The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  The only constant left in her day-to-day existence now was a closed-circle parade of thoughts, with leering, over-inflated floats tethered together by used dental floss and prayers to the gods of forgotten civilizations. Why had Deirdre turned so suddenly against her? What was her sister’s problem? And why wouldn’t she translate anymore? Hyun-Woo was growing more distant, Nur could feel it. They still hung out after class, they still explored the city, and every once in a while Nur would head back to Hyun-Woo’s inexplicably trendy pad and see to the solemn rite of buggery that kept a single man a “bachelor”, as opposed to “lonely”.

  But whatever they were up to, it only occasionally involved speaking to one another. Not for lack of trying, at least not at first. But then, yes, slightly for lack of trying. Slamming their heads against the brick wall of incomprehension was exhausting, and Nur could hardly begrudge Hyun-Woo for making friends with some of the people from his advanced classes, and preferring to hang out with them after class.

  Actually, it was more accurate to say that she knew she shouldn’t begrudge him that. But she did. It made her slightly jealous. Yeah…slightly. To begin with, he would invite her along with them, and would make a real effort to include her in their conversations. But the conversations were so far beyond her that, even as Hyun-Woo’s accommodating new friends joined in the ‘let’s all throttle back our vocabulary so Nur can join in’ routine, Nur could understand them to a certain extent, but remained incapable of formulating responses. She couldn’t help but resent the ostentatious patience with which the friend group regarded her, and she couldn’t blame them if they felt a similar exasperation with her. So she stopped coming to these soirees, so Hyun-Woo stopped inviting her. Which was on her. And she knew that.

  But still. Jealousy crept in and made a bed, and she was nothing if not a gracious host.

  This to the one side. On the other, Deirdre was making friends just as effortlessly. They were all learning to speak English with startling rapidity; how useful was the youthful soup of their swimmy, ill-formed grey matter! In theory, Deirdre couldn’t go out without Nur present as chaperone. In practice, she would sprint out the door as soon as classes were over, cackling down the street in a phalanx of quite literally fast friends, and then send Nur a message to the effect of “I’ll be at X place at X time.” And Nur would have no choice but to futz around alone (save those rare afternoons when Hyun-Woo wasn’t otherwise engaged with his new buddies) until X time, at which point she would go to X place. What choice did she have? She couldn’t well go complaining to her Aunt and Uncle. As she’d already established, Deirdre would get in big trouble, but Nur would still get in little trouble. And in the De Dernberg family, a little went a long way.

  She spent these comfortless afternoons thinking thinking thinking, naturally. To begin with, she thought about Hyun-Woo and Deirdre. As November withered and snow began to fall, the thoughts turned to generalities. Big Question type stuff, about communication and relationships and love, always love, what did love feel like and what did it mean and was this love or was that love (but never what is love, because even at her most introspective Nur was sensitive to the threshold of pure pretention) and how could you love someone who didn’t even seem to make time for you anymore and right along with love she thought about time which was slipping through her fingers, every passing day brought her back to Seychelles just a little bit more, brought her back with what seemed to be a stagnant store of English that was bound to disappoint her parents, and infuriate them as well because what had they spent all that money but to have their daughter learn English, and of course they would point to Deirdre and ask why she couldn’t have buckled down and studied hard like her younger sister clearly had, and was any of this love or was it business, this was a family business after all, and did that leave any room to view one’s children as anything other than an investment, and would they care if she told them she thought she had fallen in love, and that she’d really tried to learn the language but she just hadn’t been able to, the language being English, in case they needed clarification…

  November slipped on the ice and cracked its head open, and December came dribbling out. Nur’s thoughts took a similar tumble, from rarified generalities into abstract self-absorption. Thoughts about thoughts. Thoughts for their own sake. Productivity hit a nadir, at least as far as her relationships were concerned. She’d stopped trying to sort them out. Had this thing with Hyun-Woo become purely physical? It was starting to seem that way. They rarely spent time together that didn’t culminate in them mussing up Hyun-Woo’s always immaculately made bed (a bed he always remade as soon as they got out of it – had he always done that, or was that a recently acquired affectation? Nur couldn’t be sure). Wasn’t that what people did when they were in love? Consummate their emotions in a more tangible way? She certainly still felt something for him, and the something was still quite intense. But it was tinged with bitterness, because now his new friends weren’t so new anymore, and she felt blocked out. Some of his once-new friends were girls. Nur couldn’t help but wonder…and she hated herself for doing so.

