I close my eyes. In my heart there’s . . . recognition? Yearning? Añoro. I wonder what it’s like to be seen that way. To have someone see the thing that makes you you, and love you for them. For your you-ness to be the thing that’s perfect for one special someone. It sits in my throat like a violin holding a note.
“Molly, I too am beyond elated that our day has arrived.” His accent is crisp, vaguely British. “####### ######## ######## ##########. I love you for the way you slip your hair behind your ear when you read. For how kind you are to every small creature, even when you don’t know anyone is looking. For how you’re always the first one to dance, even if there’s no music playing, and you’re never afraid of sounding terrible at karaoke.”
“Hey!” She laughs.
His face gets serious again. “I love that every word, every story, every moment I experience, the first thing I think is about how much I want to tell you about it. I love the way you quicken my pulse. The way you challenge me. The way stilling you stills me. I love that of all the days written in the book of life, I don’t think one could be more perfect than this one.”
A tear falls out of one of my eyes, softly, slowly.
Harrison looks at me and smiles. His hand is still warm in mine. I swap out my other one. If he notices the tear, he doesn’t point it out.
The Things Unsaid
Tak was not kidding when he said Molly is the first one on the dance floor. People were still finishing up their dinner and she was already grooving to some beat only she could hear. They didn’t do the whole “first dance” thing, instead inviting everyone out onto the dance floor all at once. The band is quirky too, not what I would normally think of as dance music. But we’ve danced like crazy anyway. And now Harrison and I have gone through a walk along a winding footpath lit by tiny fairy lights.
“That was a nice ceremony, right?” he says.
“I loved it,” I say truthfully. “The vows were beautiful.”
He studies me, like he’s been thinking about something and I may have some clue he needs. “Ana, I love the way you roll the rr’s in my name. I like the way you can always figure out a math problem, like you’ve got some kind of calculator in your brain.”
I swat him, and he smiles.
“Now you,” he says.
“I . . .” Maybe it’s the emotion of the ceremony, or how he put me on the spot, but I can’t think of anything. I like Harrison. Of course I do. But as I play back what Molly and Tak said, everything that comes up for me about him feels so . . . silly. I like him because he looks like a boy in a Netflix movie? Because he folds cranes for his sister? Because he has a nice voice?
“I . . . ,” I say again.
He laughs and puts his arm around me. “Don’t worry. It was just some dumb idea.”
I stand up and take his hand. “Come on, let’s go dance.”
The Things Said
Today is a winter day that wants to be a spring day. The warmish breeze feels good on my face. We are having ESL class outside where we ate the McDonald’s food all those months ago. I like that Mr. T. does this—has class in different places, does unusual things. Besides the fact that he makes school interesting, moving outside gives me a break I don’t always get in the day.
On the walk out here, I get a text from Harrison. He says he’s busy with family stuff after school today but he’ll make it up to me with a fire chai from Green Man. I send him back a thumbs-up. The whole wedding was so romantic . . . but I couldn’t get our conversation about the vows out of my mind. Why couldn’t I think of anything to say? Was it just the pressure of the moment, or did it mean something more?
Neo glances over at me. I should tell him about Harrison, that we’re dating now, but for some reason, I can’t. Ever since our stilted conversation in the library the other day, it feels like there’s been some unspoken thing between us. What did he want to tell me before I cut him off? Did I want to hear it? Do I want to hear it now? I’m tired of all the not-knowing.
Mr. T. walks over, a huge grin on his face. “I have an announcement!” he says.
He pulls out a rolled-up magazine from his back pocket. The cover is matte, a beautiful picture of vibrantly colored street art. He looks in the table of contents, flips to a page.
He holds it in front of me. Then he holds it up to the class. “Ana submitted one of her poems in English to a magazine competition . . . and she won! They printed it!”
There it is: My poem. My name.
“It just came this morning,” Mr. T. says. “Congratulations, Ana.”
I run my finger over my name. My name, printed here by these strangers, to be seen by people I don’t know. I can hardly believe the joy. It’s like being seen, in the best way. I wasn’t sure I wanted to enter because I didn’t want the pain of no, but I can barely contain the joy of yes.
“Would you like to read it to the class?” Mr. T. says.
My face blushes. Writing a poem is one thing, but performing it is another. I shake my head.
Mr. T. smiles. “Maybe another time.”
The class claps. Neo gives a whoop. I feel something akin to dizzy, but much, much better. Mr. T. is beaming at me.
“Congratulations,” Neo says, his eyes glowing. “I am so proud of you.”
I am so proud of me, too.
A Thousand Ships
After school, Neo convinces me to go totally off plan and watch a movie not made in the eighties, and not at all the type of movie Mr. T. has recommended: the movie Troy, with Brad Pitt. I suspect maybe he just wanted a break from all the talking in movies. Troy is a movie you can understand if you don’t speak a word of any language. It’s really just about the battle scenes.
“This is very famous Greek story,” he tells me during one of the talking parts we’re ignoring.
“The Iliad,” I say.
“You know!” he says.
“Of course,” I say. “Everyone knows The Iliad.”
