Mother, Tongue
BY EVGENIYA DAME
Most days you won’t catch me dead talking to a girl from Group 3. I’ve heard them speak: basic vocabulary, no subjunctive mood awareness to speak of, prosody is jumping all over the place. I mean, language acquisition takes time, and I can’t lose any talking to a girl who doesn’t even voice a fricative right. But then, last Thursday in gym I get stuck with Veronika, and before I know it, Coach yells “In position!” and I’m kneeling on a mat, my hands wrapped around her ankles. I notice things, too, no matter what Professor Mishina says, like on the subject of the ankles I observe that they are small in circumference and easy to hold, but the skin is peeling. I know the English word for that—dry—but any idiot can say dry. I didn’t graduate top of my class and make it to Group 7 at Samara Teacher-Training University to talk like some pre-intermediate loser. I read my dictionary cover to cover, and I’m telling you: Veronika’s skin is parched.
“Fifty sit ups, come on, girls!” Coach yells. Veronika struggles to rise. Her knees dance, and then her legs are on the move. I throw my weight against the wayward ankles to keep them in place.
“What is he training us for, the Olympics?” she asks. “Never thought there’d be gym in college.”
She has big blue eyes that roll up like a doll’s whenever she manages to rise off the mat. I stare at her, trying to think of a suitable phraseological unit. Professor Mishina had us memorize eighty of them the first week of class. Nothing comes to me now, so I just tell Veronika, “Your leggings have a typo.” They also have two white stripes instead of three, but knockoffs don’t bother me, only the spelling. We all wear knockoffs here in Samara, we’re not some Moscow crowd.
“What’s your name?” Veronika asks. She’s lost her scrunchy and her hair keeps getting caught in her interlaced fingers. The sit ups are knocking the breath out of her.
“Don’t talk,” I say. “You’re making it worse.”
I keep the count, like Coach told us to, but then I look at Veronika’s face, all red from exertion, and I skip a lot of numbers. “Twenty-three,” I count—in Russian of course, for Veronika’s benefit. Who knows what these Group 3 girls can handle under duress. “Twenty-six, thirty-two, thirty-nine.” I squeeze her ankles tighter. I say “good job” even when it isn’t. I count all the attempts in her favor.
Later, we are changing at the back of the gym and she actually comes over and thanks me.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Hey, you’re Group 7,” she says, fishing a pair of pearl studs from her coat pocket. “I’ve seen you around. You don’t look like Group 7, though.” She pulls on her earlobe, jabs the earring through. “I mean, you’re nice. Not a dictionary wife at all.”
I pause, a shoelace draped over my finger.
“A what?”
She holds her palm to her mouth, but slowly. She doesn’t slap it because she’s wearing lipstick I’m guessing she doesn’t want smudged.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s a nickname. I thought you knew.”
“A dictionary wife?”
“Not you, personally,” she says. Hand in her hair, she looks around for her scrunchy. “All of your group. Because you’re kind of snobs to everyone else?” She zips up her boots. “Catch you later,” she says.
I don’t see Veronika again until the night of the free class. It’s called ‘Korean Massage Techniques,’which sounds exciting, until I show up for the first session and it’s our same old Coach, rolling rickety gurneys into a storage area behind the gym, handing out pilly flannel bedsheets that look like he stole them from a nursery. Mine is printed with little blue elephants.
When I look up, Veronika is at my side.
“Hello, snobster,” she says. “Stuck with me, are you?”
When she speaks, there is a glop glop of bubblegum pushed around her mouth. Now that her face isn’t red and puffy from doing sit ups, I see how beautiful it is. There is something neat and open about it, like the first page in a notebook where the handwriting is still good and unhurried. Her hair is black and shiny, like a car door. I’m not impressed by physical beauty, just so you know. I respond only to linguistic charm, the kind that comes, for instance, from knowing when to contract an auxiliary verb in its negative form. I’m just trying to convey that Veronika is, objectively speaking, a very pretty girl.
“You should toss that,” I tell her. “Gum interferes with the ability to produce authentic English sounds.” That’s what Professor Mishina told us. Not that anyone in Group 7 would even dream of chewing gum anymore.
