Sanibel Scribbles (32 page)

The darn creatures in her gut decided to rehearse again, but the plane’s takeoff disturbed their choreography, and they scattered about inside her. She felt dizzy, as if the earth were whirling around the sun. Faster and faster it went. But it couldn’t be. That would cheat our calendar days. No fair. The earth must take its full three hundred and sixty five point two days to rotate fully. No speeding allowed.

Dear Grandma
,

Here I sit at La Guardia Airport in New York. Rebecca hasn’t arrived yet, but she’s always late and me, well, I’m the early bird. Oh, who’s kidding whom? I know she’s not coming. I’ve kept my end of the deal, and I’ve even brought her team of angels with me. I sure wish she could have kept her end. I don’t feel like boarding this plane without her. I just traded in American money for euros, but I don’t understand how the two relate to one another. I gave one hundred dollars and got a hundred and ten euros. What a deal, I think?! Oh well, if I didn’t have a ton to learn, this wouldn’t be a learning experience
.

P.S. I feel alone, but I know we are not alone for a single moment. We are surrounded by beings we cannot see. How I would love to put on glasses that allowed me to see their mammoth white wings glistening and surrounding me like bodyguards!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AT BARAJAS AIRPORT, NINE
miles outside Madrid, Vicki showed the taxi driver the address she had carefully tucked away in her purse. She silently applauded herself for having written it down in advance and rewarded herself by sitting peacefully and passively in the backseat of the taxi, no verbal effort needed. She had also decided to keep a pad of paper and a crayon in her purse at all times, hoping she could simply scribble pictures of whatever she might need. The crayon reminded her of Rebecca and the goals they had scribbled together on the white paper tablecloth that night. Now, in the backseat of the taxi, Vicki used the crayon to draw a toilet, then a stick figure sipping a glass of water. Well done. Her most urgent, yet basic needs jotted down on flash cards, stored in her purse, just in case her Dutch accent dominated and perhaps trampled over her classroom-learned Spanish accent.

The taxi turned off a busy metropolitan street and pulled up to the curb of a narrow street, lined with meat markets, bread shops and tall apartment buildings decorated with black cast-iron balconies. A woman in her late sixties stood on the curb holding a long, thin loaf of white bread. Vicki wondered if it might be Rosario, the
señora
she would be living with. Her college had assigned her a Spanish family and given her their address, as well as the names of the family members.

The woman watched Vicki carelessly toss the taxi driver money, and after the taxi driver deposited the luggage on the curb and drove away, she
then walked up face-to-face with the American girl. “Vicki?” she asked, wiping her hands on her food-stained apron, then pushing fallen strands of dark gray hair back into the clip of her bun.

“Si, si. Rosario?” asked Vicki.

The Spanish woman nodded, then stepped closer and kissed her, once on each cheek. Vicki could smell the juice of freshly minced garlic on the woman’s skin. Rosario placed the bread under her arm and grabbed two of the heaviest suitcases. Vicki felt embarrassed, as if the woman might be judging her a materialistic American, unable to leave home without everything she owned shoved into two large suitcases, one small carry-on suitcase and two more carry-on bags disguised as purses. She placed her hands over the
señora’s
hands that smelled of garlic. She wanted to carry her own luggage but, after a tug of war, she surrendered, allowing the woman to drag her load up four flights of stairs.

The climb up the stairs felt long. All the way up, the out-of-breath woman offered her new guest a fast flow of shouted words. The words came loud and fast, and there were no pauses between them. The words, sentences, and paragraphs went unrecognized and sounded like static in her mind. The words hit hard and fast, and with her hands full and her dictionary tucked away in her pocket, she felt as though she had been caught in the midst of a rainstorm with her umbrella at home.

“Baño,”
Vicki said once inside the apartment. It triggered no response.
“Baño, necesito baño, por favor.”
She felt her bladder was ready to burst, like a water balloon hooked to the faucet, as big as it’s going to get. Okay, if her words didn’t sound familiar to Rosario, flash cards surely would, unless Spanish toilets were designed differently from American ones. As she flashed the crayon drawing of what looked like a stick figure sitting on a donut, Rosario took hold of her hand and pulled her down a long, dark, wood-floored hallway.

After the water balloon had been emptied, Vicki tried communicating again.
“Agua, por favor.”
No one could convince her that “agua” didn’t mean water, yet Rosario again stared in misunderstanding.

“¿Qué?”
asked the woman.

“Agua? Agua, por favor.”
She had heard the word on
Sesame Street
her
entire life, and the puppets pronounced “agua” no differently than she was saying it now. But then, they were American puppets. Would Spanish puppets say
agua
differently? How many ways could one possibly say it? After attempting some more unique pronunciations of the word, aware that her Spanish professor might expel her from being a Spanish major if he heard, she took out the picture of the stick figure sipping a glass of water. Proving the worth of pictures, Rosario hurried down the long hallway once more, this time to the room at the end, the kitchen.

“No hurry. It’s not that urgent,” Vicki mumbled to herself as the woman slid around the corner, returning with a glass of
agua
, which today meant, and had always meant in the past, water in Spanish.
“Agua, agua, agua,”
practiced Vicki out loud.

The tour of the apartment differed from the tour of the staff house. The place was as cozy as a bed-and-breakfast, and Rosario was as welcoming as an innkeeper. Vicki knew the woman spent most of her time cleaning to make the antique wooden table shine, the silver teacups in the hutch sparkle, and the bed linen smell like a breeze of fresh autumn air. For a moment she feared she might have felt claustrophobic in her new, windowless room—not much larger than a walk-in closet—but at least the ceiling was high. The colors of the apartment, mahogany, rust and shades of brown sang out calmness and peace, like the colors of crisp leaves. Anything bright or pink would clash like a tulip opening in October.

