The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  She would have been gratified to know that Hyun-Woo awoke four hours later, and his first thought was “where did Nur go?” But she never found out, because as was always the case, Hyun-Woo’s natural introversion meant he tended to keep thoughts, even those that would make other people happy, to himself.

  He would probably have been less gratified to know that, as Nur sprinted back to the T and fretted her way back down the red line, onto the green line and out past Coolidge Corner, where she’d had that magical, lonely moment in the snow, she was thinking of a hundred and one things, and none of them were him.

  She wouldn’t realize that herself until quite some time later.

  CHAPTER 25

  Uncle Bernard and Aunt Amy responded to Nur’s accidental overnight in the second worst way imaginable. The worst way, of course, would have been finking her out to her parents. The consequences of that would have followed her for years. But with that apocalyptic option safely put to bed, there still remained a myriad of ways her extended family could make the next seven-and-some months of her time in America (nearly halfway gone – that was a startling thought, though one that found little purchase amongst all the others she was having lately) superlatively unpleasant.

  The way they chose to respond was the only one she hadn’t forseen. Which, she supposed, actually meant it wasn’t the “second worst way imaginable”. It was the “first worst way unimaginable”, which sounded pretty dumb in both of the languages she knew, and more than likely in all the ones she didn’t as well.

  What they did was this:

  …

  …

  …

  Nothing.

  They didn’t say anything to her about it, they didn’t make a show of not saying anything to her, they didn’t even have the decency to give her nasty looks as she came slinking back into the house feeling as though she were glazed in shame…they just gave her exactly the same sort of greeting she always got when she came home. “Hi Nur.”

  HI NUR?! After what she’d done? That’s all? She winced her way up the stairs, knowing perfectly well that they were waiting for her to clean herself up. Then, she would come back down, and the hammer would fall. They’d really let her have it this time. Yes indeed.

  She took a shower, changed, and descended the stairs in extreme slow motion. Each footfall was registered by a wince, as though she expected the steps to be sown with broken glass.

  Finally; the bottom step. She swung out into the living room, about-faced towards the kitchen, and saw her Uncle Bernard slurping up soup and periodically swiping at the iPad propped up before him. He looked up at her, smiled...smiled, he smiled, he SMILED, that same smile he used to give her on other afternoons, without a hint of venom or irony or condescension, just that wretched smile, when he should have been FURIOUS with her…

  Sometimes, in cartoons, a coyote lays some dynamite for a roadrunner, tiptoes behind a rock, depresses the plunger, plugs its ears, and then…

  …

  …

  …

  Nothing happens, at which point the viewer knows the coyote is really in for it. The question is how. Will the plunger itself explode? Will the coyote peer around the rock, only to have the rock explode? Will the coyote be run over by a freight train because the explosion knocked it off its tracks? Will a space shuttle fall from the sky and flatten the coyote because the dynamite didn’t blow up and for fuckgod’s sake this means the coyote must be made to suffer?!

  Nur imagined the coyote depressing the plunger, nothing happening, and then nothing continuing to happen. The coyote would roam the desert, expecting to find itself on the receiving end of some outrageous act of violence without a moment’s notice…and nothing would happen. It might think itself in the clear, but in the back of its mind, every action it took would be fraught with the weight of the depressed plunger that yielded no kaboom. Looking both ways when crossing the street wouldn’t protect it against an underground explosion. Walking outside would always leave it open to meteorite strikes. Staying inside would always leave it susceptible to gas leaks. And the coyote would live out the rest of its agonizingly long life in a state of perpetual expectation, expectation of a gruesome promise upon which the laws of Whimsical Animation never made good…

  That’s how she felt.

  She asked Deirdre why they hadn’t said or done anything, and her sister could only shrug. “I guess they said everything they had to say in the texts,” she hypothesized.

  Which should have made Nur feel better, because that was plausible, but it didn’t. Uncle Bernard had a temper on him. Surely he wouldn’t miss a golden opportunity to let it rip. Would he? Of course not! Almost certainly not.

  SO WHEN?! For a week and a half, this drove her halfway to genuine, gibbering madness. Why weren’t they saying anything? She had worried them sick, stayed out all night, and they surely must have smelled the alcohol on her, an underaged girl, who by the way they must have known was staying with a male, and good heavens maybe they could smell the sex on her too (nevermind that she hadn’t had any that night), and yet they wouldn’t say a single thing out of the ordinary to her.

  Her social life fell apart. She stopped wanting to go out with people, fearful that allowing an unspoken curfew to lapse would send her Aunt and Uncle into their well-deserved rage. Because that must be what they were waiting for, right? Another slip-up. All it would take was one more night out, and she would feel the heel of their boot.

  So she stayed at home every night, smothered and gasping in the viscous atmosphere of Everything Being Perfectly Normal. And that certainly didn’t help things.

  After a week and a half of feeling like a sweaty sponge being wrung out over a bucket, soaked in her own excretions and wrung out again and again and again, she bounded down the stairs, rushed up to her Uncle Bernard, and blubbered apologies for a solid two minutes straight.

