Once, I get inside the Kwang house again. I call the realtor whose name is on the sign outside and we tour the place. As she keys the door she asks what I do and I tell her I am between jobs. She smiles. She still carefully shows me the parlor, the large country kitchen, the formal dining room, all six of the bedrooms, two of them masters. I look out to the street from the study at the top of the stairs. We go down to the basement, still equipped with office partitions. When we’re done she asks if I’m interested and I point out that she hasn’t yet mentioned who used to live in such a grand place.
Foreigners, she says. They went back to their country.
* * *
By the time I reach home again Lelia is usually finishing up with her last students. I’ll come out of the elevator and see her bidding them goodbye outside our door. She’ll kiss them if they want. They reach up with both arms and wait for her to bend down. The parent will thank her and they pass by me quickly to catch the elevator. Then she is leaning in the empty doorway, arms akimbo, almost standing in the way I would glimpse her when I left her countless times before, her figure steeled, allowing. She wouldn’t say goodbye.
Now, I am always coming back inside. We play this game in which I am her long-term guest. Permanently visiting. That she likes me okay and bears my presence, but who can know for how long? I step inside and walk to the bedroom and lie down and close my eyes. She follows me and says that this is her room. I usually sleep on the couch.
Usually? I murmur.
Yes, she says, her voice suddenly closer, hot to the ear, and she’s already on me.
After a few hours of lying around and joking and making funny sounds she’ll get up and drift off to the other end of the apartment. It’s a happy distance. She’ll prepare some lessons or read. Maybe practice in a hand mirror being the Tongue Lady, to make sure she’s doing it right for the kids.
I make whatever is easy for dinner, tonight a Korean dish of soup and steamed rice. I scoop the rice into deep bowls and ladle in broth and bring them over to where she is working. We eat by the open windows. She likes the spicy soup, but she can’t understand why I only seem to make it on the hottest, muggiest nights. It’s a practice of my mother’s, I tell her, how if you sweat and suffer a boiling soup in the heat you’ll feel that much cooler when you’re done.
I don’t know, Lelia says, wiping her brow with her sleeve. But she eats the whole thing.
She has been on her visits around the city. The city hires people like her to work with summer students whose schools don’t have speech facilities, or not enough of them. She brings her gear in two rolling plastic suitcases and goes to work. Today she has two schools, both in Manhattan. One of the schools is on the Lower East Side, which can be rough, even the seven- or eight-year-olds will carry knives or sharp tools like awls.
We decide that I should go with her. Besides, I’ve been an assistant before. Luckily, the school officials we check in with don’t seem to care. They greet her and then look at me and don’t ask questions. They can figure I am part of her materials, the day’s curriculum. Show and tell.
Lelia usually doesn’t like this kind of work, even though it pays well, mostly because there are too many students in a class for her to make much difference. There are at least twenty anxious faces. It’s really a form of day care, ESL-style. We do what we can. We spend the first half hour figuring out who is who and what they speak. We have everyone say aloud his or her full name. When we finally start the gig, she ends up giving a kind of multimedia show for them, three active hours of video and mouth models and recorded sounds. They love it. She uses buck-toothed puppets with big mouths, scary masks, makes the talk unserious and fun.
I like my job. I wear a green rubber hood and act in my role as the Speech Monster. I play it well. I gobble up kids but I cower when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase, which Lelia has them practice earlier. Today the phrase is Gently down the stream. It’s hard for some of them to say, but it helps that they can remember the melody of the song we’ve already taught them, and so they singsong it to me, to slay me, subdue me, this very first of their lyrics.
Lelia doesn’t attempt any other speech work. The kids are mostly just foreign language speakers, anyway, and she thinks it’s better with their high number and kind to give them some laughs and then read a tall tale in her gentlest, queerest voice. It doesn’t matter what they understand. She wants them to know that there is nothing to fear, she wants to offer up a pale white woman horsing with the language to show them it’s fine to mess it all up.
At the end of the session we bid each kid goodbye. Many freelancers rotate in these weekly assignments, and we probably won’t see them again this summer. I take off my mask and we both hug and kiss each one. When I embrace them, half pick them up, they are just that size I will forever know, that very weight so wondrous to me, and awful. I tell them I will miss them. They don’t quite know how to respond. I put them down. I sense that some of them gaze up at me for a moment longer, some wonder in their looks as they check again that my voice moves in time with my mouth, truly belongs to my face.
Lelia gives each one a sticker. She uses the class list to write their names inside the sunburst-shaped badge. Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write on the sticker, and then have me press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.
About the Author
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel, On Such a Full Sea, will be published in January 2014. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.