English as a Second Language Read online

  “What do you need another degree in English for?” my father wanted to know. He looked stern and disgruntled. Possibly the effect of his jolly red and green sweater, which I was trying to ignore. “Are there actually jobs if you do more of it?”

  “Well.” I went for a pensive expression. “There’s teaching.”

  His fantasy of a comfortable dotage spent in style at my expense took a serious hit. His brows lowered.

  “Teaching,” he said, eyeing me. The way someone might say “grave digging.” We were sitting in his study, on opposite sides of his desk, almost as if I was applying for a job. “And why exactly do you have to go to England?”

  I was actually prepared for that one. “Master’s programs in England are only a year long,” I told him. “So if I hate it, I’m not trapped for two or three more years.”

  He liked that. He’d had to foot many a bill over the years, and he knew a little something about my attention span.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” my father said gruffly, which, historically, meant yes. “Let’s see if you get in anywhere. Wasn’t there some problem with your grades?”

  “My grades were fine,” I said through my teeth, and then returned to what remained of Christmas Day.

  Oxford was the only rejection I got, having been too chicken to apply to Cambridge. I then had to choose between two northern British cities I’d never seen—one I’d never even heard of. My parents had been to the more famous of the two and vouched for its beauty. The university there offered the most exciting program I’d located across England. The campus, moreover, was arranged around a small lake in the glossy brochure, which reminded me of my undergraduate days. So that was that. All I had left to do was wait for school to begin next fall.

  I took great delight in giving Jay a month’s notice on an airless August day when he was already in a foul mood, and even enjoyed training my terrified replacement.

  “You must be kidding me,” Jay bitched on my last day. “Why are you doing this? What kind of money are you going to make with an English MA? At least go to law school.”

  “I’m not so impressed with lawyers,” I said. He let out the bark that was his version of laughter. This was probably the closest we ever came to having a moment.

  “Well,” he said gruffly, the moment over with a flick of his cunning little eyes, “good luck to you. And send that moron in here on your way out.”

  I spent my last days packing up my small, cramped studio apartment into boxes and sweltering in the summer heat.

  The closer I got to my departure date, the more at ease I felt, which went against the grain. I was nothing if not a coward. I’d been a disaster before leaving for college. The unknown usually filled me with panic. But for some reason, maybe because it was all still too huge and too unimaginable, the prospect of going to England was nothing but exciting. As if I’d finally located the path to my destiny and knew it, and could therefore simply relax into it.

  “Are you nervous at all?” Robin asked. She was taking one of the rare lunch breaks her workload allowed her.

  “I guess so,” I said, although I wasn’t. “But I think I’m going into it with the right attitude. I get to do nothing but read books, talk about them, and then write about it. What’s there to be nervous about?”

  The week before I left was crammed full. I visited my grandparents. I moved the last of my possessions into the attic of my parents’ house and argued with my mother over the things I needed to take with me across the ocean. I drew the line at canned vegetables.

  “It’s England,” my mother kept saying darkly. “You don’t know the kinds of things they eat there. Spotted dick is a dessert.”

  I didn’t think I wanted to know what spotted dick was, but I did know I was unlikely to eat canned succotash. Rather than argue, I just removed the cans she secreted in my luggage and returned them to the pantry.

  I commandeered my mother’s car and road-tripped around the greater New York metropolitan area. I spent time with my friends and shopped for things I was sure I wouldn’t find in England. Like coffee.

  I ran into Evan while Michael and I were having a goodbye dinner. It was one of those gorgeous September nights; leftover summer weather that made the city shine.

  “Oh lordy,” Michael hissed, “you won’t believe who just walked in. And he’s with a girl.”

  Sure enough, Evan was toting a petite blonde with ruthlessly styled hair. He saw us, grabbed the girl in an aggressive handhold, and swaggered over.

  “Oh my God, sweetie,” Michael exclaimed under his breath, “I think you’re supposed to be jealous of his little Kewpie doll.”

  The girl visibly reacted to my name, which made Michael and me smile.

  “Evan’s mentioned you,” the girl said. With a definite tone. I decided she wasn’t in and of herself offensive, despite her choice of man. After all, I’d been there too.

  “I just bet he has,” Michael murmured.

  “Behave,” I warned him, and smiled up at Evan. Guilelessly.

  “And what are you up to?” he asked. He was smug, his round face triumphant. As he hunkered there over our table, I could see his thoughts traipse across his face. All of them insulting.

  “Not much,” I said. “I’m just hanging out. I finally quit my job and I’m going to England next week.” I could see Michael’s widening grin from the corner of my eye.

  “A weird time to visit,” Evan said, visibly failing to make the connection.

  “No,” I said gently. “Not to visit.” I waited for it. “To graduate school.”

  It was even better than I’d thought it would be, in those months I’d plotted it. The perfect moment and a fitting end to the story of Evan.

  And so what if he thought I was going to Oxford?