“Oh, Paris and Helen. The things that love can make you do,” he says.
I turn back to the screen. Two men who both seem like they’re Brad Pitt are sword fighting next to a pristine blue sea.
“You know what amazes me most about The Iliad?” I ask him.
“What?” he says.
“Not just The Iliad, but the Bible, and The Odyssey, and all those stories from a long time ago. Even though now we think of them as being written down, they started as stories that people told each other.”
“Huh,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”
I remember how I felt about reciting my poem. “I wish I could do that. Share my words out loud.”
Neo is completely ignoring the screen now, watching me intently, his eyes alive with something I can’t read.
He nods. “The most important words are the ones we’re brave enough to share.”
What’s the Big Idea
The next day, Neo finds me at my locker.
“I have an idea!” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“When we were watching Troy, and talking about poems being spoken, I started to think about how people still do that today. Poetry slams, they’re called? I look up this word, ‘slam,’ and it makes no sense. But people say poems out loud.”
“I’ve heard of that. I saw an old movie that they did that in. I would love to see one in person.”
He stands up straighter. “You see one!”
“What do you mean?”
He shows me his phone. It’s a picture of a woman with big, beautiful hair standing on a low stage, talking into a microphone, her arms out wide.
“Where is this?” I ask. I can’t imagine it’s in town and I haven’t heard about it. Mr. T. would have told me for sure.
“New York City,” says Neo.
“Oh,” I say. It might as well be on the moon. For all the months we’ve lived here, and it being only an hour and a half away, I still haven’t been to New York.
“We go,” he says. “And you will perform in
the poetry slam.”
I am filled with panic. “What? No.”
“Yes!” Neo says. “Ana, you have the words. Now you must share them.”
I think about it. Can I really recite my poetry in front of strangers? What if they think it’s terrible? What if I’m booed off the stage?
But what if it’s the best feeling in the world?
“My father would never let me.” He grumbles about it sometimes, los Nueva Yores, he calls it when he’s being especially negative about it, the land of mayhem and probably a little bit of depravity. He’s a driver, but he turns down trips that would take him to New York, preferring his reliable Newark Airport runs. He says it’s because the traffic is too bad, but I don’t totally believe him. I guess I understand some of his nerves about it. It looks overwhelming in movies, those massive crowds, the yellow taxis always almost killing people when they step off a curb, or splashing muddy rain on them. But that scariness is laced through with something else, something electric. I so want to see it.
“I know it’s important to be good son.” He corrects himself, “Daughter. But it is also important to do the things we love. I’ll go with you. Come on. We go, we come right back.”
He seems so alive and happy. And I feel alive and happy too, that he listened to the things I said the other day, that it made him think, that he’s done all this research. But most of all, it feels like a big, terrifying, wonderful step.
I nod. “I’m in,” I say.
Los Nueva Yores
I board the bus behind Neo, heart pounding. I’ve never done anything like this before. All night I tried to come up with a way to tell my parents about the trip that wouldn’t make them explode. Finally, I took the chicken way out and told them I was going to Altagracia’s for the day. I feel bad, but they didn’t even let me go into el centro by myself back home, and today . . . Today I needed to go to New York.
New York City!
Land of Carrie Bradshaw and Rachel Green, of subways and Central Park. I’ve worn what I hope is an outfit appropriate both to New York and a poetry slam: a black T-shirt with a cropped red satin baseball-style jacket over it, black jeans torn at the knees, and black ankle boots. I paid special attention to making big waves in my hair. Neo looks like he also tried to pick a New York outfit: a charcoal-gray button-down and slim, dark jeans. Instead of his usual sneakers, he’s in dark-red leather ones. His hair is combed neatly, and he obviously shaved this morning. He smells like aftershave, and there’s a little nick on his jaw where he cut himself.
Finally, we rumble out of the other side of the tunnel, and the bus drives into a giant, grimy building. I jump down every step of the bus and onto the cement sidewalk. I wait for Neo to get off and I throw my arms around him, jumping up and down. “We are in New York, Neo!”
“It smells terrible.” He wrinkles up his nose.
“It’s that bus. Let’s get away from it.”
We find our way to the stairs and take them down two by two, then get to an escalator. We scoot around the people who are just standing on it listlessly: a woman with four overstuffed shopping bags, a guy with face tattoos, an ancient-looking grandma we’re careful not to bump. How can they all look so bored? Don’t they know they’re in New York?
At the foot of the escalator, I spot light from the street in the distance, and I say to Neo, “C’mon,” and take off in a run. We run past coffee shops and a drug store, and burst through the black-framed glass doors onto a street, under an overhang. There’s a random statue of a fat guy looking very pleased with himself to the right. I run up to the curb, dodging people on the teeming sidewalk, trying to get to the sun. There, across the street, as if it knows I need a sign that I’m really, really here, a glass building winks in the sun. The New York Times, it says.
