The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  Nur reeled herself in at headbutting speed, but slowed her approach once the critical distance had been closed. His lips were soft, but pulled taut. She wasn’t the only one who’d been nervous, but now she was the only one who seemed to have calmed down.

  Hyun-Woo’s hands hovered over her shoulders, as middle-school boys will do when they get their pictures taken with girls. As a bit of encouragement, Nur gave his lower lip another peck, this time opening her mouth juuuuuuuust the slightest bit. He got the message, and his hands stopped hovering. They were still clamped tightly to her upper arms, the way American movie stars did in the 40’s, but hey, progress was progress.

  They kept it at that speed for a while, and eventually Hyun-Woo relaxed and ran a hand up to her cheek (taking a roundabout route that let him glance her left breast with the edge of his hand – she could only grin at the collision between his natural reticence and baser instincts), while the other hand slipped down to the small of her back and pulled her in close. Turned out Hyun-Woo hadn’t relaxed too much.

  Patience, Nur counseled the both of them mentally. Physical intimacy of this sort wasn’t a big deal to her, but assuming the horizontal was, right up there with handholding.

  He didn’t press his suit though, and so it remained a romantic moment, if not one achieved in precisely the way she’d intended. Nobody came into the room, and they weren’t certain how long they were in there. But they remained there until they had sated themselves on each other, and that took long enough for them to have gotten a running start at learning the basics of fuel injection, were they interested in the books above them as anything more than a surface to lean on. If nothing else, Nur could have learned a thing or two about double entendres.

  There was a direct correlation between the amount of noise someone made and the depth of their focus. Nur and Hyun-Woo had been very focused, and remained largely unaware of just how much sound carried in the halls of the BPL.

  Suffice it to say that many readers that day came to appreciate Nur’s position that making out was great fun, but hearing other people make out was a hideous, squelching abomination.

  When the slurping horrors finally reemerged into the shining afternoon sun, Nur considered herself educated. The education pertained, specifically, to how essential it was that she learn more about Hyun-Woo. This guy was something special; now it was all down to working out how and why. Nur knew her English wasn’t up to snuff – but the good news was that this didn’t have to be an obstacle anymore.

  The bad news was that the solution was to run head first at a different obstacle, this one having sharp edges and an attitude problem.

  CHAPTER 12

  She just stared at Nur for several silent seconds, her face less a comprehensible expression and more a protean potentiality that contained a multitude of expressions.

  “I’m serious,” Nur reiterated, in case that hadn’t come across. “This is important to me, and I am asking you to be mature and sisterly about this. And if you don’t think you can do that, I’m asking you to be a decent human being and tell me so.”

  Precisely how to ask Deirdre for her help had been a vexing conundrum, one over which Nur had fretted away several weeks. In the meantime, she and Hyun-Woo had continued to see each other most evenings after class, stealing moments of intimacy whenever they could. The speed with which Hyun-Woo was picking English up was nothing short of remarkable. He was conversing freely and easily with Americans, apparently telling them jokes – which meant he was starting to pick up not just language but culture. Humor varied wildly amongst peoples, and Nur had always considered ‘making an American laugh’ the threshold for fluency. Clearly that wasn’t the case – she could still see Hyun-Woo grasping for words in ways even the slower native speakers didn’t – but it was still a testament to an inborn talent. She couldn’t be sure how long he’d been here, but he had been in the beginner class when she showed up about two months ago, so it was…

  Two months gone.

  Which left just a little over three hundred days to master the language, or face the consequences at home.

  She was getting better, for certain. Her verbal communication was much stronger than her written, and that was alright. But it still wasn’t great. Case in point; Hyun-Woo was a regular chatterbox now, happily talking up a storm to her. And perhaps it would have been better if he had just made loud whoooosh noises like a storm; it would have made exactly the same amount of sense to Nur, with the bonus of not making her feel like a complete idiot.

  The problem was daily transmogrifying, from ‘they couldn’t communicate with one another’ into ‘Nur couldn’t understand what Hyun-Woo was communicating’. And the worst part of this was that Nur’s feelings towards Hyun-Woo were shifting just as inexorably. At first it frustrated her that he would blather on at her in a language that surely he knew she couldn’t understand, save every fifth or sixth word, but the frustration was diffuse, at the situation more than anything.

  One day in early October, though, she realized that frustration had whittled down to a point, with a very specific direction. She was coming to resent Hyun-Woo, ever so slightly, because he was no longer just as culpable in their failure to communicate as she was. The onus was now entirely on her, the laggard. Did he actually feel this way? Impossible to say for sure, and Nur was inclined to say no. But she couldn’t help but project it on to him, because that’s how she felt, and she knew it was unreasonable for herself to think, so perhaps somebody else could think this unreasonable thought instead.

  It was ludicrous, a ludicrous idea if ever she’d heard one. She was essentially mad at him for ceasing to be confused in the same way that she still was. Selfish, anti-intellectual pettiness! But she couldn’t stop feeling that way, and she grew increasingly frustrated that she couldn’t.

  So why not just stop seeing him? she asked herself after one especially disheartening dinner. Two months in and they still hadn’t done anything much more adventurous than send their hands out on reconnaissance missions to lower climes. It was, in the argot of this land, ‘casual’. If he was starting to be a greater source of anxiety than positivity in her life, why not simply divest herself of him as anything more than a friend?

  This was a good point – but not one that she needed to face just yet. Hyun-Woo was, completely unintentionally, making her emotional life slightly more arduous of late. But, on the whole, his presence was still overwhelmingly positive in that indefinable way it had always been. He could sometimes be a bit stingy with eye contact, but when he gave it to you, and when his lips spread into that great big grin…the rest of it melted, right along with her.

  But how long would this last? The fact remained that she needed to be able to talk to him. Even if she didn’t grow overly annoyed by his superhuman acquisition of English (which, boy, it sounded even more ludicrous when phrased so plainly), she could quite easily imagine him growing bored with her, spluttering and struggling her way through asking the waiter if they could split the check (that had been embarrassing, particularly as her effort climaxed with Hyun-Woo paying the whole damn thing).

  Desperation did what Aunt Amy couldn’t; compelled Nur to invite Deirdre out of the house with her.

  And here she was, in their shared bedroom (Uncle Bernard was home, so having a Creole conversation downstairs was out of the question), standing in front of Deirdre, her arms folded defensively, as though expecting the inevitably sarcastic retort to come with a physical assault tacked on.

  That quivering, unreadable face of Deirdre’s finally started to coalesce into…nothing. A flat, affectless mask of apathy.

  “On one condition,” Deirdre replied.

  Not apathy – calculation. Her sister was bargaining.

  Nur had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from bursting in to song. ‘On one condition’ was highly unexpected, on account of it being the most promising reaction she co
uld have imagined. Had Deirdre simply agreed to act as translator between Nur and Hyun-Woo, all the polyester in the world couldn’t have spun a red flag big enough. But Deirdre wanted something in return, which gave Nur some leverage, and could potentially act as a guarantee against her two greatest fears: deliberate mistranslation in the moment, and indiscretion after the fact.

  Hoping she was matching her sister’s straight-mouthed anti-expression, Nur inquired as to what the one condition was.

  Deirdre jerked her head towards the door. “They won’t let me out alone. You can come and go as you please, but no, little Deirdre’s gotta be locked up for her own safety.”

  “What? Since when? I had no idea!” Which was true, but how could she have even entertained the alternative? Deirdre was fifteen. No way would Uncle Bernard let her go out alone – and even if he had been comfortable with it, their parents certainly wouldn’t be, so the injunction would have remained.

  Try this one on for size: she hadn’t entertained the alternative. She had just literally never thought about Deirdre’s experience.

  “You think I wanted to be sitting up here by myself every night?”

  “Yes, I did!” This had flown off the rails in record time. Nur raised her hands, showing Deirdre her palms. “Wait, wait. I’m sorry, okay? Really. Sorry. You were getting on my nerves and so I walked away from you, and I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Deirdre sat on her bed, mouth open and finger raised. She’d been poised and ready to strike, only to see her prey vanish into thin air with little more than a ping to mark its passage. She slowly curled her finger back into the rest of her loosening fist and lowered her hand. “Yeah, well…that’s right. You shouldn’t have.”

  Typically, Nur would have needled her sister more about her role in what had happened, but that had less to do with actually expecting her sister to acknowledge how awful she could be, and more to do with letting her know that she hadn’t won (‘Won what?’ ask only-children everywhere). But right now, conflict resolution was the name of the game. One didn’t rescue hostages by running down the hostage taker’s rap sheet and asking them to just admit that they’re not very nice.

  “Can we put that to one side for right now and try to move forward? Please?” she added for good measure.

  Deirdre made a show of thinking about this for a second, but she wasn’t a great actress. Her mind had already been made up. Whatever she wanted from Nur trumped her sense of being slighted. And as that perceived slight was a two-month affair, and certainly remained untempered by any acknowledgment of her having perhaps brought it upon herself just a bit…well, there was more than enough polyster for this red flag.

  “Alright,” Deirdre imbued with considerable portentousness.

  “So what’s your condition?”

  Again, her sister jerked her head towards the door. “They won’t let me out alone…but they really want me to go out with you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I really want to go out alone.”

  “You want me to talk to them for you?”

  “No, and you couldn’t even if I wanted you to.”

  Nur shrugged defensively. “They’d listen to me.”

  “Not in Creole, they wouldn’t.”

  “S-“ And then Nur figured out what Deirdre was gearing up to ask. Her response was self-evident. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because what if something happened to you?”

  “You could just say that I ran away from you, you wouldn’t get in tr-“

  “I’m not worried about getting in trouble, stupid! I’m worried about you getting into trouble. Real trouble.”

  “You’re not that much older than I am, and you don’t speak English as well as I do, yet you get to go wherever you want all on your own. It’s not fair!”

  “No, you’re right. It’s not. So what?”