  Clearly, I thought now from the depths of my narrow cot, I needed to learn when and where to throw down the gauntlet with irrelevant people.

  Two

  The fact that Evan was my first thought in my new life was so depressing that I sat up too quickly and rapped my bruised elbow into the wall again. The good thing about the paralyzing pain was that it completely blocked out any further thoughts of Evan, along with my creeping self-pity. I might not actually feel the way I thought an ace world traveler ought to feel, but I decided that I was more than capable of acting perfectly confident. Happy Graduate School Me, in fact, exactly as planned. There would be no lurking around in bed. There was a whole country to explore! Moreover, my mother had given me strict instructions to call home, so I kicked off the comforter and set off for the little nearby village to scare up some supplies and one of those red telephone booths everyone knew dotted the landscape.

  To get to the village from Fairfax Court, my new home, I had to walk through a courtyard to the fence and climb over a stile, then amble along a “public footpath” past a field and a farm with numerous geese, and then eventually to a single street containing a handful of shops and two pubs. The phone booth, depressingly, was glass and not in the least red, and my mother was less than amused to be woken before seven in the morning her time.

  “You must try to find some vitamins,” she told me, her voice foggy with sleep. Was she dreaming about vitamin compounds? “While you still have the strength.”

  I sighed. “Go back to sleep, Mom. I have vitamins.”

  The walk back to my new home was actually kind of pretty. Wet greens and russets laid out beneath the gray sky. The quiet of the countryside all around me. I felt a surge of something I interpreted as confidence. Look at me! Wandering around a foreign country, independent and intrepid, responsible and free!

  I spent the rest of the day alternating between unpacking more clothes that were never going to fit in my wardrobe and hovering around the communal kitchen, striking up conversations as housemates wandered in to arrange such things as their pots and pans. It made the day go by pretty quickly, and before I knew it dark had taken over outside.

  I was standing at the window with a cigarett
e, and smiled encouragingly at the dark-haired girl who came over and joined me. She asked for a light. We squinted at each other through the smoke.

  “Cristina, right?” I asked. Someone had introduced us briefly over the rationing of refrigerator space. If I remembered correctly, she was Spanish.

  “Yes, Cristina,” she said. “And you are Alexandra?”

  “Just Alex.” We smiled at each other.

  “So,” Cristina said, exhaling a stream of smoke. “This Graduate Welcome Party tonight could be fun, yes?”

  “Definitely,” Happy Graduate School Me replied.

  The only other American in the house, a midwesterner named George, bustled in. He did not exactly fill me with national pride. There was his midwestern twang. And flannel plaid pants. George, I should state for the record, was just a little guy, kind of like a young Ron Howard—all red hair, brown eyes, and corn-fed obliviousness.

  “Hey,” I said. We’d met after discovering that we shared both a wall and a nationality in the upstairs hallway. “Are you coming to this graduate thing?”

  George sniffed. “I can’t really invest the time,” he said. “I’m only going to be here for a year, so why waste all that energy meeting people? Anyway, I’m already really busy.”

  Cristina, I saw, was gaping at him in astonishment. Pompous little twerp, I thought. I forced myself to smile.

  “Obviously,” I said, “the lure of free alcohol is the best part of the whole thing.”

  “I’m going only for a small time, and then to the pub,” Cristina interjected quietly. “If you want to do that instead.”

  “I only go out drinking when I want to pick up women,” George told her, expansively. “And I’m not in the mood for it tonight.”

  In the stunned silence that followed this proclamation, we watched him march back out of the kitchen, clutching a can of Coke to his chest. Cristina and I looked at each other, then at the single British member of our household, who stood across the kitchen, also staring. Melanie’s eyebrows were high on her forehead.

  “That,” Melanie said into the silence, her lips twitching, “is a tremendous disappointment for us all, I think you’d both agree.”

  We all started laughing. And so began Orientation Week.

  Way back when, when I arrived at my undergraduate college, I formed a tentative friendship with Robin, my roommate, but otherwise found the whole college experience overwhelming and upsetting. I dealt with this by hiding in my room. I didn’t really come out of it until second semester, when Robin dragged me. She and Michael had drunk their way through first semester, the way you were supposed to, to get it out of your system.

  It’s only during those early weeks that people really let loose, when no one knows anyone and identities float around, up for grabs. As time goes on, you become known and you are accorded a certain place in the social order and a personality to match, and it’s much more difficult to let go. Which I thought might be a good thing, when all was said and done. Letting go had never led me anywhere I wanted to be.

  Fast-forward to England and a case in point: his name was Karl, and he was from Germany. Karl was the first German I’d actually met. He resembled all the blue-eyed, blond-haired, preppy boys who had failed to notice my existence throughout my youth, like Billy Peterson, High King of the sixth grade. Over the course of that first incredibly drunk week I slept with him on three separate occasions, which made me feel better because at least it wasn’t a one-night stand.

