Newlyweds
As he had promised, along the way, we stopped at a supermarket at the center of a big shopping mall. Señor Baker explained that we had to get basic necessities and enough food to keep us for at least a week or so. He said my aunt told him that all of the kitchen utensils were there, dishes and glassware, too. A vacuum cleaner, pails and mops, brooms and rags for cleaning were in the pantry. As she had said, it was a house she usually rented out. From the way Señor Baker spoke, it sounded as if mi tía Isabela owned many properties. Señor Baker told me mi tía Isabela’s husband had been very smart about his real estate investments.
“You should be very grateful,” he said. “Your aunt is making a big investment in you. She’s paying me a lot of money to teach you English quickly.”
He looked at me to see if I appreciated what mi tía was doing for me, but it didn’t feel as if she was helping me. It felt more as if she was looking for a way to get rid of me.
“Your aunt is paying for everything we need and buy, so choose whatever you like to eat,” he said. When we entered the supermarket, he said, “Go on. Get anything you want, just like a kid turned loose in a candy store.”
He gave me a cart to push and fill up. I had never seen a supermarket as big as this one. There were so many choices of every food imaginable. I was like a child turned loose in a candy store. How did anyone know what to choose? Pictures on boxes told me what many things were, but many were difficult to understand.
Señor Baker followed along and explained things, translating them for me and telling me something about everything. I had to admit it was very educational. He actually paused to tell someone I was his student.
“Nothing like hands-on, day-to-day life to help someone learn a language fast,” he explained to a woman who seemed to know him. “Right, Delia?” he asked me. He repeated what he had said in Spanish quickly, and I nodded. It did sound right.
Maybe what he was doing would be good, I thought hopefully. Maybe he wasn’t as terrible a man as I imagined he might be. He was a teacher, and when I thought of a teacher, I thought of Señora Cuevas. Like her, surely, he had to have some pride in his students and his accomplishments. If I learned English well and quickly, he would be successful, and I had no doubt that mi tía Isabela was paying him well and might even give him some sort of bonus.
I felt myself relax and became more and more interested in the choices of cereals, rices, beans, and breads. The sight of the meat and fish counters was overwhelming. There was so much. This was truly what I was told to expect in America.
“Are you a good cook?” he asked me.
I explained how I had learned many dishes from mi abuela Anabela. When I described some, he made sure we had everything we needed to prepare them. Every item I chose he identified in English and had me repeat. As we moved about the supermarket, he would nod at people and things, saying the English words. “That woman is wearing a blue hat,” he would say, or “That man is here with his son.” Whatever he said, he had me repeat and then explained and had me repeat again.
“You see,” he said, holding out his arms, “this way, the world is our classroom. Now, do you understand why I wanted to take you out of your aunt’s home and away from all of that distracting housework?”
I had to admit I did understand, although I still felt very nervous and uncomfortable about it.
Before we reached the cashier to get ourselves checked out, he made me go through the entire cart of food, calling each item by its English name, correcting my pronunciation.
When the food we bought was checked out, he reviewed the numbers on the bill, and when we rolled the cart out of the supermarket, he stopped, turned to me, and asked in English, “Where do you want to go now?”
“Where?” The question seemed so obvious I thought I was misunderstanding him. “Dónde?”
“No, no, only in English. Where?” he asked again.
I shrugged.
To the car, I thought. Where else?
I said so, and he smiled. “That’s it. Think in English. Say to the car,” he commanded, and I did.
In fact, everything we did, every move we made, he described in English and had me repeat.
“We are loading the groceries into the car’s trunk. This is a trunk. I am opening the car door for you. This is where the passenger sits. The passenger. Repeat it all,” he told me, and I did. I was beginning to feel like a big parrot. He corrected my pronunciation and made me repeat the words until he was satisfied.
Even after he started the car and drove out of the parking lot, he continued identifying and describing as much as possible along the way, each time having me repeat the words, and then, if we saw another similar thing, he would point to it and ask me to identify it in English. From the way he was reacting, I thought I was doing very well.
At one point, he began to review what he called idioms, expressions that were common.
“Every morning when you wake up, you say?”
“Good morning.”
“And?”
“How are you today?”
“What kind of a day is it?”
“It’s a sunny day.”
On and on we went, driving and talking. He would recite, and I would repeat. Then he surprised me by asking me to tell him what I was thinking, using as many English words as I could. I didn’t know what to say, but I managed, “The car is long.”
“You don’t mean the car. You mean the ride in the car,” he corrected. “It’s not that long,” he added. “Well, maybe because of all these lights and the traffic. Too many cars,” he said, pointing to the automobiles in front of us.
Finally, we turned down a side road and passed some smaller houses, and then we turned onto another road and stopped in front of a tan stucco house not much bigger than mi casa back in Mexico. This had a thin light blue gate around it, and there was a nice lawn, but there wasn’t much land. A rim of low mountains loomed behind it. It reminded me of places in Mexico. It was truly as if I had closed my eyes for a while, opened them, and found myself back home. The terrain was that similar. It gave me pangs of sadness and homesickness. How I missed Abuela Anabela.