  For the first minute, Bernard kept his eyes fixed tightly on the television, which was playing a show about dancing chef decorators looking for love or something. Eventually, he hit the pause button (Nur would later wonder if he had simply shelled out for that feature or if Bernard had DVR’d that show, which would have been a fascinating insight into the Real Uncle Dr. Bernard De Dernberg) and turned to look at her.

  When she finished, he nodded appreciatively, embodying an avuncular warmth of which she would never have suspected him capable.

  “It’s alright,” he cooed in Seychellois Creole, breaking his own nearly half-a-year old rule. “Everybody makes mistakes. Your Aunt Amy and I certainly had our fair share of wild nights. Sometimes we still do,” he added with a wink, and Nur couldn’t decide whether to explode with laughter or sick, but she knew she most certainly wanted to explode. “But you scared the hell out of us.”

  And just for a moment, there was the anger Nur had expected to see. Bernard’s face flexed, there was no other way to put it. It hardened and bulged, then relaxed once again. “We know you’re better than that.”

  (I always thought Nur was a sensible girl)

  Uncle Bernard waved a permissive hand. “So next time – not that I’m hoping there is a next time, it’s only that I know you’re young and away from home and I’m not an idiot – keep us in the loop. Please. Alright? Otherwise I’m going to have to tell your parents what you’ve been up to.”

  Had they been speaking English, Nur likely would have missed the nuance in her Uncle’s tone just there. But they weren’t, and so she understood in perfectly well. She mumbled a few more apologies, ran back upstairs, smushed her face into a pillow and decided that laughter was the explosion she was after. She laughed until she cried, she laughed so hard she started to curl into a ball, she laughed so hard her abs were sore for the next two days.

  She laughed because “Otherwise I’m going to have to tell your parents what you’ve been up to” wasn’t a threat. It was
a plea.

  Uncle Bernard was just as frightened of Nur’s parents as she was. That’s why they were all being so eminently reasonable. Nur was her Aunt and Uncle’s responsibility, as far as her parents were concerned, and while they could certainly get her in trouble by reporting her indiscretions, they would get in trouble as well.

  So what kind of trouble could he get into? Well, Nur was still never quite clear on why Uncle Bernard changed his surname to De Dernberg when her parents did, as he had no affiliation with the hotel. Unless he did have some connection of which she was unaware, in which case…

  I have some leverage, she allowed herself to think in some far corner of her mind. Not leverage to do anything crazy. She hadn’t been so anxious because she worried about punishment for her new year’s debacle (well, not solely); she genuinely felt bad. And she wasn’t about to double down on that.

  But she did have some leverage to stop having to treat Hyun-Woo as a secret. If she was going out with a boy, and it was all above board, well, that was alright, wasn’t it? If they didn’t like it, she would insist, they could phone up her parents and see what they thought about their little girl getting bonked all across America.

  And maybe not having to sneak would change things between Hyun-Woo and me. Only it wasn’t until that point that she’d admitted the ‘things between them’ needed changing.

  CHAPTER 26

  How about this, then: Nur hadn’t even considered that Uncle Bernard might be afraid of her parents, because she hadn’t considered her Uncle at all. She’d been through this before with Deirdre, hadn’t she? Yes, of course she had. But had she learned her lesson? No, apparently not. She had still been thinking like a teenager, me, me, me, with nary a thought spared for anyone else. Only that wasn’t quite true. She did think about other people, and what they might be feeling. She had learned that lesson with Deirdre before. Only it was a limited lesson, or else she had been so immature as to draw limited conclusions from it, because she had only started thinking about what other people might be feeling as pertained to her.

  What could Deirdre be feeling that would make her act this way towards me? What might be driving Uncle Bernard to behave as he has towards me? It was an ostensibly thoughtful position to take, as long as one was willing to shut the inquiry down before it reached the end of the sentence. She had continued to, without the slightest hint of intentionality, place herself at the center of the social orrery. That complete lack of deliberate selfishness made it worse, really. That meant the selfishness was so deeply ingrained as to be second nature.

  Nur had never thought of herself as a selfish person, for whatever that was worth.

  If only it could be as easy as having her younger, immature self booted from the pilot’s seat in favor of the older, more mature Nur. There was no clean divide between two selves that way; she was a unified whole, existing on a spectrum of immaturity, and any daydreams to the contrary were simply proving what they set out to contradict.

  So she had recognized it. It was time to stop thinking about people’s rich, complex personal lives as tools to explain how they were acting towards her. Instead, she needed to accept that how people acted towards her were byproducts of their rich, complex personal lives that ticked away with, in all probability, little to no consideration of Nur when she wasn’t directly in front of them.

  Which was, if she was being honest with herself (and why not be, this late in the game), sort of frustrating. But it was only fair; how often did she think about Uncle Bernard in the day, really? Not too much, in any sense other than a logistical obstacle.

  But it was also, in a way, incredibly freeing. No, her every move was not being scrutinized and judged by everyone around her. No, every embarrassing thing she had ever done was not inscribed in the stone tablets of the witnesses’ long-term memories. No, she was not foremost on everyone’s mind when they made decisions that would affect her.