  For a change one night, I was staying in until around nine, trying to work out Internet access from my room. I was determined to figure out how to check my email without having to trek all the way to campus to use one of the ever-crowded computer rooms. I was cursing at the stupid telephone system when there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in!” I called, intrigued. No one had knocked on my door before. I lived directly over the kitchen—the house’s single communal space—and could therefore hear people banging around, so I usually went down and investigated if I craved companionship.

  Cristina poked her head around the door.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I just ran out of cigarettes—”

  “Oh, come in,” I said, waving my pack. “I have lots of cigarettes. I imported them all illegally.”

  She laughed, and came in to perch on the end of my bed.

  “Are you going out?” she asked, taking the cigarette I offered.

  “There’s that disco,” I said. “I might go later. It’s open until two.”

  “In Madrid,” Cristina said sadly, “we go out at midnight. Everything is so early here.”

  “Tell me about it,” I muttered. “I’ve never heard of anything closing at eleven.”

  We settled into the cigarette, using my bed like a couch. We analyzed our housemates, particularly George. We started off shyly but quickly realized that we had similar opinions.

  “He really makes me ashamed to be American,” I admitted.

  “He makes me ashamed to be human,” Cristina retorted. “It’s terrible that he’s right next door to you.”

  “I never hear him,” I said, frowning at the wall. I sighed. “Although I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s heard me. Someday I hope to grow past the need to get wildly drunk in the company of men I wouldn’t ordinarily speak to.” I shrugged.

  Cristina froze, and grabbed my arm.

  “You too?” she squealed. “I’ve been going crazy! You wouldn’t believe what’s been going on. And who can I talk to? George? It’s all a mess!”

  “I think it’s this place!” I told her in a sudden rush. “I think it does something to people. I don’t normally behave this way, really.”

  “The happenings, the craziness . . . ” Cristina sighed. “And no one at home can understand.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the window. “I think in this rain, everyone goes a little mad.”

  It was the most comfortable moment I’d had yet. I was delighted.

  “More than a little mad,” I said. I lit a fresh cigarette and eyed her.

  She laughed. “What is it?”

  “You tell me yours,” I offered, “and I’ll tell you mine.”

  Cristina considered for a split second, then grinned. “Fine,” she agreed, “but it stays in this room. No one can know.”

  “God, no!” I shuddered. “I’d actually deny it ever happened to the guy it happened with.”

  “Exactly!” Cristina exclaimed, with a cackle. She stole a new cigarette of her own and curled her legs up beneath her. “Okay. Have you met any of those Greek guys yet?”

  Cristina and I toasted our new friendship with nightly tequila and cruised through the graduate functions together, sometimes joined by the calming influence of the much more sensible—and usually sober—Melanie. The three of us forged an immediate bond, based on Cristina’s and my bad behavior and Melanie’s ability to soothe.

  Cristina’s theory about her own encounters with the brooding, not even attractive Yannis was that he was a necessary introduction to life in the global village, and her actual boyfriend had yet to turn up. We all liked this theory. I felt it went a long way toward explaining Karl, who I saw around a lot but had managed to avoid after round three.

  “It’s to do with acclimation,” Melanie soothed. “Perfectly acceptable behavior.”

  It was not until the second week that I remembered the reason I was in England in the first place: that whole master’s degree thing. Cristina and Melanie were both doing MSc degrees in economics, along with what seemed like half the graduate school population, and they’d gotten started at once and with vigor. The English department didn’t seem to be quite so worried about getting into the swing of things.

  Our introductory meeting was at noon on a Tuesday. I arrived about five minutes early and saw the only other person I’d met from my same course already there. She was another American, a girl named Suzanne, and all I really knew about her was that she was my age, had an impressive mane of
blazing red hair, and giggled. A lot. I had elected to overlook the giggling, what with my vow to be Happy Graduate School Girl.

  “We think this is the right room,” Suzanne told me in a confiding tone, a touch too intense for the situation. “Do you think this is the whole class?”

  I looked around at the handful of people scattered along the hallway and couldn’t see a single person I could imagine wanting to talk to. There was a very tall girl with the hunched shoulders and crooked neck that spoke of years of body issues. There were three Asian girls murmuring to one another, the melodic notes of their language and laughter cascading around the echoing hallway. There was a scruffy-looking guy who was actually crouched down on the floor, his nose in a book. I thought that was an obvious and irritating attempt to curry favor with the professors, should they ever turn up, and disliked him immediately on principle. The fact that he was also kind of hot just made it worse.

  I smiled my Happy Graduate School Girl smile at Suzanne. “I’m sure more people will show up,” I said.

  Suzanne returned to her activity, which looked like some drooling over the scruffy-and-yet-hot guy on the floor, and I was suddenly gripped by panic. What was I thinking? Did I even want a master’s degree? I could hurl bullshit around like a master, but I hadn’t had a single academic thought since I left college. We’d all received a list of suggested reading with our entrance packets, and I’d read all eight of the novels, but that was it. I didn’t have any opinions to go with the books. What if I just wasn’t cut out for this?