mean something, but it didn’t have to. Emotional intimacy necessarily implied a deeper connection. That was the way she saw it, at least.
The first time Hyun-Woo had held her hand, they were crossing the street. Perhaps that was why she let him, without giving it too much thought. It was a considerate, albeit anachronistically chivalrous, gesture.
But the second time, she had taken his hand. Still without giving it too much thought! It felt like the thing to do at the time. She had even interlocked her fingers between his, despite the fact that she had always found this approach made walking slightly more difficult (that always made her self-conscious, because it didn’t make any sense and what, was she bad at holding hands or something?)
If Hyun-Woo had pushed her against a wall and started getting fresh, she’d probably have not only let him, but reciprocated with even greater enthusiasm. Finally scaling that idiocy-inducing language barrier had elated her, and the valence of said elation had an erotic element, no doubt about it. Who knew communication could be so sexy?
There was neither wallpushing nor freshgetting, though. Just handholding. Ding dong, emotional intimacy, straight away. She’d known him for a little over a week, and to think that was to make a mockery of knowledge as a philosophical concept. What did she actually know about him? Nothing. Literally nothing. He spoke a bunch of languages, seemed nice, and was handsome. She guessed he was from Korea, going by his name, but she didn’t know for sure. So where was the attraction? She’d run grammar drills with him. There weren’t exactly wedding bells pealing in the distance.
And yet, and yet, and yet she’d taken his hand and held the hell out of it. Their stroll was probably a solid thirty or forty minutes, and their grip remained unbroken that entire time.
Was it down to pheromones? He certainly smelled nice, and there was a radiant magnetism about him that she’d found lacking in the few casual relations she’d had in the past. It reminded her of her old boyfriend in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, and what a change of pace that was…
Over a half-hour of handholding with, for all intents and purposes, a stranger.
What had happened there?
What did it mean?
The T ride back to her Uncle’s place wasn’t nearly long enough to suss it out. So she utilized the time wondering if Hyun-Woo was running the same sort of play-by-play postgame breakdown.
She used the extra key her Uncle had given her and slipped in through the front door. Her Aunt Amy was nearly horizontal, watching TV and forcing a recliner to live up to its name and then some. She waved jovially. “Fun night out?” she inquired in her herky-jerky Creole. Nur loved her Aunt for not first casting furtive glances over her shoulder, checking for Uncle Dr. Bernard.
Sighing, she cast furtive glances over Aunt Amy’s shoulders, checking for Uncle Bernard. She lacked her Aunt’s courage in that regard; Uncle Dr. Bernard terrified her. “Yeah,” she confirmed in her native tongue, “I met a friend from the school, and we just wandered around a bit.” Man oh man those words had taste and texture. Chocolate and velvet, respectively. Not red velvet though. None of that bullshit.
Again, Nur loved her Aunt for not waggling her eyebrows saying ‘oooooh a friend, really?’ or any nonsense like that. Instead, Aunt Amy just nodded. “Are you looking for stuff to do? Stuff as in things. Activities. I’d be more than happy to offer some suggestions for both. All three, really. Stuff, things and activities.”
“Thanks,” Nur managed through a yawn, “I’d love some! I’d had a hard time coming up with things to do when I asked him…”
Whoops, she thought, but Aunt Amy didn’t react in the slightest. Why is it that the
coolest relative I’ve got isn’t actually related to me? She didn’t bothering wasting mental real estate with an obvious answer.
“I’ll come up with a list and give it to you tomorrow. I might come up with the list tonight though. Still giving it to you tomorrow. Just one condition though, for the giving.” Aunt Amy pulled the lever of her recliner, sliding back up to a regular seated position. It was as close as she’d ever get to sternness, Nur imagined.
“What’s that?”
“You have to take your sister out. Sometimes. Not all the times, but some. With your friend, or just the two of you, you and your sister, either way. Just get her out.”
Nur smiled archly. “She’s annoying you too?”