  In spite of her perpetual distraction, English began to sink in. Tuppence Crabshoe first stopped called Nur ‘Ahnonur’, and then graduated her from the rookie classes near the middle of December (it was only then that Nur realized why the head of the school taught the beginner courses – to personally monitor the progress of the neophytes from ‘go’), which gave her an ephemeral but nonetheless uplifting rush of slow-burning adrenaline. The low-intermediate course thrust her in to no less motley an assortment of classmates, mostly middle-aged folks who looked like they had a number of interesting stories they could tell you and a few very interesting stories they never would. It seemed the young, attractive people were all in the advanced courses.

  Nur learned, neither quickly nor heroically, but she learned. Comprehension remained far easier than conversation. She went and saw a movie one afternoon when Deirdre was off doing whatever it was she did when she went off (Nur hardly cared anymore, though she did feel periodic pings of worry like enemy submarines caught out under the sweeping green arm of radar), and understood most of it. Granted, most of it involved the world blowing up, but sometimes a character would shout “look out” or “no” or “here’s what’s going to happen”, and she understood most of that stuff.

  The city drowsed under a heavy white blanket that fell as crisply as Hyun-Woo’s duvet, after he’d tugged and slapped and yanked out the wrinkles they’d so lately pushed into it. And then, about five minutes later, the snow would be pockmarked with bootprints and plowed into grey mounds along the slushy streets, conspiring with the ice to annihilate the human race, one clumsy, puffy-coated grocery-carrying man at a time. There was one day towards the end of the year when clouds tall with incontinence dropped their business in undeniable quantities, and Boston cried out, in one voice, “fair enough”. Public transit shut down, businesses and schools closed, and the city grew warmer than Nur had ever seen it. Coolidge Corner, a quaint little intersection near her Uncle Bernard’s, was full of people, families and lovers freely wandering the intersection ordinarily so heavily congested with cars and trucks and trains, laughing and catching falling flakes on their tongue, packing those few flakes that escaped their gustatory defenses into balls and hurling them at their friends (for some reason, it was not just acceptable but encouraged to pack snow into tight, icy projectiles and whip them at the faces you love most, which made Nur wonder if love was all it was cracked up to be anyway).

  Surrounded by friends, families and loved ones taking the air, Nur wandered alone. Deirdre had refused to go out with her, and Hyun-Woo was who knew where. Actually, she suspected she did; he was probably up in Cambridge. With the T out of commission, connecting today would be nearly impossible…but it still hurt her a bit that he didn’t shoot her a text, to say hey, look how beautiful the snow is today. She could read most texts now. He knew that.

&n
bsp; Look how beautiful the snow is today, she’d written in a text just before heading outside. An hour after that, she leaned against the glass façade of a coffee shop whose Wi-Fi she’d used quite a lot. It was closed, but fortunately they hadn’t bothered shutting their router off. Not that it mattered; Hyun-Woo hadn’t responded to her.

  This was the first time Nur had seen snow. She didn’t count the earlier flurries, because, well, she hadn’t wanted to. It was more romantic to say that the first time I saw snow, it was from the center of a hushed town square, under the Tudor-style clocktower with the brown witch’s hat for a roof, the hands of the clock frozen in this magical moment, and there I stood, swaddled in wool and down, toasty despite the windless chill, watching through the curtain of thick, falling flakes as friends and families and loved ones took in the day, lit by somnolent sunlight made otherworldly by the diffusion of the clouds, and so on and so forth, tapping this vein of uncharacteristic poetry all to avoid the unhappy fact that she stood in the center of the hushed town square all alone.