  Youth had seen her dancing under the spotlight, crying for everyone to look at her and pay attention, then crying because the harsh single-point, single-mindedness of the light was so unflattering. Why did it take so long to realize that not only was this not the case, but that she didn’t want it to be?

  What a profitable round with the thinking cap she’d had that day. She had discovered something about herself, and felt prepared to take a massive leap into the greater maturity of adulthood.

  Naturally, she went on to behave exactly as she had before this long dusky late-afternoon of the soul, because personal epiphanies are great but old habits die hard. She did, however, feel little pangs of conscience when she had a selfish thought or did a selfish thing. And that’s how progress always starts; not with dreams, not with daydreams, not with bathtub epiphanies or scales falling from eyes, but with the conscious mind thwacking the unconscious one on the snout with a newspaper until a new routine became old hat.

  After a week or so of said schnoz-bopping, Nur was pleased to see the first budding chutes of personal progress.

  CHAPTER 27

  Nur could have apologized to her sister again, or sat her down for a lengthy heart to heart about the life lessons she had learned by finding out what Uncle Bernard was scared of and then having some dreams or something, but instead she went up to Deirdre and suggested they get a big-ass breakfast and then go sledding. Except first they’d have to get a sled. They went, they had a good time, though for a hot second Deirdre almost lost her big-ass breakfast, at which point she too learned a life lesson that had to do with scarfing down a full-and-a-half stack of chocolate chip pancakes with thick home-made whipped cream and maple syrup, and then trying to do anything other than hibernate for the rest of the winter.

  Still, it was fun. And the following Monday, Nur ducked out of her own class early to peek into Deirdre’s. The old Nur just stood outside the school, expecting Deirdre to come to her, thought the new, proactive Nur, whose proactivity saw her creeping through the halls and peering at children through the tall rectangular windows set into the doors.

  She saw what, in some oblique way, she had expected to see. Deirdre talking to friends, one of whom was a handsome young man taking every opportunity to touch her. Strictly PG, nothing untoward. Practiced casual is how Nur would have described his moves. A hand hovering in for a gentle landing on her shoulder, or a playful tap with the back of the hand when he’s suddenly got something witty to say, or the floating knee that just happens to brush against hers when he leans in to listen to what she has to say.

  Well, no shit. While Nur had been obsessing over her life, and her relationship with Hyun-Woo, she had been blithely blind to the story in which her sister was the lead. Deirdre and her boy had, arguably, an even more star-crossed romance, because Nur had only to contend with her Aunt and Uncle, really. And those days were at an end. Deirdre had hidden this from all of them.

  Which was sad to think about. Even in their good stretch there, Deirdre hadn’t dropped even the slightest hint that she had a brown-haired beau. Or maybe she had, and Nur had simply been too self-absorbed to notice them. That was even sadder: that Deirdre hadn’t been concealing it from Nur, but Nur still never noticed…

  …so if Deirdre hadn’t been hiding it, and assumed Nur therefore knew about this guy, and then asked Nur to return the favor of acting as wingman, a request which Nur refused…

  …on the grounds that she didn’t want Deirdre losing her virginity to a stranger…

  …which, in hindsight, was really none of her fucking business, was it? Even if the guy were a stranger, which she supposed he wasn’t, if she wouldn’t consider Hyun-Woo stranger, wasn’t that Deirdre’s decision? Nur should have asked if the situation was safe, and then butted the hell out.

  Well maybe that was going too far. She had some sisterly responsibilities. But the point was, the guy wasn’t a stranger to Deirdre. Just to Nur.

  And, well, she still didn’t feel super exc
ited about helping her sister lose her virginity. It was one of those gut-level intuitive judgments that most people are fortunate enough to have. The Venn diagram between Thoughts About Family and Thoughts About Sex should be two unbroken, non-overlapping circles on opposite sides of a football stadium (one time she had been masturbating, and just at the moment of climax, received a text message from her sister. It was a solid three weeks before Nur felt the slightest hint of loin-stirring again).

  But somehow, Deirdre had held her nose and dragged those two circles atop one another, so it was only reasonable that Nur return the favor. More than an apology, more than a long-winded explanation for the dreams and reasonings that led to this reversal, simply helping Deirdre out would be the way to mend this particular fence, between Thoughts About Family and Thoughts About Sex. And if, in the mending process, she reinforced it with steel and concrete, so much the better.

  Nur wandered back outside to wait for her sister, as per usual. But as per unusual, she waited on the stoop of the school, just outside the front door. As the students trickled and then rushed out, she shot out an arm and snatched Deirdre by the elbow.

  “Relax!” Deirdre cried – in English, Nur couldn’t help but notice. That was slightly frustrating. Half a year in America, and Deirdre was already managing to make her sudden outbursts in English. “What’s your problem?” That in Seychellois Creole – so that was alright.

  Nur patiently surveyed the docent runnel until she spied her quarry. She elbowed Deirdre softly and gestured toward the brown-haired beau with her head. “That’s him?”

  Deirdre followed her sister’s gaze and marked the terminal point with an explosive procession of emotions. The one she landed on was optimistic confusion with a soupçon of anger. “What do you mean, ‘him’?”