“We’re not in class,” Veronika says. “Chill.” But then she spits her gum into a wrapper and totters to the trash can in her heels. I’ve been thinking about those heels a lot. Took me a couple of hours flipping through the dictionary, but I found just the right word—vertiginous.
The room smells of rubber balls and bike tires. “Right,” Coach coughs. “So. Sujok is the ancient Korean technique of physical therapy. Its name comes from su meaning hand, and jok meaning foot. The class will meet once a week on Mondays.” He digs around in his pocket for a folded piece of paper. I’ve never heard Coach talk in complete sentences before. I am itching to share with him some tips on the art of public speaking that Professor Mishina posted on our classroom wall, but I keep quiet. My Group’s strive for perfection has been misinterpreted before. Besides, I don’t want Veronika to call me a snobster again.
“The objective of this course,” Coach reads, “is to master a useful way of relieving another’s pain.”
“Yeah, right,” Veronika whispers. “Like no one is here to avoid gym for the rest of the year.”
She’s got a point; no one wants to be in gym, especially since Coach made us jump around on pogo sticks. But gym is obligatory at the Samara Teacher-Training University, so here we are. I had a whole other reason to sign up for Korean Massage techniques, but I’m not about to tell Veronika that.
Coach goes around, breaking us into pairs. Then he tells us to take our tops off.
Veronika’s hand shoots up. “What about a bra?” she asks. She doesn’t even blush.
“The back must be free of any impediment,” Coach says. “Two minutes to get in position,” he adds, before leaving the room.
Veronika and I stretch the bed sheet over the massage table. I’m trying to remember when I last shaved my armpits. Or had a room of strangest stare at my naked torso.
“Want to rock-paper-scissors the whole thing?” I ask.
“Nah, I owe you one,” Veronika says after a beat and shimmies out of her turtleneck. She climbs on the table and rolls over on her stomach. I wonder what it is she saw in my eyes in that one moment.
The room looks like a beach party, except no one is having fun. The backs that emerge are broad and pale, already giving back the little tan they acquired in the summer. Veronika unhooks her bra, and I help pull her arms out of the straps. She has a pimple over her shoulder blade and a patch of dead skin—a tuberculosis shot. I struggle to arrange her arms. I try stretching them along her sides, then move them closer to her body, but Veronika’s got two cups on every other girl in the room and no matter what I do, there’s that side boob.
“Leave it,” she says. “It’s fine.”
I stare at her back, as if it could spell out the secret to being Veronika, to being pretty and uncomplicated. But her back offers no answer. It is smooth and unremarkable—an average back, no different from mine.
Coach returns with a bottle of Johnson’s baby oil. He pours a little into our cupped hands and tells us to rub it in to get the circulation going. I count eight other pairs in the room, all girls. Teacher-Training University might not be officially designated a women’s school, but no man in our city would stoop low enough to teach. What worries me is I’m the only one from Group 7. My classmates get to stay home, make flash cards, study Murphy’s Grammar in preparation for Professor Podlesov’s monthly grammar trivia, and here I am, rubbing baby oil into Veronika’s back.
I go up and down her spine, palms splayed, thumbs out for pressure. Three strokes, Coach says, one to the waist, one to mid-back, and one to the shoulder. I set my palms on edge and move them sideways, like a skater doing long strides. Coach shows us where to dig into a shoulder blade for a cartilage.
“You’ll know you hit it when it vibrates lightly under your fingers,” he says. He goes around the room making sure everyone’s found the spot.
We rub the shoulders and press our elbows into the tight knot on each side of the neck, that nexus of anger and worry, of bad love and bad home. We nudge the muscles that run like cables along the spinal cord. Under my hands, Veronika’s skin grows red, a record of each finger path. She doesn’t say much, just winces once I get to her lower back. Here, my thumbs burrow into small indentations above her butt.
“That one really hurts,” she says.
“Sedentary lifestyle!” Coach remarks from the center of the room.