  Hours later, after she’d taken a few laps and done some more thinking about nothing in particular, she returned to Uncle Bernard’s, her extremities numb despite the wool and down. Hyun-Woo still hadn’t responded to her text, and Deirdre was asleep with her head stuffed under the pillow. So Nur drew herself a warm bath and sat in it until her fingers pruned, at which point she continued to stew in it until the sun went down and she deemed it privately acceptable to go to sleep.

  CHAPTER 24

  Hyun-Woo invited Nur to his New Year’s Eve party, and she accepted. She couldn’t quite escape the feeling that the both of them were making decisions based on good form rather than genuine enthusiasm. What was she actually contributing to Hyun-Woo’s life? Certainly not sparkling conversation, of the sort he got from his advanced classmates. Sex? Well, yeah, but it wasn’t just that. They weren’t bootycalling one another (that was one of the words she’d picked up in the intermediate level – once one surpassed the basics, one’s classmates had just as much to teach as the teacher, if not more); they still went on ‘dates’, though Hyun-Woo did seem slightly bummed at the restrictions placed on where they could go. All of his advanced buddies could get into bars and clubs, after all. Nur had plenty of fun pregaming (Ibid.) at his place and having a dizzy eighteen at mini-golf, and she thought he did too. But she couldn’t be certain, and that that doubt had claws.

  So it was decided: what Nur brought to Hyun-Woo’s life was something between linguistic connection and sex.

  For some reason, standing on his stoop on that final, freezing evening of the old year, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would swing open the door, that they might commence the boozy baptism of the new…not the forthcoming moment of admittance but this one, the one in which she shifted her weight from foot to foot in a vain effort to keep warm, the one in which she soaked up the gratified silence of a spent year counting down to quitting time, the one in which her only company was the tinkling of silver chimes tickled by the breeze and the distant, premature pops of firecrackers so recently in the hands of overeager drunkards and children, both factions knowing perfectly well they’d be sound asleep before the real fireworks went off…it was this moment that Nur would always come back to. Why this moment should be the one upon which she pinned her plaintive retrospection, she never quite worked out. Oh, she had some ideas, mostly to do with how the new year began, though they didn’t explain the clarity and purpose with which this moment would become the moment in her mind, arguably the moment upon which her entire American experience pivoted. And perhaps that was an apt analogy, because the pivot point is always passive and static, just as this moment was. It was the stuff furthest from the pivoting point that did all the moving.

  However she thought of it, she always did think of it, coming back to it time and again to wonder why she never bothered to invert the question: what was Hyun-Woo actually contributing to her life?

  It’s not that the answer was negative, not at all. It’s just that, had she ever bothered to stop and ask herself this simple question, things might have turned out very differently.

  The curtain was thick and blue, but it wasn’t flush against the wall, so the sunlight rushed the sides, spilled in through the gaps like a Jackson Pollock painting that had exactly the wrong idea about what frames were for, and punched Nur in the eyeballs.

  “Mmmrrrp,” she rumbled. Somebody inside her head was trying to play “Ave Maria” with depth charges, and the sunlight brought with it an accompaniment like moist chimp fingers tracing the rims of wine glasses filled with vinegar and DDT-rich surface runoff.

  “Don’t mix your liquors,” that had a lovely ring to it in English. One of Hyun-Woo’s classmates kept saying that to her, but neglected to underline the ecstatic truth beneath the snappy rhyme. Though to be fair, she probably thought she was underlining it by repeating it over and over. Unfortunately Nur missed the emphasis, and had arrived at a rather dramatic punctuation point.

  Why did I drink so much? she might have wondered if she had been capable of coherent thought just then. Instead she wondered hhhhnnnnnngggg. But she knew what she meant.