Whoops again. A look of vague disappointment flickered on Aunt Amy’s face, and it was all the more devastating for its formlessness. “No, I haven’t seen enough of her to be annoyed. Or to be anything. In relation to her, I mean. She’s always up in her room. Your room. Both of your rooms. Well, just the one room.”
Aunt Amy rose from her seat, because, as Nur had discovered, sometimes movement helped Amy find order in the loose components of coherent thought that were always rattling around her brain. She walked up to Nur, reapproaching her thought from a different angle: “There’s a chance you two might never come back to America. We’d always love to have you, you being both you and your sister. We being us, being your Uncle and I. Your Uncle’s asleep but he’s still in the ‘we’ with me.” She shook her head once. “But being candid, you and your sister might not ever come back. Deirdre’s young, she is, and I think that’s why she’s so grouchy. But if she wastes her year in America brooding in her room, she’s going to regret it for the rest of her life.”
Valid points all, but Nur didn’t want to be thinking about her sister right now. Her mind was still occupied by Hyun-Woo. Now they were sharing the same headspace, and Nur didn’t see any good coming of the combination. “She’s so tedious, though.”
“Now you be candid: weren’t you, at that age? Just a little? Tedious?”
Thinking back on it…several memories suggested themselves. And then several more. And more. Alright. Enough with the memories.
Nur nodded. “I suppose I was,” she conceded dreamily, as though the time period under discussion was over half a century gone, as opposed to under half a decade. Deirdre could be alright, couldn’t she? They’d had that moment on the plane, at least. Maybe there was a way to make more of those happen?
More to the point, though, she wanted Aunt Amy’s ideas for things to do with Hyun-Woo. Going to a closed public library had worked out alright tonight, but Nur had her hopes on actually doing something next time.
She didn’t notice that she was taking there being a ‘next time’ at all for granted. But of course she didn’t notice it. That’s what taking something for granted means.
“Okay,” she allowed, “I’ll try to get her out more. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try my best.”
“Thank you. I say that from myself, naturally, but also from Deirdre. One day she’ll thank you too. Probably not for a long time. But eventually.”
And, oddly enough, when Aunt Amy asserted this in her benignly confident way, Nur believed it.
CHAPTER 9
As August finally made good on the promise of September, so Deirdre emerged from her cocoon of huffy despondency and spread her gossamer, gossiper wings – a big, bold botherfly.
She’d found out about Hyun-Woo, and Nur had unintentionally blown the whistle on herself.
Not that there was anything on which to blow the whistle.
Sure, Nur had met him outside of class a few more times. These meetings mainly consisted of Hyun-Woo taking Nur somewhere she couldn’t get in because of her age, like a boozy bowling alley or concert venue, and then the two of them strolling aimlessly through whatever neighborhood in which their would-be activity was taking place without them. These were pleasant evenings all, and Nur was indeed getting to see the city of Boston, just as she’d wanted. But those niggling concerns that maybe Hyun-Woo was, despite his brilliant multilingualism (and she still hadn’t worked out just how many he knew), a bit of a bonehead. Like, after the second or third turn-away, a guy with a high-watt bulb in the attic would probably find a way to call ahead of time and ask if his nineteen year old…friend could get in, or look at their website maybe? Just in case he were a bit dim, Nur pressed the case to herself that there was something charming about that. Dimmer lights were always considered more romantic, weren’t they?
Not great for reading, admittedly.