Neo is beside me. I give him a hug of gratitude. I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t suggested it. How have I stayed away this long? How did I not insist we come here on the very first day? The yellow cabs jockey for position, and the sidewalk is crammed with what looks like a thousand people. A light turns, and there’s honking, insistent and annoyed, and the river of life proceeds, pedestrians jumping in front of cars like they don’t even see them, one guy pounding on the hood of a car that dared to inch forward.
New York!
“Where do we go?” I ask Neo.
“Well, the poetry thing starts in two hours, so we have some time,” he says.
“I want to see everything.” I say.
“Okay. Let’s just walk around here for a little bit first.”
We go to the corner and wait for the light. As soon as it turns green, people start moving in a giant sea of bodies. And it’s not just the number of people, but the many different kinds. It’s like they decided to take representatives from every size, gender, shape, color, and nationality and put them all on one city block. To our left, a couple is arguing in what sounds like French. In front of us, some guys have their phone out and are looking at the map and pointing in different directions as they speak a language I can’t even begin to identify. When we get to the other side, we walk past a table covered in folded-up scarves.
I look at Neo, to see if he’s noticing this too, the great mix of everything. We’re walking past a store with a giant window filled with every fabric ever created, in every color that has ever existed. It’s a little like New York, in store form.
“This place is amazing,” he says.
We stumble into a giant intersection that looks familiar to me. It’s got massive screens, like television screens, but building-sized, and it’s even crazier than the place outside the bus terminal, if that’s possible. There are even more people here, some standing around and looking up, or taking pictures, kids on shoulders, people with noses in phones. Here, truly everyone seems to be speaking a different language. The stores are bigger, louder, brighter. A trumpet player belts out a beautiful song. There’s a dude in his underwear and a cowboy hat, and nothing else. SpongeBob SquarePants is taking pictures with a string of gleeful small children.
“Times Square,” says Neo, looking at his phone.
Of course. The place where the ball drops on New Year’s. It is huge, bigger than it looked on TV. I love everything about it instantly, its carnival atmosphere, its brash, in-your-face attitude, its multitude of languages and voices. It’s like New York making a show of being New York.
“Let’s take a picture with SpongeBob,” I say. So we do. We drop a dollar in a bucket he has at his feet.
After going into a bunch of stores, we make our way in the general direction of the poetry slam. The thrumming, frenetic life of Times Square gives way to narrower streets, although in any other place in the world, these streets would still be mind-blowing. It’s like energy radiates off the sidewalk, from the scent of nuts from the vendors on street corners, to the shouts of people trying to entice you into stores, to the colors and textures on the thousands of things for sale in every kind of store imaginable, to the sound of music wafting out of cars. My body soaks it all up, thrilling with it, vibrating at its frequency.
“I think it’s here,” says Neo. Much too soon. He’s been looking at the map to navigate us, but I’ve been looking at mine to google a thousand questions that have popped up at every step. How many residents in New York City? How many tourists each year? How many flowers in the thousands of planters? What used to be there before Times Square? I’ve learned a thousand things, and shared all of them with Neo happily. But, still, that means that when we get to Twentieth Street where the poetry slam is, it surprises me.
I peer inside. It’s a small café, dark, with tiny wooden tables and black walls. My heart thumps.
Neo puts his hand on my elbow. “Come on. It’s going to be awesome. Let’s go inside.”
So we do. The woman at the front points us to the back, behind a partition. That’s where all the people are sitting, maybe about twenty-five, arrayed around tables like the ones out front. It’s dark here, lit up by a lamp in the corner.
A guy with a fancy mustache greets us. “Are you here to listen or to speak?”
I say “listen” and Neo says “speak” at the same time.
The guy with the twirled-up mustache gives us a “which is it” look.
Neo points to me. “She’s speaking,” he says. My throat tightens up. Last night I pulled out the poem I had written for the literary magazine, and read and reread it to memorize it, but my shoulders feel a little quivery, like I’m going to explode in trembles. The man gives me a clipboard to write down my name on a list.
The first person to get up is a girl with silver and blue hair, who does a poem about the power of being a girl. The next is about a heartbreak, the one after that about the heavy expectations of parents. They’re good, so good, much better than I can be, at least today, with my accent and my inexperience. But somehow, instead of being intimidating, it’s uplifting, like I’ve just come over a ridge and seen clear to a faraway horizon I didn’t know existed.
Finally, it’s my turn. Neo gives my hand a squeeze. I stand up. I shuffle my feet, like maybe I’m a battery that can be charged by contact with the earth. Or this floor, really. I get to the microphone and look at the faces of the people there. But it’s too much, so I focus on Neo. He smiles and nods, a “you got this” look on his face.
I take a breath. I begin. “It’s called ‘An Old Story with a New Ending.’”
“America, I long for you.
I long for the day I don’t translate you in my head.
For the day I am not “other” by the way I form your words.
I want to write notes in the margins of you and so say something new about you
That’s never been said before.
I want to fold you into squares and put you in my pocket
And let your confidence work on me like an enchantment.
I want to run my finger on the length of you, California to New York,
I want to grow to your size, scale you, surf you.
I want to be enough for you, and have you be the thing that tops me up like a bottle in which the water overflows.
Love in English Page 14