by Caela Carter
As I stare at the food, I’m almost crying. Flávia is looking at me so I don’t let myself. It’s a ridiculous amount of food and something about it is so clearly fancy, so special-occasion, in this tiny, dark apartment. It didn’t strike me until this moment: Flávia has prepared for me. She has been waiting to meet me. I’m already twelve. Has she known about me since I was born? Has she been waiting my whole life to meet me?
She’s my other nanny. And my entire relationship with Nanny is not about my mom. I can’t let my entire relationship with Flávia be about my dad. She did all this for me.
For me.
I have to try to get to know her.
There are four chairs surrounding the table. Like the table they are dark wood but they each have a cheerful yellow cushion on them. Flávia pulls out one chair.
“Senta-te,” she says.
I sigh. I can’t help it. How am I supposed to get to know her if I can’t understand her?
“Sit down,” my mom says. And I do.
Flávia picks up my plate and begins to put vegetables on it. She adds one of the burgers and a slice of the cod and a roll from the breadbasket. I’m never going to be able to eat this much, but I’m going to try. I’ll have a stomachache for a week before disappointing this woman who has been waiting for me over a decade.
She puts the plate in front of me and points to the fish. “Isto era o prata favorito do teu pai quando ele era menino.”
“Pai?” I say.
I don’t know anything else she said, but I know that word.
Father.
Mom clears her throat like I’m not supposed to ask anything about him, even here. She says, “Vamos passar algumas semanas aqui em Portugual antes de falarmos muito sobre ele. OK, Flávia?”
OK, Flávia? Is she telling her not to talk about my dad too?
My grandmother looks alarmed. “Porquê?” she asks. Her voice is louder than I’ve ever heard it except when she’s saying my name.
Mom answers in Portuguese so fast I’m shocked. More than fast, actually. It sounds emotional somehow.
Flávia’s reply almost sounds like she’s yelling.
They go back and forth, talking louder and faster and their hands flying over the food. They are fighting.
I don’t know what else to do so I start eating. I shove a huge bite of slimy white fish into my mouth. I actually don’t want to eat it. I don’t usually like fish like this, all regular and fishy. But I think maybe she said it was my dad’s favorite. So I should like it.
It slips over my tongue as their Portuguese slips around my ears, neither words nor fish really being ingested. I’m not sure which is making my stomach turn more.
I want to show Flávia that I’m not like my mother. That I don’t show up to a new place and suddenly start to argue. That I appreciate everything she’s doing for me. I manage to open my throat and force the fish down. I hold my breath so it stays there.
I’m supposed to like that fish. It was my father’s favorite.
Instead I dig into the burger. It doesn’t have a bun so I eat it with my knife and fork and it’s delicious. Tender and fatty. I take some cheese and spread it on my bread. I eat a slice of fresh tomato. I focus on the food and ignore the words around me until my stomach is sticking out and my mouth is full and I realize they have stopped the shouting. They are both looking at me.
I want to spit the food out of my mouth. There is so much, I have to chew for a long time before I can swallow. Mom looks shocked. Flávia looks confused.
Eating seemed like the right thing to do but now I’m wondering if it was weird.
“Alma,” Mom says. “Ask Flávia something about herself.”
I turn to her. I try to get the words out without letting on that there is still some half-chewed burger in my mouth. “Did you grow up here, Flávia?” I say.
Mom translates.
She shakes her head. “Não, não, não,” she says. She points to her chest. “Avó. Chama-me avó.”
“She says call her ‘avó,’” Mom translates. “It means ‘grandmother.’”
But she didn’t need to. I could figure that out.
“Avó,” I say. It feels heavy and important.
She smiles.
I put that smile on her face. It feels so good. I need to find other ways to make her smile. I need to do it without words. We’ll never get to be grandmother-granddaughter, our own little thing, if Mom is translating our every communication.
I swallow and look around frantically.
That’s when I spot it. It’s smaller than ours at home, and made of pale wood. It’s shoved into the corner of the room. It’s there.
A piano.
I stand.
“Alma,” Mom says. “What are you . . .”
She trails off when she sees where I’m going. I stand behind the bench and put my fingers on the keys. They are smooth and familiar, like a piece of home underneath my flesh.
I turn. Flávia has also gotten up from the table. She’s walking to right behind me. “Do you play?” I ask.
Mom starts to translate but she’s already nodding.
“Can I?” I ask, pointing at the keys.
She nods again.
I sit and take a deep breath. Then I start. I play the opening notes of Bach’s Minuet in G Major.
Flávia slips on the bench beside me. I lift my hands to make room for hers. She plays the next three chords.
I play the next three.
Then her.
Then me.
We play the entire song back and forth like that.
We play it again, this time me playing the right hand while she plays the left.
Then we play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Then Bach’s Toccata in D Minor.
We play the afternoon away, back and forth, speaking through the notes.
At some point my mom gives up on trying to translate and instead sits on Flávia’s couch and listens to us talk.
I don’t need my mom right now.
I don’t need her answers for once.
Because I’m finally getting one. One answer after a million questions.
I finally know where I get my music.
Fifteen
Where Can I Look for You Now?
MOM WAKES ME BY BOUNCING MY mattress over and over again the next morning. We went to bed early but I still have to shake my head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth before the words Mom is saying can sink into my brain.
“Get up, Alma. Leonor will be here any minute.”
I pick my head up and the room around me spins. The sun is up and slipping hesitantly through my window. It’s early. My head crashes back into the pillow again.
Mom is already dressed in a gray pantsuit even though she’s working from home here the same way she did in Pittsburgh. Her hair is washed and combed and bun-ed.
“Leonor?” I say. “Why?”
“Alma,” Mom says. “Get up.”
I roll over so my head is buried in the pillow. “Why is she coming?” I say.
Something about Leonor makes me embarrassed and annoyed at the same time. She wants to be my cousin. I understand that. She is my cousin whether I like it or not. I just don’t know how to do this cousin-thing. I’ve never had a cousin, but from watching Julia with hers sometimes I know that the point of cousins is that you get to know them your entire life. Leonor and I will never have that. I don’t know how to work around it.
“She’s taking you to your school,” Mom says.
“School?” I say. My eyes fly open. “School starts today?”
“No,” Mom says. “It starts next week. But Leonor says all the kids go in today to sign up for clubs and catch up on their summers or something. It’s tradition or something.”
“I can’t catch up on summer,” I say. “I don’t speak Portuguese.”
Mom rolls her eyes like I’m being ridiculous. “It’s an English school, Alma,” she says. “You think I’m going to put you in
a school where they don’t speak English? You wouldn’t learn anything.”
“I don’t want to sign up for clubs,” I say. “And I won’t have anyone to talk to about my summer. I don’t know anyone.”
Mom leans over the bed and pulls all the covers off me so I’m suddenly freezing. “You’re going,” she says.
I sit up so fast I almost knock my head right into Mom’s.
“Mom!” I shout. “You have to stop telling me these things right before they happen! You have to give me some warning.”
I don’t know why I say it. Why I choose to argue now. It never works.
She turns, throws a towel onto my bed, and says, “I tell you things when I think you’re ready to know them. If I told you you’d be going to school today, you’d have been worried about it all day yesterday instead of focusing on your grandmother and the piano.”
I hate when she shuts me up like this. It makes me feel insignificant, tiny, worthless. I watch her walk out of my room, willing myself to yell at her back. But I don’t.
About an hour later, Leonor and I walk through the winding streets of Lisbon. The sky is blue and the streets are bright so the morning sun must be shining although I can’t see it because of all the buildings. The weather is perfect for the T-shirt and skirt I have on. We weave in and out of alleys, around tight corners. We pass tiny shops selling coffee and candy, little bakeries that smell delicious, lots of people hanging laundry or heading to work like it’s totally normal to live and eat and work and do laundry in a fairy-tale village.
Leonor is trying to talk to me but we keep having to walk single file in the narrow streets to avoid a crowd of tourists or a car driving by.
She barely said one word to my mother when she came to our apartment to get me. Now, the minute we’re on the sidewalk, she won’t stop talking.
“It’s fortunate that I attend the international school, isn’t it?” Leonor says. “So that we can travel together in the mornings?”
She told me that she spoke a little English, but really her English is better than mine.
“Yes,” I say. Then stop. I should say more, but I can’t. I’m too nervous about all this change.
I think my mother is wrong. Yes, I would have worried about all of this last night. But I think maybe if I’d been able to worry a little bit last night, I’d be less worried now.
“When does school start?” I ask Leonor.
“Tuesday,” she says.
“What day is it?” I ask. It seems like a reasonable question until it comes out of my mouth.
Leonor turns back to look at me, her eyebrows knitted. “Saturday,” she says.
My face burns. I feel stupid already.
We turn a corner and the sky opens up in front of us. We’re on a crowded street that slopes steeply down into the bay I saw when we were first driving in this city. Suddenly the maze is broken open and the world of possibilities floods in on me again.
Leonor stops walking in what feels like the middle of the sidewalk. There’s a crowd gathered at the same spot. There is traffic stopped bumper-to-bumper in the street. There are two metal rods running through the middle of the street.
“This is the trolley stop,” Leonor explains. “We’ll take this trolley each morning. It drops us off about a ten-minute walk from school. It’s not bad except during the rainy season.” She smiles at me. “It will be nice to have a companion with whom to travel to school each day.”
My stomach turns again and I suddenly want to be back in Pittsburgh with Julia. I don’t think I want to travel with Leonor and her perfect English and her grown-up way of understanding trollies and her city. I don’t think I want to see her every day. But I wouldn’t be able to get to the school without her.
“Did you notice my braid?” Leonor asks, turning so I can see the back of her head. She has what looks like a double braid. A loose, wide French braid going down the back of her head with a tight fishtail on top.
“Wow,” I say. “How did you do that?” I try to sound like I mean it.
“I’ve been using YouTube tutorials. I can do yours sometime if you’d like.”