  She turned to Hyun-Woo’s friend, the one who had warned her about not mixing her liquors. What was her name? Something pretty plain. Sally, or Debby, or something like that. Sallydebby was from…Russia? Or Brazil? She was from somewhere, anyway, and they had had a lovely conversation. In English! Nur had conducted herself relatively well – to her surprise, alcohol had loosened her up, and peeled away the gauzy self-consciousness that smothered her usual attempts to speak English fluidly. Or maybe the fluid she’d consumed just let her think she was doing better than she actually was. Which

  OH.

  OH GOD.

  OH FUCK (thanks, intermediate classmates!).

  OH FUCKGOD (profanity had a learning curve like anything else, natch).

  Nur had stayed awake until the big ball in New York dropped, at which point she followed suit.

  At Hyun-Woo’s house.

  Overnight.

  She pulled out her phone and utilized Hyun-Woo’s wireless internet to check her messages, of which she had approximately one million.

  The depth charge hymnal had, it turned out, not been in her head. It was in her phone, vibrating endlessly all through the night. As it was right now. One million and one messages.

  She punched in her password and made a quick survey, reconstructing the evening.

  Deirdre had sent the earliest messages; a warning, that Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy were starting to make agitated noises. It was touching, in a way, that deep in whatever pique Deirdre had been lounging the last few weeks, she was still looking out for her big sister. The tone of the messages was slightly glib, “you better hurry back or you’re gonna be in deeeeeeeep trouble,” that sort of thing, but the fact that she had about an hour lead on any of the other messages was heartening.

  Deirdre sent her first message just after midnight, after Nur had already collapsed into her booze cocoon. Aunt Amy’s first message and come just before 1:00AM. It was softly concerned, with a stern permissiveness just beneath the surface. “Send us a message to let us know you’re alright. The T is closed by now, so let us know where you are and we can come get you.”

  Then, at 1:30 on the dot, Uncle Bernard started sending messages. Well, he started by sending message, one massive disquisition on the nature of outrage and disrespect, and how he and Nur embodied each respectively. “Invited you into our home, this is how you repay us,” that sort of thing. Nur suspected that he’d punched this out in a blind rage, and stayed his finger from the ‘send’ button only by Aunt Amy’s request. “Wait until 1:30”, she must have said, and Nur could just imagine Uncle Bernard boggling at the clock, sweat trickling down his brow as he tried to steam the minutes off in the furnace of his righteous fury.

  But then, Deirdre was still se
nding messages all this time, giving Nur a fly-on-the-wall perspective of what was happening. Aunt Amy was trying to defend Nur to her Uncle, or rather from her Uncle’s punitive instincts, Deirdre assured her, but in point of fact Amy was the angrier of the two. It was an anger borne of disappointment, which was more agonizing than any punishments Uncle Bernard could hand down from high horse. “I always thought Nur was a sensible girl” was one phrase Deirdre reported via text, and that was one phrase that would haunt Nur for years to come.

  Amy wasn’t even mad that Nur had stayed out all night, Deirdre cabled. She was mad that Nur had stayed out all night and hadn’t let them know, because it left them no choice but to assume something bad had happened to her.

  Which, by about 2:30AM, they did.

  They discussed calling the police, Nur read, and at that point her phone split into two and went all runny, at least until she dabbed at her eyes with clumsy, slightly chafed palms (and what was that about?). They had discussed calling the police but knew they couldn’t, because they watched cop shows or something. Deirdre was iffy on that part. They also talked about calling her parents, which split the phone into about sixteen and necessitated more than a few dabs.

  But they didn’t. Deirdre was very clear about that. They didn’t.

  But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t.

  Nur shot off a text without quite knowing what she had written, something about sorry and didn’t mean to and nothing wrong and shouldn’t have and sorry once again, grabbed up her coat, her purse and somebody else’s scarf (raw deal, because the one she came with had been way better) and rushed out the door without saying goodbye, or indeed without thinking that she ought to.