Celia began telling me about when she and Rafael and her boys had come here from Panamá, fifteen years ago, after the invasion.
“So your son, he was born there?” I asked.
“I have two boys,” she said. “Both of them were born there. Enrique, my oldest, is away at college on a soccer scholarship. And there’s Mayor, who you met. He’s nothing at all like his brother. Rafa thinks we might have taken the wrong baby home from the hospital.” She forced a smile. “Just a joke, of course.”
She stood and lifted a framed picture from the end table. “This is from last summer before Enrique went back to school,” she said, handing it to me. “Micho took it for us.”
In the photo were two boys: Mayor, whom I recognized from the store, small for his age with dark, buzzed hair and sparkling eyes, and Enrique, who stood next to his brother with his arms crossed, the faint shadow of a mustache above his lip.
“What about you?” Celia asked. “Do you have other children besides your daughter?”
“Only her,” I said, glancing at my hands around the glass. The perspiration from the ice had left a ring of water on the thigh of my pants.
“And she’s going . . .” Celia trailed off, as though she didn’t want to say it out loud.
“To Evers.”
Celia nodded. She looked like she didn’t know what to say next, and I felt a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.
“It’s temporary,” I said. “She only has to go there for a year or two.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“She’s going to get better.”
“I’ve heard it’s a good school.”
“I hope so. It’s why we came.”
Celia gazed at me for a long time before she said, “When we left Panamá, it was falling apart. Rafa and I thought it would be better for the boys to grow up here. Even though Panamá was where we had spent our whole lives. It’s amazing, isn’t it, what parents will do for their children?”
She put her hand on mine. A benediction. From then, we were friends.
I WAS TIRED of going to my usual places, so one rainy morning I went instead to the Community House, just to see what they offered.
I took the bus Celia told me to take and walked into a building filled with white tables and chairs. Beige computers sat on some of the tabletops and a row of beanbag chairs slouched along one wall like giant gumdrops. The receptionist asked me in Spanish, “Are you here for the English class?”
“English class?”
“I’m sorry. Our new session starts today, so I just assumed that’s why you were here.”
I was about to say no, but I stopped myself. Maybe it was luck that brought me here, or maybe it was providence. I envisioned myself in the school uniform I used to wear when I was a girl—the starched blue shirt and navy vest, the pleated skirt, the knee-high socks—and all of a sudden I liked the idea of being a student again. Maybe I would even learn enough to be able to help Maribel with her homework.
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
The woman directed me to a room behind her.
A few people were already inside, seated at desks, and they glanced at me as I walked in. I smiled at them and sat with my purse on my lap, fiddling with the clasp until the teacher entered. She strode to the front and grinned at us with big horse teeth.
“Welcome, everybody,” she said in English. “I’m your teacher, Mrs. Shields.”
Of course, at the time I didn’t understand what she was saying. I only learned it later. That first day, the words were merely sounds in the air, broken like shards of glass, beautiful from a certain angle and jagged from another. They didn’t mean anything to me. Still, I liked the sound of them.
No one in the class said anything in return.
The teacher, in Spanish this time, said, “Hola a todos.”
“Hola,” a few people replied.
She put her hands on her hips. “We need to wake you people up,” she said in Spanish. “¡Hola!” She cupped one hand to her ear.
More people responded this time.
“¡Hola!” she yelled once more.
“¡Hola!” I said.
Profesora Shields threw her hands together. “Terrific. For today,” she explained, “I’m going to speak in Spanish, but as the class goes on, I’ll speak it less and less. That will be okay, because you’ll understand English more and more. You see? This is how it works.” She used her hands to mimic a scale. “Less and less,” she said, lowering her right hand. “More and more,” she said, raising her left. “Now some people will tell you that English is a difficult language. But don’t let them scare you. I congratulate you for being here at all and for having the courage to try. Bravo! Give yourself a round of applause.”
We all looked at one another.
“Go on,” she said.
We clapped lightly. Is this what Maribel was doing in her school? I wondered. Is this what school was like in the United States? It was like theater.
Profesora Shields called out greetings and had us repeat the words. Hello. Good-bye. My name is. What is your name? How are you? I’m fine, and you? Then she split us into groups of two and told us to practice. I was paired with a woman named Dulce, who was missing some of her teeth, so when she spoke she bowed her head self-consciously and directed the sounds at the floor. I asked her in Spanish, “Where are you from?”
“Chiapas,” she said.
“¿Eres mexicana?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Hello,” I said, in English, trying out the syllables on my tongue.
Profesora Shields had told us to pronounce the letter h, even at the beginning of words. “I know it won’t sound natural to you,” she said, “but you need to work to get it out. It’s important.”
I repeated the word. “Hello.”
In Spanish, Dulce said, “My son lives here with his wife. They brought me here.” She peeked at me. “Hello,” she tried.
“I came from Michoacán,” I said. “With my husband and our daughter.”
“My son’s wife just had a baby boy.”
“¡Ah, felicitaciones!”
“That’s why they brought me. To help take care of the baby.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jonathan. I wanted Carlos, but they said no, he’s an American baby.”
“Maybe Jonathan Carlos,” I said.
Dulce smiled. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello.”
“How jou are?” she asked.
“Fine, and jou?”
English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone