tutor

The job was this: I went to a beautiful house and turned pages, pronounced words, kept watch until he had finished, or maybe even fallen asleep.

It was my second semester of graduate school. In some haze of unemployment and reverse culture shock after a year in France, I had accepted an offer for a teaching assistantship and free classes, all intended to end in a master’s degree in French literature.

My first semester teaching was a stroll though an emotional minefield as undergraduate students trampled my best intentions. On the other hand, I wrote my own papers that were deemed brilliant, or at least pretty good. The editor of a literary journal invited me to be her assistant. The graduate advisor asked me to stay for my doctorate. The juxtaposition of experiences was dizzying, especially in the wake of the advances attempted by a former professor and employer (I babysat his children). That moment he smoked pot in his car and grabbed my hand was a sexual harassment moment that I scarcely recognized at the time, much less attempted to address. In fact, I was convinced that I had mistaken that strange event afterward, glad still that I had grabbed my hand back before he put it where he had apparently intended.

Instead of dwelling on what may have happened, I buried myself in books and music—live music that had become amazingly accessible to me when I started dating one of the pop music critics in the area. I buried myself also in that music critic, a tall, unshakable, wonderful guy with a way of making the world go away, a guy who remained childlike and may still have that capacity, as I imagine him still working in a record store, turning new music on his turntable and his head and his words. Most of all, I knew that he adored me—a mutual feeling—and we explored the city as if it were brand spanking new.

The next semester, after a summer of successful teaching and a multitude of private students who paid very well, I found myself in a pedagogy seminar—something that would have helped enormously in my first semester. My private students and the income they brought were gone, so when the pedagogy professor announced a tutoring gig, I ran up after class to learn the details.

The student was one of hers, an intermediate French grammar and conversation student who was housebound at times. I collected the assignments, and made the call.

K. was twenty years old, a friendly kid with his own passion for music and a weekly radio show. K. was not doing so well when I met him, though, and I talked to his sister while I waited for the pastor to finish his weekly visit.

K. had a protective family, to say the least. When he had been diagnosed with leukemia five years earlier, the family gathered, and decided that the cancer would never win. With love and laughter, they endured, keeping the world at bay. K. was indeed still alive, very much so, despite the recent chemotherapy treatments that had prompted me to his home that day.

We looked at the current chapter of French grammar, and at some point, inevitably, K. changed the subject. His real love really was music, and he could talk about that for hours longer than he could conjugate irregular verbs. I took my boyfriend once, which thrilled them both. We attempted some conversations in French, and I brought French pop music, which K. did enjoy. In fact, the reason that the university was providing a tutor in French, and not some other subject, was that K. dreamed of going to Paris. He loved the French language, and kept that thought of travel as a bright light at the end of an exhausting and sickening tunnel, a beacon of hope for recovery.

The treatments were grueling. Sometimes K.’s sister or mom called me to say he was not up to that day’s session, and I did not see him. He was hospitalized at times, and then, finally, he returned to his real class. My job ended.

Our intermediate French classes had the distinction, the true honor, of reading a literary masterpiece. Not only did our students read the masterpiece, but they put on skits about it with a distinguished audience: the author himself.

Alain Robbe-Grillet died recently, a fact that may well have been rejoiced by some intermediate French students from those years. Some surely remember the book that they struggled through, certain that it would prevent them from earning the A they had strived for all semester. They struggled for sure, wondering at first if it was the deficiency of their language skills or the excessive amounts of alcohol from the night before that made the book such a bitch to read. At a point, they realized that it was the book itself–a cruel joke–that was so impenetrable. Thought provoking, it was, and the thoughts it seemed to provoke in my own students seemed to be ones of anger, perhaps even violence. The language is relatively simple, in fact, but the story is an endless loop of beginnings, slight changes, and frustrations. The question and answer session for the author ended, as I recall, with the author shouting at undergraduates who meekly asked him what he intended in the book. “Have you never read your own authors?” he challenged them. “Have you never read Faulkner?”

And despite that, K. did perform the skit for the great author, and the author laughed. I could barely believe that this was the same kid who could not hold his head up for most of the afternoons that I spent with him.

I saw him again, on his twenty-first birthday, celebrating at a club with a band he loved, joking that he was going to have a drink—a real no-no, he told me. He energetically remarked also that he had planned that long awaited trip. His sister was going with him to Paris. He was in remission, and had been for a long time by then.

My career at the institution of higher learning unraveled in unpredictable ways… unpredictable to me at the time, but damned obvious now in retrospect. I had left, quite shaken, and never set foot in the halls that I had once loved, vowing never to see some people again in my life. And I have not.

Several months later, my brother tossed a newspaper on my plate. “Hey, isn’t that the kid you tutored?” he asked.

K. had gone home, the obituary said, for Christmas holidays after treatment following a minor relapse. His doctors had thought that the benefits of being with family during holidays outweighed the risk of leaving the hospital. He went home one last time, and caught pneumonia, and he died.

I found the funeral home, and wandered in, hoping selfishly that I would not see anyone from the university. I had to go, though, knew I had to. I saw the young body, laid out in a suit and tie like some wax figure representing K.—and not well. The life was gone, and life was what K. had always had.

The family was visibly shaken, there only in body—hollow ones, it seemed. For all the time that I knew them, they never allowed themselves to think that K. might die, and for so long, they were right. His father saw me. “Why?” he sobbed to me. And I didn’t know why.

I had no idea what to say, and I also knew that at those moments, it never matters, because words mean nothing when life is stripped bare. All that matters are the souls that remain, that remind, that wound, yet repair. All that matters is time, which will move forward, painfully, persistently farther and farther from the physical presence of the ones we loved, until they can come back to us—we realize they never left—through the love that remains in our hearts.

lost in translation

When I was twenty years old, I quit school. I was at a large state university, which was nice in many ways, but frustrating to me in others. Frustration won. One day, I was enraged (not an adjective that describes me often) when I flunked an accounting exam. I was hardly a whiz in the class, but had a B+ average up to that point, gained only through a lot of hard work. Somehow, finding out that my dad was going to die really took the energy out of studying. My professor refused to change the grade. I ended up with a B in the class, in spite of the lousy test score, but I swore that I would not stay in a school that only knew me by my student number.

So I went home. Misfit that I was in high school, I had had the job of compiling attendance reports after school for my junior and senior years. I could hardly complain about it: everyone was nice to me, I got to learn something about early 1980s computing, and I always had a job in summer, too, in the summer school. It was a fine job, but when the principal (the same principal that Jonathan Franzen writes about, same high school, and no, I never knew the writer; I am just name-dropping) offered me the chance to stay all year full-time, I told him thank you, but no. I was going to work in translation.

I did not actually have a translating job at that point, and about a month later, after going door to door to hand resumes to nearly every business in the St. Louis area that I could find with the word international in its name, I was beginning to question my decision to turn the principal down. One evening I came home, and there was a message for me.

It turned out that one of the translating companies I had visited (there really were only three) had just gotten a huge RUSH interpreting assignment and needed extra help editing and putting together brochures in four languages for a conference. Could I help temporarily?

Yes, of course I could.

My world was never quite the same after that. I went from my boring life in the suburbs to the cosmopolitan life I had always dreamed of, at least for that week. I know a lot of people identified with the movie Breaking Away because of the bicycle racing, but I had always found so much in common with the whole language and culture theme. My life may not have been Indiana. My dreams may not have been Italian. But I wanted a bigger life, too. I wanted to be French in high school. And now, I was working somewhere where I spoke it, better than I realized I could, on a nearly daily basis.

I also started learning some Spanish. The owner of the company was from Bolivia, and the other full-time translator was from Peru. That first day that I went in, I watched, my heart racing as freelance translators rendered texts into French, Italian, German. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, and there I was, in the middle of it, not in class, but the real thing.

