make fall checkup appointments for three kids
reserve a table for our anniversary
pick up the dry cleaning
call Uncle Bert
submit poems to Southwest Review
bake a casserole for the food pantry
schedule college interviews
walk the dog
feed the dog
get the dog her shots
book a DJ for the next bar mitzvah
—at least for another week.
* * *
One afternoon, Kalindi asks whether she can walk with me to the
pool. “Not to swim,” she says, “just for the walk.” When we reach
the complex, she gazes through the fence at the huge Olympic pool
with eight black tines at the bottom, then at the practice lanes, then
at the Jacuzzi. She seems awed, and I expect her to tell me she’s
never seen such a place in Nepal. Instead, she says in a low voice, “I
have no bankostumo”—swimsuit—“because I don’t swim in public.
Women don’t do that in my country.”
“Oh, too bad,” I say breezily, “but if you change your mind, let
me know.”
What a stupid thing to say, I think, swiping my card through the
turnstile as she heads back to the dorm.
The next day after lunch, Kalindi comes to my room with a bag
from the UCSD bookstore and pulls out a blue-and-gold Triton
swimsuit, a black swim cap, and goggles. I gasp, she beams, and we
head to the pool.
It’s a giddy venture for both of us, and we emerge from the locker
room in high hilarity. But before I can put on my goggles, she hands
me her cell phone. Taking her swimming means taking her picture:
Kalindi in the Jacuzzi, Kalindi with the lifeguard, a long video of
Kalindi doing the breaststroke the entire length of the pool, turning
and waving cheerily from the other end. Who is going to watch this?
Her daughter? Her husband? The samideanoj of Nepal?
Kalindi will, on her laptop, again and again. When she does the
backstroke, her pink smile is visible at fifty meters.
7. Brigadoon Out
Three weeks speed by, a blur of classes, meals, sing-alongs, field
trips. My mood oscillates. I feel euphoric when my sentences flow,
my ear catches the drift, and my coinages work; deeply frustrated
when I sense that Esperanto isn’t able to deliver the kind of nuance I
want to convey—at least, that I think I want to convey. For what
happens as I speak is changing. I’m no longer searching a toolbox of
adjectives for just the right one. Is the flycatcher I saw nesting
outside the dining hall “little”? “Small”? “Tiny”? “Puny”?
“Minuscule”? “Dainty”? “Lilliputian”? Instead, I grasp for the
essence of a thing and eke it out by concepts. I don’t have to decide
whether a bird is “dainty” or “petite” because nouns can be made
smaller or larger after they are uttered with a simple suffix: -eta
means “smaller,” -ega, “larger.” Contempt can also be expressed by
a suffix, since -aĉa handily converts any noun to an execrable
specimen. Mal-, a prefix that transforms a word into its antonym,
doesn’t simply negate; it tends to lap at words with nostalgia or
regret. The aged are deeply, irrevocably maljuna (the opposite of
young); the poor malriĉa (the opposite of rich); the hungry malsata
(the opposite of sated). Whatever’s just been said, you can counter
by starting the next sentence, “Male…” (conversely, or opposite-ly).
To learn Esperanto is to find out how Esperantists before me have
spoken all the things in their world into being. It’s both heady and
humbling. A cell phone is a poŝtelefono, “a pocket phone.” An
attitude is sinteno, “self-holding.” A generous person is donema,
“inclined to give.” “As you wish” is the adverb laŭvole, “will-
accordingly.” Something full to bursting is plenplena, “full-full.” A
gay person is geja (hence gejradaro, meaning “gaydar”) and a lesbian
is a lesbanino, but a homosexual is a samseksemulo, “a person
inclined toward the same sex.” One British Esperantist observed to
me that “we speak Esperanto from the inside out far more than we
speak English from the inside out” because we create the language
as we speak it.
Greta has promised a quiz in the last class, so I’ve studied my
vocabulary list, reviewed reflexives and causatives, and drilled
through the table of correlatives. Promptly at nine, she passes out a
sheet of green paper headed “Ĉu vi memoras?” (Do you remember?)
Below are two dozen questions. A handful pertain to grammar, a
few to vocabulary, several to the words of poems or songs we’ve
learned. But most quiz us on some ephemeral moment during the
forty-five hours we’ve spent in class:
What did Meja name the wife of the fisherman in prison?
What is the first thing Kalindi does when she wakes up?
Where does George’s great-grandfather live?
Who owns a zebra?
I was there, I know I was, but on most of them, I draw a blank.
When time is up, Greta reviews the quiz. After each answer, Meja
yells “Yesssss!” as if she’d just bowled a strike, and it’s clear that the
other college students have virtually nailed them all. But for us three
middle-aged women, whether we work in a bank, a filkfest, or a
university, the story is different. Our scores are abysmal, as if we’d
been slumped in the back, texting, all through the course. The
students find it amusing; Tero, comically exasperating. “How did you
remember al that?” she asks. I chuckle weakly, but after three weeks
of laughter and blather, three weeks in which two dozen strangers
have morphed into close friends, three weeks on my own, feeling
increasingly sound and self-sufficient, it is a bruising moment.
In my family, I’m the one who remembers phone numbers from
houses that have been razed, the birthdays of dead aunts, the names
of all the exes. And besides, remembering is my profession: I’m an
English professor, and it’s my job to know how many fragments
comprise the Canterbury Tales and where Byron’s Sardanapalus takes
place. True, it’s sometimes hard to remember the name of a student I
taught six months ago. But ever since my father’s diagnosis with
Alzheimer’s disease I’ve had a talisman against dementia, and it
seems to be working. That day the neurologist asked my father to
count backward from one hundred by sevens and he tried—“One
hundred, ninety … five, eighty … four”—and failed. My father—the
spontaneous calculator of compound interest; the man who carried a
plastic slide rule in his pocket to barbecues—failed. Since then, I’ve
been putting myself to sleep at night by doing what he could not:
counting backward by sevens. This makes it all the more startling to
sit among twenty-two-year-olds and learn how much I have
forgotten. I will bring this home, too, this knowledge, along with the
tables of correlatives and the vocabulary lists.
* * *
For the final evening, I’ve promised Slim I’d organize a poetry
reading—a deklamado. I put out a call for readers and, a few hours
later, have a full roster of volunteers. Wayne lets me into the
linguistics office to use the photocopier, and I begin leafing through
the Esperanta Antologio to find a poem that suits each reader. “Not