Señor Baker had to get out to open the gate to the short, narrow driveway. There was no garage, just a carport. He identified it in English and again narrated every little thing we did and what we saw and touched. There was a side entrance to the house from the carport. He took out the keys and opened it, reciting the words for key, door, open, unlock. As with everything else, he made me repeat and corrected my pronunciation.
The door opened right into the small kitchen. There was a preparation table and a small sink beside it at the center. The appliances looked old and used, and the floor was covered in a dull, light brown, scuffed linoleum. We brought in the groceries and set them on the table. As he took things out of the bags, I had to identity them in English again. If I missed one, he put it back into the bag. He went on to another item and returned to the one I missed until I recalled it and pronounced it adequately. He said until I did, he wouldn’t take it out, and if I didn’t, he would never take it out. I thought he was being silly, but he looked very serious, so I concentrated hard until I got it right.
Once everything was put away, he went through the kitchen, identifying everything in English and having me repeat the words. He also made me put some words together, such as “I am putting the dishes in the sink.” Then he would ask me, “Where did you put the dishes?” and I would reply. My confidence grew. Maybe this was a very good idea, I continued to tell myself.
We walked through the living room. The gray rug looked tired and worn and in need of a good vacuuming. The furniture didn’t look much better. The arms of chairs and the sofa were scratched, and the pillows looked as if they needed a good airing. Gazing about at the coffee-colored walls, I saw there were no pictures anywhere, but there were nails where pictures had been hung.
As in the kitchen, he reviewed the English words for everything in the living room and again put them into s
entences and questions. “Where will you sit?” “Sofa.” “What’s on the floor by the sofa?” “A rug.” He looked very pleased with how I was doing.
“Your aunt is going to be amazed,” he told me, and explained what he meant by amazed. “It’s good to know a few words that mean almost the same thing,” he explained. “We call those words synonyms. Words that mean the opposite are antonyms. Let’s try it. What’s a word for the opposite of warm?”
I told him, “Cold.”
“Great!” he said. It was more like a game now. I smiled. I’m going to be all right, I thought. This will be fine.
He tried the television set. It received only a few local stations. The pictures came in cloudy and powdery, which upset him.
“No damn cable hookup,” he muttered, and then turned to me and explained what that meant.
I told him we had a much smaller television set with even worse reception in Mexico, but there were places we went to watch television, and one place had a satellite receiver.
“At least we have an old video player here,” he said, pointing to something under the set, and again explained what that meant. Of course, I had heard of it and seen them.
“I’m going to pick up some movies for you to watch repeatedly, because you could learn a lot more English that way,” he said. He said he knew someone who learned Spanish that way.
“He watched one movie three hundred times if he watched it once,” he said.
That was how I had learned most of the English I knew. This would be more fun than just reading an English textbook.
We continued through the small house, pausing at the one bathroom. Although it was bigger than the one I shared back at mi tía Isabela’s estate, it didn’t look all that much nicer. There was no shower stall, just a tub and a shower with a plastic curtain. The bathroom did have a large window, however, which made it brighter but also clearly showed the stains in the floors, walls, sink, and toilet.
“You’ll have to do some cleaning here,” he said. He described the words wash, rinse, scrub, polish, and mop. I didn’t think it would take much work, because it was nowhere as large a bathroom as Sophia’s.
I told him that, and I told him what a mess her bathroom and her suite were.
“I know,” he said. “She’s as spoiled a brat as you could find anywhere in the world. I heard what she did to you in her shower, but don’t worry. I can tell already. You’re much smarter than she is,” he said.
His compliment made me blush.
“Such a sweet, innocent face,” he said, touching my cheek. “You’re a fresh breeze, believe me. I love innocence,” he added. “It’s pure.”
He looked at me more intensely now, and my heart seemed to trip over itself. Then he quickly smiled again and continued our tour of the house.
We inspected the two bedrooms, one with a king-size bed and one with two double beds. He checked the closets in the room and the one in the hallway.
“Damn. Your aunt forgot about some other basic things,” he said.
I shook my head, not understanding, and he explained that mi tía Isabela had sent us up here without telling him that we needed towels, washcloths, sheets, pillows, and pillow cases. At the supermarket, we had bought what I would need to start cleaning the small house.
“Now I’ll have to return to the shopping center,” he told me. “We’ll bring in our suitcases first. You unpack your things and start cleaning up the house. Start with the kitchen, because we’re going to have our first dinner here.”
He looked around and nodded.
“The place will work for us. We’ll be fine here,” he told me, his voice insistent. Then he suddenly smiled the smile of someone who had just had a lightbulb go on in his head.
“This is called setting up a home. Newlyweds do it,” he told me. “You and I are like newlyweds. That will help you learn faster, and it will be more fun pretending to be newlyweds.”
The word threw me. I knew wedding, but new wedding? How could there be a wedding here? I asked him.
“No, we’re not having a wedding here. It’s like we already had the wedding,” he explained. “That’s it. We’ll be like a bride and groom. Everything will be easier to explain that way.”
Again, I shook my head. How could we be like a bride and groom? And why would that make it easier?