He shows us where not to put our hands, never, unless we want to make the other person a cripple. “Here…here…here,” he says, his open palm hovering above the back of some Group 2 girl. It hasn’t occurred to me that what we’re learning can hurt, that this useless, worthless thing I signed up for has the power to wreck someone’s life.
Coach tells us that, during a session, a patient is likely to fall asleep and that is why the closing move is meant to gradually bring them back.
“Relax your posture,” he says. “Now gather up your hands…and let them come down.”
Our fingertips fall, tapping and tapping at high speeds. Coach tells us to angle the palms and deliver swift, light chops up and down the back.
“Next week you’ll switch places with your partner,” he says when the hour is up. “That way, both of you learn and you don’t overwork your hands. A massage therapist who overworks her hands isn’t going to last long.”
“Right,” Veronika whispers. “Wouldn’t that be a piiiiiiity.”
I giggle and accidentally jab her between the ribs. She howls, but then she’s laughing, and Coach says, “Well, someone is awake”, and I’m thinking, Group 3 or not, I like this girl.
*
Our university is down by the Volga, at the bottom of a long hill that bus drivers don’t even attempt to ascend. You have to walk the long set of stairs up to a tram stop. Most of the girls have taken to doing it in pairs because in winter the steps ice over and no one will sand them. If you slip, you want someone to catch you. When Veronika suggests we walk together, I just nod. We’ve become friends, haven’t we? Except walking isn’t enough. She says we have to talk about things, so I learn that her father skedaddled back to Chapayevsk and her mother works in a flower shop. For a month now Veronika’s been going with a guy who lives in the barracks across from our university. Except she calls them “the dorms” and points out Nikita is doing contract service. “He’s not some schmuck who couldn’t bribe his way out of service,” she says. “There’s money in a military career.
“And what about you?” she asks.
I tell her I’ve been teaching myself to say ‘fuck’ strategically. I learned this from a book called English as a Second F*cking Language: How to Swear Effectively, Explained in Detail with Numerous Examples Taken from Everyday Life. It turns out, fucking works great for expletive infixation, like when people say abso-fucking-lutely. “Would you like me to explain expletive infixation to you?” I ask. Professor Mishina has been dropping hints expletive infixation may come up in the winter exams.
“Maybe another time,” Veronika says in Russian as she searches her purse for a tic tac.
“Wanna know the best part? There are rules that govern the whole thing. Fucking has to go before the stressed syllable. That’s why you can say Sa-fucking-mara, but not Sama-fucking-ra.”
“Sa-fucking-mara, indeed,” Veronika says. “You’re funny, you know that?” She gives me that look again, but now I know what it means.
“I’m not stupid,” I say. “I know what we’re headed for—statistically. Underpaid school teachers in some municipal school. We’ll assign the same readings and correct the same mistakes and the days when our own students remember to add an -s to the verb in third person singular tense will feel like triumph.”
“A job isn’t everything,” Veronika says. “Especially for a woman.”
“This is not about a job.”
She crunches tic tac between her teeth and looks at me, but I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know how to explain to her the real problem: we will never experience language immersion. These days, Britain is stingy with its visas, America a faraway dream, Australia might as well be another planet, and who’s got the money anyway. As Professor Mishina likes to remind us, the language is nowhere around. We must create that reality for ourselves.
Sometimes, I suspect Professor Mishina pities us. It’s like she’s about to draw an Englishman like a chart on the board, with little arrows pointing to his pinstripe suit, his bowler hat, his kerchief. She keeps mentioning the college fairs in the spring, our only chance to meet native speakers.
“You girls should go,” she says in that sweet near-native singsong. Professor Mishina likes to joke that in English her name is pronounced Mish’n, like it’s her mission to make us sound like Eliza Doolittle at the end of My Fair Lady.
*
In the December Grammar Trivia, my Group 7 is up against Group 3 and it’s a bloodbath. At the end of the first round we’ve got them down by twenty-six points. When Professor Podlesov calls a break, I seek Veronika in the crowd.