  Deirdre shook her head. “Well, that’s my condition. You want me to play interpreter, I’ll do it. But you have to give me a night out to myself. And that’s final.”

  Though she professed nothing but fear for her sister’s safety (fear that was genuine and deeply felt), Nur was painfully aware of the peril she herself would be in, should she tell her Aunt and Uncle she were taking Deirdre out for the night, only to let her run off and do her own thing. Even if the night went absolutely beautifully, and her sister returned safe and sound…well, Deirdre wasn’t a picture of discretion. She could let word slip, or perhaps grease the floor a bit to make word slip. Because while Deirdre would certainly get in trouble, Nur would be punished. Fantasies of a totalitarian curtail on her social life should she fail to learn the English language in a year were a dawdle compared to the perpetual Hell into which she would be thrust, should her parents discover what she’d allowed Deirdre to do.

  And on top of that – assume everything did go perfectly well, Deirdre comes home with a spring in her step and a smile on her face, etc. What are the chances she would be satisfied with that single night out? A precedent would have been set. She would fully expect to have more nights to herself, and since she rolled double sixes the first time, she’d fully expect each night to go just as well as the first. A second roll of the die, and then a third, and a forth…how many could she manage before one night comes up snake eyes? And if Nur tried to draw the line at the first night, and were happy to have just the one translation session with Hyun-Woo (and what were the chances of that, talking of likelihoods), Deirdre still had the lever with which to move the world. She could tell about the first night, and no doubt she’d have had the presence of mind to get some proof, demonstrating Nur’s absence. A little slice of trouble for her, the rest of the dire pie for Nur.

  Perhaps Deirdre was aware of how fiendishly brilliant this seemingly simple request was, of how it would completely shift the power dynamic of their relationship for the foreseeable future. Or perhaps she wasn’t. She wasn’t a great actress, after all, and for once her face seemed to have all the edges filed off.

  No, perhaps she wasn’t aware yet, but that softness was fleeting. Deirdre was sharp, through and through, and she’d work all of that out in time. Consenting to her request would be one of the worst decisions Nur made in her entire life.

  On the other hand, she would finally get to know Hyun-Woo a bit better.

  Nur tapped her foot on the blah tan carpet, scarcely aware of the muted ff-ff-ff-ff with which this was filling the silence, like a fluffy helicopter struggling to get airborne.

  She curled her nose and bobbed her head from side to side, making a great show about thinking about this for a second. But she wasn’t a great actress. Her mind had already been made up.

  Deirdre’s smile curled up into points.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was going to be awkward no matter what; the challenge was in finding the least awkward way for it to go down.

  Nur was quite certain she never found it.

  They met at a charming little coffee spot on Newbury. Upon arrival the only available seats were along the elevated bench just in front of the window, which wouldn’t do at all. It was unsatisfactory from a spatial standpoint, but the view wasn’t adding much either; it was deep into October by this point, and the city palled in resignation to the ferocious winter coming its way.

  So Nur had them wait until one of the smaller, circular tables that had caught her eye during last week’s prodigious joint-casing session opened up.

  They all three sat down, and Nur was pleased to see Deirdre adhered to the predetermined choreography. Without the slightest hint of embarrassment, Nur had literally drawn her sister a picture of what she wanted her to do. This was important, damn it!

  It was important to Nur that she and Hyun-Woo be sitting next to one another. But Deirdre had to be between them; otherwise it would feel like she was just one or the other’s interp
reter, and as Nur was certainly not going to allow her sister to have the seat of honor next to Hyun-Woo, having her sister sat next to her would send the subconscious message that Nur needed the translator, as opposed to them both needing someone to translate between them.

  She remained very sensitive about the disparities between their English.

  But, Nur didn’t want Deirdre to be physically between them. But nor did she want her sister plopped on the opposite side of a square table, as it would make her feel removed from the conversation, and as she was the necessary conduit through which the conversation was to be conducted, that would serve to put a sense of distance between them, when she was after the exact opposite effect.

  Circular was perfect, though. Nur and Hyun-Woo sat close together on one “side” of it (call it 2 and 4 on a clock face), with Deirdre canted off to the opposite side, tending towards Nur (say, 9 or 10).

  For obvious reasons she wasn’t about to bring Hyun-Woo in on this extensive pre-production process for Sitting Down At A Table, so the De Dernberg sisters’ placements would have to be relative to him.

  It went off without a hitch, which was down to luck because when the time to sit came Nur just sat, without the least reference to clock faces. She was too busy thinking about the first thing she wanted to say.

  Rather tediously, she had forced Deirdre to review the general shape of her acquired English – things she did and didn’t know how to say, concepts she could and couldn’t articulate, the limits of her vocabulary, the extent of her conjugation. This latter section was the most fraught; Nur was advised to steer clear of any temporally-fluid tense, your was going to dos and your will have been doings.

  So Nur had a rough idea of what she could say, and still expect a certain degree of fidelity in the translation. But she’d not given a great deal of thought, prior to this moment, to what she actually would say.