No one in my family had ever even left the United States, but I was full of ‘satiable curtiosity, maybe from too much whimsical reading, or possibly from being that misfit. In high school, exchange students stayed to our house, for a week if not for a year, and my dad suffered nightly through three full hours of French television that I pretended to understand when cable made the world available in our living room. The exotic lives of my pen pals fascinated me, and writing to them must be how I managed to test out of most French in college.

When I started college, I never considered teaching. The thought of trying to force students like my high school classmates to have some interest in a foreign language was nearly as depressing to me as the idea that I might end up stuck in Missouri for the rest of my life. I wanted more, as in United Nations more, but honestly, anything more. Yeah, I guess I was a snob, or ambitious, depending how you look at it. I was, in fact, determined, and there I was, in a translation agency, doing what I had dreamed of doing, if only temporarily.

The conference I was hired for was a success, after hard work that I personally had never loved so much. A month later, I had a job, a real, full-time job. It was pure luck, I figured out soon after, as I went through the stacks of mail, new resumes every week. I didn’t even have a degree, but I had the job.

I learned a lot about the nature of translation, talked daily to people who were as passionate about language as I was, and found interest in topics (botany, sewing instructions, grocery store displays, camping gear, etc.), searching for the right word and the right person who knew what it was. The world grew around me in so many ways, not just in my eight hours, but after, in classes, in things I noticed, in people I met.

Yes, I loved my job. Sometimes I goofed. Once, a client was in a hurry for a sign he wanted to use for a conference in Belgium. Normally, we insisted on receiving the translation in writing, but in days before email, Roger called in the two-word translation for “Distributorships available.” Somewhere between his phone and mine, a c became an f, and I sent it to the typesetter. We received a call from Brussels. Our client was not amused when he realized why everyone was laughing. It turns out that “Confessions disponibles” has a vastly different meaning from “Concessions disponibles.” I was humbled, embarrassed; I learned a lot that day, most days, in fact. It was grand.

After a while, though, new doors opened, and I looked through them. Something in the Uruguayan poet I had met tempted me into a world I never realized I loved more: literature. I applied, was accepted, did well, ran out of money, went to France, finished school, looked for work, did not find it and went to grad school in Missouri.. I kept going back home. I taught. And there, even there in the Midwest, the world was there, and ever growing.

But unlike Dorothy, one day I let the tornado take me away, not afraid, but riding it for all it was worth, and I never returned, never tried to. The world still expands, albeit not without so much right here to do, too. Munchkins afoot, poppies distracting me from time to time… Oz, I think I am still looking.

au Canada

When I lived in Vermont, I was always fascinated by a sign that pops up not far from the Canadian border on I-91. I cannot remember the exact wording, but it informs the passer-by that you have reached the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. Wow. The sign is north of Newport, and I often saw it in times when the snow had been as high as my car for several months. The thought that a person could go even farther north, where it was certainly colder and snowier, simply horrified me at the time. Then, it made me wonder what was up there. So, one day, I decided to cross the border.

At the time, in the late 1990s, it was fairly easy to go to Canada, and not a whole lot harder to get back into the United States. Canadian customs agents usually came out, asked you the purpose of your visit, how long you were staying, and told you to enjoy your trip, all the while hoping you’d spend money and save l’économie québecoise. There was one place I crossed regularly, and the guy just stuck his head out the door and waved to me. I do not remember where that was, and it will never happen again in my lifetime, I am quite sure. On the other side, the US guards were a sometimes a little less friendly, sometimes asked a lot of questions, once made me cry (that was after 9/11), but I never had any serious problems getting back into the land of the free and home of the brave.