Only that metaphor devoured itself, because Hyun-Woo was reading. In English. Already! Running a few minutes late for the assigned meet-up time (and having been able, thanks to some helpful Starbucks Wi-Fi, to notify him through a text which read “five minute”), she rounded the corner to find him about half-way through an English language novel. It was a slim volume, and judging the book by its cover (she was still a ways away from tackling aphorisms) looked to be the straightforward sort about big men who used big guns and small words…but it was clearly in English. And he’d been here for a matter of weeks. Nur slipped back around the bend and simply watched him. He wasn’t pretending to read the book. He was reading it, his eyes tracking along the page at a respectable clip. At one point he stopped, began mouthing a word, and pulled a much larger book out of his backpack and began flipping through. Nur couldn’t make it out, and so decided to quit creeping. Upon approach, she recognized the book to be a translation dictionary. He had encountered a word he didn’t know and was looking it up. One word he didn’t know. More stunning was the realization that the dictionary was German-English. He hadn’t even gotten a Korean-English one! Which, once again, was sort of dumb, but maybe also made him kind of brilliant? And whatever he was, he was intelligent enough to fold formal study habits into leisure reading.
And then he took her to a trendy little joint full of old board games, that, go figure, served alcohol. And for the fifth time, a big man who had big muscles and a small shirt asked for their ID’s, and then frowned at them until they walked away.
A tough nut to crack, was her Hyun-Woo. Which only added a layer of fascination to her infatuation. Not that he’s my Hyun-Woo, she was perhaps a bit too slow to clarify in her mind.
This was all fine and delightful until a Thursday in mid-September when Nur went to class to find Hyun-Woo’s seat empty. Empty it remained for the entire day. After classes, waiting for her sister on the stoop of the school, Nur saw Hyun-Woo bouncing down the stairs. She waved to him. He waved back and made straight for her, arms extended like zombies used to do before they were cool. Before she knew quite what was happening, he enveloped her in a hug, which, stop the presses, was unprecedented. They’d never hugged before! Hyun-Woo had been bashful about physical contact; barring that first night out when he took her hand crossing the street, Nur had initiated all of their touching. He never recoiled from it, and he always seemed appreciative (nothing crude - squeezing her hand when she took his, or one time on the T leaning his head on hers, after she’d allowed her head to loll casually onto his shoulder). But he also seemed…cagey about it. Nur had absolutely no problem taking it slow – not that she even knew what the ‘it’ was. They lov- they enjoyed spending time together, but they still knew next to nothing about one another that couldn’t be communicated via entry-level linguistics and bug-eyed semaphores. But the strangeness – could she go so far as to say absurdity? – of having sustained an emotional intimacy of the sort they’d been nurturing without more than a few glancing passes at the physical corollary finally came home to her with the hug.
Was Hyun-Woo ever going to make a goddamned move?
As they leaned back from the hug, Hyun-Woo kept his arms around her shoulders, and for a split second she thought he was going to kiss her. Which would have been a big-time bummer – Nur was not interested
in exhibitionism, on either end of the exchange. Making out with somebody was great fun. Watching people make out was a hideous, squelching abomination that made Nur wonder if the human race should even exist anymore, if such a nauseating display of puckering and slurping was a part of its propagation.
For once, Nur thanked her lucky stars that he was such a chaste fella. He pulled all the way back, sliding his hands along her back and letting them lay on her shoulders. And then he said something, of which she understood very little.
“Tuppence mot govid me to the punnel acla.”
He had a smile on his face, so it was maybe good news? Not quite knowing what was expected of her, she gave him what she hoped was a smile. If his face was anything to go on (and unfortunately it was everything she had to go on), what she actually gave him was something between I hope this looks like a smile and a death rictus.
She accepted that he was probably working hard to suss out whether or not she was actually a moron, as she had been for him.
“Understand?” He asked, opening his mouth to keep speaking. Nur knew he was going to repeat himself a bit louder and a bit slower, and was disappointed that she had no handkerchiefs or stray socks to stuff into his face before he had the chance.
“Tuppence mot govid me to the punnel acla,” he repeated at the same speed and volume as the first time. The smile he got now was more genuine, though evinced no more comprehension.
Deirdre, who had at some point sidled up to Nur, stared at her fingernails with studied indifference (ugh, she must have picked that gesture up from movies or something) as she aaal aaal aaaled a hunk of pink, sweet-smelling gum. “He said Tuppence moved him up to one of the more advanced classes,” she translated with all due drollery and lip-smacking.