“It wasn’t so bad,” I tell her. “If you hadn’t mixed up transitive and intransitive verbs, we’d be almost even.” I’m being kind, you understand. Group 3 didn’t even get the Second Conditional right, let alone the uses of a gerund. We could have beat them to a pulp. I want to pat her shoulder and offer her my copy of Murphy’s Grammar.
“Who cares,” Veronika says. She checks her watch again.
“I’ll give you hints in the second round,” I tell her. “Watch my lips.”
“I’m not staying for the second round,” she says. “I’m late as it is.”
“What if Podlesov does a roll call again?”
“You’re right.” She moves closer, wedging herself between me and the wall. “Cover for me?”
I don’t say anything.
“Please?”
“And you won’t call me a snob again?”
“Never,” she says. “Promise.”
*
Korean massage lessons resume after the winter break and for the first time, we get to keep our shirts on. Veronika sits on the table, drumming her boots against it. I’m holding her right hand, pulling the fingers one by one. I’m guessing we have finally arrived at a su part of Sujok. She’s telling me her and Nikita are moving in together. He’s got it all figured out, she says. When his contract is up, which is in six months, they will buy an oil press and make a killing selling freshly-pressed apricot seed oil.
I don’t know whose idea it was to build barracks across the street from a teacher’s college but statistically speaking, a third of the girls who graduate will marry soldiers.
“Oil,” I say. “Is that a thing?” Veronika’s fingers are soft, pliant. They don’t crack much, but Coach explained that cracking is the result of releasing air that accumulates between the joints. If you crack your fingers often, air won’t accumulate and there will be no sound.
“It’s the future,” she says.
I try to picture a beefy ex-military guy selling bottles of apricot seed oil at the market. I’ve never wondered what those men do after their service is up. I assumed a day comes and, instead of being yelled at, they become the one doing the yelling. And they move from one town to the next, dragging their family with them. I guess that’s one way to leave Samara.
“What about English?” I ask.
“What about it?”
I flip her palm over and push my thumb in the space between her ring finger and the pinkie. I dig into her wrist where the pulse moves leisurely under the skin.
“You’re getting your degree in English so you can sell homemade oil?”
“No talking,” Coach says.
Veronika is whispering now. “A language is not a job,” she says. She closes her palm around mine, pressing the fingers into unfamiliar patterns until they hurt. “I’m worried about you,” she whispers. “You’re taking this too seriously. What are you going to do? Move to Moscow?” She twists her mouth into a strange shape. “No one wants us there. They have starving grads of their own.”
“I just want to—,” I say, but Coach’s angry eyes find me and I stop.
“Switch to the other hand,” he says.
“College fairs are starting soon,” I whisper. “Has your teacher even told you about the college fairs?”
“No,” Veronika says. “Must be one of your Group 7 things. What do you do, parade the rows with a textbook tucked under your armpit?”
“It’s an exhibit,” I tell her. It occurs to me that maybe we were supposed to keep the college fairs a secret, maybe Group 3 can’t be trusted with the native speakers yet, but it’s too late now. “You get reps from a hundred schools or so, recruiting new students. Everybody is there—the British, the Americans. Schools in Canada and Australia. Language courses in Malta.”
“And you want to pick a school?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I say. I bend her fingers backwards. They don’t bend at all, not at the base, nor in any of the digits. This is a bad sign. My own fingers bend like overcooked noodles. I even asked Coach about it and he said flexible fingers indicate an ambitious personality. He said Napoleon had fingers that bent backwards. “I can’t afford a day in those places.”
“Is it the men?” Veronika asks. “Because Nikita and I, we’re good. Better than good. And I have no interest in being someone’s mail order bride.”
“Mail order bride my ass,” I say. “They need interpreters for the fair. It’s like a job, except you don’t get paid.” I tell her she should come, otherwise she may not see another native speaker for years.
Veronika looks at me like we can’t possibly be in this together, on this bedsheet printed with little blue elephants, on this table, in this room, in this building across from the barracks. But her right hand is free now and she pulls out a scrap of paper from her bag and writes down the date and the name of the conference center.