Still, I did not realize it was that easy at first back then. I was pretty sure something terrible would happen, some agricultural product stuck to the back of my van, and I would end up questioned in a room with a chair, a bare light bulb and two Mounties. Wait. That sounds a little weird. Visions of Dudley Do-Right…. And Nell. And Dudley’s horse. Definitely weird. I think I have just insulted the entire Canadian population reading this. No. You must understand. Many of my neighbors were very wary about crossing the border. When the speed limit signs said 100, they told me, it does not mean miles. That was different. And sometimes, in some places, there are no signs in English. You cannot turn right on red, and if you do, you are guilty until proven innocent. You can see why I was nervous.

But I went anyway. It’s kind of like the first time you go to a drugstore to buy contraceptives. You are sure everyone is going to make a big deal about things and tell you something is wrong with what you are about to do. Then you walk out of the store with your stuff, and it’s never a big deal again. Crossing the border was just like that. Well, without the sex.

It did not take me long to figure out that spending money in Canada was a good thing. I could have felt bad, and maybe should have after Ames went out of business, but honestly, I liked to dress my kids like the ones on “La Boîte à Lunch”. It was one of the sweetest programs on Canadian television, which is about all we got for pre-dish television, except Channel 3 from Burlington. Ames did not sell clothes like the ones Julie-Pier wore, and they also did not return your federal and provincial sales tax. Or speak French to you. Or tell you “qu’est-ce qu’ils sont mignons!” when they saw your kids in the store. And actually, I found nicer, warmer things. I love the United States, but I also like nice clothes. In the cold climate where I was living then, I liked warm clothes. I also liked the exchange rate. And as I discovered the benefits of nice, warm clothes, great exchange rates, and returned sales tax, I also had more excuses to return across the border, which I was also starting to enjoy. It was a vicious cycle, and one I came to love.

So, no visit to Canada was complete without a trip to the duty-free shop. For one thing, it was the place you had to go to get your sales tax back. For many northern Vermonters, though, the purpose of a trip to Canada WAS the duty-free shop, and its glorious and relatively inexpensive selection of what I think is termed in Canada as booze. [Now, I have no idea if this was a loose usage of the language, or if it was considered the term of choice for alcoholic beverages up there, but I did see the word used once, on the front page of the Gazette—I swear—in an article where you would normally expect a more formal description of the beverage consumed before the accident.] I liked many things in the duty-free shop, including the nice selection of watches, pens and perfume, also the booze… um… fine wine and chocolate. But hell, I was happy with a trip to Costco in Sherbrooke, too. I liked Nutella and Tin-Tin videos.

What I really loved about crossing the border was the people. I loved crossing the border and immediately speaking French—albeit a French that I had trouble understanding at times, especially when older people in smaller towns talked to my kids. Most of the time, though, it was just fun. Sherbrooke had a mall, one that grew during the time we lived there, a mall. This, you must understand, was something I did not see everyday in the Northeast Kingdom. At Christmas one year, we were fascinated by a display that had real, live reindeer. I loved that what was the north in the United States was the south in Quebec. Lake Memphremagog was beautiful on its US side, but luxurious on its Canadian. Funny how perspectives can change. People talked to us all the time, and my older son began to pick up French. He liked Tin-Tin, too. That helped.

I loved the escape, the feeling that as isolated as I sometimes felt sitting in my Vermont living room, watching the snow swirl around the backyard on a bitterly cold day, I could get in the car and go to another world, with better coffee and people who talked about literature in French on the radio. That was pretty exciting to me. Not to say that there was none of that in Vermont. I still miss things from there, like the Eye on the Sky from St. Johnsbury and picking strawberries and that swirling snow and the Milky Way and packs of coyotes howling in the night and neighbors, both down-to-earth and eccentric, and hidden gems and the Willey’s Store in Greensboro. But crossing the border was different. It was the escape, the feeling that I had crossed into something new, something different. And that was before I discovered Montreal. I found Montreal a while later, and then… well, then, nothing was the same. But that is another tale for another time. I have wandered a lot from my intended topic, I think, but please be patient with my exhausted and circumlocutious writing style; for I am weary at the end of the day. Good night.