Rosario pulled a chair out from under the dining room table and, with dramatic hand movements, motioned for her to sit down. Then she shouted something about soap and twins over and over in Spanish, and “Victoria, Victoria, Victoria.” It sounded as if she were saying there was a bar of soap that had a twin named Victoria. Beside herself, the woman dramatically turned on the television and waved toward the screen.

Oh my goodness gracious! I can’t believe what I’m seeing!
Vicki covered her mouth with her hand.
It’s a Spanish soap opera, and I look exactly like the woman on the screen. Only she’s Spanish and not a true blonde
.

Rosario shook her head in disbelief as well, staring at the television, then at Vicki.
“Victoria, Victoria, ¿si? ¿si?”
She walked up to Vicki and
again kissed her once on each cheek, then joined her hands together as if saying a prayer. Vicki felt very welcome, as if this woman had been counting down the days until her arrival. For their first hour together, the Spanish
señora
and the American student sat at the dining room table eating marinated black olives and watching a soap opera called
Victoria
.

At supper, they broke bread and ate. Rosario’s chair remained empty as she hurried back and forth into the kitchen for more courses to the meal. There were two other empty chairs as well, and Rosario said something about her two older sons who once sat there but now sat at their tables with their own families. Rosario had a keen eye for when her family wanted the next course, and only then would she introduce it to the table. It started with red table wine, white bread, and more olives. As she brought out a platter of anchovies stuffed with garlic and strips of pimento, she explained that life itself was meant to be savored, just like a meal. “Never rush any part of it,” she said in Spanish, and Vicki proudly translated into English. “The appetizers are as important as the dessert.
Si
, the beginning is as good as the end.”

Her husband,
Señor
Lorenzo, sat at the end of the table, and it was hard not to notice his enormous stomach. Vicki wanted to look him in the eyes, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from wandering down to his stomach. It was huge and hardly allowed him to push his chair close to the table, so he sat about a foot away from the table and leaned over to eat. Lorenzo was not at all intimidating. He didn’t give off a man-of-the-house or head-of-the-table personality. He closed his eyes as he chewed, opening them only to glance and smirk at Isabella, his grown daughter sitting next to him.

Next Rosario brought out bowls of stuffed squid boiled in its ink, fried shrimp with cloves of garlic, and seafood soup.

As Vicki glanced down at the bowl of soup before her, nothing had prepared her for what she saw. Tiny black snails were squirming for life. Perhaps instead of all the grammar and history textbooks, her curriculum should have included a text on Spanish cuisine. Was this a cultural thing? The creatures must have been freshly dumped into the soup and hadn’t boiled enough to be dead yet. They squiggled around frantically, taking
cover under the hard-boiled eggs.

“My soup is alive!
Esta viviendo
, look!” Vicki screamed. “They’re still moving!”

All eyes stared at her, the eyes of her new Spanish family, and the eyes of the snails in her bowl, as she stood up, covering her mouth with her hand. She couldn’t possibly eat something slimy and still living. It had taken her several tries before liking sushi, and several more experiences before developing a craving for it, but the sushi she ordered was always dead, and didn’t have little ears and eyes. She brainstormed her escape as she looked toward the door. She would take the bowl of living creatures with her. Surely there was a pond or a mud puddle somewhere. Maybe they came from the Mediterranean Sea. Regardless of where they came from and what they were, they were full of life, and she would set them free. But then she noticed them moving less and less. Too late. They now looked nearly dead and swallowing them might actually put them out of their misery, if they were feeling any. Then again, what were they? She had mentally referred to them as black snails, but had never seen anything quite like them before.

Standing up in the middle of a meal the way she had must have made her Spanish family nervous because they were still silently staring, so she started speaking a universal language—a game of charades.

She patted her stomach, shook her head, then covered her mouth. “Estoy, um,
estoy embarazada.”
There, she said it, or at least something like it. She told them she was full, or maybe she said embarrassed. She didn’t know which came out.

Silverware dropped, as did a half-chewed anchovy from the father’s mouth. Rosario covered her mouth as she had many times during the soap opera, and they all started talking rapidly at once. Now she had a bowl of dying creatures and a Spanish family in an uproar, all because she had said she was full. It must have offended them.

“No, no.
Estoy lleno por que comi en el plano.”
She gestured with her hands to demonstrate that she had eaten while up in the sky in the airplane.

Their daughter, Isabella, shouted something loudly, grabbed a maroon-
colored velvet pillow off the sofa, and shoved it down her shirt and in front of her stomach. Señor Lorenzo pointed to his daughter’s stuffed stomach, then to Vicki’s.

“Waaa, waaa,”
he cried out like a baby with a Spanish accent. No,
“Waaa, waaa,”
he cried out, like a grown Spanish man pretending to be a baby.

“Oh dear Lord, what did I say? No, I’m not pregnant. Oh no, misunderstanding. Wait, wait.” Vicki slapped her stomach then flipped through the pages of her dictionary and, sure enough, the word
embarazada
meant pregnant.

Rosario and her husband forgave the misuse of language, but laughed and joked about it. Isabella didn’t find it funny at all. She hardly ate anything and only played with her food throughout the dinner, despite pressure from her parents to eat more. The family talked for quite some time, but Vicki didn’t know what they said and didn’t try to understand. The physical trip to Spain had been accomplishment enough. Perhaps she’d try interpreting another time. Now, she needed a mental rest. She knew she would soon have to wake up and learn this language and this family. She longed to know what Isabella did for work. Was she dating anyone? How old was she? Simple questions in English, but quite complex to ask in a different language.