The next time I touch her, a week later, her back is wide and unmarked, like a ball of pie dough. It keeps no trace. I roll my fingers along her spinal cord, dig my knuckles into her back, but when I lift them, the skin isn’t even red. When she unhooks her bra, I don’t see lines on her shoulders. I read somewhere that skin’s resistance, how quickly it bounces back after being pinched, is a good sign. Maybe Veronika is regenerating. Maybe she’s doing one of those things where you drink lots of water and give up sugar and shave years off your age.
She winces. I lift my knuckles off her back.
“Too much?” I ask. Coach always instructs us to go full force. “No offense,” he’s told us, “but you girls have to throw your full weight at the patient if you want them to feel any pressure at all. It has to hurt.”
“It hurts,” Veronika says.
“That’s good,” I say.
“No, I mean, it hurts.” She grabs my arm and pulls me down until my face is level with the little blue elephants on her sheet and that is she when she tells me about the baby.
The word—broad, sonorant, Russian—cuts me in half. I hate even the sound of it, hate how it sounds like burden. For once, though, my native language got it right. Because she will be burdened. I picture her, holding her enormous belly with one hand, while taking notes on Morphology. Veronika, sleepless, confusing the indicative and subjunctive moods in third-year Advance Grammar. Then she will drop out because someone’s got to look after the baby. Feed the baby. Dress the baby. Play little goat with the fucking baby. She will visit us once a year, speaking in whispers not to wake the baby, telling us about the miraculous properties of apricot seed oil.
As soon as Coach directs us to those final wake-up motions, those piano strokes across the back, I storm out of the gym.
I forget to mark the prosody in Professor Mishina’s homework assignment, and when I read the text in class, my voice drops and drops, bound by the Russian falling dead-end intonation. Professor Mishina looks worried. I skip massage lessons and avoid Veronika in the hallways. I am ashamed to look into the faces of other Group 7 girls. Serves you right, I imagine them saying. That’s what you get for befriending Group 3.
One time, she manages to corner me in the hallway, but I lash out. I call her a dumbass, a braindead housewife, I plant that expletive infixation into my words like a fat tick, bloated with blood. I yell at her in English, knowing she can’t follow.
And the worst thing? This is all Professor Mishina’s fault. She was the one who told me at the start of the year that I am too cerebral, that I need to develop hobbies and form life-long friendships. It made me so happy—Professor Mishina judging my character, making recommendations. But what I think now is that I should have stuck with being cerebral.
I don’t do grammar homework for a week, and then I feel bad and make a list of one hundred and forty-two phrasal verbs, which I recite on the way between the tram stop and the school. I retreat into their rhythm. Take, I go, take up, take in, take out, take up with. Give—give in, give away, give up.
On the day the college fair begins, I don’t expect to see Veronika, but she’s there in the hotel’s lobby, nine o’clock on the dot. I can’t bring myself to speak, only motion for her to follow me to the conference room.
“We’re early,” she says, disappointed.
The conference room is set up with long tables, the curtains pulled against the sharp February sun. The reps are setting up their stations with cardboard screens that showcase their school buildings. They dump piles of branded pencils onto the tables, arrange their pamphlets. They stand and move as if they were no different from us. They chat, they laugh, untangling plastic chairs like no big deal, and all this time it flows effortlessly—the language I’ve been trying to learn for most of my life.
“Being early is the point,” I tell Veronika. “You have to show up before anyone else does.”
She slows down beside a table that holds a bunch of pencils with the school’s name, little squares of sticky notes, keychains, erasers in the shape of a lion.
“Is it free?” she asks.
The woman behind the table is about to answer, but I pull Veronika along, flashing a smile I’ve practiced for a month. “My apologies, ma’am” I say, “We are the interpreters from the Teacher-Training University, here to assist you, but right now we must hurry, for we have a preexisting appointment.”
I find an unclaimed table and sit Veronika down. It’s time to explain the rules. The college fair, I tell her, trying to channel all the elegance, the nonchalance of Professor Mishina, is the greatest opportunity given us to practice our language skills. It should not be confused with an opportunity to load up on free shit or to sleep with a foreigner. Knowledge, I tell Veronika, is the most important thing, the ultimate gain. I stop and wait for the hard rock in my throat to dissolve.
