Love and Other Foreign Words (21 page)

All this week, the cultural shift from Cap to BHS jars me. It's homecoming, both places. Cap's is Saturday. Bexley's is Friday. Cap gives the event a weekend. My high school gives it the whole week. On campus, I hear of events I have nothing to do with—fraternities, sororities, alumni reunions. At the high school, I experience only the remnants of each day's activities, which are really only fun in homeroom, anyway. I haven't had a homeroom for two years. I can't decide at the moment if I miss it.

My two school IDs provide me with little sense of community lately. Maybe they never really did.

• • •

Tonight, October 25, is Bexley's homecoming, also Kate's first shower and my excuse for not attending the game or dance when, in truth, I have no energy for them. Also no date. Lately, I have little energy for anything and am relieved we ended our volleyball season with a record that precluded playoffs.

Stu pops into the Wagemakers' kitchen just long enough to say good night. He's headed out to pick up Jen for dinner and the homecoming dance afterward. Sophie left with Josh fifteen minutes ago. Stefan, I heard, is taking Sarah Selman, and I privately wish them both a good time. He's still not speaking to me, and it still hurts.

I am alone in the kitchen, attempting to lure Moses closer to me with a shrimp intended for tonight's party, but he's been reluctant to approach me since I last dropped him.

“Next time rub it on your face,” Stu suggests as he pops a cube of cheddar cheese into his mouth.

“Yeah, I'll do that,” I say as I stand, and Stu jerks his head back slightly.

“Yes?” I ask.

He finishes chewing before answering, “No, you just look great. All dressed up.”

“You've seen me dressed up before.”

“Yeah, but tonight you look really nice.”

“As opposed to all the other times when I didn't?”

“Yes. As opposed to all those times,” he says, trying unsuccessfully not to smile.

“Well, it is a party,” I say of my black dress and absurd heels. “I figured overalls were out of the question. Also bathrobes and wet suits.”

“I have flippers you could borrow.”

“Oh,” I say, momentarily thrilling to the idea. “Three weeks ago I would have taken you up on that.”

“And now—what—change of heart?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“Yeah. I know how it goes.”

“Oh, nice.”

“What?”

“You're already thinking about breaking up with Jen,” I say. “You haven't even been out with her yet.”

“I'm not thinking of breaking up with her, because we're not a couple.”

“Yet,” I say, and he shrugs.

“At least I warned her about you,” I say.

“And were wrong again.”

“Not wrong.”

“Good night, Josie,” he says.

“Good night, Stu.”

He starts out, stopping at the back door, looking as if he wants to say something—something good; he's smiling—but he just waves and leaves.

• • •

Earlier tonight, I flipped through a few dozen response cards while Kate styled my hair into a low ponytail with a piece of hair concealing the band. Mrs. Easterday wrote on the bottom of her card,
I wouldn't miss it for the world
. Lots of people wrote similar sentiments.

When Kate finished my hair, she called me “the best” for missing homecoming for this, her first shower. And I said in the language of Kate's Wedding, “I wouldn't miss it for the world.” We said very little otherwise.

Now we Sheridans and Wagemakers and one, soon-to-be two I suppose, Brills stand in Auntie Pat and Uncle Ken's kitchen, waiting for the guests to arrive to celebrate what I fear I cannot prevent and what I understand even less than I did back in March, when this whole convoluted affair began.

“What are you doing?” Kate asks Geoff, who has hooked the side of his collar with one talon-like finger.

“There's a tag here that's poking me.”

“Just yank it out.”

“You can't yank it,” Geoff and I say practically in unison, which surprises neither of us.

“Here,” I say, removing a small pair of scissors from the drawer where Auntie Pat keeps them.

Kate takes them and snips the tag, muttering, “Geez, the two of you.” Geoff gives me one of his standard winks, but nothing shakes this heavy sadness I continue to feel.

• • •

Ethan and Madison are the first to arrive. She fills the foyer with her hugs and voice. I share a nice-to-see-you nod and smile with Ethan—who produces a tangle of feelings within me I cannot begin to describe—and promptly make myself useful to Auntie Pat, passing platters of finger foods she spent the day making.

I don't feel like talking tonight, even though I speak many of the languages represented. Not all but many. Still, I have never felt so utterly disconnected from everyone—including Kate, with whom I do not speak at all. Not out of anger or in a fit of pique. I find that tonight I just don't have much to say to her in Josie that I think she would want to hear. She and I, tonight, stand in two different worlds.

All night I strategically position myself in the crowd to observe her, stunning in a merlot satin cocktail dress with spaghetti straps and light beading on the bodice, her beauty enhanced by her unawareness of it. Her smile is the natural, bright-eyed smile of a woman enjoying herself and looking forward to whatever thrills the evening brings. Behind her stands Geoff, one hand placed gently in the small of her back. Periodically, they share a warm, quick look.

This is Kate as she is at work—confident, welcoming, cheerful, and dancing that invisible dance I've seen Ross and Maggie, and Mother and Dad perform so often as couples. But Kate's dance card is full of different partners. Lots of them. In fact, she dances with every person here tonight as if this is her own private ball, her coming out party. Every person but me. And each of her dance partners will return home tonight feeling as if he or she received the special gift of attention from the dazzling guest of honor.

I cannot help thinking it was made all the more possible not only by the looks she shares with Geoff—the looks that convey a private, happy, unspoken connection. But by the looks he shares with no one else. I have not noticed before tonight that Geoff is the only guy I've ever known who did not take his eyes off Kate to ogle Maggie.