I shrug and too much time goes by and she looks at me so finally I say, “Cool.” I manage to keep myself from laughing at the thought of Leonor watching YouTube. She’s so formal and old-fashioned it seems like she’s from a different century. She’s using YouTube to create formal and old-fashioned braids on her head.
I don’t usually think twice about my hair. I sometimes forget to brush it.
This is not someone I would have been friends with back home.
In Portugal, I don’t think I get a choice who my friends are.
Within two minutes, a yellow trolley comes cranking slowly up the hill. It’s so crowded I’m sure we’ll never get on, but people pour out of it on all sides when the folding front door opens, and Leonor manages to squeeze through two old ladies with shopping bags. “Come on then,” she says.
I manage to get on it too.
It’s exactly like a trolley would look. Bright yellow painted over brown wood, the paint chipping at parts. Inside there are two rows of benches lining the sides and the windows are open to the street. In the back where you’d think there are doors there are actually just empty spaces. It reminds me of something I’d see on Saturday morning cartoons.
The trolley squeaks as it moves along within the traffic of the cars. Leonor and I are standing in the middle of the aisle, holding on to the little handles that hang from the ceiling and swaying back and forth with each stop. I can’t see out any of the windows. I wonder if my dad took a trolley to school. I close my eyes and feel for him tugging at my heart.
We wind around a traffic circle and then back and forth up what feels like a mountain. The crowd thins more and more at each stop and eventually I can see. The buildings are layered thick on both sides, no yards. Barely any grass. Definitely no graveyards. I don’t even know where I’d look for a graveyard in this maze of a city. It all looks so different from my old neighborhood, with its sprawling lawns and vinyl-sided houses.
We start our way down the other side of the mountain. I can see out the window for just a few minutes before Leonor says, “This is us!” and bounces out of the trolley.
I follow her and we’re on a real street, a paved road with sidewalks. It doesn’t even look like Lisbon anymore. There’s a park and a house with an actual yard. The buildings are still close together and the sidewalk is made of gray and white pebbles. It has cracks and roots growing into it. It doesn’t look exactly like America. But more familiar somehow. The suburbs version of Portugal.
As I follow Leonor down the sidewalk, she chats constantly about her school. She talks about the teachers I’ll have for maths and literature and history. I don’t tell her that at home we call it math and Language Arts and social studies.
“Wait until you meet the Portuguese teacher,” Leonor says. “She’s fantastic!”
“Portuguese teacher?” I say. “Mom said this was an English school.”
“Most of our classes are in English,” Leonor says. “But of course we must learn Portuguese too. They don’t want us to forget our Portuguese.”
I stumble on the sidewalk. I don’t have any Portuguese to forget. I’m going to look so stupid.
Leonor reaches out as if she wants to link arms with me again but I take a step away. I hate myself the moment I do it. But it doesn’t matter for long, because as soon as we arrive at the school’s campus, girls start running up to her. They hug and giggle and kiss on the cheek and fawn over her braid. They speak in Portuguese while I stand there.
The school looks like a school. It’s not like my school at home, but I think I would recognize it as a school even if I didn’t know what it was. It has a high wall on one side and woods on the other. The building is made of orange and white material that looks sort of like clay. On the other side of the fence are two flagpoles. One flies the Portuguese flag, the other the British flag.
While I study t
his, Leonor gossips in Portuguese. The girls around her touch one another and smile smiles that make me ache for Julia.
“Esta é a minha prima, Alma. Ela irá frequentar a nossa escola este ano,” Leonor says, suddenly gesturing to me. “Ela é dos Estados Unidos.”
The blond girl she was arm in arm with steps away from her, toward me, and says, “You’ll be joining our school, then? How exciting!” She speaks perfect English too, but differently than Leonor. She has a British accent. It’s like she wasn’t speaking Portuguese a minute ago.
I’m so surprised by it I forget to respond for a few seconds.
“Yes,” I say. “I guess so.”
I’m dizzy. There are too many new things. Too many surprises. No one is explaining anything to me.
“Come on then!” Leonor says, walking toward the side of the building. All the girls follow her, giggling. After a few seconds, so do I.
We sit on the sidelines and watch as a crowd of boys plays soccer in the yard next to the school. Leonor puts a winding braid in some other girl’s hair. The girls slip in and out of Portuguese and English as if it’s totally normal for a group of barely-even-teenagers to all speak two languages. It’s sort of like they keep forgetting that I’m there and dive into Portuguese, then one of them says, “English!” looks at me and says, “Sorry, English.” And they speak English again.
It doesn’t matter though. I’m not saying anything anyway.
I’m thinking that even without the language barrier I’d probably never fit in here.
These girls—their braids and multiple languages—I don’t think we can have anything in common. There’s no way they’d be OK with how weird I am. There’s no way they’d hunt for graveyards with me.
I’m hating them all for not being Julia.
After a while, one of the boys throws the soccer ball to Leonor and then all the boys run off in different directions as if a bell has rung. They’re speaking Portuguese of course, so I don’t know what scattered them.