“Are you okay?” Veronika asks. “What happened? I never see you after school anymore. Coach has been asking about you. You really shouldn’t study so much.”
I sniffle, then flash her my native speakers-only smile to show I’m alright.
“You don’t listen,” I say. “Were you listening?”
“Stay away from swag,” she says. “Don’t flirt, I get it.” She cradles her stomach. “A little late for that, don’t you think?”
The air in the conference center is oppressive and stuffy. Veronika’s mouth is slightly open. I make a note to correct her tongue position later. A Russian tongue at rest, Professor Mishina told us, is different from an English tongue at rest. She showed both positions with her hands, one tongue floppy and relaxed, another flexed and ready to launch into English speech. There are different ways to be silent and if we can sound English when we don’t say a word, we better do that.
“What about him?” she says, pointing to a man in the corner. Neat gray hair, sensible shoes, a stiff white shirt. His school location is listed as Vermont. A tag says his name is Henry Hopkins.
“Good morning, Mister Hopkins,” I say. “How do you do?”
Henry Hopkins eyes us while arranging pamphlets in stacks on his table. They have titles like CAMPUS LIFE and EXPLORE VERMONT.
“Hello there,” he says. “Looking for a post-grad?”
Without glancing at a brochure titled TUITION I know that all I can afford at his Vermont school is a commemorative keychain.
“We are the free interpreters, provided to you by the Teacher-Training University.” We are not taught American accent, but I remember to voice the heck out of my fricatives. “We are passionate about the educational system and look forward to assisting you today in your interactions with our fellow citizens.”
“Um,” Henry Hopkins says. He taps a stack of pamphlets against the table to line them up. “Splendid, let me grab you a chair.”
He pushes two chairs towards us. Veronika drops right down, but I remain standing. It’s better to observe a native speaker without any obstructions. Pose and gestures bear the cultural weight. I watch Henry’s hands fold empty tote bags, tuck bookmarks into brochures, loosen his tie. His forehead is covered in perspiration.
“No problem with heating in Samara, huh?” he says.
I smile politely. “Is this your school?” I point to a brick tower silhouetted on the bookmark. It looks like a castle to me.
“Yes.” He gives me the name of the academy.
“How many students are there in your school?”
“Oh, about thirteen hundred,” he says, putting a bouquet of pencils into a cup. “It’s a private school, we pride ourselves on our low teacher-student ratio.”
I turn the number in my head like a Rubik’s cube. “How many?”
Henry Hopkins draws the number on a pad and flips it to face me: 1,300.
“You mean to say one thousand three hundred students?”
“Yes,” he nods. “Thirteen hundred.”
“Forgive me,” I say. “We are not usually taught the colloquial forms of speech.” I rest my hands against the table to bury the shaking. I pray Henry won’t notice. To get tripped up on a simple number of all things! I blame Veronika. Her life drama and her Group 3 incompetence got me distracted. I need to focus. I only have a few hours with Henry Hopkins and right now he’s all the English I’ve got.
“Would you mind telling me,” I say, scrambling for my best conversational phrases, “this time next year, what will your students have achieved?”
Henry Hopkins blinks at me. I know. It’s not easy to work Future Perfect tense into a conversation.
“Well,” he says, “I hope they get a sense of their potential. You know, zero in on what they like to do.”
A warbled subjunctive, the boring present tense. I keep pushing.
“Will they have started college preparation? And what about a language requirement? Will they have become fully bilingual?”
“Henry, do you have kids?” Veronika says.
I jump a little. I forgot she was there. She sits slumped in the chair and although her stomach doesn’t show yet, I can see it’s bothering her. It must be really hot in this room. She’s fanning herself with one of Henry Hopkins’s brochures.
Henry Hopkins reaches for his wallet, which gets me confused. Does he want us to get him a coffee? Instead of money, he holds out a small square to her—smiling twins on an emerald-green lawn.