“Don’t worry,” he said when I asked, and then he went into a brief explanation of the word worry. “Your aunt is worried you won’t learn English well enough to attend school and you will be a big problem for her. We’ll show her she has nothing to worry about, right?”
He stepped up to me, put his hands on my upper arms, and held me while he smiled.
“Right, Señora Baker?” he asked.
I pulled my head back. Señora Baker? Why was he calling me Señora Baker?
“We’re newlyweds, remember? That means you are Señora Baker, and I’m your husband.”
He kissed me on the forehead, then turned to leave and paused in the doorway.
“Put your suitcase in the bigger bedroom,” he said in Spanish, and then he said it again in English and had me repeat the words suitcase, bigger, and bedroom. “No need to use two bedrooms. Our work will take all day and all night. We’ll be inseparable for these few weeks.” He explained it in Spanish, and then he stopped smiling and added that in a few days, he would stop listening to my questions if I didn’t try to use the English words first.
“It will be as if I don’t hear you,” he said. “If the house caught on fire and you didn’t say fire, I would not hear you, and we’d burn up with it,” he told me.
Again, I thought that was silly and just meant to scare me, but he had no humor in his face when he said it or right afterward. In fact, his eyes burned with seriousness.
“I’m not going to fail here,” he told me in Spanish. “Which means you’ll do whatever I tell you to do and learn quickly, or else. Entiende? Well? Entiende?”
“Sí,” I said. His mood changed so quickly I was afraid to say anything else. There was much here I did not understand.
“Not sí, damn it. Yes, yes. Say yes.”
“Yes,” I repeated.
“Get your things into the drawers in the bedroom,” he ordered. “Comprende? You know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let’s get organized. C’mon.” He beckoned.
I followed him, took my suitcase, and watched him back out.
“Get started!” he shouted at me. “Clean the kitchen, and start on our first dinner as newlyweds.” He laughed as he turned the car around and headed away to buy whatever else we needed.
I clung to my suitcase.
The world around me looked desolate. I thought I had reached the bottom of the pit of loneliness at my aunt’s house, but my descent into hell apparently went deeper yet. I had the urge to start down the road in the direction opposite where he had gone, but where would that take me?
Back in Mexico, my grandmother was full of hope for my new future. It comforted her to know I was in the United States and exposed to so much more opportunity. Surely, if she saw me now, standing in the carport of this small, very simple house, confused and lost, her fragile heart would collapse inside her chest, and I’d be going to another funeral, only I would be standing there at her grave and wondering if I could have prevented her death by simply swallowing my fear and muddling my way through this hard time. I had to find the same grit and strength in myself that she had. As she often told me, “No hay dolor de que el alma no puede levantarse en tres días. There is no sorrow the soul can’t rise from in three days.”
Maybe, once I did learn English well enough, my aunt wouldn’t be as ashamed of me, and she would give me a place in the family, and I would give my grandmother the happiness she needed to take with her to her final rest. She would die with a smile on her face instead of a grim expression of defeat.
I owed her that much.
Pulling myself up with new determination, I went into the house an
d put my things away. Then I started cleaning the kitchen, finding the pots and pans, and beginning the dinner, silently reviewing every English word Señor Baker had just taught me about the kitchen. Losing myself in the preparation of food reminded me of mi abuela Anabela losing herself in food preparation to prepare for the crowd of mourners.
Work was truly the raft upon which we floated in this sea of sadness. It kept us from drowning. It was all we had to cling to, and it kept us from thinking about our dire situations. No wonder my people were out there in the fields, churning away at their chores, looking almost grateful there was at least that.
I smiled to myself, recalling another one of mi abuela Anabela’s dichos when we had to work hard: “La pereza viaja tan lentamente que la pobreza no tarda en alcanzarla. Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon catches up.”
Back in my small village, we were always one step ahead of poverty.
A little more than an hour later, I heard Señor Baker drive into the carport. He was whistling as he entered the house, his arms full of some of what he had purchased.
“There is more to bring in, Señora Baker,” he said. “Look in the back of the car. In what?”
“The trunk,” I said.
“Good. Go on.”
I wiped my hands on a dish towel and went out to see. There was a blanket in a plastic wrap and two pillows. He waited for me in the short hallway and directed me into the larger bedroom.
“Make the bed,” he said. “I’ll put everything else away.”
“Why are we having only one bed?” I asked. “Aren’t you staying here, too?”
He smiled. “Of course. Even in your sleep, you will be learning.”
“In my sleep? How can I learn in my sleep?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said sharply. “Just do what I tell you. Your aunt has put me in charge, hasn’t she? Show respect.”
I felt my face brighten. His outburst of anger surprised and frightened me. I turned away quickly and went to make the bed. When I returned to the kitchen, he was looking at the food preparations and smiling.
“This all looks and smells delicious, Señora Baker,” he told me, and then he went about the kitchen making me identify everything in English. He was happy about my retention. “This is working,” he said, sounding surprised at his own idea. “This is really going to impress Isabela. Just continue with the dinner preparations, but repeat what I tell you,” he ordered. I did as he asked.