He has eyes only for Kate, and they say to her: “You are uniquely special to me and to me alone.” No wonder she loves him.

And I accept the previously unfathomable—that Kate and Geoff do, in fact, speak the same language, and it is one that does not include me.

Geoff catches me watching him—watching them—twice. And each time, he winks. The second time he does it, I find it hard to swallow for the developing lump in my throat. So I distract myself by finding Moses in the kitchen and continuing my efforts to lure him close with shrimp.

A much more useful distraction presents itself toward the end of the party when Sophie bursts into the kitchen, startling Moses into running away.

“Josie,” she cries, and drapes herself into a hug around me and sobs. “Josh and I broke up.”

• • •

Saturday evening, Jen pulls into my driveway and honks. When I climb into her car, she says, “Right there in the middle of the dance. Well, not the middle like the center, but, you know, the middle of the thing.”

“Chronologically,” I say, not yet knowing what she's talking about.

“Right. Time-wise. Like halfway, it happens. And it's not really a scene, but I was standing right next to Sophie, and I could see she was getting upset,” she says, and tells me her bystander version of Sophie's break-up with Josh.

“—wait, Josie, are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yeah. Go on.”

Jen continues, but I'm not listening. I'm trying, but I'm finding it difficult. Jen's conversation blends with my constant replay of last night's conversations—the ones I heard rather than joined—and they quickly become intermingled in my memory. I see Madison standing with Jen at the homecoming dance and Sophie breaking up with Josh in front of Kate in Auntie Pat's living room.

We pick up Emmy from her house. She climbs into the back and immediately says, “Don't be mad at me for being happy Sophie and Josh broke up.”

“I'm not mad,” I say, but wanted to say I don't even feel like I'm fully here. I don't want to go out tonight. To Easton of all places, Central Ohio's Grand Bazaar, where thousands of us Saturday night pilgrims can buy anything from flip-flops to diamond chokers, dine on anything from popcorn to sushi, walking and talking the night away.

Tonight my ears are overly tuned, a carryover from last night when I recognized so many different languages distinct from my own. And my translating skills overload before Jen parks the car. I manage a smile. I manage weak pleasantries. I manage to pretend I'm not three seconds away from running, screaming, from this place to one of total quiet. But I cannot manage any other language but Josie when Jen asks me if I'm all right.

“I actually don't enjoy being here and really just want to go home,” which Jen promptly translates into Jen and asks, “Why? Are you mad at me? You are, aren't you? Because I was talking about Sophie and Josh?”

“She's mad at
me,
” Emmy says dismissively. “Because I'm glad for Josh.”

“I'm not mad at anyone,” I say.

“Yes, she is,” Emmy says to Jen.

“Well, I'm not happy when you talk about me in the third person like I'm not here,” I say, causing Emmy to turn to Jen to say, “See? She's mad.”

“I'm not mad,” I say.

“Josie, don't be mad,” Jen says, hooking her arm through mine and squeezing us close. “Maybe you're just hungry. Come on. Let's go eat first.”

So we bump and thread ourselves through the crowd of foreigners, and I do find some visceral relief downing a soft pretzel and a soda, but it comes more from the distraction of chewing and swallowing—the respite from having to talk—than from anything else.

We spend a few hours there, during which time I come to feel like I'm viewing the world through the concave end of binoculars. Instead of magnifying the world, mine appears smaller, farther away and distorted and fraying at the edges. Or maybe it's not the world but me in it.

I end the evening by reassuring Jen I am not mad at her. I have just stepped out of her car into my driveway when she leans across the seat and asks, “So it's Emmy? You're mad at her?”

“Yes,” I say, and Jen smiles.

“Okay, cool. As long as it's not me.”

“It's not you,” I say.

It's me. It really is me.

• • •

Upstairs, I drop my purse on my dresser and flop backward on my bed, luxuriating, as if in a hot bath, in cushy pillows and perfect silence. I am exhausted living life in foreign places among so many hospitable tribes. Even Kate's wedding brings yet more languages and more societies into which I must contort myself, however much, to fit. All this contorting, constantly shifting from one language to the next, one culture or subculture to the next, physically and mentally, girl and woman, hugging and bowing, proms and weddings, not only fatigues me but seems, at times, to consume me. High school, Cap, home, Easton, Sophie, Stu, homecoming, prom, my parents, the track team, the volleyball team, Kate, Geoff, juniors, seniors, bridesmaids, Ethan.

What made my Language Variation Project the breeze I predicted it would be illustrated a point I have long denied. This, at last, is that invisible prickly thread that has irritated me lately.

I can speak the languages of lots of groups and learn others with some ease, but no matter how fluent I am, when I'm not speaking Josie, I am merely acting. We all are when we interact outside of our natural cultures. It is inevitable, because it is impossible to be fully yourself in a foreign language.

In someone else's language, you become a visitor, a guest—sometimes a very welcome guest received with shrieks and hugs—but still always a guest. Because as soon as you stop speaking the native language of the group, you stop being one of the group. And then you're just alone, no matter who you're with.

October 26, 11:22 p.m.

I don't think I have as many friends as I thought I did.

I close my journal and finish the entry mentally. It's not something I want to write down.

I don't think I have as many friends as I thought I did, not close ones, not many who I connect with on that deep level of language that doesn't just allow us to be ourselves with each other but allows us to be understood, even when we're not saying anything.

Silence—awkward or comfortable—is a language too. Awkward silence screams, “We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.

I swallow hard at the thought that Ethan and I were never comfortably quiet with each other. I swallow harder at the thought that I am not comfortably quiet most places.