“This here’s Dale, and this is Darl,” he says. His voice fills with warmth. I can see what Professor Mishina meant when she told us true English intonation always rises. Up and up it goes, before commas, before questions, like a hopeful balloon let loose into the blue sky.
Veronika pays no attention where his finger lands on a photograph.
“Why do you carry your children with your money?” she says.
Henry Hopkins has a wonderful laugh, loud and sonorant.
“I’ve never thought of it this way,” he says. “That’s a great observation. I guess you can’t ever separate the two, can you?”
“No,” Veronika says, a strange emotion getting under her words. “No, Henry, you’re right. You’re right, you can’t.” Poor girl can’t even master a dependent clause.
A week later, on the massage table, I touch Veronika gently, afraid to disturb the life within. I stay on the surface. My fingers no longer dig, only circle her back. She’s gathered her hands under her forehead and arched her neck so that I can run my fingers up and down its sides. In the crook of her elbow is a small mark brushed over with iodine. I catch her tracing the outline of the elephant on her bedsheet.
I am glad I brought her to the fairs. Meeting a native speaker for the first time can produce a powerful impression and I could tell, as we walked home that day, that Veronika was impressed.
“He’s a character, isn’t he?” she said about Henry Hopkins. “Him and those twins and that lawn.”
I couldn’t tell from her tone if she was jealous or mocking.
“Maybe you’ll have twins,” I said. “And a lawn.”
“Right,” Veronika said. “Sure.”
I didn’t mean that, about the twins, but for the first time I found myself thinking about this baby without anger or regret, because what occurred to me, no, what struck me, is that we have no power over the moment when something enters our life. We may wish it to be later, like the baby, or sooner, the way I saw now that my English will always be lacking because I started so late, started at seven when the brain is hard as a brick, but none of it felt tragic, somehow, because I saw at last why Veronika was in my life and I felt happy, truly happy and not one bit cerebral.
I wait until Coach is far enough to lean over and whisper.
“I’m sorry I overreacted.”
She doesn’t say anything, so I add, “about the baby.”
I have it all figured out now. All week, since the day of the college fair, I’ve been planning. I’m thinking, meal train. I’m thinking, we can raise money for a stroller.
“You won’t have to drop out,” I tell her. “I’ll bring you my lecture notes. And everyone in Group 7 will take turns babysitting.” When the baby is old enough, I think, we’ll teach it English.
Veronika says something, but her voice is muffled by the bedsheet.
“What was it?”
“You told everyone about me?”
I take my hands off her back.
“Of course not.”
“Remember to throw your full weight on,” Coach calls. I resume, but carefully.
“Tell them when you want,” I whisper. “The point is, we’ll help you. You’ll be back to studies before you know it.”
I tap Veronika’s back. In English, I spell, hello baby on her skin and picture the letters sinking in, carrying my message.
English alphabet on wooden cubes. Real books. This baby won’t even need a dictionary. Everything it needs to know, we’ll pass along.
“Is that all you’ve got?” she says. “Go harder.”
“Don’t go too light,” Coach echoes. “You’ll tickle your patients to death.”
“I don’t want to hurt the baby,” I whisper.
“Don’t worry about that,” she says. “Dig in.”
I work my thumbs around her ribcage, her spinal cord. I let the pressure accumulate until it weighs my fingers down into the soft flesh of her back, but Veronika is right. I find no resistance. She doesn’t wince. That’s when I know there is nothing inside her anymore.
Coach stops by our table.
“Do you two ever switch?” he says.
“I was up last week,” Veronika lies. We were supposed to alternate, but we never did. “This is better, right?” she says when he moves on to another table. There is no voice behind her words. She’s turned her face away and I can’t tell if she’s crying or her throat is sore. “This way, at least one of us will learn something. I don’t have the brain for all those moves.”
She’s still facing away from me, and I can’t ask, can’t form the question in any language I know. Only my hands keep moving.
“The finishing touch,” Coach says.
I poise my hands like a pianist before the first chord. They drop all over Veronika’s neck, her shoulder blades, her arms.
“Easy now. Lightly. Like rain,” Coach says.
My fingers come down. Small useless drops that produce nothing, coax nothing from the soil.
